Ch'oe Chae-sŏ (1908–64) is a controversial figure in Korean literary studies today, remembered more as a pro-Japanese collaborator than as a critic whose work spanned several literatures. He began his career in the early 1930s as a scholar and critic of English literature, which he had studied at Keijō Imperial University—an institution of higher learning that Japan had established in the former capital of Korea, its colony since the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 1 Ch'oe also wrote criticism on Korean literature and headed two major literary journals—인문평론 (Inmun p'yongnon; Humanistic Criticism) and 國民文學 (Kokumin bungaku; National Literature)—during the height of Japanese colonial rule in Korea (Hanscom 165; Suh 57). Given his unequivocal support for Japan and its intensifying efforts to assimilate Koreans during the early 1940s, it is perhaps not surprising that most scholarly works on Ch'oe—including those in English (Poole; Suh)—have focused on his writings from this time, many of which appeared in his Japanese-language journal Kokumin bungaku. The essay presented here, entitled “죠이스 ‘젊은 예술가의 초상화’ 예술의 탄생” (“Chyoisŭ ‘Chŏlmŭn yesulga ŭi ch'osanghwa’: yesul ŭi t'ansaeng”; “Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The Birth of Art”) was written on the cusp of Ch'oe's fateful turn toward Japanese imperialization. It was published at the dawn of 1940, the final year in which Ch'oe worked predominantly in the Korean language before the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945. This piece is important not only because it introduced James Joyce to Korean readers through a condensed presentation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, parts of which Ch'oe translated into Korean himself. It also sheds light on how Ch'oe grappled with his predicament as a colonial intellectual by critically interpreting the Bildung of Stephen-as-Joyce.
Many Korean intellectuals were already interested in Irish literature by the time Ch'oe wrote his essay on Joyce, because they considered Ireland under the British Empire to be comparable to colonial Korea. Specifically, they looked to the cultural and political developments made by the Irish in the early twentieth century as potential models that they could emulate to gain greater autonomy for Koreans in the Japanese empire (Masato 331–32). Some scholarship on Ch'oe has read his essay in this vein, considering it to be a forced attempt by Ch'oe to align himself with Joyce-as-Stephen when Ch'oe was much more of a comprador than the Irish writer (Suh 56). That may be the case, especially in the light of what Ch'oe began to publish and write just a year after this essay. But this piece is also undoubtedly connected to his earlier work on psychological and psychoanalytical approaches to literary criticism (“비평과 과학” [“Pip'yŏng kwa kwahak”; “Criticism and Science”]), as Ch'oe explores how Joyce's self-reflection in this “autobiographical novel” relates to the difficult realities of Ireland and the world in the early twentieth century. To this end, Ch'oe divides Portrait into nine sections, each referring to a theme that reflects the internal state of Stephen-as-Joyce over time and adding up to create the independent young man at the end of the novel.
Ch'oe places great emphasis on the ending, repeating his translation of the penultimate sentence twice in this essay: “I go to face the truth of experience a million times so that I may temper, in the smithy of my mind, the spirit that our people were previously unable to create” (“Chyoisŭ” 120, 131). He traces the birth of this thought in Stephen-as-Joyce to his conversation with Davin, in which the protagonist declares his intent to rely on his own experiences—rather than those of other Irish people, past and present—to live his life (130–31). Interestingly, Ch'oe presents this conversation as an argument over whether Stephen-as-Joyce belongs to the Irish nation as opposed to the British, without so much as hinting at the colonial nature of the relationship between Ireland and Great Britain. This shows how Ch'oe read Portrait through his own experiences of living in colonial Korea, where the term nation had two conflicting meanings for Koreans. Under Japanese rule, nation officially referred to Japan for both Koreans and the Japanese, eliding the fact of Japanese colonization—the very process that made Koreans colonial subjects, or peoples of a nation colonized by Japan. This rhetoric was pervasive in Keijō Imperial University as well, where courses on national language, literature, and history taught those of Japan (Kim 17, 20).
