europa

At its start, the Great War of 1914-1918 was a popular war. The war was even blessed by those thinkers and artists who were non-violent by nature. The war, many people sincerely believed, would be quick and glorious. The war soon gave way to bitter disillusionment.The stupidity of the war became apparent to all those men who fought for their nation. On the home front, of course, the story was a bit different. But when soldiers, lucky enough to still be alive returned home, it was to a land which knew nothing of the Somme or Verdun. "A land fit for heroes"? Perhaps.

When we turn our attention to European culture after the war we are struck by two things. First, this sense of despair, bitterness and anxiety. Second, we can detect the maturation of the modernist movement. A literary revolution burst upon the general public in the 1920s. Although they had established themselves and their careers before 1914, writers like James Joyce (1882-1941), D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and Ezra Pound (1885-1972) emerged as the new giants. Collectively they are referred to as "the men of 1914." This was the "LOST GENERATION" -- artists who rebelled against the senseless slaughter that was the Great War. They had no interest in defending either the world or the values of their fathers.

When we turn to the works of the Irish author, JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) we find another twentieth century literary giant whose novels were experimental. They were also daring and controversial. For instance, his novel Ulysses, published in 1922, was banned in both Britain and the United States until the 1930s. Joyce has been recognized as the writer who gave the novel a new subject and a new style. The author of Ulysses is not a narrator describing a subject outside himself. He is instead a recorder of what is sometimes called "the stream of consciousness" -- the haphazard progress of reflection, with all its paradoxes, irrelevancies and abrupt shifts of interest. By this means Joyce made his characters the authors of his work while, as creator of both them and their thoughts, he viewed their actions down the long perspective of history and myth, imposing structure on what, at first, seems merely random.

Above everything else, Joyce always thought of himself as a poet. While he was a student he composed numerous poems and prose sketches which he called "epiphanies." An epiphany, literally, a "showing forth" of inner truth, Joyce hoped to portray the nature of reality so faithfully as to reveal its significance without further comment. This was an extreme form of naturalism that Joyce had already detected in the works of Flaubert and Ibsen. Ulysses was the culmination of Joyce's early career. It was the fulfillment of the pledge made by the character Stephen Dedalus at the end of the Joyce's novel, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Through his work with epiphanies, Joyce had regarded this task as a long encounter with reality, the literal texture of Dublin life. So it was that Ulysses, which relates the events of a single day in the lives of two Dubliners on June 16, 1904, makes Dublin as familiar a place as the London of Charles Dickens. Joyce visited Dublin for the last time in 1912.

stevek@pagesz.net

Last Revised --diciembre 13, 1999