James Joyce

. Biography 2

08 - Biography 1 - Kirjasto - Irish novelist, noted for his experimental use of language in such works as ULYSSES (1922) and FINNEGANS WAKE (1939). During his career Joyce suffered from rejections from publishers, suppression by censors, attacks by critics, and misunderstanding by readers. From 1902 Joyce led a nomadic life, which perhaps reflected in his interest in the character of Odysseus. Although he spent long times in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zürich, with only occasional brief visit to Ireland, his native country remained basic to all his writings.

"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)

James Joyce was born in Dublin as the son of John Stanislaus Joyce, impoverished gentleman, who had failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of professions, including politics and tax collecting. 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 the author thanked Jesuits for teaching him to think straight, although he rejected their religious instructions. At school he once broke his glasses and was unable to do his lessons. This episode was recounted in A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN (1916). 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 traveling again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid (they married in 1931), staying in Pola, Austria-Hungary, and in Trieste, which was the world’s seventh busiest port. 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 nomadic, poverty-stricken, and productive. Joyce and Nora loved this cosmopolitan port city at the head of the Adriatic Sea, where they lived in a number of different addresses. During this period Joyce wrote most of DUBLINERS (1914), all of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the play, EXILES (1918), and large sections of Ulysses. Several of Joyce's siblings joined them, and two children, Giorgio and Lucia, were born. The children grew up speakin the Trieste dialect of Italian. Joyce and Nora stayed together althoug Joyce fell in love with Anny Schleimer, the daughter of an Austrian banker, and Roberto Prezioso, the editor of the newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera, tried to seduce Nora. After a short stint in Rome in 1906-07 as a bank clerk ended in illness, Joyce returned to Trieste.

In 1907 Joyce published a collection of poems, CHAMBER MUSIC. The title was suggested, as the author later stated, by the sound of urine tinkling into a prostitute's chamber pot. The poems have with their open vowels and repetitions such musical quality that many of them have been made into songs. "I have left my book, / I have left my room, / For I heard you singing / Through the gloom." Joyce himself had a fine tenor voice; he liked opera and bel canto.

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 fulfill their contract to publish Dubliners. The work contained a series of short stories, dealing with the lives of ordinary people, youth, adolescence, young adulthood, and maturity. The last story, 'The Dead', was adapted into screen by John Huston in 1987.

It was Joyce's last journey to his home country. However, he had became friends with Ezra Pound, who began to market his works. In 1916 appeared Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an autobiographical novel. It apparently began as a quasi-biographical memoir entitled Stephen Hero between 1904 and 1906. Only a fragment of the original manuscript has survived. The book follows the life of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, from childhood towards maturity, his education at University College, Dublin, and rebellion to free himself from the claims of family and Irish nationalism. Stephen takes religion seriously, and considers entering a seminary, but then also rejects Roman Catholicism. "-Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning." At the end Stephen resolves to leave Ireland for Paris to encounter "the reality of experience". He wants to establish himself as a writer.

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 with his family to Zürich, where Lenin and the poet essayist Tristan Tzara had found their refuge. Joyce's WW I years with the legendary Russian revolutionary and Tzara, who founded the dadaist movement at the Cabaret Voltaire, provide the basis for Tom Stoppard's play Travesties (1974).

In Zürich Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, which was first published in France, because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States, where the book became legally available 1933. 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. Ulysses takes place on one day in Dublin (June 16, 1904) and reflected the classic work of Homer (fl. 9th or 8th century BC?).

The main characters are Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, the hero from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope. Barmaids are the famous Sirens. One of the models for Bloom was Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo), a novelist and businessman who was Joyce's student at the Berlitz school in Trieste. The story, using stream-of-consciousness technique, parallel the major events in Odysseus' journey home. However, Bloom's adventures are less heroic and his homecoming is less violent. Bloom makes his trip to the underworld by attending a funeral at Glasnevin Cemetary. "We are praying now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you're well and not in hell. Nice change of air. Out of the fryingpan of life into the fire of purgatory." The paths of Stephen and Bloom cross and recross through the day. 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 the mythology, history, and literature.

From 1917 to 1930 Joyce endured several eye operations, being totally blind for short intervals. (According to tradition, Homer was also blind.) In March 1923 Joyce started in Paris 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. Wake occupied Joyce's time for the next sixteen years - its final version was completed late in 1938. A copy of the novel was present at Joyce's birthday celebration on February 1939.

