10-Dec-08 12:00 PM CST

James Joyce

By Jim Austin

It is clear that Ireland has produced more than its fair share of literary giants. The student of Irish writing comes across such luminous names as Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Edmund Burke, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Moore, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats.

But no writer in the English language, Irish or otherwise, is more interesting than the great genius of the turn of the century, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. Many scholars cite Joyce as the greatest writer of all time. He was certainly one of the deepest and most creative. He is known for using a radical stream of consciousness technique and inventing different literary approaches to the narrative underpinnings of his works. In his last work, Finnegans Wake, he manipulated the very words and phonemes themselves to create almost a juggernaut, helter-skelter language that some say is incomprehensible and others say is expressive but conceptually different from standard articulation.

Joyce was born on the outskirts of Dublin on February 2, 1882. He was the oldest of ten children, five of whom died in infancy.

Joyce's father, John Stanislaus Joyce, lived from 1849 to 1931. John Stanislaus Joyce was an endearing but feckless man, a bit of a bungler. And when it came to money, he was somewhat of a disaster. Thus the family fortune was whittled away when Joyce was a young boy and the family subsequently lived a life of poverty and deprivation.

Nevertheless Joyce received a good education and became very involved in the literary arts movement at University College Dublin. Such a scholar was Joyce that he learned Dano-Norwegian in order to better understand his literary hero, Henrik Ibsen. At the age of eighteen Joyce published his first piece, a review of the Ibsen play When We Dead Awaken in the Fortnightly Review. Upon his graduation in 1902, Joyce left for Paris.

The success at publishing his first piece spurred the young Joyce on with his literary career. It was while in college that Joyce developed a habit of writing down what he called his epiphanies: those gems of circumstances that when viewed by a writer or another creative person gave forth an insight that said much more than the singular details of the event or episode itself. Joyce recorded these epiphanies throughout his college days and beyond and would refer to the epiphanies notebooks to reconstruct historical events in his literary works.

On April 10, 1903 Joyce's father telegrammed him in Paris with the news that his mother was dying. Joyce returned to Dublin and knocked about for several months while unsuccessfully launching various attempts at starting a career. On August 13 of that year his mother passed away.

Joyce stayed on in Dublin until October of 1904. In June of that year he met the woman who was to become his companion and wife for the rest of his life, Nora Barnacle. Nora was a Dublin hotel employee from Galway on Ireland's western coast. Joyce fell in love with her on June 16, 1904, which would later become a very significant date in Joyce's life. It is the date chronicled in Joyce's most celebrated work, Ulysses.

Joyce and Nora, whom he loved deeply, but refused to marry on principle, left for Europe -- specifically for Zurich where Joyce was to take a position teaching in the Berlitz School. Joyce and Nora had two children, Giorgio born in 1905 and Joyce's darling and beloved Lucia born in 1907.

In The Dubliners, published in 1914, Joyce wrote short stories based on the actual lives and personalities of various characters taken from his real life and experience. Two years later a novel he had been working on for many years, Stephen Hero, came out under the title A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce and Nora had moved from Zurich to Trieste in Italy but had to leave Trieste to move back to Zurich in 1915 when the First World War broke out in Italy. It was at this time that he began to work on his monumental masterpiece, Ulysses.

Ulysses is an amazing work that parallels Homer's Odyssey. In that epic poem Ulysses wanders the world as a skilled warrior and resourceful leader possessing the qualities of bravery and trustworthiness. Ulysses was the King of Ithaca. His wife was Penelope and his son, Telemachus.

In James Joyce's novel Ulysses the hero is Leopold Bloom. His Penelope is Molly Bloom based on Joyce's real life Nora. The entire book's activity takes place on one day, June 16, 1904, in and around Dublin, Ireland. Joyce's style of writing changes with each chapter and the stream of consciousness technique gives a vivid picture of the protagonist Leopold Bloom and the various Dubliners encountered during his wanderings. Ulysses is at once filled with humor and depth, with cunning and simplicity, with bitterness and sweetness. It is considered one of the greatest works of western literature. June 16 is now celebrated as "Bloomsday" in Dublin.

The final work of James Joyce's life is Finnegans Wake. (The lack of an apostrophe in Finnegans leads to several interpretations of the two words.) The book is actually cyclical. It begins with the end of a sentence, a sentence whose first part appears as the end of the book on the last page. The language invented by Joyce in Finnegans Wake is one of humor and of multi-lingual origins. It is probably one of the most difficult books to read in the English language.

Joyce was plagued with eye problems and had multiple operations over a fifteen year span. In 1920 he moved to Paris where he spent the next two decades. Upon publishing FinnegansWake, Joyce lost the support of many of his close friends. Whether they abandoned him because of his increasingly incomprehensible literary style, or he them over their lack of loyalty to him and his supreme new work, is debatable.

Perhaps the saddest story in Joyce's life is the vigorousness with which he tried to keep his beloved daughter Lucia out of mental institutions. Lucia suffered from schizophrenia and its strong pull was more than even a loving father's efforts could assuage.

Joyce died of a perforated duodenal ulcer in January 14, 1941. He was buried in Zurich in the Fluntern Cemetary. Nora died ten years later (April 10, 1951) of a type of blood poisoning, uremia.

The final words of Richard Ellman's excellent biography of Joyce (p. 744) are:

The surface of the life Joyce lived seemed always erratic and provisional. But its central meaning was directed as consciously as his work. The ingenuity with which he wrote his books was the same with which he forced the world to read them; the smiling affection he extended to bloom and his other principal characters was the same that he gave to the members of his family; his disregard for bourgeois thrift and convention was the splendid extravagance which enabled him in literature to make an intractable wilderness into a new state. In whatever he did, his two profound interests - his family and his writings - kept their place. These passions never dwindled. The intensity of the first gave his work its sympathy and humanity; the intensity of the second raised his life to dignity and high dedication.

Samples from Finnegans Wake (as cited by Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, New York, 1952).

"And Trieste, ah Trieste, ate my liver!" Finnegans Wake page 301

"The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have the night for morn, lightbreakfastbringer. . .." Finnegans Wake page 473

"He even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland's split little pea." Finnegans Wake page 171

"Whar now are alle her childer, say? In Kingdome gone or power to come or Gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger." Finnegans Wake page 213

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lawrence on 27-Jan-10 11:47 AM permalink
the writer understates jj as a student. he was not merely a good student, he was probably the best student of his generation in the world. he had a quality jesuit education which should of ended in the priesthood. however jj could not serve and so married quickly and exiled himself to become a writer. he continues to perform as the most intelligent of all authors ever. the best read. the most knowledgeable. this is all well established in jj biography.