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RICHARD LEHAN James Joyce: The Limits of Modernism and the Realms of the Literary Text James joyce oversaw the modern novel through its evolution of various narrative modes. Such movement takes us from realistic fiction (the kind of slice-of-life portraits that we have in Dubliners) to the literature of self-consciousness and the indeterminate that we find in Finnegans Wake. Joyce's development as a novelist thus recapitulates— indeed replicates—the evolution of the modern novel. Joyce's work is a microcosm of the macrocosm—proof that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny —and Joyce is the paradigmatic modern. This argument presupposes that there was a radical shift in narrative conception between the novels of Dickens and the naturalistic novels of Zola. This shift came about because the new commercial/urban process no longer accommodated the sentimental hero/heroine with his/ her capacity to convince us that what was good in the human heart could overcome the evil embodied in the new megalopolis. Dickens himself no longer felt confident in his sentimental endings, as his rewriting of Great Expectations would indicate. Dickens always tried to conclude his novels with a new sense of life and energy, inseparable from the idea of sentiment and the nuclear family, but by the time he got to Our Mutual Friend such plots were wearing thin, and the sense of death that emerges from that novel is stronger than the sense ofnew life. No longer could the novel be recuperated in terms of comic realism— Arizona Quarterly Volume 50 Number 1, Spring 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 Richard Lehan that is, in terms of a moral center embodied by a Squire AUworthy, a Mr. Knightley, an Esther Summerson, or a John Harmon. And where comic realism left off, literary naturalism began. Zola's world turns on force—biological and environmental—and not on moral order. The center of the Rougon-Macquart novels is Paris, and Zola took us from the world of the new proletariat in LAssommoir to the decadent salons of Nana, from the source of money in LArgent to its effects in the northern coalfields in Germinal, from the way the new commercialism had transformed the peasantry in La Terre to the way it led up to the gigantic military defeat in La Débâcle. Joyce's connection to Zola was remote and indirect, but the connection was nevertheless real. It was most directly mediated by George Moore, whose early novels were written under the influence of Zola, and whose works like The Lake, The Untitled Fields, and Vain Fortune Joyce knew well. Joyce often disparaged some aspects of this work, especially novels like The Lake in which Father Oliver Gogarty's (Moore and Joyce saw different things in the original of Buck Mulligan) sexual awakening came coincidental with his nude swim across a lake in County Mayo. Joyce thought all this was a bit too much. But like Moore, Joyce believed that Ireland was in the grip ofa morally overbearing church, that the moral timidity of the nation undercut the drive for home rule and independence, and that the parochialism of the country would keep it locked into a peasant mentality. The Irish were obsessed with sex and death, suppressing one and celebrating the other in a ritual that became grotesque. Caught in the tension ofsuch self-destructive play, young men and women in Ireland were destined to express their energies neurotically, to desire escape while succumbing to the invisible walls that held them. Joyce did not have to look far to find in Moore analogues to such stories of his own in Dubliners as "Eveline," "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," and "The Boarding House." Moreover, Moore had moved away from the omniscient point of view of Zola's novels toward more psychologically narrated stories—stories which unfold through a central consciousness. Joyce realized that the unfolding of such consciousness could be the basis for a new kind of novel—a novel with an aesthetic hero for whom sensibility was more important than sentiment, and who was more interested in being defined in the context of the beautiful than in the naturalistic context of biological necessity and...

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