NOVEL II

CONCLUSIVE TALK ON A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN AND TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

LECTURE 14

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Synopsis

Narrator of the Novel and Point of View Conveyed

Tone, Protagonist and Major Conflict the rising action, climax and falling

action of the novel the major themes, motifs and symbols

presented in the novel

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Narrator of the Novel and Point of View Conveyed The narrator is anonymous, and speaks

with the same voice and tone that Stephen might.

Although most of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in the third person, the point of view is Stephen's: as Stephen develops as a person, the language and perspective of the narration develop with him. We see everything in the manner in which he thinks and feels it. At the very end of the novel, there is a brief section in which the story is told through Stephen's diary entries. This section is in the first person.

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Tone, Protagonist and Major Conflict

The tone is generally serious and introspective,

especially during Stephen's several heartfelt

epiphanies.

Stephen Dedalus

Stephen struggles to decide whether he should be

loyal to his family, his church, his nation, or his

vocation as an artist.

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the rising action, climax and falling action of the novel Rising Action:

Stephen's encounters with prostitutes; his emotional reaction to Father Arnall's hellfire sermons; his temporary devotion to religious life; his realization that he must confront the decision of whether to center his life around religion or art.

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Climax: Stephen's decision in Chapter 4 to reject

the religious life in favor of the life of an artist.

Falling action: Stephen's enrollment in University

College, where he gradually forms his aesthetic

theory; Stephen's distancing of himself from his

family, church, and nation.

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the major themes, motifs and symbols presented in the novel

Themes: The development of individual

consciousness; the pitfalls of religious extremism;

the role of the artist; the need for Irish autonomy.

Motifs: Music; flight; prayers, secular songs, and

Latin phrases

Symbols: Green and maroon; Emma; the girl on

the beach

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CRITICAL REFLECTION

LECTURE 14

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Are the problems experienced by characters in the book universal, or do they seem uniquely Irish?

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Many of the events of this novel are seen through a haze of murky discontent. Joyce poses dissatisfaction as a necessity of the developing artist. Our protagonist’s unhappiness with his setting, his family, and most of all, himself, are fundamental to his eventual transformation from observant child to blooming writer.

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Until he realizes that his vocation is to become a writer, he feels aimless, alone, and uncertain. However, we get the feeling that he could never arrive at this conclusion without undergoing his period of profound dissatisfaction. It is this lingering sense of malcontent that forces Joyce’s character to confront his personal anxieties and uncertainties in order to get past them.

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Joyce often pinpoints the inability of language to truly express meaning. How does Stephen approach this problem?

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Stephen’s fixation on language is what alerts us to his artistic inclinations from the very beginning of the novel. Both Joyce and his protagonist demonstrate a deep fascination with the purely aesthetic elements of language. Sometimes elements like repetition, rhythm, and rhyme take over the narrative completely.

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This demonstrates the novel’s stance on Communication: it highlights the arbitrary and sometimes meaningless ways in which language works – and doesn’t work. While the goal of language is to clarify and enlighten, it doesn’t always succeed and is often misused. Joyce and many of his Modernist colleagues (especially T.S. Eliot) were very concerned with the failure of language to successfully communicate ideas.

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In his heavily religious phase, does Stephen think of religion in any social way (i.e. does he consider its role in a broader community), or is his faith purely personal and self-centered?

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Marx famously wrote that religion is a kind of drug constructed to keep the masses bovine (cow-like) and contented, chewing their cud comfortably and not confronting the true nature of life. Joyce delivers a similarly cynical and unflinchingly critical picture of religion in Portrait of the Artist; our hero, albeit in a markedly un-cow-like and intensely cerebral fashion, also latches on to religion as a system of definite explanation.

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However, religion is rejected as a solution to life’s unanswerable questions, both by Joyce and by Stephen, who realizes that life is not that simple, and that the strict rules and regulations of the Church can’t explain everything. The book implies that no religious doctrine, Catholic or otherwise, can provide universal solutions, and furthermore, that dogma often limits the possibilities of human accomplishment.

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Does the figure of Daedalus, the "old father, old artificer," ultimately replace God for Stephen?

