|
|
 |
|
|
|
English Literature Author: James Joyce
|
|
| |
by Tim Conley
State University of New York
Albany, New York
|
|
| |
More About James Joyce...
James Joyce
1882-1941
Irish
Introduction
Major Works
Chronology
Introduction
Perhaps more than any other writer in the twentieth century, James Joyce has radically changed our understanding of language and literature. He thrived on apparent contradictions: his self-declared position as "exile" removed him physically from his native Ireland, but he would always write about it; his intense privacy and rather formal manners did not prevent his books from being starkly, sometimes shockingly, realistic and always autobiographically informed. Although he tried his hand at poetry and drama (after his original master, Henrik Ibsen), with mixed results, Joyce's greatest accomplishments are in prose.
 Henrik Ibsen
Dubliners, a collection of some of the best naturalistic stories in English, was delayed in its publication for a decade because of censorious editors and squeamish printers, whom Joyce ridiculed in a scatological verse, "Gas from a Burner." A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man quickly followed, after having been serialized with the help of American poet Ezra Pound. Stephen Dedalus is the novel's hero (a somewhat ironic self-portrait), and the story of his coming-of-age and struggles with Irish politics, religion, and sex is told in a style that develops and evolves as his own intellect does.
Ezra Pound
At the height of modernism, in its thriving center of Paris, Joyce released Ulysses. This rich novel transplants Homer's epic, The Odyssey, onto a single day in Dublin. In the course of this incredibly detailed but ordinary day, Stephen Dedalus encounters Leopold Bloom, a mild-mannered Jewish man whose thoughts absorb the facts and events in his wanderer's path and whose heroism rests in his simple humanism. Just as the individual styles of each of the 18 chapters of Ulysses are carefully structured, Joyce's choice of date, June 16, 1904 (known now as Bloomsday), is not entirely arbitrary: it was on this day that he first "walked out" in public with Nora Barnacle, with whom he eloped. Nora became the model of Molly Bloom, the lusty, vibrant woman who narrates the end of Ulysses in a flowing, unpunctuated affirmation of life. Even when the novel began to appear in serialized form in literary magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, it provoked admiration and outrage, and when Sylvia Beach, American proprietor of a French bookstore, at last published the completed book, it faced immediate censorship.
Joyce's worries about publication and finances diminished with the extraordinary patronage of Harriet Shaw Weaver but would be replaced by anxieties about his troubled eyesight, his daughter Lucia's mental health, and the growing threat of war. His final work, Finnegans Wake, is one of the most challenging literary experiments: it is a strange conflation of history and myth recounted in a melodious mishmash of many different languages. Two years after its publication, having retreated to Switzerland from the German invasion of France, Joyce died of peritonitis, a few weeks before his fifty-ninth birthday.
Major Works
- Dubliners (1914)
- A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (1916)
- Ulysses (1922)
- Finnegans Wake (1939)
Penguin publishes all of these in good editions, though perhaps some warning should be made about the so-called "Reader's Edition" of Ulysses, edited by Danis Rose: Although the publisher has been legally forced to withdraw and destroy this volume at the wishes of the Joyce estate, secondhand copies may be bought by the unwary. The editing history of Ulysses is convoluted, and no two editions are the same, but Rose's edition is particularly spurious among "Joyceans."
Chronology
1882
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, the first of 10 children, born in Rathgar, a Dublin suburb, February 2 (Candlemas).
1888
Joyce enters Clongowes Wood College.
1890
The fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, Irish statesman for Home Rule, deeply affects Joyce.
1891
Joyce's first poem, "Et Tu, Healy," excoriates the betrayal of Parnell.
1900
Joyce publishes an article on Ibsen in the Fortnightly Review and is subsequently contacted by Ibsen.
1902
Joyce meets William Butler Yeats. Joyce goes to Paris to study medicine.
1903
Joyce makes an emergency return to Ireland to attend his dying mother.
1904
Beginnings of an autobiographical fiction called Stephen Hero, later revised into A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Joyce meets Nora Barnacle. On June 16, Joyce and Nora "walk out" together. The couple elope and leave Ireland together.
1905
Son Giorgio born.
1906
Joyce takes a job as a bank clerk in Rome.
1907
Daughter Lucia born. Joyce's first book, a poetry collection entitled Chamber Music, is published.
1911
Joyce throws the unfinished manuscript of A Portrait into the fireplace; the pages are rescued by his sister Eileen.
1914
Dubliners published, after years of delay and hesitation, by Grant Richards.
1916
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man is published in New York.
1917
Joyce begins Ulysses. Harriet Shaw Weaver begins her financial support of Joyce, who meanwhile undergoes the first of many eye operations.
1920
The Joyces settle in Paris. A court decision prevents the American magazine The Little Review from continuing its serialization of Ulysses.
1922
Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company, publishes Ulysses.
1923
Joyce begins "Work in Progress," later to be published as Finnegans Wake.
1928
Joyce meets Samuel Beckett.
1931
Joyce and Nora are legally married in London. Joyce's father dies in December.
1932
Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, is born to Giorgio and Helen Joyce. Joyce writes a short, moving poem, "Ecce Puer" on the coincidence of Stephen's birth and his father's death.
1933
New York Judge John Woolsey finds Ulysses "not pornographic," and the U.S. ban of the book is lifted. Lucia is placed in a clinic after a mental breakdown.
1939
Finnegans Wake is published by Faber and Faber (London) and Viking (New York).
1940
The Joyces move to Zurich.
1941
Joyce dies of a perforated ulcer on January 13.
Tim Conley is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at SUNY-Albany and an adjunct professor at Queen's University in Kingston. He is the author of Joyce's Mistakes (University of Toronto Press, 2003).
|
|
|
|
|
|
