The life and literary fate of the Austrian writer Hermann Broch, who lived from 1866 to 1951, is closely related to the rise of fascism in Europe and the destruction of the moral and cultural values of the Old Continent. This subject, which was also featured in Franz Kafka's works, gets a giant dimension at Broch, and becomes the basis of all his work. Hermann Broch concludes that human life becomes REALIZING only when it is subjectively perceived as comprehensible - only then it gets meaning and price and can be experienced. But the self-consciousness of the individual is continually endangered by many foreign realities that remain incomprehensible. To this threat is added the feeling of the ignorance of one's own soul. So the crucial question facing the modern man is the question of time and death. According to Hermann Broch, death lies on the border between the light peace of consciousness, where everything is understandable, and the world of darkness, where everything is undefined, meaningless, waiting to be named and overcome. From this view of death, the writer's true moral task is to include the world of death, darkness and irrationality in the light peace of consciousness. Such an integration would mean a moral victory over the time to death, overcoming the great unrestrained fear of life - and that fear a man feels the moment he first realizes his loneliness in his death. Because of Hermann Broh, death is not only about ending life - it manifests itself in every shrinking or shrinking of human nature. The opposite of death is the ecstatic union of the individual with the cosmos. The fear of life only comes to an end when one begins to perceive the relationship between his earthly extremity and the infinite universe.
From this position, the Austrian writer looks at the work of his contemporary and literary teacher James Joyce. The essay was written in 1932 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the famous Irish novelist. Hermann Broch notes that the rationalism of the era and the increased desire for self-consciousness are expressed in the epoch of Joyce "Ulysses" (the Latin name of Odysseus) so extremely precise and embossed that one asks whether the signs of synchronicity with historical time have been deliberately achieved: not only because, to portray the everyday life of the world, Joyce chooses a particular day like everyone else, not only because the temporal frames of the generation are covered with precision until the day, putting the action in 1904, not only that the mythical task but the work is realized through an ideally simple plot and deliberately overlooked through historical parallels and allegories, but over all these and many other things create the impression that Joyce had the intention of addressing the question: how far the world lends itself to imagery and what are the possibilities of literature. It is as though the complexity of his inventive machine, through the almost rational esoteric of concepts and speech, that Joyce wants to prove the success of such a gigantic experience that it is precisely in such a successful reflection of the world that he reflects his implacability to reflect that in almost hypertrophied, to which the artist is forced to resort, expresses the inexpressiveness of a world condemned to silence; as if Joyce, deeply horrified by this, had begun a powerful swan song, so that with one last, super-grandiose literary creation, bring all the literature to absurdity, put it into the grave.
And Hermann Bros questions: Was this the intention of the great Irishman? His answer is: The jolt that sounds from Joyce's "Street" rises high above both the rational and the conscious - otherwise this work could not appear - but it is filled with deep pessimism, with aversion to all inherited, but now dead forms of existence, with a deep disgust against rational thinking, which, despite its insight, can no longer tell us anything, against a language that is nice, but now nothing can express, in short, Joyce's shock with aversion to culture - and this is also in sync with an era because it expresses revulsion from rationalism, which is why the time disappointed by rational, thrown into the arms of the irrational - and this shock - continues Hermann Broch - is overflowing from that tragic cynicism with which modern man simultaneously strive for culture and destroys it; this is the shock that Joyce denies to his own creative work and art, a shock he thinks he can dismiss and overwhelm only purely animal - through the sweet sleeping of the body - and yet that shock has made him embrace the totality. Hermann Broch, who has dubbed his James Joyce and Modernity essay, believes from his Austrian position in the face of fascism rising to Germany that no contemporary artist can escape this dilemma, no one is able to save himself from this pessimism toward his own creativity, but no one but Joyce has pictured, accurately but so aggressively, unveiled the discrepancy between the will to build and the destruction of the created. Anyway! No matter how loudly Joyce asserts, the artistically recreated world can no longer be recreated by literature, and that all the former values have already been absorbed in animal sickness, even though he uses all the possibilities of his great art to defend that view, that he painfully mocks himself and his adherents and forbids any further artistic activity-yet Joyce's personal opinion will have to give way to his work: only she has the right to speak through her synchronicity through her so that we can do nothing but examine the currents passing through Joy's "everyday world of the age", examine them and ask them how much they have formed and formed this age, how much they express it and determine its appearance, to what extent they embody the spirit of time, and through it - and the time itself. Naturism is present, and even very intense, and contrary to the opinion of many, it is not limited to psychology or the internal monologue characteristic of Joyce, but covers all methods of naturalism - from Zola to Dostoevsky as it goes much farther. But this realistic portrait of mr. Bloom, his opponents and the city of Dublin, who often acquires the satirical sharpness of the cartoon, is just the primer of a much more fantastic fresco, yes and not even a primer, but something like a middle layer, through who sees fantastic and fabulous.
In addition to his naturalism, under and over him, all kinds of styles appear. Not only are the original literary generations fused together: epic, lyric, dramatic, not only that they themselves meet in a variety of variations, in transformations ranging from the scientific slogan to the Homer verse, and that each of the twelve chapters is written in a different style that there are places in the book that can be completely expressed as expressionistic ones, and those in which the subject of the image has broken down so that critics do not coincidentally speak of daudism. Of course, from the outset of all current trends in modern literature, it can be deduced that Joyce was in full synchronicity with time, but although such a foundation would be too narrow for such large summaries, one might object: such an agglomeration of styles will lead to nothing but eclecticism. But the unprecedented concentration with which all these stylistic means and expression forms are bound in artistic unity, true symphonic mastery, overlaid with irony, invalidates the accusation of eclecticism or, more precisely, raises it to "creative" eclecticism, for only in this form can the correspondence with the age was demonstrated, because only in this new unity and interdependence the stylized styles show their endurance and viability. From a technical point of view, Joy's agglomeration of styles is a method in which the object illuminates from one style to another until it is fully exhausted until a maximum over-naturalistic reality is derived from it.
But there is almost no situation in Ulysses that, besides its naturalistic significance, does not have any other, too rich meaning. This could most accurately be described as an esoteric-allegorical method. It is not a coincidence that the work is called "Ulysses", because the blooming of Bloom in Dublin is the odyssey that shows us all the stages of the journey of the noble Odysseus. But this allegory would only be a flat wit, if the essence had no deeper spiritual significance if it did not hide an allegory in a double and triple sense if it could not express again, as Homer once, the essence of life and literature. This is an allegorical structure and superstructure that houses both elementary vital functions and the highest philosophical-scholastic reflections, an allegorical cosmogony through which Ireland and its history are elevated to the allegory of the world, a multi-layered and complex cosmogony , as he can only create a poly-historical and theological spirit like Joyce. "Hermann Broch finished his essay with the observation that precisely because the moral values of the modern world are breaking apart, and the everyday world becomes chaos, literature has no right to escape from its duty to see and symbolize the forces of time. According to the Austrian writer, this is the moral task of knowledge, which grows as much as the man enveloped by the darkness of the value destruction tries to untie from it. Because literature stands above optimism and pessimism, its very existence is already moral optimism.