James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882-1941)
Joyce (1882-1941)
Irish novelist, noted for his experimental use of language in such works as ULYSSES (1922) and
FINNEGANS WAKE (1939). During his career Joyce suffered from rejections from publishers,
suppression by censors, attacks by critics, and misunderstanding by readers. From 1902 Joyce
led a nomadic life, which perhaps reflected in his interest in the character of Odysseus. Although
he spent long times in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zürich, with only occasional brief visit to
Ireland, his native country remained basic to all his writings.
"But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild
sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me. The mimic warfare of
the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real
adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at
home: they must be sought abroad." (from Dubliners)
James Joyce was born in Dublin. His father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was an impoverished
gentleman, who had failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of professions, including
politics and tax collecting. Joyce's mother, Mary Jane Murray, was ten years younger than her
husband. She was an accomplished pianist, whose life was dominated by the Roman Catholic
Church and her husband. In spite of the poverty, the family struggled to maintain solid middleclass facade.
From the age of six Joyce, was educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College, at Clane, and
then at Belvedere College in Dublin (1893-97). Later the author thanked Jesuits for teaching him
to think straight, although he rejected their religious instructions. At school he once broke his
glasses and was unable to do his lessons. This episode was recounted in A PORTRAIT OF THE
ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN (1916). In 1898 he entered the University College, Dublin, where
he found his early inspirations from the works of Henrik Ibsen, St.Thomas Aquinas and W.B.
Yeats. Joyce's first publication was an essay on Ibsen's play When We Dead Awaken. It appeared
in Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time he began writing lyric poems.
After graduation in 1902 the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a
journalist, teacher and in other occupations in difficult financial conditions. He spent in France a
year, returning when a telegram arrived saying his mother was dying. Not long after her death,
Joyce was traveling again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid (they
married in 1931), staying in Pola, Austria-Hungary, and in Trieste, which was the world’s
seventh busiest port. Joyce gave English lessons and talked about setting up an agency to sell
Irish tweed. Refused a post teaching Italian literature in Dublin, he continued to live abroad.
The Trieste years were nomadic, poverty-stricken, and productive. Joyce and Nora loved this
cosmopolitan port city at the head of the Adriatic Sea, where they lived in a number of different
addresses. During this period Joyce wrote most of DUBLINERS (1914), all of A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, the play, EXILES (1918), and large sections of Ulysses. Several of
Joyce's siblings joined them, and two children, Giorgio and Lucia, were born. The children grew
up speakin the Trieste dialect of Italian. Joyce and Nora stayed together althoug Joyce fell in
love with Anny Schleimer, the daughter of an Austrian banker, and Roberto Prezioso, the editor
of the newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera, tried to seduce Nora. After a short stint in Rome in 190607 as a bank clerk ended in illness, Joyce returned to Trieste.
In 1907 Joyce published a collection of poems, CHAMBER MUSIC. The title was suggested, as
the author later stated, by the sound of urine tinkling into a prostitute's chamber pot. The poems
have with their open vowels and repetitions such musical quality that many of them have been
made into songs. "I have left my book, / I have left my room, / For I heard you singing / Through
the gloom." Joyce himself had a fine tenor voice; he liked opera and bel canto.
In 1909 Joyce opened a cinema in Dublin, but this affair failed and he was soon back in Trieste,
still broke and working as a teacher, tweed salesman, journalist and lecturer. In 1912 he was in
Ireland, trying to persuade Maunsel & Co to fulfill their contract to publish Dubliners. The work
contained a series of short stories, dealing with the lives of ordinary people, youth, adolescence,
young adulthood, and maturity. The last story, 'The Dead', was adapted into screen by John
Huston in 1987.
It was Joyce's last journey to his home country. However, he had became friends with Ezra
Pound, who began to market his works. In 1916 appeared Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
an autobiographical novel. It apparently began as a quasi-biographical memoir entitled Stephen
Hero between 1904 and 1906. Only a fragment of the original manuscript has survived. The
book follows the life of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, from childhood towards maturity, his
education at University College, Dublin, and rebellion to free himself from the claims of family
and Irish nationalism. Stephen takes religion seriously, and considers entering a seminary, but
then also rejects Roman Catholicism. "� Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I
would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not
serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my
church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as
wholly as I can, using my defence the only arms I allow myself to use � silence, exile, and
cunning." At the end Stephen resolves to leave Ireland for Paris to encounter "the reality of
experience". He wants to establish himself as a writer.
There once was a lounger named Stephen
Whose youth was most odd and uneven
--He throve on the smell
--Of a horrible hell
That a Hottentot wouldn't believe in.
