Time concepts applicable to Joyce's Ulysses
Difficulties about Joyce's Time Concept
One of coordinates that calls most attention in the Ulysses of James Joyce is that all the action takes place on a given day at times that establish a bounding insertion, like a physical space.
1-Richard Ellmann and Ulysses narrative structure
If you google Internet typing on google "time in James Joyce Ulysses" or something like that, what you get will not minimize or remedy what was missing in Richard Ellmann and I quote:
One of the areas of Ulysses that has often been overlooked, however, is that of the various functions played by the passage of time and awareness of time in the novel
From his book James Joyce's Ulysses,pp.8-9, 2nd edit, NY Knopf, 1952, p22:
The meaning of Ulysses... is not to be sought in any analysis of the acts of the protagonists or the mental make-up of the characters; it is, rather, implicit in the technique of the various episodes, in nuances of language, in the thousand and one correspondences and allusions with which the book is studded
Those which are accustomed with standard use of objectiveness have a tendency to pre empty the subject and perhaps CG Jung summarizes it all when he wrote in 1932:
Ulysses...pours along for seven hundred and thirty five pages.. one single and senseless every day of Everyman... a day on which, in all truth, nothing happens...
... It not only begins and end in nothingness, but it consists of nothing but nothingness...
I will beg for excuses from those enlightened specialists, but I think Richard Ellmann has not achieved elucidating the question of time in the way Joyce used. There are other perspectives (placed in sequence) which, in my view, explains it and we can better appreciate the role of time in Ulysses narrative structure. :
2 - T S Elliot
Probably the first observation about time (although in a very long shot) in Ulysses came from TS Elliot, quoted by Prof. Heffernan:
TSElliot, in turn, said he considered this book the most important expression of this was, and we are all his debtors and which nobody can escape. Elliot, informs us Heffernan, said Joyce fled the standard 19th century, which wore a single consistent and particular point of view , being that Joyce left it for the handling of a parallel continuum between contemporaneity and antiquity, as TS Eliot called mythical style. Elliot also said that Joyce uses an ancient mythical structure to make sense of control, order, give a shape, significance, for the huge panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary world.
4-An objective and practical way to understand it
The movie The Vow ,whose synopsis is the story that inspired the film::
The life that Kim and Krickitt Carpenter knew completely changed on November 24, 1993, two months after their wedding, when the rear of his car was hit by a pickup truck that was passing at high speed. A serious head injury left Krickitt in a coma for several weeks. When she finally awoke, part of her memory was impaired and she could not remember her husband. She had no idea who she was. Essentially, the "Krickitt" with whom Kim had married died in the accident, and at that moment he needed to win back the woman he loved.
At 17' minutes elapsed on the film, when Kim discovers that his wife had lost her memory and did not know who she was, he does a consideration of what he calls "These moments of impact" that "define who we are." But the questions he raises, "and if one day we could not remember any of them?"
He does these considerations in stream of consciousness ... an inner monologue in Ulysses Joyce style... and it is obvious that Ulysses is a huge amount of moments of impact whioch define who the Irish areand who is he ... his wife Nora should be excluded, for there is consensus and I agree, Joyce does not define her...
On the other hand, to create a mental map of Dublin, he could do so only through the moments he had internalized before the impression about the realities he describes and, in doing so, he makes visually through words and the effect is exactly what McLuhan says and I have emphasized above: But such language is made by exclusion of everything that has not visual sense, even the words
The time, acts as a catalyst, a frame, a construction scaffolding, the housing to fill around the skeleton of Homer Ulysses, so Joyce is able to explore his"moments of impact" ...
5 - Man & Time - J.B.Priestley
Priestley became famous and a nationally known figure after (at the UK) his first play The Good Companions, which can be seen Youtube.
This piece was incorporated into the English culture as Shakeaspeare's plays and recently the National Theater presented a production of it.
If you do not have time to see it, take a look at Wikipedia to find out what it is.
For the Portuguese language, especially in Brazil, there are authors of the English language that are almost unheard of, although extremely competent. If ou go to a bookstore in their homeland there are whole sections in bookstores reserved to them, such is the demand that exists for those who speak English. Despite all that, they simply are not translated or known in Brazil or Portugal, or in other places where Portuguese is spoken. Priestley is such a case.
Priestley não se notabiliza pelos livros, embora os tenha escrito e editado e até tenham chegado aqui no Brasil, mas se notabiliza por suas peças, especialmente por seu tratamento do tempo, que é único e talvez incomparável. Ele sofreu grande influencia dos conceitos de J.W.Dunne sobre tempo, especialmente as contidas no seu livro An Experiment With Time. T.S. Elliot tambem se interessou por Dunne e isto esta refletido em Burnt Norton, onde é discutida a natureza do tempo e a salvação.
Priestley is notable not for books, although he has written and edited them and some (in English) have arrived to Brazil. He is famous for his plays, especially because his treatment of time, which is unique and perhaps unparalleled. He suffered great influence from J W Dunne concepts of time, especially those contained in his book An Experiment With Time. T. S. Elliot also became interested in Dunne and this was reflected in Burnt Norton, where the nature of time and salvation are discussed.
The best-known play by Priestley influenced by Dunne's is Time and the Conways, which led to a film that can be seen on youtube. If you do not have time for it, see the explanation of the concept of time within it.
In his book Man & Time, Priestley tells us the following about time in Ulysses:
The third method could be described as slow motion or movie camera slow motion.
It turns episodes in a story taking more time than it takes to experience them in real life.
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Ulysses takes much longer to read than actually
the time it is reported.
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Moments are expanded so
much that nothing they contain goes unnoticed or unrecorded. It's like a super
ant, extremely intelligent, familiar with human life, began to report or describe
our lines, actions in all its details, gestures, smiles and gestures. We owe
much to Sterne
in modern literature, because he was a precursor and a triumphant master this
method. Sometimes in Tristram
Shandy we feel everything will come to a stop, the flow of time ceases,
the clock hands are stuck and can not move forward, the next minute turns into
a giant obstacle.
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Sounds familiar?
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Ele prossegue dizendo que muitos escritores deste século (20) fizeram
uso deste recurso de câmera lenta, a narrativa que usa "fluxo de
consciência" seria impossível sem isto e a fuga da duração
familiar do tempo é óbvia. Nós somos magicamente transportados
para outro tempo diferente, que não apenas se move lentamente, mas também
move em pequena escala de num tempo privado e particular que pode ser usado
para criar uma estranha beleza, como em algumas obras de Virginia
Woolf, ou no memorável livro de realismo cômico (sic) Ulysses
de James Joyce. Uma razão que parece representar nossa era é que
é uma revolta com a tirania do tempo que passa.
He goes on to say that
many writers of this century (20) used this slow motion feature, narrative using
the "stream of consciousness" would be impossible without it and escape
the familiar length of time is obvious. We are magically transported to a different
time, which not only moves slowly, but also moves in small scale in a private
and particular time that can be used to create a strange beauty, as in some
works of Virginia Woolf, or memorable book comic realism (sic) James Joyce's
Ulysses. One reason seems to represent our age is that it is a revolt with the
tyranny of time passing.