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In 1882, James Augustine Joyce was born into a Catholic family in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar. He was the eldest of ten surviving children; two of his siblings died of typhoid. His father's family, originally from 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 collector by Dublin Corporation; the family subsequently moved to the fashionable new suburb of Bray. Around this time Joyce was attacked by a dog, an event which caused a lifelong fear of dogs, in addition to his fear of thunderstorms, which his deeply religious aunt had described as a sign of God's wrath.
In 1891, Joyce 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 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 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 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 St. 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 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.
After graduating from UCD in 1903, Joyce left for Paris; ostensibly 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. Joyce refused to pray at her bedside but this seems to have had more to do with Joyce's agnosticism than antagonism for his mother. After she died he continued to drink heavily, and conditions at home grew quite appalling. He scraped a living reviewing books, teaching and singing.
On 7 January 1904, he attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, in a day, only to have it rejected from 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. The same year he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Connemara, County Galway who was working as a chambermaid. 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 these drinking 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's, Alfred H. Hunter, who brought him into his home to tend to his injuries. Hunter was rumored to be a Jew 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 six nights he left in the middle of the night following an altercation which involved Gogarty shooting a pistol in his direction. 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 trunk. Shortly thereafter he eloped to the continent with Nora.
Joyce and Nora went into self-imposed exile, moving first to Zurich, 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 Pola, then part of Austria-Hungary (today part of Croatia). He stayed there from October 1904 through March 1905, when the Austrians discovered an espionage ring in the city and expelled all aliens. With Artifoni's help, he moved back to Trieste and began teaching English. He would remain in Trieste for most of the next ten 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. Stanislaus and Joyce had strained relations the entire time they lived together in Trieste, most arguments centering around Joyce's 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 George, in order to visit his father, show off his son 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 Frantisek 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 of Roberts. It was his last trip to Ireland, and he never came closer to Dublin than London again, 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 an always-discussed but never-accomplished plan to import Irish tweeds into Trieste. His expert borrowing skills kept him from ever becoming completely destitute. His income was made up partially from his position at the Berlitz school, and partially from taking on private students. Many of his acquaintances through meeting these private students proved invaluable allies during his 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 a Jew, 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 he moved to Zurich in order to avoid the complexities of living in Austria-Hungary during World War I, where 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.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 stories incorporate epiphanies,
a word used particularly by Joyce, by which he meant a sudden
consciousness of the "soul" of a thing. The final and most famous story
in the collection, "The Dead", was directed by John Huston and completed in 1987 as his last feature film.
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 Stephen Hero
novel, 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 an autobiographical 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 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, ed 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 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 ed 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 ors 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 Left Bank bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. An English ion 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.
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, 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 ion 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. 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.
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.
Neither film really manages to convey the full scope of Joyce's
masterpiece, however, and each only covers the text selectively. It is
debatable whether such an ambitious and complex work could ever be
satisfactorily filmed.
Finnegans Wake
Having completed work on Ulysses, Joyce felt he had completed his life's work but soon was at work on an even more ambitious work. On 10 March 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 sentences 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 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. """"A man's errors are his portals of discovery.
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion
Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul. |