More importantly for Ch'oe, his adviser Satō Kiyoshi foregrounded the nation-as-Japan in his teaching philosophy, asserting that he sought to teach “자국문학을 위한 [영문학]” (“[English literature] for the sake of national literature”; qtd. in Kim 80).Footnote 2 But this exhortation was far from straightforward for Satō's Korean students; Satō himself recalled how “충격을 받지 않을 수 없었다” (“shocked”) he was to find them studying English literature for “그들[의] 민족의 해방과 자유” (“the liberation and freedom of [their] nation”)—that is, Korea (qtd. in Kim 253).Footnote 3 Yet by the early 1940s, many took the official fiction of the nation-as-Japan to be the truth, choosing to ignore the fact that their identity as Koreans barred them from belonging to Japan in the same way as the Japanese. Ch'oe also made this choice, despite having read Portrait to make sense of the positions that colonial Koreans occupied—and could occupy—between the two nations of Korea and Japan. Given the timing, why did Ch'oe write this essay on Joyce in Korean, rather than in Japanese or English? And how has this linguistic choice affected its legibility as a work of transcolonial criticism, rather than as yet another instance of Joycean reception in a non-Western nation outside the British Empire? This essay invites its readers today to consider these questions and better account for unruly colonial experiences by rethinking postcolonialism to include comparisons across colonies of different empires.
Location
How was an artwork like Ulysses born out of a country of poverty and superstition and political factional strife like Ireland? I consider Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (I will refer to it below as A Portrait of the Artist) to be very important as a psychological record—a history of psychological development that reveals this secret.
This work is an autobiographical novel that depicts Joyce's life, above all his inner life, which begins with recollections from childhood that “if you urinate in your bedding it is warm at first but later becomes cold. . . . Mother's bosom emanated a better smell than father” (Joyce 1), and ends with Joyce leaving for Paris, the capital of the arts, while resolving that “I go to face the truth of experience a million times so that I may temper, in the smithy of my mind, the spirit that our people were previously unable to create” (Joyce 299).Footnote 1 It goes without saying that in the past, writers who composed autobiographies in the manner of fiction were not few in number, but with respect to their intentions and methods, they have great epochal differences with A Portrait of the Artist. I will gradually explain at what points they differ, but in any case, this novel—which takes the inner life of a young man as its theme and attempts to write it realistically to the end—is simultaneously a pioneer and a model of the autobiographical novel, which has become like a genre of the contemporary Euro-American novel.
We not only consider A Portrait of the Artist to be important in the sense above, but it is also imperative to know this work in order to understand that strange masterpiece Ulysses. Moreover, as previously mentioned, the time period addressed in this work is the preparatory period not only for the author himself but also for Stephen, the boy protagonist of this work, who will appear in Ulysses with the same name but as a mature adult. So the strangeness and the difficulty of the protagonist of Ulysses will be resolved in large part by understanding the boy protagonist Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist. Then what kind of young man is Stephen and what kind of life did he lead?
Sensitivity
Although it is something that may be assumed just by looking at the previous quotation, Stephen is an abnormally sensitive young man. His skin is indescribably sensitive to external stimuli. Moreover, his sensitivity to sounds is extremely delicate. His association of thoughts—stream of consciousness, which is fixed as a distinct method of his novel—is in large part aural. He is actually able to depict a diverse and complex fantasy even with ordinary sounds that are heard in everyday life. This, more than anything, speaks to his poetic talent. (His sentences are generally poetic, and additionally his first work was a book of poetry called Chamber Music.)
One of the most memorable instances of this is the part in which he imagines his own death from the sound of bells ringing through the cold air outside the window of his dorm room, where he alone is sick. This young man suddenly becomes sad not so much because of the fact of his dying but because the poetic verse in his own fantasy is extremely beautiful.