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One of the transformations our protagonist undergoes is a shift from zealous, super-disciplined belief in Catholic doctrine to a more unrestricted, self-created sense of spirituality that’s closely intertwined with his drive to create art. Spirituality is not limited to the worship of any one religion, or even of any specific god – rather, there is something profoundly fulfilling and potentially redemptive in the worship of Art and Beauty.

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If To the Lighthouse is a novel about the search for meaning in life, how do the characters conduct their search? Are they successful in finding an answer?

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Although all the characters engage themselves in the same quest for meaningful experience, the three main characters have vastly different approaches. Mr. Ramsay’s search is intellectual; he hopes to understand the world and his place in it by working at philosophy and reading books.

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01:04:30 – 01: 13: 00

Nancy’s reading a book and being interrupted by Andrew (the suitor)

Lily’s monologue while painting Mrs. Ramsey with JamesDiscussing limited potential of canvassing the ‘all’ by the medium of paint.. “ I wish I could capture all…”

Conversation between Michel and Carmichael

Regularity of life and measurement of love… pains of individuals

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01: 13: 00 – 01:22:13

James, “ I like dead things…”

The art of imagination is being pored into the little girl before she sleeps…

A mother’s art of dealing “it’s still there James…”

English vs. French ( food as a medium)

Inner voices of characters

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Mrs. Ramsay conducts her search through intuition rather than intellect; she relies on social traditions such as marriage and dinner parties to structure her experience. Lily, on the other hand, tries to create meaning in her life through her painting; she seeks to unify disparate elements in a harmonious whole.

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While these characters experience varying degrees of success in their quest for meaning, none arrives at a revelation that fulfills the search. As an old man, Mr. Ramsay continues to be as tortured by the specter of his own mortality as he is in youth. Mrs. Ramsay achieves moments in which life seems filled with meaning, but, as her dinner party makes clear, they are terribly short-lived.

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Lily, too, manages to wrest a moment from life and lend to it meaning and order. Her painting is a small testament to that struggle. But, as she reflects while pondering the meaning of her life, there are no “great revelations” but only “little daily miracles” that one, if lucky, can fish out of the dark.

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Compare and contrast Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. How are they alike? How are they different?

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Although Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s love for each other and for their children is beyond doubt, their approaches to life could not be more opposite. Mrs. Ramsay is loving, kind to her children, selfless, and generously giving, while Mr. Ramsay is cold and socially awkward. He is stern with his children, which causes them to hate and fear him, and he displays a neediness that makes him rather pathetic in the eyes of his guests.

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Despite these profound differences, however, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay share the knowledge that all things—from human life to human happiness—are destined to end. It is from this shared knowledge that their greatest differences grow. Keenly aware of human mortality, Mrs. Ramsay is fueled to cultivate moments that soothe her consciousness, while Mr. Ramsay nearly collapses under the weight of this realization.

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IN A NUTSHELL

LECTURE 14

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To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, which centres on the Ramsays and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skilfully manipulates temporal and psychological elements.

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To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity, and the problem of perception.

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In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present.

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01:22:13 – 01:32:39

Characters’ are made to reveal through their own mediums… words, painting…etc.

Change of weather from Summer to Winter

Mrs. Ramsey leaves her family crying behind

Loneliness could be seen and heard

Glimpses of World War

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Large parts of Woolf's novel do not concern themselves with the objects of vision, but rather investigate the means of perception, attempting to understand people in the act of looking.

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This examination of perception is not, however, limited to isolated inner-dialogues, but also analysed in the context of human relationships and the tumultuous emotional spaces crossed to truly reach another human being.

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Narration and perspective The novel lacks an omniscient narrator

(except in the second section: Time Passes); instead the plot unfolds through shifting perspectives of each character's stream of consciousness.

Unlike James Joyce, however, Woolf does not tend to use abrupt fragments to represent characters' thought processes; her method is more one of lyrical paraphrase.

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The lack of an omniscient narrator means that, throughout the novel, no clear guide exists for the reader and that only through character development can we formulate our own opinions and views because much is morally ambiguous.

