James Joyce
James Joyce, ca. 1918 |
| Born: |
2 February 1884(1884--)
Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland |
| Died: |
13 January 1941 (aged 58)
Zürich, Switzerland |
| Occupation: |
Novelist and Poet |
| Literary movement: |
Modernism, and imagism |
| Influences: |
Homer, Aristotle, Dante, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Dujardin, Ibsen, Bruno, Vico |
| Influenced: |
Beckett, Borges, O'Brien, Rushdie, Eco,
Woolf, DeLillo, Burgess, Campbell, Faulkner, Edna O'Brien, Martin
Amis |
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Irish Séamus Seoighe; 2 February 1882 – 13 January
1941) was an Irish expatriate writer, widely considered to be one
of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his landmark
novel Ulysses (1922) and its highly controversial successor Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection
Dubliners (1914) and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
Although he spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Joyce's psychological and fictional universe is firmly rooted in his
native Dublin - the city which provides the settings and much of the subject matter for all his
fiction. In particular, his tempestuous early relationship with the Irish Roman Catholic
Church is reflected through a similar inner conflict in his recurrent alter ego Stephen
Dedalus. As the result of his minute attentiveness to a personal locale and his self-imposed exile and influence
throughout Europe, (notably in Paris,
France), Joyce became simultaneously one of the most cosmopolitan[clarify] and one of the most local[clarify] of all the English language writers.
Life and writing
Dublin, 1882–1904
In 1882, James Augustine Joyce was born into a Roman Catholic family in the Dublin
suburb of Rathgar. He was the oldest of 10 surviving children;
two of his siblings died of typhoid. His father's family, originally from Fermoy in Cork, had once owned a small salt and lime works. Joyce's father
and paternal grandfather both married into wealthy families. In 1887, his father, John Stanislaus
Joyce, was appointed rate (i.e., a local property tax) collector by Dublin
Corporation; the family subsequently moved to the fashionable adjacent small town of Bray
12 miles from Dublin. Around this time Joyce was attacked by a dog; this resulted in a lifelong canine phobia. He also suffered from a fear of thunderstorms, which his deeply religious aunt had described to him as
being a sign of God's wrath.[1]
In 1891, Joyce wrote a poem, "Et Tu Healy," on the death of Charles Stewart
Parnell. His father was angry at the treatment of Parnell by the Catholic church and at the resulting failure to secure
Home Rule for Ireland. The elder Joyce had the poem printed and even sent a copy to the Vatican
Library. In November of that same year, John Joyce was entered in Stubbs Gazette (an official register of
bankruptcies) and suspended from work. In 1893 John Joyce was dismissed with a
pension. This was the beginning of a slide into poverty for the
family, mainly due to John's drinking and general financial mismanagement.[2]
Photograph of James Joyce taken by fellow
University College student Constantine P. Curran in
the summer of
1904. When asked later what he was thinking at the time, Joyce replied 'I was
wondering would he lend me five shillings' (in Ellmann).
James Joyce was initially educated by the Jesuit order at Clongowes Wood College, a boarding school near
Sallins in County Kildare, which he entered in 1888 but
had to leave in 1892 when his father could no longer pay the fees. Joyce then studied at home and briefly at the Christian Brothers school on North Richmond
Street, Dublin, before he was offered a place in the Jesuits' Dublin school,
Belvedere College, in 1893. The offer was made at least partly in the hope that he
would prove to have a vocation and join the Order. Joyce, however, was to reject Catholicism by the age of 16, although the
philosophy of Thomas Aquinas would remain a strong
influence on him throughout his life.[3]
He enrolled at the recently established University College Dublin in 1898. He studied modern
languages, specifically English, French and
Italian. He also became active in theatrical and literary circles in the city. His
review of Ibsen's New Drama, his first published work, was published in 1900 and
resulted in a letter of thanks from the Norwegian dramatist himself. Joyce wrote a number of
other articles and at least two plays (since lost) during this period. Many of the friends he made at University College Dublin
would appear as characters in Joyce's written works. He was an active member of the Literary and Historical Society, University College Dublin,
and presented his paper "Drama and Life" to the L&H in
1900.
