Introduction
If a poll were taken among authors, critics, and
scholars to choose the greatest
writer of the twentieth century, the likeliest name
to emerge at the top of the list
would be that of James Joyce. After two early works
of fiction perfect in their
technical execution, remarkable in their eye for
telling detail, and subtle but
powerful in their emotional impact, he spent seven
years writing what many
consider the most important novel of the century,
one that defined the modernist
movement in literature and recreated the concept of
serious fiction. In addition to
his achievements as a writer, Joyce also stands as
an icon of the artist as culture
hero. In his early twenties, he turned his back on
his native land to pursue his
formula of "silence, exile, and cunning,"
as he lived in a succession of European
cities, earning--and sometimes cadging--a
hand-to-mouth subsistence and
devoting himself with scrupulous discipline and
concentration to his art, a
concentration so intense that in large part the
story of his life is the story of his
books. He watched as ego-driven, infinitely less
talented writers achieved
successes denied to him, while he fought with
publishers over trivial details, saw
an entire edition of one of his books destroyed by
its own prospective publisher,
and had his work--when it finally was
published--attacked as unintelligible and
suppressed as obscene. In the midst of these
artistic travails, he lovingly cared for
his daughter as she drifted further into mental
illness, and suffered through many
long eye operations that left him in terrible agony
and near-blindness. And he
persevered through everything, painstakingly
fashioning his densely written and
layered works word by word, until he brought the
world around to the
acknowledgment, and much more, of his vision.
Early Years
James Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland,
on February 2, 1882, the
eldest son (among fifteen children, ten of whom
survived infancy) of John
Stanislaus Joyce, a rate collector, and Mary Jane
(Murray) Joyce. He was
educated first at Conglowes Wood College, a
Jesuit-run grammar school, and
then at Belvedere College, also a Jesuit school.
This change of schools was a
considerable step down in social level, one
necessitated by his family's economic
reverses, which also brought about several shifts of
residence. Joyce's first
publication came in 1891, when he was only nine
years old, in the form of an
essay called Et Tu, Healy. This was an attack on the
main political opponent of
the recently dead Charles Stewart Parnell, the great
Irish nationalist and hero to
many, including Joyce's father, who paid to have the
piece printed as a
broadside.
An excellent student, Joyce completed his
education at University College in
Dublin, from which he received his degree on October
31, 1902. While in college,
he discovered the work of the great Norwegian
dramatist Henrik Ibsen, famous
for uncompromising realism and attacks on bourgeois
complacency and
conformity, and published an essay on him in the
Fortnightly Review. These years
were also marked by the kinds of controversy that
would become part of the
pattern of his life: he published a pamphlet called
The Day of the Rabblement,
assailing the insularity and philistinism of the
Irish Literary Theater, and he found
himself becoming increasingly estranged from the
Catholic faith, heavily dominant
in Ireland, in which he had been raised.
Joyce went to Paris in the fall of 1902,
intending to take up medical studies. This
plan was put aside in short order, but his time in
Paris left him with a permanent
taste for life on the European continent. He was
called home the following spring
in response to his mother's illness, and at her
deathbed in August 1903 he found
himself unable to fulfill her request that he pray
for her. His mother's death, and the
guilt that he felt from his refusal of her plea,
haunted him deeply, and would
become one of the principal components of the last
chapter of his first completed
novel and of the first several chapters, a
continuation of sorts, of his second. He
taught school briefly in Dublin in the spring of
1904, and in June of that year he
met a young woman named Nora Barnacle. On June 16,
1904 (which date Joyce
would later make into "Bloomsday," the day
upon which his masterpiece Ulysses
is set), there was some transformation of Joyce's
feelings that began what would
become a lifelong bond between Nora and himself.
Unwilling to marry and unable
to live openly with her in Ireland without benefit
of marriage, Joyce took Nora to
Zurich, Switzerland, in October 1904 (they were
ultimately married in Paris in
1931, largely to secure the inheritance of their son
Giorgio [born 1905] and
daughter Lucia [born 1907]). Within a short time
they had settled in Trieste, where
Joyce taught English at the Berlitz School--a
position he would soon leave, finding
it more profitable to give private English
lessons--and embarked upon a series of
frustrating dealings with publishers in his attempts
to get his work into print.
