James Joyce: A brief examination of his life and times
By
Aishling O’ Reilly
One of
Ireland’s most famous novelist and poet is James Joyce. As well as W.B Yeats,
Joyce has exerted a huge influence on the development in America and Europe of
modern literature. While his masterpiece Ulysses was seen initially as a piece
of scandalous work; very quickly it was seen as a modern classic. There are
also very few writers nowadays who have not been aware and indeed influenced of
the literary example of Joyce.
He was born
in Dublin at 41 Brighton Square on the 2nd February 1882, the eldest
surviving child of a Cork man, John Stanislaus Joyce, an official in the tax
office. His mother May Murray and her people came from Longford. He was a
fantastic, outgoing child and from an early age he was interested in the use of
words and the study of language. Joyce’s father was a middle class catholic who
loved music. He also however suffered from drinking problem, a habit which led
him into financial difficulties. He lost all his inherited income and property
and had to move himself and his family from one rented house to the next. He
appears in Ulysses book Simon Dedalus. Tragrically Joyce’s mother, May a devout
catholic, died in 1903 of cancer.
He was sent as a boarder to Clongowes Wood at
the age of six and a half. After a period of time he transferred to Belvedere
College, a day school in Dublin. He went to University College Dublin and he
studied Maths, Philosophy and languages. He succeeded in getting his degree.
Even at this early stage
He was
anti-clerical comparing the Catholic clergy to ‘Trgrannous lice. He also
attacked WB Yeats for surrendering to a nationalistic Ireland. He demonstrated his
antipathy to Patrick Pearse in a satirical sketch. Joyce showed strong writing
tendencies very early in life. However, on completion of his degree he was
rebuffed by the leaders of the Irish literary revival.
He expressed the complexity of the human mind
through his literature. He recreated the English language because of his
talented technique. His key works are the short collection Dubliners (1914); A
portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916); Ulysses (1922), which is regarded
as a masterpiece: and Finnegan’s Wake (1939).
Ulysses, this book has the event of a single Dublin day; it experiments
with the English language and combines direct narrative with the unspoken and
unconscious reactions of the characters. At first the book was banned in the
USA and the UK. But later on it made a huge impact. Finnegan’s Wake; is a story
about a man who is a Dublin publican and his family. This continued Joyce’s
experiments with language. In this books the word-coining which is a feature of
Ulysses is pushed to its limits.
June 16, 1904,
was the day he fell in love with Nora Barnacle was later named as
“Bloomsday” the same day his masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), takes place. Joyce
fell in love with Nora Barnacle (1883-1951) she worked as June a chamber maid in
Dublin. James and Nora married in 1932 In October Joyce and Nora left Ireland
for Europe the same year to begin life as expatriates, living in Switzerland,
Italy and France. His reasons for choosing self exile may be read in the
declaration made by his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, In the Portrait of a young
Artist as a Young Man (1916) “ I will not serve that in which I do not believe,
whether it call myself home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will not try to
express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can, using for my
defence only I allow myself to use silence, exile, and cunning. “ He used his
love for Nora to write about many of his characters. While away Joyce published
a few sketches but he wasn’t able to make a living, He and Nora travelled
eventually to Trieste, in Italy. There he taught English,” Joyce’s two children
Giorgio and Lucia were both born here in 1905 and 1907 respectively.”[1]
Joyce was so happy he began writing delicate happy things. Some years before
this Joyce had finished a book called Chamber-Music which was a book of lyrics,
this got published in 1907. He also wrote another book with short stories
called Dubliners in 1906, but that didn’t get published until nine years later.
Meanwhile the party autobiographical called A Portrait of The Artist of a Young
Man was serialised by Ezra Pound in the Egoist (1914-15)
As World War
One began, Joyce travelled to Zurich, Switzerland where he lived until 1919.
“There he formed a company of Irish players and performed his play Exiles
(1918), modelled on the work of Ibsen, with whom he had corresponded”[2]
Joyce’s financial support was secured by W.B. Yeats his, and he began writing
his major work Ulysses, in 1914. It appeared in New York magazine Little Review
(1918-20) until publication was stopped in the early 1921 because of a
prosecution for obscenity.
Back in
Zurich, Joyce began having problems with his eyesight, and he moved to Paris.
There Ulysses was published as a book in 1922, just in time for Joyce’s 40th
birthday. However the book was banned in both the USA and the UK being finally
published there in 1932 and 1936. The novel is related to both the physical and
mental history of Leopold Bloom, who was a Jewish advertisement canvasser, and
Stephen Dedalus, scholar philosopher, during a single day in Dublin, “Bloom’s
day being paralleled to the wanderings of Odysseus in the Homeric epic”[3]
Joyce had claimed he discovered the device of the interior monologue, used in
Ulysses, in Edouard Dujardin’s forgotten work Les lauriers sont coupes
(1888).”The device was used by Marcel Proust and Dorothy Richardson, among
other writers, and the development of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique
had a far-reaching influence on many modern authors.”[4]
Joyce began writing his next novel in 1922,
which is known as the Work in Progress, in 1927 this, appeared in parts under
various different titles. At this time Joyce had numerous eye operations which
left him very emotional, physical and mentally strained he was also worried at
this point about his son Giorgio and his daughter Lucia’s schizophrenia. His
book was fully published in 1939 as Finnegan’s Wake. This hard but amazing work
comes with many different conventions, which created a continuous entity (the
words that open the book run on from the last words in the book) which can be
entered at any point. It also side-steps the basic convention of using a single
language throughout the book. It has been hailed in ultra-modernistic because
of its different languages which merge throughout it. It’s evasion of
conventional form and its linguistic obscurities which make the work so complex
that very few readers can actually follow the meaning without the assistance of
a commentary
The Joyce
family moved to Gerand - le - Puy, near Vichy, France because of World War Two
but then in 1940, 14 December they moved to Switzerland except Lucia who was in
a sanatorium, Joyce was taken into hospital on 10 January 1941 because he was
suffering severe stomach pains. He died there 13 January three days later after
an operation for an ulcerated duodenum.
SHORT QUESTIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ø Joyce
James. A student’s guide, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, London, 1978.
Ø Joyce,
James. The Years of Growth 1882-1915, Roberts Rinehart Publishers, Dublin 1992.
Ø Welch,
Robert, the Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, Oxford University
Press London, 2000.
Ø Anderson,
G, C. James Joyce. Thames and Hudson, Spain, 1998.
Ø Peter
Costello, The Irish 100, A Ranking of
the Most Influential Irish Men and Women of All Time, Simon & Schuster, New
York, 1995.
Why
this topic merited study?
This
topic merited study for the following reasons:
1.
As a part of Transition year we were
going to the James Joyce museum so it was good to have some background
information on him.
2.
He is one of the islands most famous
authors and at the same time he is not covered by the Leaving Certificate
History course.
Skills
The following
are the skills that I learnt while doing this research topic
1.
Computer skills – I learnt how to use
Microsoft Word and to use the internet to find information.
2.
I learnt how to write a proper
Leaving Cert History essay with footnotesand using many sources and a
bibliography.
Long Review of a source
One of the
books used was James Joyce: The Definitive Biography by Michael Gurrow. I found
this to be a useful source of information for this essay. In this the author
has revised and expanded an earlier book definitive work on Joyce’s life to
include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love
affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, previously unknown
letters, and much more. It gave a clear and easy understands account of the
life of James Joyce and it also went through all his major works in detail. The
book also had a good bibliography.