Joyce's daughter Lucia, born in Trieste in 1907, became Carl Jung's patient in 1934. In her teens, she studied dance, and later The Paris Times praised her skills as choreocrapher, linguist, and performer. With her father she collaborated in POMES PENYEACH (1927), for which she did some illustrations. Lucia's great love was Samuel Beckett, who was not interested in her. In the 1930s, she started to behave erratically. At the Burghölz psychiatric clinic in Zurich, where Jung worked, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. Joyce was left bitter at Jung's analysis of his daughter - Jung thought she was too close with her father's psychic system. In revenge, Joyce played in Finnegans Wake with Jung's concepts of Animus and Anima. Lucia died in a mental hospital in Northampton, England, in 1982.

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).

(Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound & John Quinn at Pound's place in Paris in 1923. Quinn was a lawyer who defended the publication of Ulysses in "The Little Review" in 1921)

Finnegans Wake was the last and most revolutionary work of the author. 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. "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." 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. Transformations are as flexible as in Ovid's Metamorphoses. 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 analogy 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 savior of Ireland, and Tim Finnegan, the hero of music-hall ballad, who sprang to life in the middle of his own wake.

For further reading: James Joyce by Herbert Gorman (1939); Introducing James Joyce, ed. by T.S. Eliot (1942); Stephen Hero, ed. by Theodore Spencer (1944); 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); Toiseen maailmaan. James Joycen novelli "Kuolleet" kirjallisuustieteen kohteena by Pekka Vartiainen (1999); The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920 by John McCourt (2000); Joyce's "Ulysses" for Everyone, Or How To Skip Reading It the First Time by John Mood (2004) - See also: Little Blue Light, Samuel Beckett, William Butler Yeats, Marcel Proust

(Sylvia Beach y James Joyce in París, Shakespeare & Cía)

Selected works:

* CHAMBER MUSIC, 1907
* DUBLINERS, 1914 - Dublinilaisia - film Dead (1987), based on the last story in the collection, dir. by John Huston, starring Anjelica Huston
* A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, 1916 - Taiteilijan omakuva nuoruuden vuosilta (trans. into Finnish by Alex Matson) - film 1979, dir. by Joseph Strick, starring Bosco Hogan, T.P. McKenna, John Gielgud
* EXILES, 1918
* ULYSSES, 1922 - Odysseus (trans. into Finnish by Pentti Saarikoski) - film 1967, dir. by Joseph Strick, starring Barbara Jefford, Molo O'Shea, Maurive Roeves, T.P. McKenna
* POMES PENYEACH, 1927
* COLLECTED POEMS, 1936
* FINNEGANS WAKE, 1939 - film 1965, dir. by Mary Ellen Bute
* STEPHEN HERO, 1944
* THE PORTABLE JAMES JOYCE, 1947
* THE ESSENTIAL JAMES JOYCE, 1948
* THE LETTERS OF JAMES JOYCE, 3 vols., 1957-66
* THE CRITICAL WRITINGS, 1959
* 'LIVIA PRULABELLA' - THE MAKING OF A CHAPTER, 1960
* A FIRST DRAFT VERSION OF 'FINNEGANS WAKE', 1963
* THE LETETRS OF JAMES JOYCE, 3 vols., 1957-66
* GIACOMO JOYCE, 1968
* SELECTED LETTERS OF JAMES JOYCE, 1975
* THE JAMES JOYCE ARCHIVES, 63 vols., 1977-80
* ULYSSES: A READER'S EDITION, 1997 (ed. by Danis Rose)

Biography 2 - Oxford University

 James [Augustine Aloysius] Joyce

Joyce, James [Augustine Aloysius] (1882-1941), novelist; born in Rathgar, Dublin, to May and John Stanislaus Joyce, the latter, figuring in his son's books as Simon Dedalus. Joyce went to Clongowes Wood, entered the Royal University at St Stephen's Green [see universities] on a scholarship, and there studied languages together with courses in mathematics and philosophy. He began to write prose sketches in 1900 with the composition of epiphanies, short writings in the form either of dramatic vignettes or prose-poems. These short notations were first circulated by him in manuscript, but later used to indicate moments of heightened perception in the novels from Stephen Hero to Ulysses. A broadside against the Irish Literary Theatre [ Abbey Theatre], attacking W. B. Yeats and the other leaders of the dramatic movement for ‘surrender[ing] to the popular will’, appeared as ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ (1901). On completion of his degree, Joyce met and felt himself rebuffed by leaders of the Irish literary revival. His antipathy to Patrick Pearse soon took the form of a satirical sketch of an Irish-language class given by a Mr Hughes in Stephen Hero—the novel where, in 1904, he set about marshalling his arguments against simplistic views of Irishness, sexuality, and politics. After first enrolling at the medical school of the Royal University, he left Dublin for Paris on 1 December 1902 with a view to training there instead, but encountered difficulties over entrance qualifications. He returned for Christmas, but left again on 23 January 1903, to be recalled by a telegram in August informing him of his mother's impending death. Back in Dublin he embarked on a period of dissipation with Oliver St John Gogarty, but continued the literary notices for the Daily Express which he had begun to write in 1902. He briefly stayed with Gogarty at the Martello Tower in
Sandycove, 9-15 September 1904, quitting in a spirit of mutual distrust which was never entirely overcome.

