James Joyce

(1882 ­ 1941) Novelist

Modernist widely regarded as the greatest writer of the 20th century for his experimental use of novelistic techniques, language, and literary symbolism in dealing with Irish themes.

Biography

Born July 3, 1882 in Dublin Ethnicity Irish Residence Paris, Rome, Zurich

Died January 13, 1941 in Zurich Nationality Irish Language English

Other occupations teacher, journalist, Irish tweed salesman, bank clerk, cinema owner

Joyce was born to a couple with a wide difference in age, temperament and accomplishment who struggled to financially maintain their middle class respectability. Young Joyce watched his father fail in politics, tax collecting and owning a distillery (which hardly seems possible in Ireland). His mother, an accomplished pianist, exposed him to the arts as well as the strictures and guilt of Roman Catholicism. The Jesuits were responsible for the training of his intellect if not for his spiritual development. Books, booze and whores (who greeted him on the way to school) became his teachers in that. He continued this education at the conservative University College Dublin where he was known as a danger because of his poetry and interest in Aquinas, Yeats and Ibsen. The prostitutes still said hello to him on his way to school. Throughout his school years, he was cheerful, social and drunk in company and cold, imperious and sober in the classroom. After school, Joyce went to Paris where he struggled financially in a variety of jobs before returning home to his dying mother. He then returned to heavy drinking and left with Nora (former chambermaid and future wife) for Europe, settling in Trieste. His years in Trieste were productive: two children, several short stories and his first novel. He avoided formal marriage but not the strains of a family man. During this period his writing had to contend with his conscientious brother, poverty, young children, doubts about his relationship with Nora, and bouts of heavy drinking. He began lecturing, publishing poetry and articles as well as reworking his conventional autobiographical novel into an experimental modern masterpiece with the encouragement of Ezra Pound. He fought with his timid publisher to get his slightly obscene collection of short stories in print. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man was serialized and Joyce gained a wealthy patron that relieved many of his financial worries, though his eyesight now began troubling him. He then wrote Ulysses, his masterwork of modernist experimentation in language and form, which had a terrible time getting published, not so much for its bewildering techniques and complexity as for its infamous obscenity. The book brought him a circle of admirers in Paris and his international reputation grew. Finnegans Wake, his next work, took ten years to finish but was received coldly, confusing and disappointing many of his closest admirers. In addition to the onset of blindness, Joyce had to deal with his mentally unstable daughter who took a liking to Samuel Beckett, who was his secretary for a short while. Joyce succumbed to marriage in 1931. The looming of World War II caused Joyce to flee Paris and move to Zurich where, shortly after, he fell into a coma and died. He was buried without Catholic rites.

Themes: Cyclical nature of human history and development, repression of Catholicism, complete variety of human experience from crude to religious.

Style: Ground breaking use of literary techniques such as stream of consciousness, literary allusions, use of many languages, dislocations of time. Most of the stories are meant to be experienced as a 'work or art' and hence Joyce dispensed with such conventions as plot and character. One reads him as one looks at a painting or listens to music - one appreciates the effect of the words and literary devices rather than the development of the plot or character. In Joyce, plot and character (if any) serve the artful use of literary technique, literary techniques do not serve character delineation or plot development. Yet Joyce is predominantly humorous- from the highest literary pun to the most obscene slapstick. However, the joke is in how the story is told rather than the story itself. For Joyce it is not the story, nor merely how the story is told. How the story is told is the story.

Major Works

Ulysses Retells Homer's Odyssey in modern Dublin over one day with multilingual puns, many literary allusions, literary experimentation, and obscenity. Besides all that, Joyce wanted it to be funny.

Finnegans Wake A disjointed account of several characters dreaming during one night. The characters take many shapes, religious characters, animals. Known for its multilingual puns and stream of consciousness technique. Confuses even the most well read and avant garde reader.