His imagination was varied. He writes his name, the name of his class, and his school's name on the book cover, and after writing in order the city of Sallins, Kildare county, Ireland, Europe, world, and the universe, he suddenly becomes captivated by the imagination of a great unknown god (Joyce 11–12). In no time, he drifts from this kind of religious daydream to a political daydream. The motivation for this is extremely simple. In the middle of this fantasy about the universe, he sees the green earth floating in the maroon-colored clouds. (This is also an example of free association, one of his writing methods.) Green was the color that represented Parnell's party in his home. In his home, the Catholic party and Parnell's party are always treated through separate decorations. And those associations cause him pain.
It is necessary to remember that thoughts of religion and politics jump in early on even in immature daydreams such as these. This is because they become the keys to understanding the contradictory anxieties at the crossroads of Joyce's artistic foundation.
Imbecility
Let's look a bit more at Stephen's life during his primary-school days. As for school life, it isn't filled with the drive of a young man fueled by some ambition, but that doesn't mean that there is some romantic dream there, either. The inner life of the young man is clearly depicted as if it were in film, through all the different ways in which the reality of ordinary surroundings combine with, and separate from, the protagonist Stephen's consciousness, including how they connect with, replace, and flow into one another. That is beautiful not because life itself is beautiful but because that description is real and has poetic beauty. And what is certain through all of this is that Stephen is extremely sensitive and also naive. But the reality in which he lives (Ireland) is extremely foolish and obstinate, even though it will gradually become civilized. This barbarous reality deposits doubt and fear deep into this sensitive boy protagonist. It also creates a rich background for Joyce's art, together with the aforementioned religious and political fantasies.
The mischievous Wells asks Stephen the following in the schoolyard: “Do you kiss your mother every night before you go to sleep?” When Stephen responded that he did, Wells's accomplices laugh out loud. When Stephen denied it this time and said that he didn't because he was embarrassed, they again laugh out loud. Stephen's body quickly turns red as he begins to question himself on what actions would be proper in this situation (Joyce 9–10). Although this part seems to be an unimportant account, it anticipates his spirit, which wanders around until he takes hold of his artistic beliefs.
There is a boy who kicked him into a ditch because he did not exchange a toy with him. “That water was cold and slick. Someone said that they saw a large rat jump into the dirt in that ditch” (Joyce 5). The illusion of this rat comes up several times like the refrain of a song. Also, the black dog with eyes as large as a carriage lamp frequently appears as a symbol of fear. Critics call this Joycean method internal rhythm, as this repetition allowed readers to easily grasp the psychological state of the protagonist.
Politics
What kind of influence did the politics and religion of Ireland, under extraordinary circumstances at the time, have on this boy protagonist? To answer this question, it is necessary to observe his family and school life in greater detail.
It is winter break, and so Stephen gets to go to his long-awaited home. This pleasant trip on the road—the joy in that part of the work is poetry that shines like bubbles of a stream. But the Christmas dinner that he observes when he enters the house becomes chaotic because of the political debate that arises between his family members, and the young man's homesickness ends in grave sorrow. The people gathered for this dinner are Simon Dedalus (Stephen's father), an implacable, foulmouthed person belonging to Parnell's party, and Mr. Casey, also a member of Parnell's party, and on the other side grandmother Dante, a member of a fanatic Catholic sect who hates Parnell like an enemy and barks like a crazy dog whenever his name is mentioned, and mother, who belongs to neither side, and sensitive Stephen.
If we take a moment here to discuss the background of this work, Ireland at this time was one in which the Fenian party, following the death of its leader Parnell (1891), had collapsed and internal divisions had arisen even within the Irish home-rule movement to the extent that its fighting strength was completely sapped. Political movements were stagnant, and on a superficial level Parnell's party and foolish Catholic sects were spending time on polemics and insults at every waking moment.
