James Joyce
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| Born | 2 February 1882 Rathgar (near Dublin), Ireland |
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| Died | 13 January 1941 Zürich, Switzerland |
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (February 2, 1882 - January 13, 1941) was an expatriate Irish writer and poet, and is widely considered one of the most significant writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his short story collection Dubliners (1914), and for his novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
Together with Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, he is credited with the development of the stream of consciousness technique in which the same weight is given to both the internal world of the mind and the external world of events and circumstances as factors shaping the actions and views of fictional characters.
Although most of his adult life was spent outside the country, Joyce's Irish experiences are essential to his writings, and provide all of the settings for his fiction and much of their subject matter. His fictional universe is firmly rooted in Dublin and reflects his family life and the events and friends (and enemies) from his school and college days. In this, he became both one of the most cosmopolitan and one of the most local of all the great English language modernists.
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Early life
James Joyce was born into a well-off Catholic family in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar. His father's family, which originally came from Cork, were wealthy merchants. In 1887, his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was appointed rate collector by Dublin Corporation and the family were able to move to the fashionable new suburb of Bray.
In 1891, he wrote a poem, Et Tu Healy, on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell. His father had it 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 bankrupts) and suspended from work. In 1893 he 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 mismanagement. John Stanislaus Joyce was the model for the character of Simon Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, as well as of the narrator's uncle in several stories in Dubliners.
Joyce was initially educated by Jesuits, originally at Clongowes Wood College, a boarding school 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 in North Richmond Street before he was offered a place in the Jesuit's 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 Jesuits himself. He rejected Catholicism by the age of 16. However, the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas remained a strong influence on him throughout his life.
He enrolled at 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 article Ibsen's New Drama was published in 1900 and resulted in a letter of thanks from the Norwegian dramatist. He wrote a number of other articles and at least two lost plays during this period. Many of the friends he made at University College would appear as characters in Joyce's written works.
Exile and early writings
Joyce made his first visit to Paris in 1902 to be part of the growing artist movement in Montparnasse and Montmartre at the time. He left the city in 1903 to return to Ireland as his mother was dying. He met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from County Galway who was working as a chambermaid, the next spring, and on June 16 they went on their first date (which would give a date for the action of Ulysses). Joyce remained in Dublin for some time longer, drinking heavily, and took up with medical student Oliver St John Gogarty, who formed the basis for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. After staying in Gogarty's Martello Tower for six nights he left following an altercation, got drunk in a whorehouse and got into a fight, from which he was rescued by his father's acquaintance Alfred Hunter, an Irish Jew who thus inspired Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses.
Shortly thereafter, he eloped with Nora Barnacle. The pair went into "exile" (his only play was titled Exiles), moving first to Pola and then Trieste in Austria-Hungary to teach English. Joyce would spend most of the rest of his life on the Continent. In 1915 he moved to Zurich, and returned to Paris in 1920 where, apart from two visits to Ireland, he remained for the next twenty years. He returned to Zurich only shortly before his death. In Paris, Maria and Eugene Jolas nursed Joyce during his long years of writing Finnegans Wake. Were it not for their unwavering support, there is a good possibility the book might never have been finished or published. In their now legendary literary magazine "transition," the Jolas' published serially various sections of Joyce's novel under the title Work in Progress.
His Irish experiences are essential to his writings, and provide all of the settings for his fiction and much of their subject matter. The early volume of short stories, Dubliners, is a penetrating analysis of the stagnation and paralysis of Dublin society. The stories incorporate epiphanies, a word used particularly by Joyce, by which he meant a sudden consciousness of the "soul" of a thing.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, largely autobiographical, shows the process of attaining maturity and self-consciousness by a young gifted man. The main character is Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's representation of himself. In this novel some glimpses of Joyce's later techniques are evident, in the use of interior monologue and in the concern with the psychic rather than external reality.
Ulysses
Early publishing history
In 1906, as he was completing work on Dubliners, Joyce considered adding another story featuring a Jewish advertising canvasser called Leopold Bloom under the title Ulysses. The story was not written, but the idea stayed with Joyce and, in 1914, he started work on a novel using both the title and basic premise, completing it in October, 1921.
