Everything about James Joyce totally explained
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (
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 paradoxically one of the most
cosmopolitan yet one of the most regionally-focused of all the
English language writers of his time.
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 (for example, a local property tax) collector by
Dublin Corporation; the family subsequently moved to the fashionable adjacent small town of
Bray 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.
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.
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'd 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.
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. 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. 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.
On
7 January 1904, he attempted to publish
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 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
St. Stephen's Green; 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. 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. 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. 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'd 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. 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.
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 Giorgio, 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. 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
During this era, Joyce traveled frequently to Switzerland for eye surgeries and treatments for Lucia, who, according to the Joyce estate, suffered from
schizophrenia. Lucia was even analyzed by
Carl Jung at the time, who was of the opinion that her father had schizophrenia after reading Ulysses. 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. In-depth knowledge of Joyce's relationship with his schizophrenic daughter is scant, due to the fact that the current heir of the Joyce estate, Stephen Joyce, burned thousands of letters between Lucia and her father that he received upon Lucia's death in 1982. In her 2003 work,
Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, Carol Loeb Shloss infers from this destruction of letters that there may have been incest between Lucia and her father and between Lucia and her brother Georgio., but this allegation remains largely unsubstantiated. Stephen Joyce stated in a letter to the editor if the
New York Times that "Regarding the destroyed correspondence, these were all personal letters from Lucia to us. They were written many years after both Nonno and Nonna [for exampleJoyce and Nora Barnacle..] died and didn't refer to them. Also destroyed were some postcards and one telegram from
Samuel Beckett to Lucia. This was done at Sam's written request."
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's 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. Although two senior Irish diplomats were in Switzerland at the time, neither attended Joyce's funeral, and the Irish government subsequently declined Nora's offer to permit the repatriation of Joyce's remains. Nora, whom Joyce had finally married in London in 1931, survived him by 10 years. She is buried now by his side, as is their son Giorgio, 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'. Swiss tenor
Max Meili sang
Addio terra, addio cielo from
Monteverdi's
L'Orfeo at the funeral service.
Major works
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, who asserted that it would never be published. A
Künstlerroman, or story of the personal development of an artist, it's 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. 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.
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
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 didn't 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 at law 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 proscribed in the United States until Judge John M. Woolsey lifted the ban in 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, Paris. 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. 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, 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". 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. Others include 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. 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.
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 didn't write a line of prose for a year. On
10 March 1923 he informed a patron, Harriet Weaver: "Yesterday I wrote two pages — the first I've 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 can't change his spots". 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).
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. 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" 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.
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" and, on completing the book, would turn to page one and start again, and so on in an endless cycle of reading.
Legacy
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
Hugh MacDiarmid,
Samuel Beckett,
Jorge Luis Borges,
Flann O'Brien,
Máirtín Ó Cadhain,
Salman Rushdie,
Robert Anton Wilson, and
Joseph Campbell.
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;
Finnegans Wake, horrible (see
Strong Opinions, The Annotated Lolita or
Pale Fire), an attitude
Jorge Luis Borges shared. In recent years,
literary theory has embraced Joyce's innovation and ambition.
Jacques Derrida, who wrote a book on the use of language in
Ulysses, tells an anecdote about the two novels' importance for his own thought; in a bookstore in
Tokyo,
Joyce's influence is also evident in fields other than literature. The phrase "Three Quarks for Muster Mark" in Joyce's
Finnegans Wake is often called the source of the physicists' word "
quark", the name of one of the main kinds of
elementary particles, proposed by the physicist
Murray Gell-Mann. American philosopher
Donald Davidson has written on
Finnegans Wake in comparison with
Lewis Carroll. Psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan used Joyce's writings to explain his concept of the
sinthome. According to Lacan, Joyce's writing is the supplementary cord which kept him from
psychosis.
The life of Joyce is celebrated annually on
June 16,
Bloomsday, in
Dublin and in an increasing number of cities worldwide.
Each year in
Dedham, Massachusetts, USA literary-minded runners hold the James Joyce Ramble, a 10K Road Race with each mile dedicated to a different work by Joyce. With professional actors in period garb lining the streets and reading from his books as the athletes run by, it's billed as the only theatrical performance where the performers stand still and the audience does the moving.
Much of Joyce's legacy is protected by the
Harry Ransom Center at the
University of Texas, which houses thousands of manuscripts, pieces of correspondence, drafts, proofs, notes, novel fragments, poems, song lyrics, musical scores, limericks, and translations by Joyce.
Not everyone is eager to expand upon academic study of Joyce, however;
Stephen Joyce, James' grandson and sole beneficiary owner of the estate, has been alleged to have destroyed some of the writer's correspondence, threatened to sue if public readings were held during
Bloomsday, and blocked adaptations he felt were 'inappropriate'. On
June 12 2006, Carol Shloss, a
Stanford University professor, sued the estate for refusing to give permission to use material about Joyce and his daughter on the professor's website.
The main library at
University College Dublin today bears his name.
Works
Further Information
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