The dinner proceeds and just when the steaming meat of the turkey is to appear the debate begins with an attack on the pastors. It is not necessary to introduce all the details of that debate here. Despite the efforts of mother to spend Christmas as joyfully as possible by organizing this gathering and diffusing tensions in all four directions, the fight went so far that all sorts of verbal abuse spewed forth in front of this young man.
Dante—“They are right! Pastors are always right! It's because God and morality and faith are more precious than anything.”
Casey—“Right! In that case Ireland does not need God!”
“Blasphemer! Devil!”
“Go croak, God.”
Dante shouted as she slammed the door and left—“Hell's devils! This is our victory. Didn't we kill and get rid of that fellow Parnell!”
Casey murmured while weeping on the floor. “Poor Parnell! Our party leader is dead.”
At that moment, when Stephen raised his head that had been weighed down by fear, his father's eyes were filled with tears (Joyce 40–41). This serious political reality of Ireland becomes the fetters that bind Joyce's artistic wings, but in the end it becomes a motive that makes Joyce fly off to his own artistic world.
Reality
He first encounters harsh reality when he could not go to school, because money disappeared from his home. “Recently, he realized that the air in the house had changed for some reason. When the things that he thought would never change changed in this way, at each such moment, his outlook on life, like that of a child, became disturbed bit by bit. He thought as if there was no room for his ambition, rippling at times to break out of the dark corners of the soul” (Joyce 70). At this time, Stephen was someone who had thoughts too innocent to be called romantic toward Eileen, who was already old enough to be his niece.
One morning, two large yellowish carriages came and suddenly left with their things, and he moved by train together with his mother, whose eyes had reddened from crying, from “the comfortable and dreamy life in Blackrock” to “the new house in Dublin, past the dreary and foggy road and empty as if deserted with its lights seemingly off” (Joyce 72). His happy visions have completely disappeared, and “Dublin, like an enormous monster” mercilessly steps on his delicate nerves. He feels rage toward the change of fate that within a short period of time completely changed his surroundings into a suffocating and fake world. “But the world would not change in any way even if he were to become angry. He patiently stored those things visible to him in his mind, and taking a step back, secretly tasted that bitter taste alone” (emphasis mine).Footnote 2 Here we see the very first awakening of this young man as an artist, at the same time that we are introduced to his insight, an important key point to his art. This insight is an element that leads Joyce's art into internal realism while giving his work a sweet yet tangy lyricism. He did not violently rebel against the violence of reality, but seemed satisfied with representing it through artistic means after storing its effect within his psyche for some time. I think that this is entirely the reason why he prefers to depict the internal world—stream of consciousness rather than the external world.
Not long afterward, he enters a university preparatory school run by the Jesuit sect through arrangements made by his father. There he cannot but address his concerns about ideology and sex, which came at him like the tides.
Ideology
Not long after he enrolled in Belvedere College did ideological torture rain on his delicate self. After reading his essay, a teacher declared that it included heterodox thoughts. This is a frightening announcement in an Irish school, steeped in Catholicism down to its marrow. It is as if Stephen became a good object for troublesome students to attack.
Two or three days later, young Stephen's artistic conscience and sense of justice were subjected to hardship by the barbarism of foolish classmates. In front of these philistines who considered Captain Marryat, a popular novelist of old, to be a great artist and Tennyson a first-rate poet, he decidedly insisted on the greatness of Byron and was hit by everyone for it. Seeing these bullies run away while shouting for him to change, he tightly closed his fist and cried.
At this time Stephen was already a solitary young man chasing his artistic vision. But his surroundings were too noisy for him to follow this vision in quiet. The advice from his father and teachers to become a great gentleman and a good Catholic believer above all else, from sports club members to become a strong man, from the nationalists to exalt the language and traditions of his mother country, as well as all sorts of other talk throw him into complete disarray and bother him as he seeks to delve into lofty artistic contemplation.
