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Biography (1882–1941)
James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland, during a time of political upheaval. The country had endured nearly a century of economic depression and terrible famine and continued to suffer under what many Irish regarded as British oppression. Joyce came from a declining middle-class family of more than a dozen children, eventually reduced to poverty by his father’s drinking. Nevertheless, Joyce received a fine classical education at Jesuit schools, including University College, Dublin. His strict early education was strongly traditional in its Catholicism, but when he entered University College, he rejected both his religion and his national heritage. By the time he took his undergraduate degree in 1902, he was more comfortable casting himself as an alienated writer than as a typical citizen of Dublin (who he thought lived a life of mediocrity, sentimentality, and self-deception). While at college he studied modern languages and taught himself Norwegian so he could read the plays of Henrik Ibsen in their original language. Joyce responded deeply to Ibsen’s dramatizations of troubled individuals who repudiate public morality and social values in their efforts to create lives of integrity amid stifling families, institutions, and cultures. In his own writing, Joyce focused on the everyday lives of ordinary people trying to make sense of themselves. After graduation Joyce left Dublin for Paris to study medicine, but that career soon ended when he dropped out of the single course for which he had registered. Instead, he wrote poetry, which was eventually published in 1907 as Chamber Music. In 1903 he returned to Dublin to be with his mother, who was dying of cancer. The next summer he met Nora Barnacle while she was working in a Dublin boardinghouse. He lived with Nora his entire life, having two children and eventually marrying her in 1931. After leaving Dublin with Nora in 1905 to return to the Continent, he visited his native city only a few times (the final visit was in 1912), and he lived the rest of his life in Europe. From 1920 until shortly before his death in 1941, Joyce settled in Paris, where he enjoyed the stimulation of living amid writers and artists. Joyce earned a living by teaching at a Berlitz language school, tutoring, and working in a bank, but mostly he gathered impressions of the world around himū whether in Trieste, Zurich, Rome, or Parisū that he would incorporate into his literary work. His writings, however, were always about life in Ireland rather than the European cities in which he lived. Fortunately, Joyce’s talents attracted several patrons who subsidized his income and helped him to publish. Dubliners, Joyce’s first major publication in fiction, was a collection of stories that he published in 1914. Two years later Joyce published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel. Joyce strongly identified with the protagonist, who, like Joyce, rejected custom and tradition. If the price of independence from deadening sensibilities, crass materialism, and a circumscribed life was alienation, then so be it. Joyce believed that if the artist was to see clearly and report what he saw freshly, it was necessary to stand outside the commonplace responses to experience derived from family, church, or country. The short story collection Dubliners is Joyce’s quarrel with his native city, and his homage to it. Written between 1904 and 1907, it is the most accessible of Joyce’s works. It consists of a series of fifteen stories about characters who struggle with oppressive morality, plodding routines, somber shadows, self-conscious decency, restless desires, and frail gestures toward freedom. These stories contain no conventional high drama or action-filled episodes; instead, they are made up of small, quiet moments that turn out to be important in their characters’ lives. Most of the characters are on the brink of discovering something, such as loss, shame, failure, or death. Typically, the protagonist suddenly experiences a deep realization about himself or herself, a truth that is grasped in an ordinary rather than melodramatic moment. Joyce called such a moment when a character is overcome by a flash of recognition an "epiphany" and defined it as "sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself." Ulysses (1922) is regarded by many readers as Joyce’s masterpiece. This remarkably innovative novel is an account of one day in the life of an Irish Jew named Leopold Bloom, who, despite his rather ordinary life in Dublin, represents a microcosm of all human experience. Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique revealed the characters’ thoughts as they experienced them. The book was censored in the United States until 1933, when a judge ruled in a celebrated court case that the book was not obscene. Though Ulysses is Joyce’s most famous book, Finnegans Wake (1939) is his most challenging. Even more unconventional and experimental than Ulysses, it plays endlessly with language within a fluid dream world. The characters’ experiences evolve into continuously expanding meanings produced through complex allusions and elaborate puns in multiple languages. The novel’s plot defies summation, but its language warrants exploration, which is perhaps best begun by hearing a recording of Joyce reading aloud from the book. His stylistic innovations in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake had as great an influence on literature as the automobile and the radio did on people’s daily lives.
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