Literary Career
Joyce's first book was Chamber Music (1907), a
sequence of thirty-six poems
heavily romantic in feeling and traditional in
style. Within their limited intentions,
they were quite skillful and often beautiful, and
have--unsurprisingly, given their
manner and their title--been frequently set to
music. (Twenty years later, Joyce
would publish another pamphlet of verse, this one
containing only thirteen poems.
Although a bit more modern than the poems in the
earlier collection, they were still
quite traditional in technique and themes. While not
major works by any means,
they are not negligible, and hardly deserve the
contemptuous dismissal they
received from Ezra Pound when Joyce showed him the
manuscript.)
In this same period, Joyce was writing many of
the stories that would comprise
Dubliners, the work he described as a series of
"chapters in the moral history of
my community, written in a style of scrupulous
meanness" (he used the term
"meanness" in its sense of bareness,
simplicity, lack of ornamentation). Always a
highly schematic writer, he devised an underlying
four-part structure: three stories
of childhood, expressing disillusion; four stories
of adolescence, expressing
entrapment; four stories of maturity, expressing
sterility; and three stories of public
life, expressing corruption. "Araby" is
the last story of the first group. Only these
three are written in the first person, each of them
narrated by a sensitive, bookish
young boy. The others are written in the third
person, at times with surgical
detachment. After a heartbreaking experience with a
Dublin publisher who
actually set the book up in type and then refused to
issue it, out of fear of lawsuits
from Dublin commercial establishments mentioned in
the text and because of an
unflattering reference to the British monarch, Joyce
placed the work with the
London publisher Grant Richards, who brought it out
in 1914. Shortly before
publication, Joyce added to the volume a long,
recently-completed story entitled
"The Dead," and in so doing vastly
elevated the quality of what was already a fine
work. Unquestionably one of the finest stories in
the English language, "The
Dead" describes a long night spent among family
and friends in which Gabriel
Conroy, a somewhat self-important but extremely
self-conscious and insecure
young man, is forced to come to terms with his own
limitations, and in doing so
experiences a new understanding of human fragility
and a new depth of sympathy
and love. Its last several pages are stunning in
their beauty and emotional power.
In 1915, because of uncertain conditions
occasioned by the First World War,
which he was resolute in his determination to ignore
as much as he possibly
could, Joyce moved his family to Zurich. (After the
war, they would return to
Trieste, and then in 1920 move to Paris, which
became their home for almost all
of Joyce's remaining years). The following year,
1916, brought the publication of
the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Once again Joyce's amazing
technical skills were displayed: he takes his
heavily autobiographical protagonist
Stephen Dedalus from earliest youth to young manhood
in five long chapters,
each written in a style that is reflective of
Stephen's age and sensibility at that
point in his development. The book is grounded--as
always with Joyce--in richly
detailed descriptions of both Stephen's outer and
his inner life, as he passes
through religious doubts, sexual awakening, family
conflict, and other experiences
that all contribute to the formation of his
character. At the end, he is determined to
follow unswervingly the promptings of his artistic
conscience, no matter what the
outcome may be.
Upon finishing the Portrait, Joyce in 1914 began
to write Ulysses, the work that
would insure his literary immortality and would open
previously undreamt-of
technical possibilities to generations of fiction
writers. It begins by taking up the
story of Stephen Dedalus where the previous novel
had left him, suffering the guilt
of his mother's deathbed scene, but in short order
the focus of attention shifts to
Leopold Bloom, a Jewish salesman in his late
thirties with a sensuous (and
unfaithful) wife called Molly. Its entire action
takes place on a single day, a day of
small incidents that bring about great emotional
transformations, a day into which
Joyce packs the many-layered, sprawling, boisterous
life of his city (although
Joyce never again lived in Dublin after the age of
twenty-two, all of his fiction is set
there). Ulysses is a richly comic performance with
tragic overtones, whose most
notable feature is the astonishing range and
inventiveness of its experimental
techniques. Each of its eighteen chapters has a
parallel in one of the episodes of
Homer's Odyssey (hence the title), and each has its
own style, mood, and
symbolic patterns. Its most celebrated technique,
one not original with Joyce, is
the use of stream of consciousness, a device that
seeks to create the illusion of
actual thought processes through fragmented phrasing
and quick, frequent
associative leaps. One chapter, set in a maternity
hospital, displays the gestation
of English prose style through a series of brilliant
parodies from earliest
Anglo-Saxon to late Victorian. The last chapter, a
lengthy, unpunctuated internal
monologue of Molly Bloom, is one of the high points
of Joyce's art.