After graduating from UCD in 1903, Joyce left for Paris to "study medicine", but
in reality he squandered money his family could ill afford. He returned to Ireland after a few months, when his mother was
diagnosed with cancer.[4]
Fearing for her son's "impiety", his mother tried unsuccessfully to get Joyce to make his confession and to take communion. She
finally passed into a coma and died on August 13, Joyce having refused to kneel with other members of the family praying at her
bedside.[5] After her death he continued to drink heavily,
and conditions at home grew quite appalling. He scraped a living reviewing books, teaching and singing — he was an accomplished
tenor, and won the bronze medal in the 1904 Feis
Ceoil.[6]
On 7 January 1904, he attempted to publish A Portrait of
the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected by the
free-thinking magazine Dana. He decided, on his twenty-second birthday, to revise the story and turn it into a novel he
planned to call Stephen Hero. This was the same year he met Nora Barnacle, a young
woman from Galway city who was working as a chambermaid at
Finn's Hotel in Dublin. On 16
June 1904, they went on their first date, an event which would be commemorated by providing
the date for the action of Ulysses.
Joyce remained in Dublin for some time longer, drinking heavily. After one of his alcoholic binges, he got into a fight over a
misunderstanding with a man in Phoenix Park; he was picked up and dusted off by a minor
acquaintance of his father, Alfred H. Hunter, who brought him into his home to tend to his injuries.[7] Hunter was rumored to be Jewish and to have an
unfaithful wife, and would serve as one of the models for Leopold Bloom, the main
protagonist of Ulysses.[8] He took up with medical student Oliver St John
Gogarty, who formed the basis for the character Buck Mulligan in Ulysses.
After staying in Gogarty's Martello Tower for 6 nights he left in the middle of the night
following an altercation which involved Gogarty shooting a pistol at some pans hanging directly over Joyce's bed.[9] He walked all the way back to Dublin to stay with relatives for
the night, and sent a friend to the tower the next day to pack his possessions into his trunk. Shortly thereafter he eloped to
the continent with Nora.
1904–1920: Trieste and Zürich
Joyce and Nora went into self-imposed exile, moving first to Zürich, where he had supposedly acquired a post teaching English at the Berlitz Language School through an agent in England. It turned out that the English agent had
been swindled, but the director of the school sent him on to Trieste, which was part of
Austria-Hungary until World War I (today part of
Italy). Once again, he found there was no position for him, but with the help of Almidano
Artifoni, director of the Trieste Berlitz school, he finally secured a teaching position in Pula,
then also part of Austria-Hungary (today part of Croatia). He stayed there, teaching English
mainly to Austro-Hungarian naval officers stationed at the Pula base, from October 1904 until March 1905, when the Austrians —
having discovered an espionage ring in the city — expelled all aliens. With Artifoni's help, he moved back to the city of Trieste and began teaching English there. He
would remain in Trieste for most of the next 10 years.
Later that year Nora gave birth to their first child, George. Joyce then managed to talk his brother, Stanislaus, into joining him in Trieste, and secured him a position teaching at the school. Ostensibly
his reasons were for his company and offering his brother a much more interesting life than the simple clerking job he had back
in Dublin, but in truth, he hoped to augment his family's meagre income with his brother's earnings.[10] Stanislaus and James had strained relations the entire time they lived together
in Trieste, with most arguments centering on James' frivolity with money and drinking habits.[11]
With chronic wanderlust much of his early life, Joyce became frustrated with life in Trieste and moved to Rome in late 1906, having secured a position working in a bank in the city. He intensely disliked Rome, however,
and ended up moving back to Trieste in early 1907. His daughter Lucia was born in the summer
of the same year.
Joyce returned to Dublin in the summer of 1909 with George, in order to visit his father and work on getting Dubliners
published. He visited Nora's family in Galway, meeting them for the first time (a
successful visit, to his relief). When preparing to return to Trieste he decided to bring one of his sisters, Eva, back to
Trieste with him in order to help Nora look after the home. He would spend only a month back in Trieste before again heading back
to Dublin, this time as a representative of some cinema owners in order to set up a regular cinema in Dublin. The venture was
successful (but would quickly fall apart in his absence), and he returned to Trieste in January 1910 with another sister in tow,
Eileen. While Eva became very homesick for Dublin and returned a few years later, Eileen spent the rest of her life on the
continent, eventually marrying Czech bank cashier František Schaurek.
Joyce returned to Dublin briefly in the summer of 1912 during his years-long fight with his Dublin publisher, George Roberts,
over the publication of Dubliners. His trip was once again fruitless, and on his return he wrote the poem "Gas from a
Burner" as a thinly veiled invective against Roberts. It was his last trip to Ireland, and he never again came closer to Dublin
than London, despite the many pleas of his father and invitations from fellow Irish writer William Butler Yeats.
