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 Irish
novelist, noted for his experimental use of language in such works
as ULYSSES (1922) and FINNEGANS WAKE (1939). 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 mythology,
history, and literature, and created a unique language of invented
words, puns, and allusions. From 1902 Joyce spent his life in Paris,
Trieste, Rome, and Zurich, with only occasional brief visits to
Ireland, but his native country remained basic to all his writings.
"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."
Joyce was born in Dublin the son of John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished
gentleman. 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 middle-class
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 he thanked Jesuits for teaching him to think straight,
although he rejected their religious instructions. 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 travelling again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora
Barnacle, a chambermaid (they married in 1931), staying in Pola,
Austria-Hungary, and in Trieste. 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 chaotic, poverty-stricken, and productive.
Several of Joyce's siblings joined them, and two children, Giorgio
and Lucia, were born. A short stint in Rome as a bank clerk ended
in illness, and Joyce returned to Trieste. In 1907 Joyce published
a collection of poems, CHAMBER MUSIC. The title was suggested, Joyce
later stated, by the sound of urine tinkling into a prostitute's
chamber pot. 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 fulfil their
contract to publish DUBLINERS. The contained a series of short stories,
dealing with the lives of ordinary people. The stories deal progressively
with youth, adolescence, young adulthood 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)
 Nothing
was accomplished, and it was Joyce's last journey to his home country.
Dubliners was published in 1914 by which time Joyce had became
friends with Ezra Pound, who began to market Joyce's works. In 1916
appeared Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an autobiographical
novel. The book follows the life of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus,
from childhood towards maturity, encompassing his education at University
College, Dublin and his rebellious attempts at freeing himself from
the claims of family, church and state. At the end Stephen resolves
to leave Ireland for Paris to encounter 'the reality of experience'.
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 to Zürich with
his family. In Zürich Joyce started to develop the early chapters
of Ulysses, which was first published in France because of
censorship troubles in Great Britain and the United States. 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. The book,
which takes place on one day in Dublin (June 16, 1904) and reflected
the classic work of Homer (fl. 9th or 8th century BC?), gained immediate
success. The main characters are Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising
canvasser, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, the hero from Joyce's
earlier novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They
are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and
Penelope. The story, using stream-of-consciousness technique, parallels
the major events in Odysseus' journey home.
In March 1923 in Paris Joyce started 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. The work on Wake occupied
Joyce's time for the next sixteen years - the final version of the
book was completed late in 1938, and a copy of the novel was present
at Joyce's birthday celebration on February 1939.
After the fall of France in WWII, Joyce returned to Zürich, where
he died on January 13, 1941, still disappointed with the reception
of Finnegans Wake. The book was 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).
 Finnegans
Wake was the author's last and most revolutionary work. 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.
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.
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 analogue 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 saviour of Ireland, and Tim Finnegan, the hero of
music-hall ballad, who sprang to life in the middle of his own wake.
NOTE: According to tradition, Homer was blind. From 1917
to 1930 Joyce endured several eye operations, being totally blind
for short intervals. - Joyce's daughter suffered from schizophrenia
and she was among Carl Jung's patients in the 1930s. - Joyce's
WW I years with Lenin and Tzara provide the basis for Tom Stoppard's
play Travesties (1974).
For further reading: 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) --See also: Samuel Beckett, William Butler Yeats,
Marcel Proust.
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