Umberto Eco: the Poetics of Joyce and the Transformation of the Type
of Culture

The sixties of the last century, when "The Poets of Joyce"
by U. Eco was published, are the time of the appearance of the European sixties
(M. Foucault, J. Baudrillard, J. Derrida, G. Deleuze, etc.) in whose work the
problem of the qualitative turn of European culture begins to be actively discussed.
Classical European culture based on a hierarchically arranged order and
uniquely defined rules of human action is replaced in the twentieth century by
the culture of the event and the culture of the disintegrated consciousness facing
unexpected situations. Analysis of the poetics of Joyce, creating a new language
and a new way of organizing the artistic world, opens, according to Eco, the
opportunity to understand the processes of modern culture, which requires
a person to act in unforeseen circumstances.
The new culture for Joyce is not in the actions of people, not in new experiences,
but in a new language, in style, in poetics. Joyce creates the language
of the new culture. It is the language of the accomplished (perfective) experience,
not the experience of the possible, which is based on stable values and can
be expressed in words that have a stable conceptual meaning. But when the experience
is new, then it must show himself in the word. Here the word, the expression
does not resort to essences (does not refer to them), but retains for the
material of its representation "its immediate and gross individuality" (Eco).
U. Eco introduces the notion of an "expressive structure" through which the
epiphany of the meaning of the accomplished (new) experience is realized. Thus
Joyce, creating a new poetics, demonstrates the principle of a new order which is not based on any reason outside this action (God, master), but on the fact that
the order itself legitimizes. The sign means inside the work, "the sign and the
signified are engaged through a short circuit, poetically necessary, but ontologically
unjustified" (Eco).
The article contends that the modern state of culture is the time for the approval
of a new project of modernity, the basis of which is not freedom as a perceived
necessity and enlightenment of the mind (the culture of the Enlightenment
as the realization of the "first" modernity), but freedom as a transgression,
as the achievement of the limit and experience of the limit (Culture of the "second"
modernity). It is this experience of the limit, not as an experience of an
action, but as an experience of utterance, the experience of the language ("Wake
of Finnegan"), which demonstrates the poetics of Joyce.