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The Life of James Joyce

(1882-1941)

            James Joyce was an influential Irish writer of well-crafted and poignant novels that made good use of the author's enormous vocabulary, as well as his considerable literary skill. Though he received acclaim for the majority of his novels, with the exception of FINNEGANS WAKE (1939), which most critics found confusing and incomprehensible, Joyce made little money from his literary ventures, and had to rely on friends to support both himself and his wife. When ULYSSES was first published in France in 1922, the novel was outlawed in both Great Britain and America because of its sexual content. Using a variety of literary techniques, and grammatical differentiations from the norm, Joyce became the literary world's leading experimenter of form and style. Deeply influencing a number of writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Jack Kerouac, with his complicated symbolic meanings, his unusually vast vocabulary, and vivid descriptions that utilized the full potential of the stream-of-consciousness motif, Joyce has secured his legacy as one of the twentieth century’s most important authors.

            James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on February 8, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland. His father was John Stanislaus Joyce, a tax collector descended from a long-line of wealth, his mother was and Mary Jane Murray, who was obsessively Catholic. Although they were a poor family, John Joyce hid this from the rest of Dublin by shrouding his family's financial troubles with an illusion of economic stability. Young James was, in turn, oblivious to his family's money troubles, and had a happy youth built on a superficial sense of security. At the tender age of six, James was enrolled in Clongowes Wood College, a Catholic school run by Jesuits. Throughout all of his youth, James would be raised Catholic, forcibly arranged to attend expensive Catholic schools by his evangelical mother, and would regularly attend mass with his parents. All of it, however, did not stop his eventual conversion to atheism. However, Joyce never was to bear a grudge on his overbearing mother. Later he even attributed the origin of his intellect and sensibilities to the Jesuits' teachings.

            At the age of ten, James entered Belvedere College in his hometown of Dublin. It was here that Joyce completed his early education, experienced his first spiritual doubts, and began experimenting with a number of literary styles while writing essay assignments. James was known to be a good student: young and bright with a promising future ahead. He excelled in his classes, and was even awarded a number of accolades for his high-test scores. After aging seventeen, James graduated from the Belvedere day school, and was promptly enrolled in the University College Dublin, Ireland's largest and most prominent school with a reputation for churning out skilled building designers. James' father undoubtedly saw this profession as being a sturdy and reliable job. Considering the fact that he had had little to no success in his own business practices, John Joyce naturally wanted his son in as comfortable a profession as possible. After entering the university, however, James showed more of an interest in literature than anything, his favorite writers at the time being the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and W.B. Yeats, an Irish poet. Instead of pursuing a career in construction, James entered the Faculty of Arts at the university.

            At the college, Joyce began writing lyrical poetry. His only published work during this period, however, was an essay on an Ibsen play that appeared in the Fortnightly Review when Joyce was eighteen. By all accounts, Joyce was an attentive and eager student at first. He had a genuine interest in the artistic cultures of other European countries, and also wanted to pursue a career as a serious writer. However, the young writer also had a penchant for prostitutes that had developed during his teens. His parents, naturally, had no idea of their son's visits to bordellos. They could not, however, have not known of James' drinking, which he began when he was only sixteen, though they were probably not perturbed by this, since most of Ireland's youth back then drank. However, their son was beginning to develop into a man of established views and original thought that were radically different to what he had been raised with. James had become an arrogant student who, despite being naturally bright, was having serious problems with the way the Catholic college was being run. After graduation in 1902, James was seeking adventures of the sort that Homer's Odysseus engaged in THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY, two novels that heavily impacted the young Joyce. He moved from Dublin to Paris, France, on the promise of a career in medical literature that was only half-heartedly proposed. Being innately intelligent, Joyce was probably aware the offer was tenuous. But he had also been recently freed from a strenuous schedule of studying that had lasted since the age of six, and he was probably at that point jubilant just to be in Paris, the city that novelist Sherwood Anderson cried upon first sighting; the city that was only twenty years away from an artistic renaissance.

