Joyce, James

Arguably the most important English-language writer of the twentieth century, James Joyce (1882–1941) was born into a family of some wealth that spiraled down into economic misery during his youth. Raised in various locations in Dublin and its environs, Joyce was educated principally by the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College. He earned his university degree from University College, Dublin, in 1902, after studying modern languages, particularly French and Italian. Joyce left Ireland permanently in 1904—returning only for visits thereafter—with Nora Barnacle, whom he married in 1931 and with whom he had two children, Giorgio and Lucia. He lived on the Continent, writing primarily in Trieste, Rome, Zurich, and Paris. He was helped by patronage from and association with such writers as W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound; he was lionized by the avant-garde literary circles of Paris and supported economically by his longterm benefactor Harriet Shaw Weaver. Other patrons included Mrs. Harold McCormick and Sylvia Beach, who arranged the publication of Ulysses.

Written in a style described in his letters as "scrupulous meanness," Joyce's first major work was Dubliners (published in 1914). Using covert Irish-language symbolism, Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories purporting to be "a chapter of the moral history of [his] country" and to show Dublin as "the centre of paralysis" in Ireland. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a semiautobiographical symbolist narrative, is a landmark of varied perspective. Joyce welds together form, style, and content even as he demonstrates that the Irish artist has a dual heritage and identity, comprised of both Gaelic and English elements. Ulysses (1922) is Joyce's masterpiece, one of the central modernist narratives of the twentieth century, enormously influential on all of Western literature because of its stream-of-consciousness technique as well as its experiments with style and its merging of symbolist and realist aspects. Following the experiences of three principal characters in Dublin on a single day (16 June 1904), Ulysses challenges the canonical form of the novel, in part through the deployment of narrative techniques drawn from early Irish literature. Although Joyce had experimented with mythic substructure and Irish symbolism in his earlier narratives, in Ulysses his mythic technique became a major focus, intertwining principally Greek and Irish sources, and using the myth armature itself to convey political and ideological stances.

Drawing on Giambattista Vico's theory of history, Finnegans Wake (1939), a sui generis encyclopedic work, meshes history, myth, popular culture, and Dublin placelore, to name just a few strands. Here Joyce's syncretism extends to language itself, with the text a stream of puns, portmanteau words, and other types of wordplay, all drawing on dozens of languages, among which Irish ranks highly. Structured around the collective and personal dreamwork of a household near Dublin during a single night, Finnegans Wake was begun in 1922, during the Irish Civil War, and published on the eve of World War II. A thread of conflict, from the local to the global, lends a somber basso continuo to the text, emphasized by the circular structure whereby the first line of the book completes the last line.

Joyce's other works include two volumes of poetry, Chamber Music (1907) and Pomes Penyeach (1927); a play, Exiles (1918); Stephen Hero, a preliminary form of A Portrait of the Artist, which was published after Joyce's death; and numerous critical essays, lectures, and reviews.

Hailed as both modernist and postmodernist, Joyce created a new narrative type with each of his major works. He was a postcolonial writer before such a critical category existed, writing his nation's history, culture, language, and literature into all of his texts. Though in his youth he criticized the Irish Literary Revival, in many ways his works are a fulfillment of the revival's literary project. His influence is patent on writers ranging from Flann O'Brien and Samuel Beckett to William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, and Toni Morrison.

Bibliography

Adams, Robert Martin. Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce's "Ulysses." 1962.

Campbell, Joseph, and Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to "Finnegans Wake." 1944. 2d edition, 1961.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 2d edition, 1982.

Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce's "Ulysses." 1930. 2d edition, 1955.

Kenner, Hugh. Joyce's Voices. 1978.

Lawrence, Karen. The Odyssey of Style in "Ulysses." 1981.

Manganiello, Dominic. Joyce's Politics. 1980.

Tymoczko, Maria. The Irish "Ulysses." 1994.