"Ulysses": A Concerto Of Religious Tradition And Modern Culture

James Joyce(1882-1941)is one of the best Irish writers in the beginning of the 20th centuary.Joyce received the whole liberal education in Jesuit school during his boyhood and adolescene.And the time during his growth was also the years Catholic Church faced the inner and outer crisis.Joyce's works are full of sign inscribed by the ages he lived in.He lived in a time when religious tradition had both discourse and collision with modern thoughts,and the relation between them is just like the soloist and the orchestra in a concerto:alternate episodes of opposition and cooperation in the creation of a music flow.The relation between religious tradition and modern thoughts embodies in the modernists who tried to coordinate the conflict between Catholic theology and modern science,the revival of Neo-Thomasism,and Theosophy which aimed to resolve the contradiction between ancient religion and modern science etc.Joyce didn't receive or exclude religious tradition or modern thoughts totally.His novels take both of them in as nourishment.Joyce not only preserve his right to free/mis-read,but also use the raw materials in favor of his novel clerverly whether they are metaphysics or science fact or religious superstition and whether he believes them or not.Because of Joyce's openhearted pragmatism,Ulysses became an encyclopedic novel.The discourse and collision happened between religious tradition and modern thoughts in Ulysses highlighting one of the most significant change in the age:the interpersonal-relationship of the family,such as filiation,mother-child relationship,and conjugal relation.Ulysses which describes a world in which everything is changing also focuses on the identity crisis between father and son,the harm between mother and son,and the faithfulness between spouses.Inspired by Biblical study,Joyce treats the previous classics as a cover to represent the ever changing family ties.For example,Joyce rewrites Hamlet,Odyssey and heresy of Holy Trinity and reveals the fictionality of paternity;and in order to show the significance of the spiritual father,he also reconstructs the stories or theories of Divine Comedy,Talmud and Theosophy.Mariolatry is another method the Catholic Church use to defend Modernist Crisis The Church encouraged Mariolatry to establish its authority and maintain the laities's faith.So,although Joyce rewrites many classics to represent mother-son and spouse relations,he is more inclined to use the elements of Mariolatry.He also use psychoanalysis as a theoretical tool to remove the veil of Holy Virgin,and subvert Immaculate Conception comically.In fact,the source of the changing relation in family is the crisis of past and present.The anxiety of time is prominently represented in the art of modernism.Joyce's solution is allusion,intertextuality and epic analogy.They all make the past echo with the present,and make the Meta-event repreatedly happens in history,so the Meta-event can prove its eternal value.In that way,the past and the present time are equaled in the level of valuation.Not only can the cyclical history pattern in Finnegans Wake find its origin in Ulysses,but Joyce's solutions also appeal to the language revolution in Finnegans Wake.