JOYCE AND HIS TIME

EARLY YEARS

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a fairly prosperous southern suburb of Dublin. His father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was from Cork, where the Joyce family had been merchants for some generations, and where they had married into the O'Connell family, who claimed a connection with the famous Daniel O'Connell, "the Liberator." The earliest Joyces were Norman, but later established themselves in the West of Ireland near Galway, where a large area is known as "the Joyce Country." John Joyce insisted upon the family's noble descent, and indeed a Joyce coat of arms is registered, with the motto, "Mors aut honorabilis vita" ("An honorable life or death"). Colbert Kearney, who has researched the Cork background, reports that family myth asserted the gentlemanly Joyces of Cork, such as John Joyce's father James Augustine, were dragged down by the shopkeeping O'Connells.

Like all Irish Catholics, the Joyces inherited a tradition of legal and cultural repression. Having suffered invasions by Vikings and by Normans in medieval times, Ireland was more programmatically conquered by the British, beginning in the Elizabethan period; successive waves of invasion and settlement established an "Anglo-Irish" aristocracy who controlled much of the land, while during the eighteenth century the "penal laws" effectively barred Catholics from social advancement. Even the Irish language spoken by Joyce's ancestors was prohibited. A series of reforms culminating in the Emancipation Act of 1829 allowed the growth of a Catholic middle class, but the hopes of the Catholic peasantry--and many of the middle class as well--remained firmly tied to the establishment of an independent Irish nation..

When John Joyce moved from Cork to Dublin in his mid-twenties he was a man of some means, including property in Cork; by the age of forty he had lost his final job as tax collector and was never again regularly employed. He was a man of considerable charm, a fine tenor and storyteller, but also an improvident spendthrift and drinker. A friend, Constantine Curran, described him as "a man of unparalleled vituperative power, a virtuoso in speech with unique control of the vernacular." In many ways a disastrous father, he nevertheless fathered twelve children, of whom eight survived to adulthood. Whatever strain this may have put on his resources, the strain of a pregnancy virtually every year following her marriage was far worse on May Joyce, who died at forty-four. James Joyce was the eldest surviving child; two of his siblings died of typhoid, a disease encouraged by the family's poverty.

But in 1888, when James Joyce was sent to board and study at Clongowes Wood College, most of these embarrassments and tragedies lay in the future. Clongowes, run by the influential Jesuit order, was perhaps the best preparatory school in Ireland (sons of the wealthier Anglo-Irish families were often sent to still better schools in England). Despite the repressive picture he paints of the school in Portrait, Joyce later spoke warmly of his experience there; unlike Stephen, whom we only see unjustly punished, Joyce received punishment that he admitted he deserved on several occasions, including once for bad language. Joyce was a good student at Clongowes despite his youth, and in some ways never abandoned the habits of thought with which the Jesuits inculcated him. But public events in Ireland were equally important to him, at least as they reached him through the talk of his parents and their friends.

PARNELL AND IRISH NATONALISM

The two-and-a-half years Joyce attended Clongowes happened to coincide with the climax of the Parnell affair, which seized the young boy's imagination. Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant landholder entered the British Parliament as an Irish representative in 1875. Along with the former "Fenian", or Irish revolutionary, Michael Davitt, he founded the predominantly Catholic Land League to redistribute farm land. Gradually he became head of a political group that included nationalists of all sorts from moderates to militant revolutionaries. By 1879 he had become leader of the Home Rule movement, which insisted that the Irish be allowed a measure of self-government. He managed to unite the Irish vote in the House of Commons, and by threatening various tactics of parliamentary obstruction, he was able to bargain for the Prime Minister Gladstone's support for Home Rule. His cause suffered a setback in 1882, when a radical group called the Invincibles assassinated two British officials in Phoenix Park, northwest of Dublin. Although Parnell publicly condemned the assassination, in 1887 the London Times ran a series of articles based on information supplied by a former nationalist named Piggott that accused Parnell of supporting the Invincibles. A trial showed the letters supposedly written by Parnell were forgeries, but the violent feelings of Parnell's conservative opposition were made clear. Then in 1890 Parnell was accused of adultery in a divorce suit brought by Captain O'Shea, a former member of the Home Rule party, against his wife Katharine.

The trial made headlines. Parnell's ten-year liaison with Mrs. O'Shea, to which the Captain had given tacit assent, was the stuff of scandal, and the intimate details that emerged were embarrassing for all concerned. For instance, Katharine and Parnell addressed one another as "King" and "Queen" in private. One of Parnell's code names in communicating with his lover, "Mr. Fox," became widely known, while Mrs. O'Shea was universally referred to as "Kitty," which was coincidentally a slang term for a prostitute. Parnell was a man of enormous pride and rather cold, aristocratic demeanor. He refused to defend against the charge and wished only to marry Mrs. O'Shea, who for ten years had remained legally married to her husband only in hopes of a legacy. Gladstone decided that his Liberal party in its fight for Home Rule could not afford to be associated with a man of questionable moral character, and the Irish party, at the urging of Davitt and Tim Healy, removed Parnell from leadership. Parnell refused to capitulate, and the party spilt; he was denounced by Catholic churchmen, whose leaders hoped to regain influence over the Nationalist movement. Among his attackers was Archbishop William Walsh, whom Simon Dedalus characterizes as "Billy the Lip."

As his power diminished, Parnell was accused of outrageous things, such as embezzling the Land League's "Paris funds" to subsidize his love life. Following his marriage to Kitty he continued to take his campaign to the people, in weakening health, and in 1891 died. As many as 150,000 people accompanied his sealed coffin to Glasnevin cemetery, led by the radical Fenians who had supported him at the end. In a revulsion of popular feeling, Parnell gained a kind of mythic status even among many of those who had attacked him, and as it became clear that Nationalism was in disarray he became the "dead king" who alone could have led Ireland to independence. Following his death the nine-year-old Joyce wrote a bitter broadside poem against Parnell's betrayers entitled "Et tu Healy," which John Joyce had printed. Joyce came to see Parnell as a martyr, betrayed by his own people, in the mold of earlier nationalist heroes who had led aborted insurrections, such as Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet. Like Joyce, Stephen Dedalus views himself as their potential successor, an Artist-Hero who may save his country not only from its enemies but from itself.