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 serialisation ran into censorship problems in the United States, and in 1920 the editors were convicted of publishing obscenity, resulting in an end to the serial publication of the novel. The novel remained banned in the 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 Left Bank bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. 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.
Ulysses and the rise of literary modernism
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, June 16, 1904, sets the ancient myth of Ulysses, Penelope and Telemachus in modern Dublin and represents them in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, parodically 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 claimed that if Dublin were to be destroyed in some catastrophe it could be rebuilt, brick by brick, using his work as a model. 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 the one of the book's major contributions to the development of 20th century modernist literature. 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.
Finnegans Wake
The writing of Finnegans Wake
Having completed work on Ulysses, Joyce appears to have suffered from a period of writer's block. On March 10, 1923 he began work on a text that was to be known, first, as Work in Progress and later Finnegans Wake. By 1926 he 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.
Reaction to the early sections that appeared in transition 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 Jolas' home, Joyce revealed the final title of the work and Finnigans Wake was published in book form on May 4, 1939.
The style and structure of Finnegans Wake
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, the 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 a usylessly unreadable Blue Book to the Wake itself.
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 works 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". The most obvious example of the influence of Vico's cyclical theory of history is to be found in the opening and closing sentences of the book. Finnigans 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.' (with a pun on Vico in 'vicus') and ends 'A way a lone a last a loved a long the'. In other words, the first sentence starts on the last page and the last sentence on the first, 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.
Joyce's legacy
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Joyce was forced to leave Paris and eventually returned to Zurich, where he died. He is buried in the Fluntern Cemetery in that city, together with Nora, whom he had married in 1931.
Joyce's work has been subject to intense scrutiny by scholars of all types, and he is one of the most noted writers of the twentieth century. He has also been an important influence on writers as diverse as Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, and many more.
Joyce's influence is also evident in fields other than literature. Finnegans Wake is the source of the physicist's word "quark", the name of one of the main kinds of elementary particles. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida has written a book on the use of language in Ulysses, and the American philosopher Donald Davidson has written similarly on Finnegans Wake in comparison with Lewis Carroll.
The life of Joyce is celebrated annually on June 16, Bloomsday, in Dublin and in an increasing number of cities worldwide.
List of works
- Chamber Music (1907 poems)
- Dubliners (1914)
- Exiles (1915 play)
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
- Ulysses (1922)
- Pomes Penyeach (1927 poems)
- Finnegans Wake (1939)
See also
- Literature
- English literature
- Irish literature
- Irish fiction
References
General
- Ellman, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford University Press, revised edition 1983.
- Levin, Harry (ed. with introduction and notes). The Essential James Joyce. Cape, 1948. Revised edition Penguin in association with Jonathan Cape, 1963.
- Read, Forrest. Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound's Essays on Joyce. New Directions, 1967.
Finnegans Wake
- Beckett, Samuel; Williams, William Carlos; Et. Al. Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress. Shakespeare and Company 1929.
- McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegans Wake Johns Hopkins University Press 1991.
Online
General
- Detailed timeline of Joyce's life, contemporary critical comments and Joyce, &c. (http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_datasets/authors/j/Joyce,James/life1.htm)
- Music in the Works of James Joyce (http://www.james-joyce-music.com)
- James Joyce the citizen of Pula (http://www.pulainfo.hr/en/jj.asp)
Ulysses
- Publication history of Ulysses (http://www.uwm.edu/Library/special/exhibits/clastext/clspg158.htm)
- Schemata of Ulysses (http://www.ulysses-art.demon.co.uk/scheme.html)
Finnegans Wake
- The Writing Of Finnegans Wake (http://mural.uv.es/joesdel/Writing_Wake.html)
- Concordance of Finnegans Wake (http://www.kirbymountain.com/FWconcordance/fwc-main.html)
Other external links
- Creative Quotations from James Joyce (http://www.creativequotations.com/one/617.htm)
- Project Gutenberg e-texts of works by James Joyce (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?amode=start&author=Joyce%2c%20James)
Categories: Irish novelists | Irish short story writers | Irish poets | Irish dramatists | Imagists