(Joyce ine Dublin)

Three stories of what was to be the Dubliners (1914) collection were invited by George Russell and appeared in The Irish Homestead (Aug.-Dec. 1904). In June 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, a girl from Galway who was working as a chambermaid. His love for her opened a source of ordinary human feeling upon which he drew at all stages of his career, basing Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake on her vitality. In October 1904 Joyce left Dublin with Nora for a teaching post in Trieste, where he remained for ten years. From there, he sent twelve stories of Dubliners to the London publisher Grant Richards, but it was not to appear until 1914. With Joyce's encouragement, his brother Stanislaus joined them in 1905 and became an economic mainstay for the family. He left the Berlitz School in 1907, taking with him some private pupils who provided better rates of payment. In 1909 he undertook to open a Dublin cinema, the Volta (the first in Ireland), for a Triestino company. Owing to his choosing Italian rather than American films, the audience rapidly fell off. In 1913 Yeats alerted Ezra Pound to Joyce's talent, and when Joyce sent him the first chapter of his autobiographical novel in its revised form Pound found a publisher for it: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first appeared serially in The Egoist (2 Feb. 1914-1 Sept. 1915) and then in book form in New York (1916), an Egoist Press edition following in London (1917). Meanwhile, Joyce had reopened negotiations with the publisher Grant Richards, and Dubliners was issued in London on 15 June 1914. Joyce now began to receive financial support through Pound's advocacy, notably from Miss Harriet Shaw Weaver (co-editor of The Egoist with Dora Marsden). Improved finances and Pound's critical support gave Joyce the confidence to commence a novel which he had contemplated as a final story for Dubliners. He began writing Ulysses with the ‘Calypso’ episode on 1 March 1914, and had completed the first three chapters (‘Telemachiad’) by early 1915. The First World War compelled Joyce to move to Zürich, arriving 30 June 1915. There he continued with Ulysses. Joyce returned at the cessation of hostilities to Trieste (mid-October 1919) before moving to Paris (8 July 1920) on Pound's advice. There he soon met Sylvia Beach, who offered to bring out Ulysses under her Shakespeare & Company bookshop imprint, with the help of Adrienne Monnier. The book appeared in time for Joyce's 40th birthday, 2 February 1922. With the production of his play Exiles in 1919, Joyce fulfilled an early ambition to write for the theatre. Exiles, a study of jealousy, was begun in 1913, when he was urging Nora towards infidelities (which she resisted) in a spirit of emotional inquiry. During the autumn of 1922 he began to compile notes for a new book, incorporating unused material from Ulysses. During that year he studied Sir Edward Sullivan's 1920 Studio edition of the Book of Kells, drawing his friends' attention to the Irishness of its densely patterned illuminations. On 10 March 1923 he wrote a draft of the first episode, ‘King Roderick O'Conor’. The ensuing labour of ‘Work in Progress’—as the book was known before publication—took seventeen years, during which Joyce experienced physical, mental, and emotional trials. Sections of Finnegans Wake were published in avant-garde magazines including Transatlantic Review (Apr. 1924), Criterion (July 1925), Navire d'argent (Oct. 1925), and transition (Apr. 1927-Apr./May 1938). Episodes and combinations of episodes were published as Anna Livia Plurabelle (1928); Tales Told by Shem and Shaun (1929); and Haveth Childers Everywhere (1930). Finnegans Wake was completed on 13 November 1938 and published on Joyce's 57th birthday, on 2 February 1939. The outbreak of the Second World War caused the Joyces to move to Gérand-le-Puy, the town near Vichy where Maria Jolas (editor of transition with her husband Eugene) kept a bilingual school attended by Joyce's grandson Stephen (b. 1932). In December 1940, the family entered Switzerland with special visas—all except Lucia, his son, who was by then in a sanatorium. Joyce died after an apparently successful operation for an ulcerated duodenum on 13 January.

Bibliography

Michael Groden et al. (eds.), The James Joyce Archive (63 vols., 1977-9) and Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959; rev. 1982).