Joyce came up with many money-making schemes during this period of his life, such as his attempt to become a cinema
magnate back in Dublin, as well as a frequently discussed but ultimately abandoned plan
to import Irish tweeds into Trieste. His expert borrowing skills saved him from indigence. His income was made up partially from
his position at the Berlitz school and from taking on private students. Many of his acquaintances through meeting these private
students proved invaluable allies when he faced problems getting out of Austria-Hungary and into Switzerland in 1915.
One of his students in Trieste was Ettore Schmitz, better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo; they met in 1907 and became lasting friends and
mutual critics. Schmitz was Jewish, and became the primary model for Leopold Bloom; most of the details about the Jewish faith included in Ulysses came from Schmitz in response to Joyce's queries.[12] Joyce would spend most of the rest of his life on the
Continent. It was in Trieste that he first began to be plagued by major eye problems, which would result in over a dozen
surgeries before his death.
In 1915, when Joyce moved to Zürich in order to avoid the complexities (as a British subject) of living in Austria-Hungary
during World War I, he met one of his most enduring and important friends, Frank Budgen, whose opinion Joyce constantly sought through the writing of Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake. It was also here where Ezra Pound brought him to the attention of English feminist
and publisher Harriet Shaw Weaver, who would become Joyce's patron, providing him
thousands of pounds over the next 25 years and relieving him of the burden of teaching in order to focus on his writing. After
the war he returned to Trieste briefly, but found the city had changed, and his relations with his brother (who had been interned
in an Austrian prison camp for most of the war due to his pro-Italian politics) were more strained than ever. Joyce headed to
Paris in 1920 at an invitation from Ezra Pound, supposedly for a week, but he ended up living there for the next twenty
years.
1920–1941: Paris and Zürich
He traveled frequently to Switzerland for eye surgeries and treatments for Lucia, who, according to the Joyce estate, suffered
from schizophrenia. There is much evidence that Lucia was not diagnosed with schizophrenia
by several doctors. In fact, she was analyzed by Carl Jung who was of the opinion that her
father was a schizophrenic after reading Ulysses.[13]
Jung noted that she and her father were two people heading to the bottom of a river, except that he was diving and she was
falling.[14][15]
In Paris, Maria and Eugene Jolas nursed Joyce
during his long years of writing Finnegans Wake. Were it not for their unwavering support (along with Harriet Shaw
Weaver's constant financial support), there is a good possibility that his books might never have been finished or published. In
their now legendary literary magazine "transition," the Jolases published serially various sections of Joyce's novel under
the title Work in Progress. He returned to Zürich in late 1940, fleeing the Nazi occupation
of France. On 11 January 1941, he underwent surgery for
a perforated ulcer. While at first improved, he relapsed the following day, and despite several transfusions, fell into a coma.
He awoke at 2 a.m. on 13 January 1941, and asked for a nurse to
call his wife and son before losing consciousness again. They were still en route when he died 15 minutes later. He is buried in
the Fluntern Cemetery within earshot of the lions in the Zürich zoo - Nora's offer to
permit the repatriation of Joyce's remains was declined by the Irish government. Nora, whom he had finally married in London in
1931, survived him by 10 years. She is buried now by his side, as is their son George, who died in 1976. Ellmann reports that
when the arrangements for Joyce's burial were being made, a Catholic priest tried to convince Nora that there should be a funeral
Mass. Ever loyal, she replied, 'I couldn't do that to him'.
Major works
The title page of the first edition of
Dubliners.
Dubliners
-
Joyce's Irish experiences constitute an essential element of his writings, and provide all of the settings for his fiction and
much of their subject matter. His early volume of short stories, Dubliners, is a penetrating analysis of the stagnation
and paralysis of Dublin society. The final and most famous story in the collection, "The
Dead," was made into a feature film in 1987, directed by John Huston (it was Huston's
last major work).
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
-
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a nearly complete rewrite of the abandoned novel Stephen Hero, the
original manuscript of which Joyce partially destroyed in a fit of rage during an argument with Nora. A Künstlerroman, or story of the personal development of an artist, it is a biographical
coming-of-age novel in which Joyce depicts a gifted young man's gradual attainment of
maturity and self-consciousness; the main character, Stephen Dedalus, is in many ways
based upon Joyce himself.[16] Some hints of the
techniques Joyce was to frequently employ in later works — such as the use of interior monologue and references to a character's
psychic reality rather than his external surroundings — are evident in this novel.[17] Joseph Strick directed a film of the book in 1977 starring
Luke Johnston, Bosco Hogan, T.P. McKenna and John Gielgud.
