During the years when these early works were written, Joyce was also working on the short stories that would be collected as Dubliners, and on his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The world of literary art experienced a revolution during this period which we now characterize as literary Modernism or modernist art. Such theorists as Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud were revolutionizing thinking about the human condition and the human mind during the late 19th and early 20th century. Joyce demonstrated this impact even in small moments in his fiction, as when he has the young medical student Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan quote Nietzsche’s “Thus spake Zarathustra” (Ulysses 19) in the first chapter of Ulysses, set in 1904.
Literature’s response to these influences was to reinvent itself, to make itself “new,” as the poet Ezra Pound put it. It did so by giving itself the freedom to experiment with style and language, while nonetheless anchoring itself to what the critic T.E. Hulme termed “Classicism,” a return not only to classical themes but also to a formal restraint in writing, using concrete images and a deliberate economy in crafting poetic language. Joyce’s own tribute to classicism is seen in the surname of his protagonist Stephen Dedalus, derived from the Greek myth of an artisan living on the island of Crete, who makes wings out of feathers and wax to allow him and his son to fly across the ocean. And Joyce not only derived the title of Ulysses from Greek mythology, but gave every episode in the novel a correspondence to characters, places, or incidents in Homer’s epic Odyssey. T. S. Eliot’s 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” made another point illustrated in Joyce’s use of classicism, namely evidence of the poet’s “impersonal” stance in his writing, a strategy best implemented by narration in different voices and not in the single voice of the poet. In Ulysses, the episodes are sometimes narrated in the third person, sometimes in the first person, by male voices and female voices, even by such unusual maneuvers as having a voice express how a character might wish to speak if she could, in the language of romance novels, say, rather than how she would actually speak. Joyce’s era committed itself to having modernist literature aspire not only to the “new,” but also to preserving the historical timelessness found in classical art and literature. This simultaneous grounding in tradition and disciplined writing combined with an impulse toward pushing avant-garde experimentalism to often wild extremes makes Joyce’s literary canon so extraordinary. From the solemn poems of “Chamber Music” to the colorful verbal deconstructions of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s work encompasses a virtually unprecedented literary universe.
Margot Norris
Irvine, California
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Introduction: Life and Career
The previous discussion of Joyce’s lesser known works alluded to various moments in his life and career, serving as a prelude to a more systematic and detailed biographical portrait of Joyce over the course of his life. Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland on February 2, 1882, the oldest child of a Catholic family that was initially well off, but whose fortunes declined as each of its 10 children was born and their father, a heavy drinker, failed to find steady work. Joyce was initially sent to a prestigious Jesuit boarding school in County Kildare, where he received the beginning of an excellent education that continued through his college years. Critic Lee Spinks writes that it was at Clongowes Wood College that Joyce “gained his first grounding in Latin, theology and the classics” (James Joyce: A Critical Guide 3). But the six-year-old Joyce was also bullied by classmates and unjustly punished over an incident involving his broken glasses—an event that points to the ongoing eye problems he would endure throughout his life.
After his one year at Clongowes, Joyce’s father could no longer afford the tuition, but fortunately, the former rector of the boarding school helped Joyce get admitted to the Jesuit high school of Belvedere College in Dublin, which he attended for the next six years. He did well at Belvedere, acting in a play and winning prizes for academic achievement. His adolescence led him to an encounter with a prostitute that created a religious crisis for him, an experience echoed in detail in the retreat episode in Portrait. Like Stephen Dedalus, Joyce too was approached by one of his mentors to consider joining the priesthood, and he too declined. During his early years, religion and politics also came into critical conflict in Ireland, creating a painful moment in Joyce’s young life that too becomes a reference in Portrait. The Protestant politician Charles Stewart Parnell, a champion of Irish independence from Britain, was denounced by the Catholic Church after his affair with a married woman was disclosed. This created conflict not only in Ireland at large, but also within families, as Joyce portrayed in the devastating Christmas feud in the novel.
