Pursuing For The Spiritual Home

Since 1922, when Ulysses was published, the book was censored to be dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable, whereas the censorship battles over the book played a significant role in establishing its status as a literary masterpiece. Due to various reasons, no definitive version of the text exists. The textual complexities have fueled a vast amount of scholarship. In fact, there mainly used to be two schools of critics on the book. One school represented by Benett and Huxley held a negative attitude toward the book, the other including Virginia Woolf and Eliot thought highly of it. Until today, the comments on the book are still distinctively divided. However, Ulysses heads list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, which should be owing to its effective social value, in that Joyce depicts the bleak lives of the modern Westerners represented by the Dubliners, especially their innermost feelings within a Homeric epic structure. The extraordinarily experimental forms, such as the skill of "stream-of-consciousness", also help to make the book permanent. Throughout Joyce's creative life, Joyce indulged in forms of analysis that are remarkably Freudian in methods and results. His epiphany is a version of Freud's parapraxis. Ulysses is popularly thought to be a "Freudian"novel, because in the book Joyce concerns himself with such "Freudian"themes as neurosis, the dream, the unconscious, and employs such appropriate Viennese techniques as free association, linguistic distortion and interior monologue to illustrate those themes. Psychoanalysis differs from other such criticisms, not in its insistence upon reductionism and the discovery of simple roots, but in its looking for those roots in deep-psychic process, be they of an author, a character, or an audience (see Joyce in Nighttown, 15/19). Based on the above-mentioned factors, the approach of Freudian psychoanalysis is adopted in the thesis. If the application of this theory is successful, the slightest gestures in Ulysses will lay bare the deepest conflicts of the characters. My assumption in the thesis is that Joyce intends to pursue a new spiritual home as a modern Westerner. Breaking away from the evil history nightmare, Joyce performs a self-analysis and self-revelation in the guise of either Stephen or Bloom or any other appropriate character in Ulysses. To realize his intention, Joyce uses the Freudian psychoanalysis as an instrument to unfold the many-sided personalities of his characters. Evidences are provided mainly from three aspects to prove such a hypothesis. First, Ulysses is the fruit of Joyce's long-year spiritual pursuit; the book is quite autobiographical. Second, there are close relationships between Joyce and Freudian psychoanalysis. Third, Ulysses gives a clinical scrutiny of psychoanalysis to the modern Westerners, whose egos are on the edge of cracking up, by disposing their depressed anxiety and by interpreting their dreams. Accordingly, in structure, the main body of the thesis consists of a brief introduction, three main chapters, and a short conclusion. In the introduction, the controversial criticisms on Ulysses and its literary status are discussed. In chapter one, a careful examination is given on both the life and the works of James Joyce, in the hope of finding something contributing to Joyce's spiritual pursuit expressed in Ulysses. Some of the most important Freudian psychoanalytic terms and theories and approaches are introduced and explained in chapter two. The relationship between Joyce and Freudian psychoanalysis is also examined in this chapter. Chapter three is the last but not the least. In this chapter Ulysses is read by Freudian psychoanalysis mainly from two aspects. On...