The life and literary activity of James Joyce

James Joyce was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, the eldest of the ten surviving children. His family was relatively well-to-do. His father sent Joyce at the early age of six to the finest preparato­ry school in Ireland, the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College. Soon his father John Joyce lost his previous job and was unable to keep the boy at Clongowes Wood. The boy was removed from that school and sent for two years to a mediocre Christian Brothers' school in Dublin. Later he was admitted without fees to Belvedere College where he showed himself as a successful schoolboy. Years of unholy mysteries of sex which he experienced at Dublin's red-light district and the sacred mysteries of his training at Belvedere were followed by some months of piety, fasting, and prayer, Joyce seriously con­templated entering the priesthood.

In 1898 Joyce graduated from Belvedere and entered University College, Dublin, the Catholic university which competed with the more prestigious Protestant institution, Trinity College. His former life satisfaction was replaced now by academic success and recognition. His literary idol was Henrik Ibsen whose work was thought to be scandalous at the turn of the century. Joyce attacked the nar­rowness and provincialism of the Irish intellectuals and nationalists and looked toward Europe as a scene of greater vision and freedom. In 1902 Joyce took his degree and was ready for search for his own vision and freedom abroad. He travelled to Paris to begin studying medicine but quickly dropped out for want of money. He lingered in Paris for a while writing reviews for the Dublin Daily Express and teaching English to private pupils. His mother was seriously ill and Joyce came back home. In 1904, after his mother's death, he took a post teaching at a school in a Dublin suburb.

In June of 1904, Joyce met and fell in love with a young woman, Nora Barnacle, tall, pretty, but nearly uneducated and having no interest in literature. She was not the girl one would have expected to become the consort of a great master of modern letters, but her understanding and uncritical acceptance of him was perhaps just what Joyce needed. In September 1904 the couple set out for the Continent. Since then Joyce had made only two brief trips to Ire­land. After brief stays in Poland and in Rome, Joyce took up lan­guage teaching at the Berlitz School in Trieste, where he and Nora lived until 1915, and where their two children were born. Not until 1931 were Joyce and Nora legally married, Joyce was a brilliant linguist who for many years earned his living by teaching English to foreigners. He knew Latin, Italian, French, German, and numer­ous other tongues.

His first recorded poem was written in 1891. The collection of poetry entitled Chamber Music was published in London in 1907. His second work was an autobiographical brief sketch called A Portrait of the Artist, written in 1904. He also began the collection of short stories. The original manuscript contained twelve stories. They were mostly written in late 1904 through 1905. By 1907 the manu­script was completed by the addition of three more stories and the novella The Dead. But it was not until 1914 that a collection of stories Dubliners was offered to the public. 1914 marked a water­shed in Joyce career. He got recognition of poet Ezra Pound too. Joyce had begun refining A Portrait of the Artist into the evocative and dramatic form of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He showed the first chapter to the editor Harriet Shaw Weaver who arranged for it serial publication in his literary magazine The Egoist during 1914-1915 before its book publication in 1916. The book is a remarkable technical achievement, nearly perfect in the econo­my of its form and the objectivity of its treatment of the most personal of subjects. Portrait principally recounts Joyce's homesick misery at Clongowes. Using symbolism, epiphanies, and distinct style, Joyce conveyed the inner life of his protagonist in his progress from early childhood to the assumption of his mature destiny.

In 1920 Joyce settled in Paris. He spent his first two years completing and revising Ulysses, the greatest work of Joyce which he began writing still in 1914. The book was published by the Shake­speare Press in 1922. Despite its obvious seriousness, the uncom­promising language and vision of Ulysses made it impossible to publish in Britain and in America. The first American publication appeared only in 1933.

Ulysses is a book that is impossible to describe adequately in brief. It covers one day (June 16, 1904) in the life of three Dubliners, a day in which nothing very much happens, which ends as inconclusively as it began - and yet it is a novel of amazing breadth and scope, an encyclopedia portrait of modern life. On one level, it conveys the flickering, fugitive thoughts of its characters, the hid­eous domestic details of their lives, dissecting them with a surgical precision hitherto unknown in fiction. On another level it presents Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as the modern sym­bolic equivalents of Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus in Hom­er's epic. The book does not only give the details of the life of the city of Dublin - it is the whole journey of man from birth to grave. In his novel Joyce attempts to embody the whole significance of all human history, the meaning of the family, of manhood and woman­hood, war, politics, and human achievement of every sort. Words are Joyce's obsession, his delight, the source of his power. So won­derfully are words used by the author that the whole world of Dub­lin springs up out of their sounds, colours, reverberations, and linkage with each other. A complex network of parallels constantly relates and contrasts the characters to their Homeric counterparts. Joyce uses the story of the wanderings of the classical hero Ulysses as a kind of mythical shorthand to underscore the eternal significance of the contemporary episodes in his work. The ultimate triumph of Ulysses goes beyond its psychological naturalism, its mystic and symbolic structure, its stylistic experimentation. It deals with the elemental drama of Bloom's search for a son and Stephen's search for a father, and it reflects the spiritual profundity that underlies all of Joyce's artistry. Ulysses is James Joyce's masterpiece.

Joyce spent the next seventeen years, from 1922 to 1939, writ­ing his last novel, Finnegans Wake - Joyce called it his 'monster' – a book that cannot be read, but can only be studied. If in Ulysses he tried to universalize his three Dubliners through their symbolic relations with Greek characters, in Finnegans Wake he attempted a universal history. The title refers to an Irish tavern song about Tim Finnegan, who breaks his skull in a drunken fall and is miraculous­ly 'resurrected' at his own wake. The novel deals with the theme of death and resurrection and with the broader theme of the cyclical character of human history, in which civilizations evolve, collapse, and are reborn. These themes govern the structure of the novel, which in itself is cyclical. It begins in mid-sentence and ends in the middle of the same sentence - as though the novel, like life itself, were continuous with no beginning and no end. The language is English, but with misspellings that call up puns in a dozen other tongues. Word-play, puns, the use of sounds to enforce meaning (onomatopoeia) - these are just a suggestion of the allusive and musical uses of language achieved in this book. It is a book in which Joyce strove to give voice to the eternal dream of humanity, taking place on a single never-ending night of dreams. Within its own terms, the book is great, but it was destined never to be popular with the readers, and the one which can be fully understood only by the handful of specialists willing to devote their lives and energy to mastering its complexities.

Driven again to Switzerland by the Nazi occupation of France, Joyce died on January 13, 1941 at the age of fifty-eight, nearly blind and almost worn out by a combination of hard work and hard living. By the time of his death, Joyce had become a legend and remains today the archetypal modern writer, against whom all oth­ers are measured.

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