At 16, Joyce continued his education at University College, Dublin. There he expanded his intellectual grounding in the art and culture of his day, to extend beyond England and Ireland to the Continental literature that had revolutionized fiction writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This included the works of Henrik Ibsen, and later also the writings of Gustave Flaubert, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Leo Tolstoy, among others, inspiring Joyce to write “The Day of the Rabblement.” In 1900, he wrote a play titled A Brilliant Career, which was inspired by Ibsen’s work, but unfortunately did not survive. He also began writing poetry. Joyce scholar and biographer Morris Beja reports that in 1902 the distinguished Irish poet W. B. Yeats responded to some of the poems by telling Joyce “your technique in verse is very much better than the technique of any young Dublin man I have met during my time” (James Joyce: A Literary Life 27). Another of his writing experiments took a form that might be considered “prose poems,” as biographer Richard Ellmann calls them, brief works that have become known as his ‘epiphanies’ (James Joyce 83). Ellmann points out that their aim was to reveal “the whatness of a thing,” and thereby to make “the soul of the commonest object . . . radiant.” After college, Joyce decided to study medicine in Paris (he was by then fluent in French, German, and Italian), and Yeats kindly met with him on his stopover in London before he continued his journey abroad. His Paris sojourn of eighteen months was not successful. Joyce stayed there until April of 1903 when a telegram from his family informed him that his mother was dying, forcing him to hurry back home. She died several months later, and Joyce’s refusal to pray at her deathbed—he had distanced himself from the Catholic Church by that time—inspired a similar event for his character Stephen Dedalus in his 1922 Ulysses.
After his mother’s death, Joyce was somewhat aimless and unclear about how to proceed with his life. He took a teaching job for a few weeks, and since he had a beautiful tenor voice, entered a singing contest. He continued experimenting with some writing, jotting moments of his life that would later emerge in Stephen Hero and Portrait. Then in the summer and fall of 1904, three momentous events changed the course of his entire life. In June, Joyce met a young woman from western Ireland named Nora Barnacle, who was working as a chambermaid at Finn’s Hotel in Dublin. Morris Beja writes “She was a self-confident woman, with a sharp wit, and striking in appearance, with beautiful auburn hair” (23), and Lee Spinks agrees, calling her “spirited, independent, and self-contained” with a “direct and unaffected manner” (22-23). Joyce’s attempt to get a date with her didn’t work immediately, but on June 16, 1904, they went walking together, leading to a life-long relationship. To celebrate this meeting, Joyce set Ulysses on that very day.
Another real-life event is also commemorated in Ulysses. In September of that year, Joyce shared a room with a friend named Oliver St John Gogarty. They lived in the Martello tower, a military tower available for rental at Sandycove, along the south coast of Dublin. Joyce was there for only five days, but his tense relationship with Gogarty and a British visitor named Samuel Chenevix Trench is represented in the opening chapter of Ulysses in a series of strained conversations between Stephen Dedalus and two young men at the Martello tower. Soon after this experience, Joyce decided to leave Ireland for the Contin
ent, but this time not alone. Although he did not want to marry, he asked Nora Barnacle to elope with him, and in early October they left for London and Paris by boat. And so Joyce’s new life on the Continent began.
Joyce’s plan had been to teach English at a Berlitz school in Zurich, but it turned out that no positions were available. He ended up teaching in Italy instead, first in the city of Pola and then in Trieste, where he and Nora lived for 10 years until the outbreak of World War I. Less than a year after leaving Ireland, Nora gave birth to a baby boy they named Giorgio. Before too long Joyce invited his brother Stanislaus to join his family in Trieste. Joyce now began serious work on the short stories that would eventually be published as ‘Dubliners’, but an early attempt to get them published in Ireland failed, much to his disappointment. In 1906, he took a job in Rome and took his family there, hoping for a better life. But it turned out not to be a good venue for him, and the Joyces returned to Trieste. This experience inspired some of the characters in his play Exiles, which he wrote some years later and published in 1918.
In 1907, Nora gave birth to a little girl they named Lucia, and in the same year, the poem collection of Chamber Music was published. Joyce also began publishing a series of articles in the Trieste newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera, most focused on Ireland and Irish art. In 1909, Joyce made his first trip back to Ireland so his father could meet his grandson, Giorgio. On his return trip back to Trieste, he brought his younger sister Eva with him. Still in her teens, Eva loved the movie theaters in Trieste and complained to her brother about the lack of similar venues in Dublin. This spurred Joyce to find some entrepreneurs who were willing to invest in a cinema in Dublin. Joyce traveled there to get the project—called the Volta Theatre—started, and this time returned to Trieste with another sister, Eileen. But the Volta did not get off the ground well, and Joyce returned to teaching.
During the last several years Joyce had been writing short stories and continued working on a novel of sorts that he initially titled Stephen Hero. He hoped to publish his short stories as a collection to be called Dubliners, and on another trip to Ireland he tried to negotiate its publication, but ran into some difficulties. While all this was in progress, Joyce developed some friendships that were to play important roles in his developing career. One such relationship was with a middle-aged student he tutored, a businessman named Ettore Schmitz, who later became a famous writer under the pseudonym of Italo Svevo. He was Jewish, one of a number of Jewish acquaintances Joyce befriended in Trieste, and this experience may have later influenced his decision to make the protagonist of Ulysses a Jew (“more or less,” as Beja describes him [57]). Another Jewish student named Amalia Popper inspired Joyce’s “notebook” (as his biographer Richard Ellmann calls it [342]). Titled Giacomo Joyce, its strange descriptions are generally construed as expressing an infatuation Joyce may have had with the young woman.
