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JAMES JOYCE
Irish novelist, noted for his experimental use of language in
such works as Ulysees (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). During his
career Joyce suffered from rejections from publishers, suppression by censors,
and attacks by critics, and misunderstanding by readers. 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 mythology,
history, and literature, and created a unique language of invented words, puns,
and allusions. 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 Zurich, with only occasional brief visit to Ireland,
his native country remained basic to all his writings.
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 a 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 he
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 a year in France, 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 Poland, 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 chaotic, poverty-stricken, and productive. The author
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. A short stint in Rome as a bank clerk ended in illness, and Joyce
returned to Trieste. In 1907 Joyce published a collection of poems, Chamber
Music.. The title was suggested, Joyce 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." 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;
a series of short stories, dealing with the lives of ordinary people. The
stories deal progressively with youth, adolescence, young adulthood and
maturity. The last story, 'The Dead', was adapted to screen by John Huston in
1987.
Joyce had became friends with Ezra Pound, who began to market Joyce's
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.
At the outset of the First World War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich,
where Lenin and the Dadaist, Tristan Tzara had found their refuge. In Zürich
Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, which was first
published in France because of censorship troubles in Great Britain and
the United States, where the book became legally available 1933.
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. The work on Wake
occupied Joyce's time for the next sixteen years - the final version of the book
was completed late in 1938, and a copy of the novel was present at Joyce's
birthday celebration on February 1939.
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).
Finnegans Wake was the last and most revolutionary work of the author.
Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it
incomprehensible. 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."
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