(Joyce's limerick on the book's protagonist)
At the outset of the First World War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich, where Lenin and
the poet essayist Tristan Tzara had found their refuge. Joyce's WW I years with the legendary
Russian revolutionary and Tzara, who founded the dadaist movement at the Cabaret Voltaire,
provide the basis for Tom Stoppard's play Travesties (1974).
In Zürich Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, which was first published in
France, because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States, where the book
became legally available 1933. The theme of jealousy was based partly on a story a former friend
of Joyce told: he claimed that he had been sexually intimate with the author's wife, Nora, even
while Joyce was courting her. Ulysses takes place on one day in Dublin (June 16, 1904) and
reflected the classic work of Homer (fl. 9th or 8th century BC?).
The main characters are Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, his wife Molly, and
Stephen Dedalus, the hero from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They are intended to be
modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope. Barmaids are the famous Sirens.
One of the models for Bloom was Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo), a novelist and businessman who
was Joyce's student at the Berlitz school in Trieste. The story, using stream-of-consciousness
technique, parallel the major events in Odysseus' journey home. However, Bloom's adventures
are less heroic and his homecoming is less violent. Bloom makes his trip to the underworld by
attending a funeral at Glasnevin Cemetary. "We are praying now for the repose of his soul.
Hoping you're well and not in hell. Nice change of air. Out of the fryingpan of life into the fire of
purgatory." The paths of Stephen and Bloom cross and recross through the day. Joyce's technical
innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a
complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history, and literature.
From 1917 to 1930 Joyce endured several eye operations, being totally blind for short intervals.
(According to tradition, Homer was also blind.) In March 1923 Joyce began in Paris his second
major work, Finnegans Wake, suffering at the same time chronic eye troubles caused by
glaucoma. The first segment of the novel appeared in Ford Madox Ford's transatlantic review in
April 1924, as part of what Joyce called Work in Progress. Wake occupied Joyce's time for the
next sixteen years � its final version was completed late in 1938. A copy of the novel was
present at Joyce's birthday celebration on February 1939.
Joyce's daughter Lucia, born in Trieste in 1907, became Carl Jung's patient in 1934. In her teens,
she studied dance, and later The Paris Times praised her skills as choreocrapher, linguist, and
performer. With her father she collaborated in POMES PENYEACH (1927), for which she did
some illustrations. Lucia's great love was Samuel Beckett, who was not interested in her. In the
1930s, she started to behave erratically. At the Burghölz psychiatric clinic in Z�rich, where
Jung worked, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. Joyce was left bitter at Jung's analysis of his
daughter � Jung thought she was too close with her father's psychic system. In revenge, Joyce
played in Finnegans Wake with Jung's concepts of Animus and Anima. Lucia died in a mental
hospital in Northampton, England, in 1982.
After the fall of France in WWII, Joyce returned to Zürich, where he was taken ill. He was
diagnosed of having a perforated duodenal ulcer. Joyce died after an operation, on January 13,
1941, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake, published on 4 May, 1939, by
Faber and Faber. His last words were: "Does nobody understand?" Joyce was buried in Z�rich
at Fluntern cemetery.
Finnegans Wake was the last and most revolutionary work of the author, partly based on Freud's
dream psychology, Bruno's theory of the complementary but conflicting nature of opposites, and
the cyclic theory of history of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). There is not much plot or
characters to speak of � the life of all human experience is viewed as fragmentary. Some critics
considered the work masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. "The only
demand I make of my reader," Joyce once told an interviewer, "is that he should devote his
whole life to reading my works." When the American writer Max Eastman asked Joyce why the
book was written in a very difficult style, Joyce replied: "To keep the critics busy for three
hundred years." The novel presents the dreams and nightmares of H.C. Earwicker (Here Comes
Everywhere) and his family, the wife and mother Anna Livia Plurabelle, the twins Shem/Jerry
and Shaun/Kevin, and the daughter Issy, as they lie asleep throughout the night. In the frame of
the minimal central story Joyce experiments with language, combines puns and foreign words
with allusions to historical, psychological and religious cosmology. The characters turn up in
hundreds of different forms � animal, vegetable and mineral. Transformations are as flexible as
in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The last word in the book is 'the', which leads, by Joyce's ever
recurrent cycles, to the opening word in the book, the eternal 'riverrun.'
Although the events are set in the Dublin suburb of Chapelizod, the place is an analogy for
everywhere else. Wake's structure follows the three stages of history as laid out by Vico: the
Divine, the Heroic, and Human, followed period of flux, after which the cycle begins all over
again: the last sentence in the work runs into the first. The title of the book is a compound of
Finn MaCool, the Irish folk-hero who is supposed to return to life at some future date to become
the savior of Ireland, and Tim Finnegan, the hero of music-hall ballad, who sprang to life in the
middle of his own wake.