The years before and after 1914 were a turning point in Joyce’s career and his life. In 1913 he heard from an American named Ezra Pound, who had learned about Joyce’s skill in writing from Yeats, and who asked Joyce if he would send him some of his work for possible publication in a new journal called The Egoist. Pound, who eventually became a distinguished poet in his own right, offered Joyce critical professional support in the ensuing years. Joyce sent Pound not only his short stories but also a sample from his novel which he now titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and by 1914 The Egoist began serial publication of the book. One of the editors of the journal, a woman named Harriet Shaw Weaver, became a major financial supporter not only of Joyce’s work, but also of his family, for years to come.
By 1915, all of Portrait had appeared in serial form and was published as a book the following year. Joyce’s career was launched. However, the outbreak of World War I created a major turmoil in Joyce’s life. In spite of its largely Italian population, Trieste belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire up to that time, which made the political situation for technically British citizens like the Joyce family complicated and risky when war with Italy broke out. As a result, they moved to Zurich in neutral Switzerland, where they lived until the end of the war. By then Joyce had begun working on the new novel that would become Ulysses, while still teaching private pupils. Joyce also became involved in a theater company called “The English Players,” which unfortunately involved him in a complicated dispute with an actor who complained about insufficient pay, a conflict that resulted in legal actions. But plays continued to be produced during this time, and Nora and the children actually took part in one of the productions. Joyce also made a number of new friends in Zurich, including a man named Frank Budgen with whom he remained on friendly terms for many years. Also around that time Joyce, who had begun having eye problems as early as 1908, suffered a serious attack of glaucoma that required surgery. As with Portrait, initial publication of chapters of Ulysses began in a journal, an American production called The Little Review, where the new book’s objectionable language and concepts created censorship problems. The editors, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, were eventually tried in a U.S. court for the work’s supposed obscenity, and were both fined and forbidden to continue publication.
The Joyce family left Zurich and returned to Trieste the year after World War I ended, in 1919. But they found the city much changed, and a year later, at the urging of Ezra Pound, whom Joyce had finally met in person, they moved to Paris; they lived there until the outbreak of World War II. Thanks to the support of Harriet Shaw Weaver and another patron, Joyce was able to devote himself to his writing, and after having worked on Ulysses for seven years, Joyce finished the work in 1921. The search for a publisher began, made complicated by the fact that its reputation for obscenity deterred English or American publishers from considering it. Fortunately, a year earlier Joyce had met an American woman who ran a bookstore called “Shakespeare and Company,” which became an important institution for English-speaking expatriates living in Paris at that time. Her name was Sylvia Beach and she and Joyce became good friends. When Joyce told her of his worry that his book might never be published, their discussion led to a decision to have “Shakespeare and Company” publish it for him. It was unusual to have a bookstore owner with no publishing experience undertake such a project, but Beach found an excellent printer named Maurice Darantière who worked in Dijon. The publication process was arduous, with Joyce making many changes to the proofs, but the first copies of Ulysses, with blue covers reflecting the Greek flag, were finally printed at the beginning of February 1922. In what has become a famous story, we are told that Darantière put two copies of the book on the express train to Dijon on the morning of Joyce’s fortieth birthday, February 2, 1922, and instructed the conductor to give them to Sylvia Beach, who was waiting for the train in Paris. She took them and jumped into a taxi, and gave Joyce his first copy of Ulysses that morning (Ellmann 524).
The book created a sensation of sorts, and before long copies were being smuggled into the United States where it was not available for legal publication until after a landmark U.S. court decision in 1933. The book’s problematic legal status created a crisis of sorts in 1926 when an American publisher named Samuel Roth began to publish an edited serial version of the work, without Joyce’s permission, in a journal he ran. Without legal recourse, Joyce turned to the international community to ask authors and others to sign a protest letter, and Morris Beja reports that the signatories included such famous names as Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, among others (94). The protest had little effect, but the fame of Ulysses continued to grow. Beja notes that by the end of the 1920s, Joyce—“certainly not the most widely read of authors in the English language—was probably the most famous” (96). A year after the publication of Ulysses, Joyce began working on a new project whose title did not become known until many years later, but which we now know as Finnegans Wake.
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