As Joyce struggled to complete the book, Ulysses
began to be serialized in the
American publication The Little Review in March
1918. In October 1920, after
about half the work had appeared, the Society for
the Suppression of Vice in New
York complained against the publication on grounds
of obscenity, and the
serialization was stopped. Joyce was unable to find
any publisher in the
English-speaking world who would print his novel.
His wandering one day into an
English-language bookstore in Paris brought about a
meeting that led to one of
the most famous episodes in publishing history.
Sylvia Beach, the shop's
proprietor, was an idealistic young American with a
great admiration for Joyce,
who agreed to publish Ulysses. Luckily for both of
them, she had no idea of the
magnitude of what she was taking on. The book was
published to coincide with
Joyce's fortieth birthday on February 2, 1922. It
immediately became a lightning
rod for attacks by conservative critics, some of
whom denounced Joyce as
degenerate and/or insane, and became a rallying cry
for writers and readers who
recognized not only its technical brilliance but
also its depth and richness of
life-affirming humanity. It also became notorious as
"obscene," although, to most
of those who sought it out for prurient reasons, it
was also unreadable. It was not
until 1933, in a legal ruling that became a landmark
decision in the fight against
censorship, that it was cleared for publication in
the United States. In holding that
it was indeed a serious work of art, Judge John M.
Woolsey wrote that "whilst in
many places the effect of 'Ulysses' on the reader
undoubtedly is somewhat
emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an
aphrodisiac," perfectly reflecting the
standard of a Puritan society that, while it is
perfectly acceptable to disgust
readers, it is not appropriate to arouse them.
Joyce's next, and last, literary project would
occupy him for seventeen years. This
was Finnegans Wake, in which he pushed stylistic
experiment as far as it could
possibly go--and, in the opinion of many, a good
deal further. It is ostensibly the
story of H. C. Earwicker, a Dublin pubkeeper whose
initials also signify Here
Comes Everybody and Haveth Childers Everywhere; his
wife, Anna Livia
Plurabelle, whose name has roots in Dublin's Liffey
River; and their sons, Shem
and Shaun. In this work, Joyce seeks to capture the
dream state through the
creation of a language that goes beyond mere
English, a language in which every
sentence is a multileveled, densely packed,
endlessly reconnecting and
reverberating series of multilingual puns. Joyce was
now the most celebrated
avant-garde writer in the world, and as portions of
his Work in Progress, as it was
provisionally called, appeared from time to time in
pamphlet form, it produced
both headscratching incomprehension and passionate
defense and
interpretation. In small bits it can be entertaining
("Americans are jung and easily
freudened") and even evocative (Joyce himself
made a marvelous recording of a
brief excerpt in 1932), but there are not many
people who can work their way
through its hundreds of pages.
Last Years and Legacy
After seventeen years of sustained effort on
Finnegans Wake, punctuated by
frequent eye operations and the worsening emotional
problems of his daughter
Lucia, Joyce was exhausted. Although he spoke of
further projects, he did no
more writing. Another world war totally upended
Joyce's settled way of life, and he
and his family were forced to leave France in 1940
and once again relocate in
Zurich, where Joyce died of a perforated ulcer on
January 13, 1941, three weeks
before his fifty-ninth birthday.
His literary legacy is vast. The emphases of his
work--the years of planning,
writing, and revising that went into the making of
each of his works of fiction; the
absolute authorial control in which every word was
made to play its essential part
in the total intent of the work; the fitting of
manner to matter, and the necessity to
rethink this relationship for each new work--have
become, chiefly through his
example, standard practice for the majority of
writers of serious fiction, many of
whom have been inspired by the fruits of his
experimentation to explore new
possibilities of their own. But no writer can remain
alive with readers purely on the
basis of technical genius, and in the end it is the
humanity of Joyce's work--his
infinitely varied depiction of the life of his
times, his limitless curiosity about
people of all types and social levels, his
sympathetic understanding of the
complexities of the human heart--that fully
justifies his towering position in the
literature of the twentieth century.