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James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Irish Séamus Seoighe; 2 February
1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish expatriate writer, widely considered to be one
of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his
landmark novel Ulysses (1922) and its highly controversial successor Finnegans Wake
(1939), as well as the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the
semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
Although he spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Joyce's fictional
universe is firmly rooted in Dublin, providing the settings and much of the subject
matter for all his fiction. In particular, his tempestuous early relationship with
the Irish Roman Catholic Church is reflected through a similar inner conflict in
his recurrent alter ego Stephen Dedalus. As the result of his minute attentiveness
to a personal locale and his self-imposed exile and influence throughout Europe,
Joyce became simultaneously one of the most cosmopolitan and one of the most local
of all the great English language writers.
 Life and
writing
Dublin,
1882–1904
In 1882, James Augustine Joyce was born into a Roman Catholic family in the Dublin
suburb of Rathgar. He was the oldest of 10 surviving children; two of his siblings
died of typhoid. His father's family, originally from Fermoy in Cork, had once
owned a small salt and lime works. Joyce's father and paternal grandfather both
married into wealthy families. In 1887, his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was
appointed rate (i.e., a local property tax) collector by Dublin Corporation; the
family subsequently moved to the fashionable adjacent small town of Bray 12 miles
from Dublin. Around this time Joyce was attacked by a dog; this resulted in a
lifelong canine phobia. He also suffered from a fear of thunderstorms, which his
deeply religious aunt had described to him as being a sign of God's wrath.
In 1891, Joyce wrote a poem, "Et Tu Healy," on the death of Charles Stewart
Parnell. His father was angry at the treatment of Parnell by the Catholic church
and at the resulting failure to secure Home Rule for Ireland. The elder Joyce had
the poem printed and even sent a copy to the Vatican Library. In November of that
same year, John Joyce was entered in Stubbs Gazette (an official register of
bankruptcies) and suspended from work. In 1893 John Joyce was dismissed with a
pension. This was the beginning of a slide into poverty for the family, mainly due
to John's drinking and general financial mismanagement.
James Joyce was initially educated by the Jesuit order at Clongowes Wood College, a
boarding school near Sallins in County Kildare, which he entered in 1888 but had to
leave in 1892 when his father could no longer pay the fees. Joyce then studied at
home and briefly at the Christian Brothers school on North Richmond Street, Dublin,
before he was offered a place in the Jesuits' Dublin school, Belvedere College, in
1893. The offer was made at least partly in the hope that he would prove to have a
vocation and join the Order. Joyce, however, was to reject Catholicism by the age
of 16, although the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas would remain a strong influence on
him throughout his life.
He enrolled at the recently established University College Dublin in 1898. He
studied modern languages, specifically English, French and Italian. He also became
active in theatrical and literary circles in the city. His review of Ibsen's New
Drama, his first published work, was published in 1900 and resulted in a letter of
thanks from the Norwegian dramatist himself. Joyce wrote a number of other articles
and at least two plays (since lost) during this period. Many of the friends he made
at University College Dublin would appear as characters in Joyce's written works.
He was an active member of the Literary and Historical Society, University College
Dublin, and presented his paper "Drama and Life" to the L&H in 1900.
After graduating from UCD in 1903, Joyce left for Paris 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. Fearing for her
son's "impiety", his mother tried unsuccessfully to get Joyce to make his
confession and to take communion. She finally passed into a coma and died on August
13, Joyce having refused to kneel with other members of the family praying at her
bedside. After her death he continued to drink heavily, and conditions at home grew
quite appalling. He scraped a living reviewing books, teaching and singing — he was
an accomplished tenor, and won the bronze medal in the 1904 Feis Ceoil.
On 7 January 1904, he attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story
dealing with aesthetics, 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. This was the same year he met Nora
Barnacle, a young woman from Galway city who was working as a chambermaid at Finn's
Hotel in Dublin. On 16 June 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. After one of his
alcoholic binges, he got into a fight over a misunderstanding with a man in Phoenix
Park; he was picked up and dusted off by a minor acquaintance of his father, Alfred
H. Hunter, who brought him into his home to tend to his injuries. Hunter was
rumored to be Jewish and to have an unfaithful wife, and would serve as one of the
models for Leopold Bloom, the main protagonist of Ulysses. 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 in the middle of the night following an altercation which involved Gogarty
shooting a pistol at some pans hanging directly over Joyce's bed. He walked all the
way back to Dublin to stay with relatives for the night, and sent a friend to the
tower the next day to pack his trunk. Shortly thereafter he eloped to the continent
with Nora.