Through clashes with reality in this manner, Stephen becomes attentive to the surrounding world outside himself and also comes to sense the passing of a generation even within himself. He once went back to his hometown with his father. Their household goods had been auctioned off, and the trip was to settle remaining affairs related to it. His father is an extremely good-natured person but without actual skills, and while he has an interest in politics it only amounts to the exaggerations of a typical member of the Irish middle class. Even then, he drank with his hometown friends whom he had not seen for a while, and quickly passed the time with reminiscences of the past and self-praise.
“Stephen saw his father and his two old friends raise their glasses at the counter for their remembrances of the past. Whether it was fate or differences in disposition, a deep abyss opened a gap between him and them. In his mind, he felt as if he himself had matured more than them. His mind, like the moon that shines upon the youthful earth, was shining a melancholic light on their debates and joys and regrets from above. He had neither a life akin to that which palpitated within them nor youth. He lived without knowing the joys of befriending others, healthy masculine strength, or filiality. There was nothing that pulsated within him except heartless and loveless lust. His youth died or disappeared, and so his spirit, which could have had simple happiness, also disappeared at the same time. Consequently, he was wandering around in the center of his life, which was like the crust of the barren moon” (Joyce 107–08).
Lust
Heartless and loveless lust—this was what bit and held on to his psyche next. The clear and wholesome yearning he had for Eileen early on disappeared with his youth like film exposed to the sunlight, and “if there were any images that attracted his eyes he defiled that figure while persistently holding on forever and looked down on the detailed process of his secretive passion as cold practicality. He wandered day and night in the midst of a distorted vision of the outside world” (Joyce 111). In this way, the sixteen-year-old young man in the sexual prime of his life jumps into the darkness of ecstatic guilt in the arms of a prostitute.
But Stephen's case was not that kind of simple case in which he could transition easily from a youth into an adult with everything completely resolved once he relieved his desires unconsciously. Because his pleasures were always attended by a sense of guilt, his youth was colorful yet thoroughly worn down by religious concerns. As his researcher, I cannot ignore the importance of this religious consciousness not only in the light of the facts that serve as the basis for his art, but also because of the role it plays as fetters of destiny he had to fight against for his entire life.
When he became physically dirty and stood in spiritual danger, what pushed him into remorse and purification through lessons of death and judgment and hell were the three days of trinity prayers conducted by his school. At this prayer meeting, Father Arnall preached of God's grace and the purity of the Virgin Mary after scaring the young men into an awareness of sins, the fear of death, and despair while deploying all images of hell that human knowledge is capable of producing. Early on, Huxley mentioned that there were spiritual barbarians just like there were physical barbarians.Footnote 3 When I read this long passage on the trinity prayers, I can only say that Ireland is a country of spiritual savages with respect to that biased and violent emphasis on divinity. Because of this vehement sermon, and also because of his subsequent repentance and penance of the soul, Stephen, who had fallen down to the level of beasts, eventually receives a recommendation even from the school principal to devote himself to priesthood. But on the contrary, this was a crisis for Stephen as an artist. The reason for this is because he was an artist destined to kick these fetters off and fly high.
Exaltation
Paul is said to have seen a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus and as a result repented and converted. But what Stephen, beset by a psychological crisis after receiving his call to holy vocation, saw on the Irish coastal roads was a vision not of Christ but of the Greek artisan Daedalus. His classmates, who were sunbathing, called his name Stephen Dedalus in the Roman way, shouting hey Stephanos Dedalos! Hey Stephanos Dedalos (Joyce 196). Of course that was a joke. But Stephen, with an already strong aural imagination, heard this sound as if it were an enlightened prophecy attempting to make him aware of his artistic calling.
