Woolf’s refusal to publish Joyce’s Ulysses for her Hogarth Press, as well as the English writer’s remarks on the immature nature of Joyce’s work (Diary, 1922) are only the most clamorous elements of the complex system linking the two writers. Woolf’s preoccupation after the publication of Jacob’s Room that what she had achieved was “probably being better done by Mr Joyce” (Diary, 1920), shows how the relation connecting the two authors didn’t simply take the form of antagonism and misjudgement. Woolf’s praise of Joyce’s ability to convey “life itself” (“Modern Fiction”) demonstrates the two authors’ co-temporary and similar working at a profound renovation of narrative forms, which was to culminate in two dissimilar but not opposite conceptions of writing. Joyce’s attempt to “give the unspoken, unacted thoughts of people in the way they occur” (Budgen, 92) does not appear far from Woolf’s intent to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order they fall” (“Modern Fiction”). Nevertheless, Woolf’s refusal of Joyce’s processes of radical deconstruction in language and insistence on the Irish author’s “narrowing” and not enough impersonal point of view in conveying consciousness (Diary, 1920) prove the two authors’ different approaches to the “inward turn” characterizing modern fiction. Though both focussing on the pre-conscious and over-semantic aspects of language, Woolf and Joyce appear in fact to concentrate on different stages of the process which brings the subject to acquire existence through language (Ferrer). Similarly, the two authors’ employment of the interior monologue techniques reveals different directions in their portrayal of the self as dynamic and disarticulated. This tends in fact in Woolf to a temporary re-construction of what in Joyce appears as overly “disintegrated”, unveiling not as much the two authors’ opposite and irreconcilable views, but rather their original and parallel re-definitions of narrative conventions.
"The Damned Egotistical Self": Self and Impersonality in Virginia Woolf’s and James Joyce’s writing
PRUDENTE, Teresa
2009-01-01
Abstract
Woolf’s refusal to publish Joyce’s Ulysses for her Hogarth Press, as well as the English writer’s remarks on the immature nature of Joyce’s work (Diary, 1922) are only the most clamorous elements of the complex system linking the two writers. Woolf’s preoccupation after the publication of Jacob’s Room that what she had achieved was “probably being better done by Mr Joyce” (Diary, 1920), shows how the relation connecting the two authors didn’t simply take the form of antagonism and misjudgement. Woolf’s praise of Joyce’s ability to convey “life itself” (“Modern Fiction”) demonstrates the two authors’ co-temporary and similar working at a profound renovation of narrative forms, which was to culminate in two dissimilar but not opposite conceptions of writing. Joyce’s attempt to “give the unspoken, unacted thoughts of people in the way they occur” (Budgen, 92) does not appear far from Woolf’s intent to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order they fall” (“Modern Fiction”). Nevertheless, Woolf’s refusal of Joyce’s processes of radical deconstruction in language and insistence on the Irish author’s “narrowing” and not enough impersonal point of view in conveying consciousness (Diary, 1920) prove the two authors’ different approaches to the “inward turn” characterizing modern fiction. Though both focussing on the pre-conscious and over-semantic aspects of language, Woolf and Joyce appear in fact to concentrate on different stages of the process which brings the subject to acquire existence through language (Ferrer). Similarly, the two authors’ employment of the interior monologue techniques reveals different directions in their portrayal of the self as dynamic and disarticulated. This tends in fact in Woolf to a temporary re-construction of what in Joyce appears as overly “disintegrated”, unveiling not as much the two authors’ opposite and irreconcilable views, but rather their original and parallel re-definitions of narrative conventions.
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