For further reading: James Joyce by Herbert Gorman (1939); Introducing James Joyce, ed. by T.S. Eliot (1942);
Stephen Hero, ed. by Theodore Spencer (1944); James Joyce by W.Y. Tindall (1950); Joyce: The Man, the
Reputation, the Work by M. Maglaner and R.M. Kain (1956); Dublin's Joyce by Hugh Kenner (1956); My Brtother's
Keeper by S. Joyce (1958); James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (1959); A Readers' Guide to Joyce (1959); The Art of
James Joyce by A.W. Litz (1961); Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce's Ulysses by R.M. Adams
(1962); J. Joyce-again's Finnegans Wake by B. Benstock (1965); James Joyce's 'Ulysses': Critical Essays, ed. by
Clive Hart and David Hayman (1974); A Conceptual Guide to 'Finnegans Wake' by Michael H. Begnal and Fritz
Senn (1974); James Joyce: the Citizen and the Artist by C. Peake (1977); James Joyce by Patrick Parrinder (1984);
Joyce's Anatomy of Culture by Cheryl Herr (1986); Joyce's Book of the Dark: 'Finnegans Wake by John Bishop
(1986); Reauthorizing Joyce by Vicki Mahaffey (1988); 'Ulysses' Annotated by Don Gifford (1988); An Annotated
Critical Bibliography of James Joyce, ed. by Thomas F. Staley (1989); The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce,
ed by Derek Attridge (1990); Joyce's Web by Margot Norris (1992); James Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man' by David Seed (1992); Critical Essays on James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake ed. by Patrick A. McCarthy
(1992); James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare by Robert E. Spoo (1994); Gender in
Joyce, ed. by Jolanta W. Wawrzycka (1997); A Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses, ed. by Margot Norris (1999);
Toiseen maailmaan. James Joycen novelli "Kuolleet" kirjallisuustieteen kohteena by Pekka Vartiainen (1999); The
Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920 by John McCourt (2000); Joyce's "Ulysses" for Everyone, Or
How To Skip Reading It the First Time by John Mood (2004) - See also: Little Blue Light, Samuel Beckett, William
Butler Yeats, Marcel Proust
Selected works:
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CHAMBER MUSIC, 1907
DUBLINERS, 1914 - Dublinilaisia (suom. Pentti Saarikoski, 1965) / Kuollut: kaksi
novellia kokoelmasta Dubliners (suom. Jorma Etto, 1957) - films: A Painful Case, 1984, prod.
Channel 4 Television Corporation (Ireland), dir. John Lynch; The Dead, 1987 (based on the last story in the
collection) dir. by John Huston, starring Anjelica Huston, Donal McCann, Dan O'Herlihy, Donal Donnelly;
The Dead, 2004, prod. PIB Productions, dir. Prince Bagdasarian, screenplay Celin Cuadra
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A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, 1916 - Taiteilijan omakuva
nuoruuden vuosilta (transl. into Finnish by Alex Matson, 1946) - film 1979, dir. by Joseph
Strick, starring Bosco Hogan, T.P. McKenna, John Gielgud
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EXILES, 1918
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ULYSSES, 1922 - Odysseus (transl. into Finnish by Pentti Saarikoski, 1964) - films: 1967,
dir. by Joseph Strick, starring Barbara Jefford, Molo O'Shea, Maurive Roeves, T.P. McKenna; Uliisses,
1982, prod. Werner Nekes Filmproduktion (West Germany), dir. Werner Nekes, starring Armin W�lfl,
Tabea Blumenschein, Russel Derson, Shezad Abbas; Bloom, 2003, prod. Odyssey Pictures (Ireland), dir.
Sean Walsh, starring Stephen Rea, Angeline Ball, Hugh O'Conor, Neil� Conroy
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POMES PENYEACH, 1927
COLLECTED POEMS, 1936
FINNEGANS WAKE, 1939 - films: 1965, prod. Expanding Cinema, dir. by Mary Ellen Bute,
starring Martin J. Kelley, Jane Reilly, Peter Haskell, Page Johnson, John V. Kelleher; The Wake, 2000,
prod. Wake Film (Denmark), dir. Michael Kvium, Christian Lemmerz
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STEPHEN HERO, 1944
THE PORTABLE JAMES JOYCE, 1947
THE ESSENTIAL JAMES JOYCE, 1948
THE LETTERS OF JAMES JOYCE, 1957-66 (3 vols.)
THE CRITICAL WRITINGS, 1959
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'LIVIA PRULABELLA' � THE MAKING OF A CHAPTER, 1960
A FIRST DRAFT VERSION OF 'FINNEGANS WAKE', 1963
GIACOMO JOYCE, 1968
SELECTED LETTERS OF JAMES JOYCE, 1975
THE JAMES JOYCE ARCHIVES, 1977-80 (63 vols.)
ULYSSES: A READER'S EDITION, 1997 (ed. by Danis Rose)
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