Originally, Stephanos Daedalus was a renowned artisan who appeared in Greek mythology. He was incarcerated because of King Minos but is said to have invented wings glued with wax, and while flying above the seas together with his son Icarus, he fell into the sea because he flew too high, and the wax melted from the heat of the sun.Footnote 4
The name of this mythical artist symbolized for Stephen “a hawk flying toward the sun from the sea” and “the artist who creates some formless and coverless thing flying across the sky out of the metal ores of the earth” (Joyce 196). His heart jumped, and his breathing became hurried, and liveliness overflowed his limbs. His soul flew toward other shores of the world and his entire body became purified in an instant as he reached the extremes of skepticism and shone brilliantly (Joyce 196–97).
His throat itched at the urge to want to raise his voice and shout. That was the shout of an eagle flying in midair, the shout of life that called him out from the world of duty and despair. In this way, the short moment of intense flight saved him and the victorious cry that had been stopped up in his lips chipped at his brains—“Stephanos!” (Joyce 197).
After that the author mutters, “What has everything until now been if not the clothes taken off from a corpse? The fear that he held night and day, the skepticism surrounding him, the shame that made him servile both internally and externally—what is all this if not the clothes of the dead, the hemp clothes worn within the grave?” (Joyce 197).
“His soul was resurrected from the grave of his boyhood, shaking off the clothes of the dead. That's right! That's right! That's right! He will create some formless and endless thing that newly flies in midair with the strength of the soul and freedom like that of the great artisan who shares his name” (Joyce 197).
But Stephen had another fetter that he had to shake off in order to completely liberate the artist within himself. That was Ireland, his birthplace. This process took place at the University of Dublin, the final step of his intellectual preparation.
Intellect
Stephen, who now appears as a student at the University of Dublin, is no longer a naive boy who trembles in fear in front of tradition and authority. Even though his intellect had become sophistic and his sensibilities had degenerated, he was a young man whose aloof artistic pride raised its head higher. The finances of his family shrank down to such an extent that while catching lice embedded within the collar of his school uniform, he reached the point of “closing his eyes at the desperate convulsions caused by the life of a body in hand-me-downs, undernourished, and roiled with lice” (Joyce 275). He made great efforts to resist this kind of reality through ridicule and cynicism. When he received a request for his signature on a resolution for the peace movement advocated by the Russian czar, he jeered by asking if he would be given money for signing.
It is rather a natural thing that his attitude, which attempted to defend his own inner artistic world through ridicule and cynicism, made him appear incomprehensible to his colleagues.
“I cannot understand you as a person at all. Sometimes you curse at English literature. Sometimes you curse at Irish spies. When I see your name and your thoughts . . . are you an Irish person at all?” (Joyce 236).
He calmly responds to these kinds of scolding questions.
“This race, this country, the life of this era gave birth to me. I will express that kind of self as I am” (Joyce 237).
And he continues to speak. “Our ancestors threw away their own national language and borrowed the language of another nation. Were they not at peace even after having been conquered by no more than ten foreigners? Where is the reason that I must pay back the debt that they made willy-nilly with my own life and body?” (Joyce 237).
Stephen fully knew just how many people throughout Irish history had dedicated their lives, youth, and love for their country as respectful and earnest individuals only to have been sold off to the enemy, cast aside, and cursed because of extreme circumstances. He must have thought it impossible to suffer the sacrifice of his artistic world because of these kinds of political ideals. What is the following quotation if not the words directly indicating the psychological attitude he instinctively took as an artist who sought to keep his own artistic values alive throughout these sudden political developments!
“The birth of the soul is, more so than the birth of the body, a birth that is more mysterious, more regrettable, and darker. If a human soul is born in this country, then it is covered with nets so that it may not escape. You spoke to me of nationality, language, and religion. I intend to escape from those nets to fly high” (Joyce 238).
Thus, seeing the beautiful dusk that immersed him into the world of poetry, and swallows that fly in the twilight, he thinks of farewells—farewells with his family and accomplices and compatriots and birth country.
A Portrait of the Artist ends with a part from his diary as follows.
