The Influence of James Joyce

I've heard that James Joyce had a huge influence on literature; that he's arguably the most important author of the 20th Century. Currently, I'm making an attempt on Ulysses, and I've started to wonder...

What is his influence? How has he changed literature?

I've tried to find out on Google, but all I've found is stuff about stream-of-consciousness and literary allusions - has he influenced more than just those styles? Surely he must have, to be considered so important. I'm also wondering: how does his influence extend beyond Lit Fic?

Thanks for any answers you can give.

Joyce was one of the first writers to successfully do with words what Picasso & Braque did with images: he was a groundbreaking modernist who showed that literary modernism could be done, and done well. He was also an encyclopaedic kind of writer whose last two novels, in different ways, double as a condensed, quasi-coded history of human literature.

That said, he's more important than influential. Anyone who wants to write experimental prose will want to take pointers from Joyce, but unlike Picasso, Joyce didn't revolutionize the field for future practitioners. Critics are still fine with authors who want to write a traditional novel that Henry James would have recognized—it's more the rule than the exception, in fact. Joyce isn't a Shakespearean figure whose example every writer has to come to terms with. But without Joyce, it's hard to imagine the careers of certain writers, like Thomas Pynchon, Gabriel García Márquez, or David Foster Wallace.

So I don't think Joyce changed literature in any all-encompassing way, but he expanded its possibilities in a way that only a few have managed.

His work, and the analysis of it, contributed a lot to the divide between literary and popular fiction. Post-Joyce, what makes literature literary is the presence of symbolism, motifs, and other interpretable stuff, prioritized over story. It made it so that literary brilliance had to come from the ability of the work to transcend its own plot when analyzed.

The freedom of his prose's flow also paved the way for a more direct sense of interior monologue in literature where before it might be confined to poetry. This was not a trifling development by any means. Furthermore, his wry sense of humour, based in literary allusion, sideways observation and eccentric satire pretty much set the tone for the modern humorous literary voice.

edited 6th Apr '12 4:37:29 PM by JHM

Thanks, y'all.

Wait... He's responsible for that?

...

... Someone get me a time machine, and a gun.

Wait, does that mean he helped to end the Victorian age's ubiquitous omniscient narration?

... Okay - cancel the gun.

A time machine would still be nice, though.

edited 8th Apr '12 2:04:38 PM by HughMan

About the above, there's an informal group of science fiction and fantasy writers who call themselves the Pre-Joycean fellowship (Steven Brust is one of them), and they use pre-Joyce to mean pretty much exactly that- specifically, they don't like Joyce for creating the idea that literary fiction uses True Art Is Incomprehensible, and something strongly plotted is automatically popular fiction.

It's partly to do with the fact that the novel (or prose fiction in general) was a relatively new form, and it didn't have such high artistic pretensions before. People didn't accept literary storytelling for its own sake at first, because it was newer and less artistic than drama or poetry. At first, prose fiction was justified by styling itself as factual in some way, taking the form of memoirs, journals, or other nonfiction (lots of 17th and 18th century fiction did this). Then by the 1800s readers were used to fiction, so writers were getting the idea that it was okay to just tell the stories you wanted to without the facade.

Then Joyce started using prose in more inventive, artsy ways, so then they had to acknowledge literature as art. But there was still all this prose fiction that wasn't art, so we ended up with a divide where literature could be highbrow, but clearly not all of it was.

It's not something we're stuck with forever. We have a better, less prejudiced understanding of fiction and access to alternative criticism, so people will be able to be praised for writing whatever they want so long as it's good. It's just been a long slog to get there.

Joyce influenced modern literature in more or less the same way other great artists influenced their field: he did something completely new and unheard of, and did it so well that a whole bunch of other artists ended up doing the exact same thing instead of trying something new themselves. Philippe Sollers wrote an "experimental" novel without interpunction (Paradis) as late as 1981.

It's like Flaubert, or Wagner. Some artists see it and think: the way these guys write/compose is the only legit way to write/compose.

Aside from that I'm pretty certain that Joyce has had much influence outside of Lit Fic. When I read the introductory chapter of Guards Guards I thought, "Hmm... that reads a bit like Joyce."

The greatest thing about Ulysses is the emotional directness of a lot of passages. For example,

Show, Don't Tell at its finest. It's this direct kind of writing you see often in post-Joycean literature, and not just highbrow literature.

edited 24th Apr '12 3:27:50 PM by Fresison

I took a look at the first parts of A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and by the Gods, he had some unique style. I should definitely pick it up again.

edited 24th Apr '12 5:07:20 PM by dRoy

Double posting, because I read that bit and WOW I have to read the whole thing!

edited 10th Jul '12 1:09:26 AM by dRoy

I began to read Ulysses (Italian translation) with the guide and I must say it is not too difficult to read however it takes a lot of time due to the neverending references to almost every field of classic knowledge but I want to finish it so that when someone will ask my if I have read it I will say yes I will be so proud that my heart will go like mad and yes I say I have YES.

See the influence?

edited 13th Jul '12 2:35:55 AM by Belfagor

Who influenced Joyce? I heard that Thomas Aquinas was a pretty major one.

I think so, yes. The entire Worldbuilding of Finnegans Wake, however, is based on Giambattista Vico's Scienza Nova.

Joyce's early stuff owed a huge debt to Ibsen. And not the works that people think of, the early plays that resulted in a "social agitator" caricature of the playwright and inspired hacks like Arthur Miller. Joyce internalized the later Ibsen's mythic tendencies and use of symbolism, drawing on quasi-supernatural works like The Master Builder, '"When We Dead Awaken, and John Gabriel Borkman. The influences are all over Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist''.