            No job was there to meet Joyce, so he entered a number of professional positions, including teacher, journalist and literary critic that rarely lasted for longer than a few months at a time. However, the Joyce stuck around and made a difficult living that was very hard on the twenty-year-old man; often times he was near the point of starvation due to a lack of nourishment. And yet, he still managed to remain representable, and even alluded to prosperity by dining in fancy restaurants and dressing impeccably. All of which was characteristic of his father, John Joyce. After only year of struggling to survive in Paris, Joyce was called back to Dublin: his mother was in ill health and did not have a long time to live. Once back in his hometown, Joyce made his religious beliefs known. In a pompous act that was typical of a young, arrogant, and rebellious Joyce, he refused to pray with his mother at her deathbed. Though this might sound like the ultimate act of disrespect, it does not, however, mean that Joyce was not hit by hard when his mother eventually died of cancer in 1903. Indeed, after Mary Joyce had been buried, the twenty-one-year-old Joyce entered a period of grieving in which he depended on alcohol more than ever.

            After the synergetic combination of anger and resentment of an old friend who betrayed him, painful memories of his mother, and general inactivity all became too unbearable for Joyce to handle any longer, the young writer left Dublin in 1904, and traveled to Trieste, a port town located in Austria-Hungary. Accompanying the young man was Nora Barnacle, a fellow Dubliner who had been working as a chambermaid in a local hotel. Nora was a gregarious and charismatic young woman who, despite having little in common with Joyce in terms of interests, was both funny and different in every way to the unapproachable educated women he had become accustomed to meeting in college. That same year, Joyce began to write an autobiographical novel entitled STEPHEN HERO. He would spend a number of years working on this novel, but in the end, the work would never be completed. However, the novel would later become important in that it would serve as a catalyst for the eventual writing of A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN (1916).

            The years Joyce spent in Trieste were some of the most difficult and most creative years of the writer's entire life. Joyce initially taught English at the Berlitz School, but gradually began devoting more and more time to writing the doomed STEPHEN HERO and a collection of short stories that would later be titled THE DUBLINERS (1914). He also began to depend on his brother Stanislaus (named after the middle name of his father) Joyce, who was living around the area at the same time as sibling James. The birth of a daughter by the name of Lucia help financial matters much, either, and only increased Joyce's dependency on his brother. Around the time that he began writing THE DUBLINERS (roughly around 1906 to 1908), Joyce also scrapped STEPHEN HERO and began writing A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. He also began to consider writing a novel that would help him better understand the jealousy and anger he felt upon learning his wife had had an affair with Oliver Gogarty, an old friend in Dublin, and lost her virginity before marrying him. What was initially an idea would later become a novel entitled ULYSSES (1922), the book that many consider to be Joyce's greatest. He would begin writing the book in 1915 following the publication of THE DUBLINERS.

            A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN follows the life of Stephen Dedalus from the time his father begins to read him stories to put him to sleep ("Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...") to when he would attend a Catholic school and be taught my Jesuits, and finally to a time when he would reject Catholicism and decide to become a writer. The novel was published in 1916, and by then Joyce and his wife had moved to Zurich to avoid World War I conflicts. The novel did only modestly in sales, but was praised by critics as a profound work enriched with honesty and beauty. Of the novel, author H.G. Wells said it was "by far the most living and convincing picture that exists of a Irish Catholic upbringing." He also noted it as being "memorable," and he said that Joyce's style and technique for writing literature was "startling."

            Getting his first novel published had been difficult for Joyce. He had revised STEPHEN HERO countless times and submitted it just as many, all to no avail. In fact, no one had initially been interested in publishing A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN until Joyce befriended the poet Ezra Pound, who read the work and thought it excellent. Pound was also integral in getting a number of writers and poets published in France during this period, including Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot. Sometime during World War I, Joyce began to write ULYSSES. The novel would take him seven years to complete, and would eventually be published by Pound to a mixed reception. On one hand, the open-minded critics of the novel considered it excellent, beautiful, and one of the great novels of the twentieth century. On the other, the novel contained a vivid description of masturbation and a number of sexual aspects. When first published in 1922, the novel was only released in France; a country where creating art without limitations or restrictions has always been a liberty. It was not until 1933 that a United States District Judge by the name of John M. Woolsey finally legalized the novel. Despite the nay Sayers, Judge Woolsey saw the work as a tour de force attempting "to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of man kind."