“Come, oh life! I go to face the truth of experience a million times, and I will temper, in the smithy of my mind, the spirit that our people were unable to create” (Joyce 299).
Here, we need to go back to the opening of this novel and look at the part quoted there from Ovid, which is the following.
“And he digs into the previously untouched arts” (Joyce 1).
Readers will easily guess that this previously untouched art is Ulysses.
———
Above, I examined A Portrait of the Artist by focusing on the kinds of processes art goes through to be born. In closing, I also cannot overlook the place and significance of the form, or formal aspect, of this work. As previously mentioned, the autobiographical novel after the Great War—especially the autobiographical novel that cast boys as protagonists—was popular. It was different from the countless biographies and confessions available in the past with respect to its intent and methods. It was not a simple confession but a description, not a simple narration but a fiction, and also a flawless weave of both description and fiction.
Study of the Human
As is well known, the Great World War destroyed European tradition and simultaneously broke up the dependent relationship between humans for the time being. Here, it became the task of novels that originally made the study of the human their final goal to consider the human from a completely new angle. From this perspective, it seems rather natural that the author's own boyhood, of which he is the most fully informed, is selected as material for his novels. And also, another point to pay attention to is that these autobiographical novels, like the traditional characteristic novels, do not mainly depict the external lives of humans but their internal lives—their psychological world, including even their unconsciousness. Whenever humans find themselves in historical crises, they always returned to and examined themselves, and attempted to restart studying the human from that sole point of certainty. What twentieth-century men were surprised to find when they returned to themselves was the unconscious world. That they used the methods of psychoanalysts in the middle of their novels is nothing more than indicating that their psyches are realistic.
Reality and Consciousness
Stephen said that the impressions of reality projected onto his consciousness appeared more truthful than reality itself. This is Joyce himself speaking of what Carl Jung called the introvert psychology type. In his work, we see reality not as the vivid material of reality itself but as it has been reflected onto his consciousness. And his consciousness is a mirror with an especially delicate structure. This is the reason why the reality that appears in his work is especially clear. It is as if we were seeing a particularly vivid scene from a film. At the same time, this is also the reason why the reality within his work loses freshness and appears morbid in some parts.
Description
On the one hand, he possesses frightening accuracy with regard to external description. That is because he fully demonstrates the principle of mots justes (proper words in proper places) that he mainly learned from the French symbolists. To bring about the prescribed effects, he puts precise language in proper places through agility and effort actually worthy of admiration. This may even be comparable to a seasoned surgeon's skillful use of the scalpel in conducting a rather important surgery. His writing style emits a metallic sheen because of this precision.
Fiction
We can identify the so-called internal monologue as another secret of his style. This is said to be a method he learned from Édouard Dujardin, but Joyce was the one to fully put this method to use. It is a type of psychological self-recording method that attempts to directly (that is, while rejecting the established forms of expression and even the subjective interpretations of the author himself) convey a character's stream of consciousness to the reader. As the psyche wanders around and, moreover, as the unconsciousness flows, the author records it in monologic form. And while he even records the external reality that stimulated the consciousness at the same time (this is called synchronization), he presents it unexpectedly, without any forewarning or hints (this is an application of a filmic method). Although this causes confusion for the unaccustomed reader, those familiar with his novels will be able to get a sure impression from it.
The significance that this novel has with respect to the technical aspect of writing cannot be fully explained in this kind of short piece. In sum, this novel is uniquely significant because it used all possible ways to fully present the two weapons that a novel can wield—namely, description and fiction. It of course created surprising musical effects through countless internal monologues. It also used the naturalist method from the past for descriptions of the hideous city, the Dostoevskian method for psychological crises, and the Mallarméesque method for scenes at the seaside leading the protagonist into the world of arts, as well as for the scene at twilight. The psychological realism of Joyce, who freely used all these methods to inevitably reveal himself, is the product of an artist's artificial, or inhuman passion, previously seen only in Flaubert.
