THE ESSENCE OF JAMES JOYCE

It is a well know fact, although not generally taken into consideration, that James Joyce tried to create with his Ulysses a substitute, or a replacement for the Christian tradition, more specifically, the Bible. Although in a rather clumsy way, very difficult to be realized, he epitomized that with his Finnegan's.

There are many scholars that discuss extensively about not only Joyce's but also at literature in general as how it has been used to approach some chief intellectual problems of our time. Which can be understood as if life has a meanning and what is it. An excellent example of that is Prof.William Franke and reading his curricullum we can understand more specifically "to whom it may concern" what we are talking about. Prof. William Franke on chapter 46 of one of his books explains the relation Joyce had with the Bible and summarizes it at the first paragraf and I quote:

"James Joyce’s employment of the Bible in his literary productions is vast and multifaceted: nevertheless, the Bible filters into Joyce’s texts most intensively and persistently through the forms of the Latin liturgy of the Mass.This helps us to restrict and focus the field of vision to the point where we discern that the core of the Bible as it is refracted in Joyce consists in the eucharistic celebration of the death of Christ, his offer of his flesh as nourishment for all: this rite in the Bible and in Joyce alike culminates in the symbolic resurrection of the body of Christ and in the salvation and even the sanctification of the world. Numerous figures and narratives from throughout the Old and New Testaments are alluded to by Joyce, but in the motif of the Eucharist as a re-enactment of the death and resurrection of Christ we grasp the essential dynamic of the Bible at the heart of Joyce’s whole project of apocalyptic imagination – his envisioning of a final disclosure of the truth of the universe through poetic images"

He goes on and tells us, and I quote again: "My main guide for this interpretation of the biblical vision in Joyce is Thomas J. J.Altizer."

Altizer became famous with his approach to the problem of wheter God is dead which received a comprehensive report from Time Magazine

Instead of trying to figure out intellectually what his is all about, let's go directly to the source, and suffices to take a look at this under the perspective put together by the BBC documentary "Human, all too human" and at the last minute, the image of the lonely man at the top of a freezing mountain and Nietzsche's quote is the best way to summarize The essence of things: “The finest virtue of a great thinker is the magnanimity with which, as a man of knowledge, he intrepidly, often with embarrassment, often with sublime mockery – offers himself and his life as a supreme sacrifice.” Another good definition what Joyce is all about.

It is not our objective to discuss that or come to some sort of agreement, or proposal, about the meaning of life, but to examine what is the design involved In Joyce`s work to do this task, how he set himself to do that.

Joyce went the opposite way normally use, God, or god, or some central and most powerful source, instead of that, he used man. Accordingly, instead of the "big" things when God, or god, or some powerful source is used, he used, for the case of the ordinary man, small ones, the unexceptional, the ordinary, average, typical, everyday, mediocre, run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road events.

It can be better understood if taken in the context of furniture design:

The Essence of Things - Die Essenz der Dinge English/German 2009

»The Essence of Things« seeks to investigate the motifs and motivations of reduction in design. Beginning with a look at the broad horizons of the theme, this richly illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition of the same name places a central focus on industrial design. Its extensively researched and vivid presentations consider the importance of technological and economic conditions as well as the dialogue between design and art and the changing ethical standards applied to design. It traces the unassuming heroes of daily life, examines the concept of man as the measure of all things and finds meaning in omission as a paradoxical intervention.

Colour illustrations and descriptions of over 160 objects accompany the bilingual articles by Dirk Baecker, Martin Hartung, Wiebke Lang and Mathias Schwartz-Clauss.
Editors: Alexander von Vegesack, Mathias Schwartz-Clauss
Paperback, 132 pages, 180 mostly coloured illustrations
Bilingual German/English
Size (l/w): 310 x 245 mmISBN:9783931936501

The essence of James Joyce

The simple fact of life is that James Joyce was after a style when he wrote The Portrait, and this is the main theme of it, he implemented his style n Ulysses and came of age in Finnegan's. Correctly appreciated, his style is basically noise, as Eames sees it...Better yet, the medium he used became the message, as McLuhan sees it...

Last, but not least, one of the biggest "noise" he introduces is the one day development in Ulysses and the one night in the Portrait. So much about that... It is simply because when you go in this direction, you do not have neither past, neither future, just the present. As matter of fact, if you think this way, there is only the present: past and future are abstractions... Time perhaps is the biggest fallacy abstraction there is...

Confirming that, Joyce said: "There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present" to Jacques Mercanton, on the structure of Ulysses, as quoted in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (1997) by Robert H. Deming, p. 22

His "noise" style can be traced to his declaration: "If I gave it all up im mediumtely, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." Joyce's reply for a request for a plan of Ulysses, as quoted in James Joyce (1959) by Richard Ellmann

You can also appreciate this style in an entirely different subject, furniture, as I already did, within the same frame of man as the measure of things and without he begginning-middle-end that we are so fond of at The fiction of something.

In Ulysses, Joyce took nearly 800 pages to say the following:

Makes breakfast for his wife. Goes to the butcher. Goes to the post office. Goes to church. Goes to a chemist. Goes to a public bath. Goes to a funeral. Goes to a newspaper press. Goes to a locksmith to canvass an ad. Feeds some seagulls. Goes to a bar. Helps a blind man cross the street. Goes to the museum. Goes to to the library. Visits a bookseller. Window-shops. Goes to a restaurant. Listens to some live music. Writes a love letter. Goes to another bar. Nearly gets in a fight. Masturbates to a beautiful eighteen-year-old exhibitionist giving him a private show. Takes an alfresco nap. Takes up a collection for a widow. Goes to a hospital to visit a pregnant woman. Flits with a nurse. Feeds a stray dog. Goes to a whorehouse. Helps avert a row with the police. Goes to a cabman’s shelter and listens to a sailor tell stories. Breaks into his own house. Urinates under the stars with another man. Watches the sunrise. Kisses his wife on her arse.

From Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks.

In Finnegan`s, he invented the longest word there is in English to explore the idea of how does it sound the Fall of Man from paradise, but instead of a perfect masterpiece creation, his thunders sort of blame God for the imperfection there is in man. Or simply put God invented evil...

What a noise he built into it...

The closing of The Portrait is the opening of Ulysses, and what he does is to set himself to a black mass, as an answer, or as a meaning, or his meaning, to what he describes and sought after in the Portrait...

But... the real thing...

It is in the S+M=P...