How to make ordinary things have lasting philosophical significance and full spiritual value? Geniuses like James Joyce ’s exploration did not happen overnight. In his early manuscript "Stephen Heroes", Stephen passed by a house on Ixley Street and heard a blurry conversation between a couple on the steps, although it triggered him "it seems to represent the Irish paralysis." "One of those brown brick houses" with emotion, but without further explanation below, it is still meaningless to readers. Such a narrative lacks both form and substance. To see the secrets in the house, it needs more than the actual records. Ten years later, Joyce used an original stream of consciousness narrative to expose the inner world of the Broomes in a brown brick house with house number seven. Just before that, he needs to go through a long and tortuous journey of discovering himself.
As the first novel in the sense of fact, the autobiographical novel "Stephen Hero" marked a new beginning for Joyce's writing career and was a concluding attempt to his early experience. The amount of space in this colorful work about the protagonist's student period is five times that of the corresponding part in "Portrait of a Young Artist". In the latter, only the incidents that were hinted are fully described in the former. Even Stephen's family and friends have different degrees of existence according to their own value. Such a narrative spread out without choice, for researchers who are interested in Joyce's personal life, is a lot more good, but also gives future generations an opportunity to interpret Joyce's two later works. Compared with the elaborate "Portrait of a Young Artist", the natural unadorned "Stephen Hero" has its own charm, but this does not save Stephen from becoming a puppet with the author's attitude and ideas, nor can it make " "Stephen Hero" became a successful novel.
Perhaps realizing such a problem but not knowing how to deal with it for a while, Joyce simply throws Stephen away and concentrates on the environment he resisted, thus completing the creation of the short story collection "Dubliners". What we read here is the story of the small streets and the alleys, the smelly rooms and the life in it. Under the realism of realism is the underlying undercurrent of symbolism, and even Ulysses can be found. "The witty narrative technique, the story with allegorical purpose, and the mysterious allusions to the myth. Joyce ’s unique imagination and expressiveness are emerging in this work. The literary talent of “Irish composition genius” is also remarkable, but at the same time we can also see that the future masters ’narrative Art is still lacking. Although the narrative is clever, it inevitably tends to be flat. Although the character shape is rich, it is difficult to hide its paleness. Many short productions are mostly character sketches and scene fragments. It is difficult to have a complete narrative structure and a full plot.
The "Dead", which appeared at the end of the book, is a well-known structure that is generally considered to exceed these limitations. The concentrated narrative scene is full of flesh and blood, and the hierarchical story is included in the complete narrative structure. The lively and vanity rendered by the extravagant party description and the tedious character portrayal in front, and the loneliness and sincerity of the protagonist behind, as well as the simple and metaphorical snow scene from the dead, form a sharp contrast. All the previous chapters of the "Dead" are also gathered in this magnificent narrative masterpiece into a magnificent finale. More importantly, it introduced for the first time a protagonist whose intelligence level is very close to Joyce himself.
Gabriel, a frustrated university lecturer and writer of literary magazines, is not only an extremely important figure in The Dubliners, but even more so than Bloom, who appeared in Ulysses later. The narrative shows the complicated and painful process of Gabriel ’s self-conceited and self-defense line of gradual collapse under the meticulous dramatic harmony and meticulous psychological insight, and he realizes that his wife ’s tears are for a premature lover The impact of Liu Shi, as well as the image of isolation and divorce at first, and then the heroic loneliness, and finally the snow of life and death interdependence, all of which show that the practice of narrative art in Joyce ’s novels finally It was completed in "The Dead", the entire "Dubliner" has a foundation, and Joyce's fact as a novelist is also confirmed at the same time.
Joyce was younger and more intense than Gabriel when he wrote "The Dead" and was not mature enough to abandon his arrogant and uncompromising attitude. If this kind of attitude is still watching the mortal beings of Dublin City with his cold eyes in "Dublins", then in "Portrait of a Young Artist", it is decided to sacrifice the method of objectively presenting one plot after another, or characters, as much as possible. Spilled everywhere in the protagonist's consciousness, a wide range of real life is controlled and arranged from a viewpoint. Everything that happened was recorded according to his sensitivity, and the event only made sense when it helped his inner development. The rest of the characters correspondingly only exist in Stephen's mind, just like the characters he wrote, except for the name and the way of speaking, no more explanation is needed.
This way of narrative makes the process of reading as if looking at the situation in the room through a keyhole instead of an open door. Something that our limited vision can perceive has added ominous omen or hopeful imagination. "Portrait of a young artist" also has more narrative intensity and focus than "Stephen Hero" because of its controllable focus. Correspondingly, the external drama retreats behind, the inner monologue highlights the front, and the presentation of the event is not through the description of the details, but by the seemingly careless hint. If the change of narrative method makes "Portrait of a Young Artist" extracted from the original ore of "Stephen Hero" more artistic, then the difference in the titles of the two works is also a wise and unreasonable thing made by Joyce. Ignored changes.
Stephen we saw in the first two-thirds of "Portrait" is a child in a state of confusion, and a middle school student who was hit by the storm of adolescence. A fierce quarrel with people at Christmas dinner revealed his own opinion; after being beaten by the coach, it was a stubborn performance to go to the dean for stubbornness; he was very concerned about whether his academic performance exceeded others. But at the same time, he is also weak, and he is often tricked and bullied by his classmates; he is obedient, and he has to complete a whole set of prayers before going to bed; Intricate symbolic techniques and meticulously arranged narrative changes have not weakened our power to enter his emotional world. If the narrative stops here, we may accuse Joyce of why he spent so long a description of the victim of a negligible external environment, and still used such delicate and lyrical strokes. He can write a short story like "Dubliner" to kill such an insignificant character.
Stephen's accurate positioning is just like his real body Joyce. He is a young literary talented artist. Stephen, who haunts Dublin's small town, his most heroic act is to refuse to become Father Stephen by defying his mother's fate. Guilty feelings caused by the crisis of faith and the thirst for God's forgiveness, and the evangelical power of Father Anell's fire, all reflect the sharp courage of Stephen who criticized the church. Parting with the church is even more desperate. He, like Joyce, who travels far away, wants to "express himself as freely and completely as possible" in a specific art form. At the end of the narrative of the novel, the young artist who has never turned his back strides forward and embraces his destiny in a nobody's way, and the three weapons he uses for "self-defense" are silence, exile and wit.
Feng Xinping