Joyce's Cultures, the Classical, and the Popular

Abstract

Classical literature could well be considered to offer the opposite of the ordinariness of daily life, with its focus on events of great importance with significant implications for the welfare and fate of nations and cultures. Joyce's Ulysses , with its many allusions to the activities and texture of ordinary life previously discussed, is simultaneously structured on the narrative events of Homer's epic Odyssey , a device already evoked in the earlier A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There Joyce complicates the identity of young Stephen with that unconventional name, for an Irishman, of Dedalus. By connecting Stephen to the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus, Joyce extends the story of oppressive life on an island from modern Ireland to ancient Crete, and traces the ambition (and failure) of artists to fly across the waters to freer environments back to classical mythology. For scholars of literary history the classical frameworks of Portrait and Ulysses made Joyce one of the premier figures of early twentieth-century Modernism as a movement. Beginning with T. E. Hulme's 1911 essay on “Romanticism and Classicism,” such Modernists as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot embraced the concept of Classicism as a modernist principle. Their focus was largely stylistic, urging clean, dry, objective, precise language both in poetry and in prose rather than emotional flights of Romantic aesthetic excess. But Modernists also incorporated classical themes into their poetry and fiction, with Ulysses as a premier example. The thematic analogues to various events and adventures in the Homeric epic are of course programmed into the titles of the episodes that Joyce revealed to Carlo Linati, even though they are not listed as chapter titles in the book. Their function is, once again, to enlarge and enhance the story of ordinary and mundane life on a Thursday in Dublin by making it resonate with epic and heroic adventures. Classical mythology is not Joyce's only fictional intertext, however, and the democratic impulse that spurs his focus on ordinary life in his works also extends to what we now call “popular culture” – the panoply of media productions that ordinary citizens encounter in the course of their daily experiences. The title of Ulysses may have been inspired by Homer's Odyssey , but Finnegans Wake alludes to the popular Irish ballad that recounts the death and resurrection of a fallen man.