James Joyce : Life andWork

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born

on 2 February 1882 in the Dublin suburb of 

Rathgar. At the age of 9 James wrote a poem

on the death of Charles Parnell. When his

father lost his job,the family started to slip

into poverty which resulted in James being

home schooled. Luckily it was short termed

and James started attending Jesuits' Dublin

school, Belvedere College, in 1893.

Childhood

Joyce enrolled in University College

Dublin in 1898,studying English,

French and Italian. He also became

active in theatrical and literary

circles in the city. In 1904 he met

his future wife,Nora Barnacle. Later

on he started teaching English in

Trieste and for a short time in Pola.

Youth

Statue of James Joyce in Pola,Croatia

Joyce returned to Ireland briefly in 1909 in a futile attempt to start a chain of motion picture theaters in Dublin, and again in 1912 in an unsuccessful attempt to arrange for the publication of the short story collection Dubliners, which had to be abandoned due to fears of prosecution for obscenity and libel. Although the plates were destroyed, Dubliners was finally published in England in 1914. A short volume of poetry, Chamber Music, was his first published volume; it appeared in 1907. He published two subsequent volumes of poetry, Pomes Pennyeach (1927) and Collected Poems (1937).

Joyce and his family spent the years of World War I in Zürich, where he finished his novel A Portrait of the

Artist as a Young Man. It first appeared in The Egoist, a periodical edited by Harriet Shaw Weaver, and was published in book form in 1916. In 1917, Joyce contracted glaucoma; for the rest of his life he would endure pain, periods of near blindness, and many operations. At this time he also wrote his only play, the Ibsenesque Exiles (1918).

Ulysses, written between 1914 and 1921, was published in parts in The Little Review and The Egoist, but Joyce encountered the same opposition to publishing the novel in book form that he had confronted with Dubliners. It was published in Paris in 1922 by Shakespeare & Company, a bookstore owned by Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate. Its publication was banned in the United States until 1933. For many years he lived mainly on money donated by patrons, notably Harriet Shaw Weaver.

From 1922 until 1939 Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake (1939), a complex novel that attempts to connect multiple cycles of Irish and human history into the framework of a single night's events in the family of a Dublin publican. In 1931 Joyce finally married Nora. Her practical, sometimes cynical response to Joyce's work provided a needed complement to his own self-absorption. Joyce and Nora had a turbulent relationship; both were profoundly affected by the progressive insanity of their daughter. Joyce died in Zürich in 1941 after an operation for a perforated duodenal ulcer.

James Joyce and his wife Nora

In a collection of short stories Joyce writes about a group of Dublin residents, each of whom reflects the moral and political paralysis of the city. The story are characterized by key symbolic moments, which Joyce termed epiphanies*, which allow each of the protagonists to experience a deep level of self-awareness.

Dubliners (1914)

Epiphany’ has become the standard literary term to refer to the sudden revelation or self-realization which frequently occurs in modern poetry or fiction]

On the Irish and their language – “The Irish, doomed to express themselves in a language not their own, had stamped it with their genius and competed for glory with other civilized countries. It was called English literature. Samuel Beckett many years later improved on that claiming that the Catholic church and English

domination had buggered [Irish writers] into glory’”.

On Dublin – “not merely a backdrop for their veniality but as rich a musical as themselves. No other writer so effulgently and so ravenously recreated a city.”

“Dublin was his inner landscape”.

This book gave Joyce international fame. The time span of this long and complex novel is that of a single day, 16th June 1904, the day Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who was to become his lifelong companion.

It has no traditional plot. One key to its interpretation is given by its main structure: 18 chapters whose titles are derived from the Odyssey by Homer, as Joyce based Leopold Bloom’s wanderings in Dublin on the Wanderings of those of the mythical Odysseus.

Leopold is a modern Ulysses, a common Everyman living in Dublin, a city where cultural and artistic life – in Joyce’s opinion – is paralysed.

His travelling is compressed into a single day in a modern town1. His adventures are the events of everyday life.

Ulysses (1922)

“To each chapter he gave a title, a scene, an organ, an art, a colour, a symbol and a technique; so that we are in a tower, school, strand, house, bath, graveyard, newspaper, office, tavern, library, street, concert room, second tavern, a lying-in hospital, a brothel, a house and a big bed. The organs include kidneys, genitals, heart brain, ear, eye, nose, womb, nerves, flesh, and skeleton. The symbols vary from horse to tide, to nymph, to Eucharist, to siren, to Virgin, to Fenian, to whore, to heart mother. The technique ranges from narcissistic to gigantic, from tumescent to hallucinatory, and the styles so variable that the 18 episodes could really be described as eighteen novels between the one cover.”

Symbolism inUlysses

Joyce represents both the interior and exterior worlds of his characters. The realistic descriptions of the external events are mixed with historical, literary, religious, and geographical allusions, while interior monologue is used to recreate the characters’ most intimate and random thoughts.

Word, play, puns, and gross jokes are mixed with highly intellectual verbal exchanges. The triviality of everyday life is sometimes described in minute detail, while elsewhere there are intensely poetic passages and a variety of styles that range from the literary to the journalistic.

Language of Ulysses

“Language is the hero and the heroine , language in constant fusion with a dazzling virtuosity. All the given notion about story, character, plot, and human polarizings are capsized

Joyce believed in the impersonality of the author. The formal aspect of fiction was very important for him, as well as the problem of the point of view. In order to ensure that his works carried no ‘messages’ from himself, he adopted different points of view, different narrative techniques, different linguistic styles, appropriate or paradoxical to different characters or situations. In this way he hoped to solve the problem of how to present the fragmented, multifaceted nature of reality and how to convey the subjective dimension of experience.

It was Joyce’s opinion that the artist’s task was neither to teach nor to convince, but to make people aware of reality through their own subjective perception. Therefore he sought a form which would make a literary work as ‘impersonal’ as possible.

“What he wanted to do was to wrest the secret from life and that could only be done through language because, as he said, the history of people is the history of language”