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James Joyce

1882–1941

 

Along with W.B. YEATS [8], James Joyce has exerted an immense influence on the development of modern literature both in Europe and America.  Though in his own day Ulysses was seen as a scandalous work, it quickly achieved the status of a modern classic.  There can be few writers since who in some way or another have not been aware of the literary and moral example of James Joyce.

      He was born in Dublin on 2nd February 1882, the eldest surviving child of a Corkman, John Stanislaus Joyce, and his wife, formerly May Murray, whose people came from Longford.  At the age of six-and-a-half he was sent to the Jesuit college at Clongowes Wood.  He eventually transferred to Belvedere College, a day school in Dublin, from where he went on to University College, but these, too, were run by the Jesuits.  Joyce revolted against his religious training, but to the end his mind remained imbued with the tenets and traditions of the Catholic church, his mind working with and reacting to the Thomistic philosophy of his teachers.

      He was a brilliant, indeed precocious, child.  From an early age he was interested in the use of words and the study of language.  At college he studied modern languages, and later taught English as a foreign language.  Through his studies he became widely read not only in older literatures, but also in contemporary writers such as Henrik Ibsen.

      He had abandoned a medical career to go and live in Paris when he was summoned home to the harrowing scenes of his mother's death from cancer in 1903.  After an idle, drifting year, he left Ireland accompanied by Nora Barnacle, a Galway girl who was to be the mother of his two children.  Though he revisited Ireland briefly in 1909 and 1912, he spent the rest of his life in Europe, first at Trieste (then the port city of the Austrian Empire), in Switzerland for much of the First World War, and finally in Paris until he was forced to flee after the German invasion.  He and some of his family escaped to Switzerland and settled in Zurich, where he died unexpectedly on 13th January 1941.

      Ireland was a largely rural country in the nineteenth century, and the art of Yeats and other writers of the Irish literary revival looked to the ancient traditions and language of the countryside for their inspiration.  Not so James Joyce.  He was a distinctly urban genius.  The city and its people were the perennial source of his inspiration.   But the culture and history of the city, as he showed in later work, was as rich in linguistic and mythological overtones and undertones as the west of Ireland, beloved of Yeats and John Synge.

      He began his career in an unexceptional way as a poet of some very slight lyrical poems, but these and some later ones are very minor works indeed, and largely of autobiographical interest.  But with Dubliners (1914), a collection of sharply observed short stories, he instantly established his place as a distinctive voice in modern Irish literature.  The impression which these stories had made was reinforced by the publication of the deeply autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which provided an account of an Irish-Catholic upbringing which was often unsparing in its painful detail, but executed with cool precision.  The character based most closely on Joyce himself, Stephen Dedalus, closes the novel with a passage in his diary as he is about to leave Ireland: 'I go to fashion in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.'

      He wrote a play, Exiles (1918), which was largely considered a failure and even a minor work until it was given a triumphant production by Harold Pinter in London in 1971, which at last restored its tortured intimacies to their proper place in the Joyce canon.

      If his short stories had been objective, and his novel subjective, these two modes were combined in his next work.  He moved on to explore his personal urban world, which he developed in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), which represent, respectively, the hectic day and the dreaming night of a great modern city.  Leopold Bloom, the central figure of Ulysses, represents the moral conscience of the city through his encounters with its diverse citizens, while Finnegans Wake, through the dreaming hotel keeper H.C. Earwicker, contains the backward and forward history of the universe.  Neither work is capable of simple explication.  They have to be read and experienced for themselves.

      But just as important in Ulysses is the figure of Molly Bloom, the wayward wife of the wandering Leopold.  Joyce's women are of two kinds, the icy virgin and the voluptuous mother goddess.  Molly Bloom's rambling thoughts on the verge of sleep fill out the end of the novel, and are among the most remarkable impressions of the female psyche achieved by a male writer.  They close with her passing into sleep, the sleep where Mr Earwicker and his family are discovered at the opening of Finnegans Wake, reminding us that Joyce's books are not separate items, but parts of one long and continuous creative work.

      These books, especially Ulysses, broke new ground in that they dealt with human actions in words which many thought broke down the proper amenities of literature.  However, for writers of the early part of the century, Joyce's linguistic and technical experiments were of profound consequence.

      In Ireland he was the inspiration of two generations of writers who found their material in the life of the city, and his influence can be traced in such diverse figures as Flann O'Brien and J.P. Donleavy.

      In America, where Ulysses was banned, Joyce was seen as the leader of the vanguard of modern literature.  This was not a comfortable place to be.  It obscured many of the classical features of his writings and the profound debt which it owed to the medieval thought of the Catholic Church.  Though it might seem that Joyce had renounced, indeed denounced, the God of his fathers, his own mind and imagination was deeply grained by the history, culture, and mental attitudes of the Irish people.