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Whereas in Part I the novel is concerned with illustrating the relationship between the character experiencing and the actual experience and surroundings, the second part, 'Time Passes' having no characters to relate to, presents events differently. Instead, Woolf wrote the section from the perspective of a displaced narrator, unrelated to any people, intending that events be seen related to time. For that reason the narrating voice is unfocused and distorted, providing an example of what Woolf called 'life as it is when we have no part in it.'

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Allusions to autobiography and actual geography Woolf began writing To the Lighthouse

partly as a way of understanding and dealing with unresolved issues concerning both her parentsand indeed there are many similarities between the plot and her own life. Her visits with her parents and family to St Ives, Cornwall, where her father rented a house, were perhaps the happiest times of Woolf's life, but when she was thirteen her mother died and, like Mr. Ramsay, her father Leslie Stephen plunged into gloom and self-pity.

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Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell wrote that reading the sections of the novel that describe Mrs Ramsay was like seeing her mother raised from the dead. Their brother Adrian was not allowed to go on an expedition to Godrevy Lighthouse, just as in the novel James looks forward to visiting the lighthouse and is disappointed when the trip is cancelled. Lily Briscoe's meditations on painting are a way for Woolf to explore her own creative process (and also that of her painter sister), since Woolf thought of writing in the same way that Lily thought of painting

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Woolf's father began renting Talland House in St. Ives, in 1882, shortly after Woolf's own birth. The house was used by the family as a family retreat during the summer for the next ten years. The location of the main story in To the Lighthouse, the house on the Hebridean island, was formed by Woolf in imitation of Talland House. Many actual features from St Ives Bay are carried into the story, including the gardens leading down to the sea, the sea itself, and the lighthouse.

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Although in the novel the Ramsays are able to return to the house on Skye after the war, the Stephens had given up Talland House by that time. After the war, Virginia Woolf visited Talland House under its new ownership with her sister Vanessa, and Woolf repeated the journey later, long after her parents were dead.

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JOYCE, WOOLF AND MODERNISM MOVEMENT

LECTURE 14

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James Joyce is an irish writer born in 1882, his two masterpieces are “Ulysses” and “The Dubliners.

The first of these features, the one from which all the other ramified, is Paralysis. All Joyce’s characters are paralized and oppressed by a society with no certaintes developed after the first World War (1914-18), people are full of anguish also for familiar and religious fights (especially in Ireland where religious take power on people mind).

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Joyce himself felt paralyzed for the same reason in the 20th century, but he escaped successfully from Dublin first to Switzerland and after to Italy.

Nevertheless they realized to have had this paralysis, characterizing the most important moment in the story.

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Character has an epiphany, a kind of spiritual revelation about his psycology and personality, from a simple object, fact, and event that will influence his life since then. Ephiphany could happened many times during the story, sign of how Joyce gave importance to the interior monologue of  flow of thoughts of characters.

Stream of consciousness (James) is the name of this narrative tecnique, in which the reader follows the character’s  inner thoughts as they appear in his mind before to be analyzed by the conscious and rational part of the mind.

The stream of consciousness gives to life  many points of view as the number of faces human being has got.

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In Freud opinion man has got three faces, three parts: Es, ego and superego. Psycoanalysis in 20th century trying to study the Es, the unconscious part (having sometimes bad results as we can see in Mrs. Dalloway). 

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With a novel of Virginia Woolf a day could cover a hundred of pages (Mrs. Dalloway), and just a hundred of pages could cover three centuries (Orlando). She is the writer of memory and art, she gets the memory able to steel life from time.

The differences from Joyce are about the use of stream of consciousness and for the use of syntax.

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In Virginia there is an indirect interior monologue to represent a gap between chronological and interior time; this process is supported by the use of analogies that make her writing a mixture of prose and poetry, maybe in a more vulnarable and sensible position than Joyce.

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As in Joyce there is the epiphany in Woolf the moment of intensity and perception that signs character’s life is called moment of being.

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Review Lecture 14

Narrator of the Novel and Point of View Conveyed

Tone, Protagonist and Major Conflict the rising action, climax and falling

action of the novel the major themes, motifs and symbols

presented in the novel Joyce, Woolf and Modernism movement

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