Exiles and poetry
-
Despite early interest in the theatre, Joyce published only one play, Exiles,
begun shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and published in 1918. A study of a
husband and wife relationship, the play looks back to The Dead (the final story in Dubliners) and forward to
Ulysses, which was begun around the time of the play's composition.
Joyce also published a number of books of poetry. His first mature published work was the satirical broadside "The Holy
Office" (1904), in which he proclaimed himself to be the superior of many prominent members of the Celtic revival. His first full-length poetry collection Chamber Music (referring, Joyce explained,
to the sound of urine hitting the side of a chamber pot) consisted of 36 short lyrics. This publication led to his inclusion in
the Imagist Anthology, edited by Ezra Pound, who was
a champion of Joyce's work. Other poetry Joyce published in his lifetime includes "Gas From A Burner" (1912), Pomes
Penyeach (1927) and "Ecce Puer" (written in 1932 to mark the birth of his grandson and the recent death of his father). It
was published in Collected Poems (1936).
Ulysses
-
Announcement of the initial publication of
Ulysses.
As he was completing work on Dubliners in 1906, Joyce considered adding another story featuring a Jewish advertising
canvasser called Leopold Bloom under the title Ulysses. Although he did not pursue
the idea further at the time, he eventually commenced work on a novel using both the title and basic premise in 1914. The writing
was completed in October, 1921. Three more months were devoted to working on the proofs of
the book before Joyce halted work shortly before his self-imposed deadline, his 40th birthday (2
February 1922).
Thanks to Ezra Pound, serial publication of the novel in the magazine The Little Review began in 1918. This magazine was edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, with the backing of
John Quinn, a New York attorney with an interest in contemporary experimental art and literature. Unfortunately, this
publication encountered censorship problems in the United States; serialization was halted
in 1920 when the editors were convicted of publishing obscenity. The novel remained banned in the United States until 1933.
At least partly because of this controversy, Joyce found it difficult to get a publisher to accept the book, but it was
published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach from her well-known Rive
Gauche bookshop, Shakespeare and Company at 12 Rue
l'Odéon. A commemorative plaque placed in 1989 by JJSSF (James Joyce Society of Sweden and Finland) is to be found on the wall.
An English edition published the same year by Joyce's patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver,
ran into further difficulties with the United States authorities, and 500 copies that were shipped to the States were seized and
possibly destroyed. The following year, John Rodker produced a print run of 500 more
intended to replace the missing copies, but these were burned by English customs at Folkestone. A further consequence of the novel's ambiguous legal status as a banned book was that a number of
'bootleg' versions appeared, most notably a number of pirate versions from the publisher Samuel
Roth. In 1928, a court injunction against Roth was obtained and he ceased publication.
The year 1922 was a key year in the history of English-language literary modernism, with the appearance of both Ulysses
and T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land. In
Ulysses, Joyce employs stream of consciousness, parody, jokes, and virtually every other literary technique to present his
characters.[18] The action of the novel, which takes
place in a single day, 16 June 1904, sets the characters and
incidents of the Odyssey of Homer in modern Dublin and represents
Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope and Telemachus in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and
Stephen Dedalus, parodically[clarify] contrasted with their lofty models. The book explores various areas of Dublin life,
dwelling on its squalor and monotony. Nevertheless, the book is also an affectionately detailed study of the city, and Joyce said
that "I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be
reconstructed out of my book".[19] In order to achieve
this level of accuracy, Joyce used the 1904 edition of Thom's Directory — a work that listed the
owners and/or tenants of every residential and commercial property in the city. He also bombarded friends still living there with
requests for information and clarification.
The book consists of 18 chapters, each covering roughly one hour of the day, beginning around about 8 a.m. and ending sometime
after 2 a.m. the following morning. Each of the 18 chapters of the novel employs its own literary style. Each chapter also refers
to a specific episode in Homer's Odyssey and has a specific colour, art or science and bodily organ associated with it. This
combination of kaleidoscopic writing with an extreme formal, schematic structure represents one of the book's major contributions
to the development of 20th century modernist literature.[20] The use of classical mythology as a framework for his
book and the near-obsessive focus on external detail in a book in which much of the significant action is happening inside the
minds of the characters are others. Nevertheless, Joyce complained that, "I may have oversystematised Ulysses," and played
down the mythic correspondences by eliminating the chapter titles that had been taken from Homer.[21]
Joseph Strick directed a film of the book in 1967 starring Milo O'Shea, Barbara Jefford and Maurice Roëves. Sean Walsh directed another version released in 2004
starring Stephen Rea, Angeline Ball and
Hugh O'Conor.