1904–1920:
Trieste and Zürich
Joyce and Nora went into self-imposed exile, moving first to Zürich, where he had
supposedly acquired a post teaching English at the Berlitz Language School through
an agent in England. It turned out that the English agent had been swindled, but
the director of the school sent him on to Trieste, which was part of
Austria-Hungary until World War I (today part of Italy). Once again, he found there
was no position for him, but with the help of Almidano Artifoni, director of the
Trieste Berlitz school, he finally secured a teaching position in Pula, then part
of Austria-Hungary (today part of Croatia). He stayed there, teaching English
mainly to Austro-Hungarian naval officers stationed at the Pula base, from October
1904 until March 1905, when the Austrians — having discovered an espionage ring in
the city — expelled all aliens. With Artifoni's help, he moved back to Trieste and
began teaching English there. He would remain in Trieste for most of the next ten
years.
Later that year Nora gave birth to their first child, George. Joyce then managed to
talk his brother, Stanislaus, into joining him in Trieste, and secured him a
position teaching at the school. Ostensibly his reasons were for his company and
offering his brother a much more interesting life than the simple clerking job he
had back in Dublin, but in truth, he hoped to augment his family's meagre income
with his brother's earnings. Stanislaus and James had strained relations the entire
time they lived together in Trieste, most arguments centering on James' frivolity
with money and drinking habits.
With chronic wanderlust much of his early life, Joyce became frustrated with life
in Trieste and moved to Rome in late 1906, having secured a position working in a
bank in the city. He intensely disliked Rome, however, and ended up moving back to
Trieste in early 1907. His daughter Lucia was born in the summer of the same
year.
Joyce returned to Dublin in the summer of 1909 with George, in order to visit his
father and work on getting Dubliners published. He visited Nora's family in Galway,
meeting them for the first time (a successful visit, to his relief). When preparing
to return to Trieste he decided to bring one of his sisters, Eva, back to Trieste
with him in order to help Nora look after the home. He would spend only a month
back in Trieste before again heading back to Dublin, this time as a representative
of some cinema owners in order to set up a regular cinema in Dublin. The venture
was successful (but would quickly fall apart in his absence), and he returned to
Trieste in January 1910 with another sister in tow, Eileen. While Eva became very
homesick for Dublin and returned a few years later, Eileen spent the rest of her
life on the continent, eventually marrying Czech bank cashier František
Schaurek.
Joyce returned to Dublin briefly in the summer of 1912 during his years-long fight
with his Dublin publisher, George Roberts, over the publication of Dubliners. His
trip was once again fruitless, and on his return he wrote the poem "Gas from a
Burner" as a thinly veiled invective of Roberts. It was his last trip to Ireland,
and he never came closer to Dublin than London again, despite the many pleas of his
father and invitations from fellow Irish writer William Butler Yeats.
Joyce came up with many money-making schemes during this period of his life, such
as his attempt to become a cinema magnate back in Dublin, as well as a frequently
discussed but ultimately abandoned plan to import Irish tweeds into Trieste. His
expert borrowing skills saved him from indigence. His income was made up partially
from his position at the Berlitz school and from taking on private students. Many
of his acquaintances through meeting these private students proved invaluable
allies during his problems getting out of Austria-Hungary and into Switzerland in
1915.
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.
Schmitz was Jewish, and became the primary model for Leopold Bloom; most of the
details about the Jewish faith included in Ulysses came from Schmitz in response to
Joyce's queries. Joyce would spend most of the rest of his life on the Continent.
It was in Trieste that he first began to be plagued by major eye problems, which
would result in over a dozen surgeries before his death.
In 1915 he moved to Zürich in order to avoid the complexities of living in
Austria-Hungary during World War I, where he met one of his most enduring and
important friends, Frank Budgen, whose opinion Joyce constantly sought through the
writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It was also here where Ezra Pound brought
him to the attention of English feminist and publisher Harriet Shaw Weaver, who
would become Joyce's patron, providing him thousands of pounds over the next 25
years and relieving him of the burden of teaching in order to focus on his writing.
After the war he returned to Trieste briefly, but found the city had changed, and
his relations with his brother (who had been interned in an Austrian prison camp
for most of the war due to his pro-Italian politics) were more strained than ever.
Joyce headed to Paris in 1920 at an invitation from Ezra Pound, supposedly for a
week, but he ended up living there for the next twenty years.
