James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (February 2, 1882 – January 13, 1941) was an expatriate Irish writer and poet, widely considered a significant writer of the 20th century. He is best known for his short story collection Dubliners (1914), and his novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Exile and early writings

After graduating from UCD, Joyce left for Paris; ostensibly to study medicine, but in reality he squandered money his family could ill afford. He returned to Ireland after a few months, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. After she died he began to drink heavily, and conditions at home grew quite appalling. He scraped a living reviewing books, teaching and singing. The following January he wrote A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, in a day, only to have it rejected from the free-thinking magazine Dana. He decided, on his twenty-second birthday, to revise the story and turn it into a novel he planned to call Stephen Hero. The same year he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Connemara, County Galway who was working as a chambermaid. On June 16 1904, they went on their first date, an event which would be commemorated by providing the date for the action of Ulysses. Joyce remained in Dublin for some time longer, drinking heavily. He took up with medical student Oliver St John Gogarty, who formed the basis for the character Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. After staying in Gogarty's Martello Tower for six nights he left following an altercation, got drunk in a brothel and got into a fight, from which he was rescued by his father's acquaintance, Alfred Hunter, an Irish Jew who provided the model for Leopold Bloom, who is one of the protagonists of Ulysses.

Related Topics:
Nora Barnacle - Connemara - County Galway - June 16 - 1904 - Oliver St John Gogarty - Martello Tower - Brothel - Jew - Leopold Bloom

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Shortly thereafter he eloped with Nora. The pair went into self-imposed exile, moving first to Pola and then Trieste in Austria-Hungary to teach English. One of his students in Trieste was Ettore Schmitz, better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo; they met in 1907 and became lasting friends and mutual critics. Joyce would spend most of the rest of his life on the Continent. In 1915 he moved to Zurich, and returned to Paris in 1920 where, apart from two visits to Ireland, he remained for the next twenty years. He returned to Zurich only shortly before his death. In Paris, Maria and Eugene Jolas nursed Joyce during his long years of writing Finnegans Wake. Were it not for their unwavering support, there is a good possibility the book might never have been finished or published. In their now legendary literary magazine "transition," the Jolases published serially various sections of Joyce's novel under the title Work in Progress.

Related Topics:
Pola - Trieste - Austria-Hungary - Ettore Schmitz - 1907 - 1915 - Zurich - 1920 - Maria - Eugene Jolas

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Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce's Irish experiences are essential to his writings, and provide all of the settings for his fiction and much of their subject matter. The early volume of short stories, Dubliners, is a penetrating analysis of the stagnation and paralysis of Dublin society. The stories incorporate epiphanies, a word used particularly by Joyce, by which he meant a sudden consciousness of the "soul" of a thing. Although many of Joyce's works illustrate the rich tradition of the Catholic Church, his short story "Araby" displays his disaffection and loss of faith with the Church. The final and most famous story in the collection, "The Dead", was directed by John Huston as his last feature film, completed in 1987.

Related Topics:
Dubliners - Epiphanies - Catholic Church - John Huston

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a nearly complete rewrite of the abandoned Stephen Hero novel. It is largely autobiographical, showing the process of attaining maturity and self-consciousness by a gifted young man. The main character is Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's representation of himself. In this novel, some glimpses of Joyce's later techniques are evident, in the use of interior monologue and in the concern with the psychic rather than external reality.

Related Topics:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Stephen Dedalus

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Exiles and poetry

Despite early interest in the theatre, Joyce published only one play, Exiles, begun shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and published in 1918. A study of a husband and wife relationship, the play looks back to The Dead (the final story in Dubliners) and forward to Ulysses, which was begun around the time of the play's composition.

Related Topics:
World War I - 1914 - 1918

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Joyce also published a number of books of poetry. His first mature published work was the satirical broadside The Holy Office (1904), in which he proclaimed himself to be the superior of many prominent members of the Celtic revival. His first full-length poetry collection Chamber Music (named after the sound of urine hitting the side of a chamber pot) consisted of 36 short lyrics. This publication led to his inclusion in the Imagist Anthology, edited by Ezra Pound, who was a champion of Joyce's work. The other poetry Joyce published in his lifetime consists of Gas From A Burner (1912), Pomes Penyeach (1927) and Ecce Puer, written in 1932 to mark the near death of his father and birth of his grandson. It was published in Collected Poems (1936).

Related Topics:
Celtic revival - Imagist Anthology - Ezra Pound

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