Finnegans Wake
-
Having completed work on Ulysses, Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write a line of prose for a year.[22] On 10 March
1923 he informed a patron, Harriet Weaver: "Yesterday I wrote two pages — the first I have since
the final Yes of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a
double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them. Il lupo perde il pelo ma non il vizio, the Italians say. The wolf may
lose his skin but not his vice or the leopard cannot change his spots".[23] Thus was born a text that became known, first, as Work in Progress and later Finnegans
Wake.
By 1926 Joyce had completed the first two parts of the book. In that year, he met Eugene and Maria Jolas who offered to
serialise the book in their magazine transition. For the next few
years, Joyce worked rapidly on the new book, but in the 1930s, progress slowed considerably. This was due to a number of factors,
including the death of his father in 1931, concern over the mental health of his daughter Lucia and his own health problems, including failing eyesight. Much of the work was done with the assistance
of younger admirers, including Samuel Beckett. For some years, Joyce nursed the eccentric
plan of turning over the book to his friend James Stephens to complete, on the
grounds that Stephens was born in the same hospital as Joyce exactly one week later, and shared the first name of both Joyce and
of Joyce's fictional alter-ego (this is one example of Joyce's numerous superstitions).[24]
Reaction to the work was mixed, including negative comment from early supporters of Joyce's work, such as Pound and the
author's brother Stanislaus Joyce.[25] In order to counteract this hostile reception, a book of essays by supporters of the new work,
including Beckett, William Carlos Williams and others was organised and
published in 1929 under the title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for
Incamination of Work in Progress. At his 47th birthday party at the Jolases' home, Joyce revealed the final title of
the work and Finnegans Wake was published in book form on 4 May 1939.
Joyce's method of stream of consciousness, literary allusions and
free dream associations was pushed to the limit in Finnegans Wake, which abandoned
all conventions of plot and character construction and is written in a peculiar and obscure language, based mainly on complex
multi-level puns. This approach is similar to, but far more extensive than that used by Lewis
Carroll in Jabberwocky. If Ulysses is a day in the life of a city, then
Wake is a night and partakes of the logic of dreams. This has led many readers and critics to apply Joyce's oft-quoted
description in the Wake of Ulysses as his "usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles"[26] to the Wake itself. However, readers have been able to reach a consensus
about the central cast of characters and general plot.
Much of the wordplay in the book stems from the use of multilingual puns which draw on a wide range of languages. The role
played by Beckett and other assistants included collating words from these languages on cards for Joyce to use and, as Joyce's
eyesight worsened, of writing the text from the author's dictation.[27]
The view of history propounded in this text is very strongly influenced by Giambattista
Vico, and the metaphysics of Giordano Bruno of Nola
are important to the interplay of the "characters". Vico propounded a cyclical view of history, in which civilisation rose from chaos, passed through theocratic, aristocratic, and democratic phases, and then lapsed back into chaos. The most obvious example of the influence of Vico's
cyclical theory of history is to be found in the opening and closing words of the book. Finnegans Wake opens with the
words 'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back
to Howth Castle and Environs.' ('vicus' is a pun on Vico) and ends 'A way a lone a last a loved a long the'. In other words, the
book ends with the beginning of a sentence and begins with the end of the same sentence, turning the book into one great cycle.
Indeed, Joyce said that the ideal reader of the Wake would suffer from "ideal insomnia"[28] and, on completing the book, would turn to page one and start again, and so on
in an endless cycle of reading.
Legacy
- See also: Postmodern
literature
Statue of James Joyce on North Earl Street, Dublin.
Joyce's work has been subject to intense scrutiny by scholars of all types. He has also been an important influence on writers
and scholars as diverse as Samuel Beckett,[29] Jorge Luis Borges,[30] Flann O'Brien,[31] Máirtín Ó Cadhain,
Salman Rushdie,[32] Robert Anton Wilson,[33] and Joseph Campbell.[34]
Some scholars, most notably Vladimir Nabokov, have mixed feelings on his work, often
championing some of his fiction while condemning other works. In Nabokov's opinion, Ulysses was brilliant;[35] Finnegans Wake, horrible (see Strong Opinions, The Annotated Lolita or Pale Fire[36]), an attitude
Jorge Luis Borges shared.[37] In recent years, literary theory has embraced Joyce's
innovation and ambition. Jacques Derrida tells an anecdote about the two novels'
importance for his own thought; in a bookstore in Tokyo,