1920–1941: Paris
and Zürich
He traveled frequently to Switzerland for eye surgeries and treatments for Lucia,
who according to the Joyce estate, suffered from schizophrenia. In her 2003 work,
Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, Carol Loeb Shloss alleges that there may have
been incest between Lucia and her father and quite possibly between Lucia and her
brother Georgio. She cites the admission of the current heir of the Joyce estate,
Stephen Joyce, that he burned thousands of letters between Lucia and her father
that he received upon Lucia's death in 1982. There is much correspondence of
Joyce's showing that Lucia was his muse in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. All three works include a voyeuristic father with a
libidinal interest in nubile pre-pubescent and adolescent girls—very often his own
daughter. Finnegans Wake ends with a father having sex with his daughter. There is
correspondence from Joyce proving that he spoke with Lucia in a language similar to
that of the fragmented multi-language style in Finnegans Wake. There is much
evidence that Lucia was not diagnosed with schizophrenia by several doctors. In
fact, she was analyzed by Carl Jung who was of the opinion that her father was a
schizophrenic after reading Ulysses. Jung noted that she and her father were two
people heading to the bottom of a river, except that he was diving and she was
falling.
In Paris, Maria and Eugene Jolas nursed Joyce during his long years of writing
Finnegans Wake. Were it not for their unwavering support (along with Harriet Shaw
Weaver's constant financial support), there is a good possibility that his books
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. He returned to Zürich in late 1940, fleeing
the Nazi occupation of France. On 11 January 1941, he underwent surgery for a
perforated ulcer. While at first improved, he relapsed the following day, and
despite several transfusions, fell into a coma. He awoke at 2 a.m. on 13 January
1941, and asked for a nurse to call his wife and son before losing consciousness
again. They were still en route when he died 15 minutes later. He is buried in the
Fluntern Cemetery within earshot of the lions in the Zürich zoo. His wife Nora,
whom he finally married in London in 1931, survived him by 10 Joyce's work has been
subject to intense scrutiny by scholars of all types. He has also been an important
influence on writers and scholars as diverse as Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges,
Flann O'Brien, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Salman Rushdie, Robert Anton Wilson, and Joseph
Campbell.
Some scholars, most notably Vladimir Nabokov, have mixed feelings on his work,
often championing some of his fiction while condemning others. In Nabokov's
opinion, Ulysses was brilliant; Finnegans Wake, horrible (see Strong Opinions, The
Annotated Lolita or Pale Fire), an attitude Jorge Luis Borges shared. In recent
years, literary theory has embraced Joyce's innovation and ambition. Jacques
Derrida tells an anecdote about the two novels' importance for his own thought; in
a bookstore in Tokyo,
“ ...an American tourist of the most typical variety leaned over my shoulder and
sighed: "So many books! What is the definitive one? Is there any?" It was an
extremely small book shop, a news agency. I almost replied, "Yes, there are two of
them, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. ”
Joyce's influence is also evident in fields other than literature. The phrase
"Three Quarks for Muster Mark" in Joyce's Finnegans Wake is often called the source
of the physicists' word "quark", the name of one of the main kinds of elementary
particles, proposed by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann. The French philosopher
Jacques Derrida has written a book on the use of language in Ulysses, and the
American philosopher Donald Davidson has written similarly on Finnegans Wake in
comparison with Lewis Carroll. Additionally, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
used Joyce's writings to explain his concept of the sinthome. According to Lacan,
Joyce's writing is the supplementary cord which kept him from psychosis.
The life of Joyce is celebrated annually on June 16, Bloomsday, in Dublin and in an
increasing number of cities worldwide.
Each year in Dedham, Massachusetts, USA literary-minded runners hold the James
Joyce Ramble, a 10K Road Race with each mile dedicated to a different work by
Joyce. With professional actors in period garb lining the streets and reading from
his books as the athletes run by, it is billed as the only theatrical performance
where the performers stand still and the audience does the moving.
Much of Joyce's legacy is protected by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of
Texas, which houses thousands of manuscripts, pieces of correspondence, drafts,
proofs, notes, novel fragments, poems, song lyrics, musical scores, limericks, and
translations by Joyce.
Not everyone is eager to expand upon academic study of Joyce, however; Stephen
Joyce, James' grandson and sole beneficiary owner of the estate, has been alleged
to have destroyed some of the writer's correspondence, threatened to sue if public
readings were held during Bloomsday, and blocked adaptations he felt were
'inappropriate'. On June 12, 2006, Carol Shloss, a Stanford University professor,
sued the estate for refusing to give permission to use material about Joyce and his
daughter on the professor's website.
Source : Some of the information on
this page came from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU
Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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James
Joyce - Projector - Biography
