James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882-1941)
James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. His father is ,John Stanislaus Joyce, Joyce's mother is Mary Jane Murray.
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 the twenty-year-old Joyce
went to Paris in 1902,he left Dublin forever and spent the rest of his life in Europe, first in
Trieste with Nora Barnacle (by whom he had a son and daughter although they were not
married until 1931) and later in Zurich (1915) and Paris (after the First World War). Joyce supported himself by teaching, but it was a constant struggle against poverty and illness.
CHAMBER MUSIC
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.
They reflect the influence of Elizabethan lyricists and the
English lyric poets of the 1890s.
They also reflect Joyce’s love of the vocal music that influenced all his writing, and is especially
evident in his later works that lend themselves particularly well to
being read aloud. Although he had
rejected Dublin and Catholicism,
both were central to his writing.
-Major Works-
Dubliners is a
collection of 15 short stories by
James Joyce, first published in 1914.
They were meant to be a naturalistic
depiction of the Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
Dubliners
The stories centre on Joyce's idea of an
epiphany: a moment where a character has a special moment of self-understanding or
illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in
Joyce's novel Ulysses.The initial stories in the collection are narrated by children as
protagonists, and as the stories continue, they deal with the lives and concerns of
progressively older people. This is in line with Joyce's tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence and maturity.
"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)
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
This is James Joyce’s first novel, the semi-autobiographical story of a young Irish boy who struggles
with family, country, and religion to
become an artist and a man.
It was a fictional rendering of Joyce's youth, but he eventually grew frustrated with its direction and abandoned this
work. It was never published in this form, but years later, in Trieste, Joyce
completely rewrote it as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The unfinished Stephen Hero was published after his death.
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. At the end Stephen resolves to leave Ireland for Paris to encounter "the reality of experience”.
His stylistic virtuosity was already evident : in the book we see the
prose style develop along with
Stephen, from what is really baby- talk in the opening paragraphs, to the “lucid supple periodic prose”
of the end of the book.
"– 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."
(from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
Ulysses
The title alludes to
Odysseus (Latinised into Ulysses), the hero of
Homer's Odyssey, and establishes a series of parallels between
characters and events in Homer's poem and Joyce's novel
e.g., the correspondence of Leopold Bloom to
Odysseus,
Molly Bloom to Penelope, Stephen Dedalus to
Telemachus.
Ulysses which came out in 1922, the same year as Eliot’s The Waste Land, was more brilliant, but also deeply shocking containing explicit
descriptions of sex and other bodily functions and a profusion of
different styles ( at least one for each of the
nineteen chapters), other features were its incredibly complex
formal structure ( which critics might never have noticed had Joyce not made explicit
statements about it )
The main character is Leopold Bloom, in 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
Structure :
Joyce divided Ulysses into eighteen chapters or
"episodes". At first glance much of the book may appear unstructured and chaotic; Joyce once said that he had "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant", which would earn the novel
"immortality".
Every episode of Ulysses has a theme, technique, and correspondences
between its characters and those of the Odyssey.
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a work of comic fiction ,significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the
English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work.
It is 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.
Finnegans Wake ,which may be
interpreted as a dream containing the whole of human history , full of puns in twenty different languages and written in a kind of English
which is barely recognizable as
such , since every word is loaded
with multilingual resonances and
allusions.
Joyce’s humanity and humour triumph
everywhere in his fiction, and his constant
combination of the vulgar and the refined , the
sublime and the
ridiculous, has made him perhaps the greatest
novelist of this century.
On January 13, 1941, James Joyce died of a stomach ulcer at the age of 58, and was buried in Zurich's Fluntern
Cemetery.