            ULYSSES depicts one vividly described day in the lives of a group of Dubliners that includes Leopold Bloom, the protagonist, and his wife, Molly Bloom, as well as Stephen Dedalus, the main character in A PORTRAIT OF THE PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. Using THE ODYSSEY as its example, the novel recreates Odysseus as a Jewish advertising canvasser, Penelope as a lethargic housewife, and Telemachus as a confused young writer. As the day progresses, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus go their separate ways in Dublin, meeting occasionally and befriending each other on a journey that will eventually end with Leopold coming home to Molly, but not into the heroic and brave way that Odysseus returns to his wife in Homer's epic poem. Using a number of invented words, allusions to politicians, philosophers, and historical events in Ireland, and a strange and detached vernacular, Joyce creates a novel that is awe-inspiring, and troublesome to read at the same time. Nevertheless, it is quite possibly Joyce's greatest literary feat.

             Following the publication of ULYSSES, Joyce discovered something troubling. For years his eyesight had been getting worse and worse, and as the years wore on, Joyce's glasses became thicker and thicker until they finally grossly enlarged his eyes and made him resemble a startled owl. However, it was neither age nor simply his eyesight slipping that was the cause of it all. At the age of thirty-nine, he was diagnosed as having glaucoma. Determined not to let it affect his work, Joyce began writing FINNEGANS WAKE in 1923. He would spend the next sixteen years writing the novel until its eventual publication in 1938. During the writing of the novel, Joyce experienced joy, pain, and depression that increased his dependency on alcohol ten-fold and hastened the author's death. In 1931, he finally married his long-time partner, Nora Barnacle. Two years later, however, Joyce's daughter was diagnosed as schizophrenic by the renowned psychologist Carl Jung, of whom she was a patient. She was committed to a mental facility where she remained until her death in 1980s. His daughter's illness depressed Joyce greatly, and he began drinking more and more often.

            FINNEGANS WAKE was published in 1939 to a lackluster reception. Many critics considered confusing for the sake of being confusing. A few saw it as genius, but the majority was highly critical of the novel. Written with a vocabulary devised by Joyce, the novel literally loops around itself and begins where it ends and ends where it begins. The story concerns a family in Dublin, and yet it is written as if it were all a dream. Though one can summarize the plot into convenient little synopses, the book is actually unconnected from its plot in that it transcends its characters and seems to observe them in a manner that is only slightly interested in their plight. The novel is one of literature's enigmas that baffle even some of the most intelligent men and women. Joyce wasn't kidding when he replied to why all of his works were so difficult by saying he requires the readers of his novels to devote their entire lives to reading his works.

            The novel did not put Joyce into a better position either economically or artistically. He was having to live off wealthy friends, his daughter had been committed, and he was living in France while a German dictator named Adolph Hitler was beginning to express his interest in taking over all of Western Europe. Perhaps for a change of scenery, or perhaps out of fear, Joyce departed from Paris with his wife and moved back to Zurich, Switzerland, where they had originally sought refuge from World War I. After spending a year wallowing in his misery and drowning himself daily in large doses of liquor, James Joyce died of peritonitis, an infection of the abdomen, on January 13, 1941, at the age of fifty-eight. Although he did not achieve a great level of success financially with his novels, Joyce became one of literature's greatest novelists through his experimenting with language, his concise and yet mystical stories, and his expansion of the English language. Of all the writers in the twentieth century, it is doubtful that any will ever be  as closely a studied writer as James Joyce a hundred more years from now.

The Works of James Joyce

Written by Cyanne Topaum

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