James Joyce - his life and works

Bob Williams has provided this fine article on James Joyce - his life and works. Canadian artist Robert Amos has kindly supplied the images (click for a larger view). James Joyce: The Life

When James Joyce was born and when, eight years later, Parnell fell from power, Dublin, the creation of Scandinavian invaders, had been ruled for over seven hundred years by England. The fall of Parnell with the concomitant failure to achieve Home Rule set upon Ireland the status of a province, a province exploited by its ruler and subjected to the immemorial forces of political bonds and ecclesiastical influences.

James Joyce, born on February 2, 1882, to John and May Joyce, was the oldest surviving son. The death of the older brother in infancy placed James in the position of favoured child. His guilt over this undeserved distinction is a constant undercurrent in all his works. I have written a fuller account of this (Appendix: The Vopiscan Complex) available at: http://www.jamesjoycestudies.com/joyce/docs.html

The Joyce family, well if not brilliantly derived, flourished less and less as John’s improvidence and the disadvantages of his political loyalties acted against him. James, a gifted and sometimes industrious scholar, began his education with the Jesuits, Ireland’s most prestigious educators of Catholic youth, at their school at Clongowes Woods. He was not there long before he was withdrawn. Although the family fortunes were already in peril, the withdrawal appears to have been for reasons of James’ health. He received some education apparently at a Christian Brothers’ school but his scholastic ability was such that the Jesuits were happy to give him an education, this time at Belvedere College. From Belevidere he then went to University College Dublin, another Jesuit institution, where he completed his formal education.

Such school exercises in writing as have survived (‘Trust Not Appearances’ 1896?) show the kind of glib fluency that is within the scope of many students. They are otherwise undistinguished but from 1900 to 1902 Joyce wrote essays more expressive of the direction that he would take. In these essays he ostensibly studied Ibsen and Mangan but really defined his own intellectual stance. At the age of 22 (1904) he wrote an essay with the prophetic title ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ and the early version of the opening story of Dubliners, ‘The Sisters.’

These works, few in number, are abundantly interesting to Joycean scholars and ‘The Sisters’ in its revised form has independent literary value but the circumstances of Joyce’s life were little conducive to writing. The circumstances that surrounded the death of his brother George (1902) precipitated an avowal of his rejection of Catholicism and his pursuit of impractical career aims further dissipated his energies. He made two brief sojourns in Paris. From the second of these he was recalled in 1903 because his mother was dying.

On 16 June, 1904, almost a year after May Joyce’s death, James and Nora Barnacle began a relationship that was to last despite great difficulties until Joyce’s death in 1941.

In his fiction James Joyce expressed through his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, many of his own experiences and problems. That there was not absolute equivalence between James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus is obvious but Stephen Dedalus as a broad, if partial, sketch of James Joyce deserves serious consideration. Stephen is gauche and sensitive about his ramshackle family. He adopts a haughty demeanour to disguise his lack of social ease. When James finds himself emotionally involved with Nora - maid in a hotel, an uneducated woman of no particularly exalted family and from a countrified background - he sees the relation as a misalliance, a union unacceptable to his family and friends. His solution, since he cannot give her up, is to give up Ireland instead, in many ways a typically Joycean (solipsistic) decision.

There were influences other than his attachment to Nora that induced him to take this step. He had already renounced the Celtic Revival as provincial, Nationalism as essentially revolutionary and violent and Catholicism as repressive and inhuman. These were potent forces in Ireland and, although they were not in any way congruent parts of a unified program, it was impossible for a young man like Joyce to have a place in Ireland if he denied each and all of these entities. He left Ireland with Nora on October 8, 1904. He wrote for subsequent distribution the first of his satirical poems ‘The Holy Office’ and the first of his ventures in scoring off those who in one way or another had not pleased him.

Although he left Dublin he also took it with him in the same way that he rejected Catholicism but remained for his entire life entranced - often perversely - with its teachings, lore and rituals. Dublin was the background of his short stories with a very constant possibility of becoming foreground. In Ulysses Dublin became a holy city and in Finnegans Wake, a divine one.

If Joyce’s relationship to Dublin was of unusual intensity, so was that of Dubliners to Joyce. Towards Joyce Dubliners have shown a traditional indifference edged with dislike. Dubliners have resented Joyce’s specificity about Dublin persons. To the rest of the literate world these very persons have appeared almost always as particularly endearing, not as the victims of a shameless libel.

Nora and James fled to Zurich but the expected position did not exist, a cause for panic to the improvident Joyce who was little able to consider or provide for contingencies. With great difficulty they made their way to Pola, a backwater city on the Adriatic. In March of 1905 Joyce was transferred to the Berlitz school in Trieste. But Trieste bored him and he, Nora and their son Giorgio (born July 27, 1905) left Trieste for Rome where Joyce worked at a bank. He had induced his brother Stanislaus to come to Trieste. Both in Trieste and in Rome they depended on Stanislaus’ assistance and generosity.

Joyce quickly grew weary of Rome and, after a stay there of nine months, returned to Trieste. Here he wrote the fifteenth, the last and greatest, story of Dubliners, ‘The Dead’ (Spring, 1907.) Grant Richards of Maunsel and Company, a Dublin publisher, had already accepted Dubliners for publication early in 1906. Encouraged by this, Joyce began to convert the unwiedy Stephen Hero to the more subtle and artful A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But Richards suddenly brimmed over with difficulties and made Joyce miserable by his demands for changes and suppressions. Joyce had been in Ireland on non-literary business in 1909. He returned again in 1912 to confront Richards. He came away defeated. This was his last visit to Ireland and, as with his departure in 1904, he accompanied this one with a satirical poem, ‘Gas from a Burner.’

In the following year he had a brief but intense flirtation with an unidentified woman in Trieste. The product of this encounter was the short lyric work Giacomo Joyce.

But there began to be some improvements in his situation. William Butler Yeats put Joyce in contact with the American writer Ezra Pound and the latter worked so well on Joyce’s behalf that Dora Marsden, editor of the Egoist, took notice of him. Through Pound, Joyce also became known to H.L. Mencken, editor of the Mercury.

These attentions induced second thoughts in Grant Richards and, whatever reasons or influences had before prevented him, he published Dubliners (1914) as Joyce had written it (barring misprints which Richards, with characteristic disregard of his author, had not allowed Joyce to correct.) Joyce now finished A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, began Ulysses but set it aside to write his play Exiles. A Portrait was serialized in the Egoist and Harriet Shaw Weaver of that publication began her patronage of Joyce. From 1917 to 1941 Harriet Shaw Weaver gave Joyce, it is estimated, around a million dollars.

Joyce’s good fortune continued. Although the authorities interned Stanislaus for the duration of the war, Joyce was not disturbed and was allowed to leave Trieste for Switzerland when the economic conditions in Trieste made a longer stay undesirable. The Royal Literary Fund gave him a monetary gift in 1915 and in 1916 he received a grant from the British Treasury Fund. But eye problems subjected him in 1917 to the first of many eye operations. In the following year Mrs. Harold McCormick gave him a monthly stipend. This continued for nine months until Joyce refused to let Carl Jung psychoanalyse him.

During 1918 Joyce participated in the English Players. This group performed English and Irish plays in Switzerland. The demands of one of the actors, a consular employee, impaired the usefulness of the group by the resulting furor and the alienation of the British consulate. Between March and October of this year the Little Review (New York) serialized the first seven chapters of Ulysses.

The war over, the Joyce family - James, Nora, Giorgio and Lucia (born in Trieste in 1907) - returned to Trieste but, at Ezra Pound’s urging and because post-war Trieste was no longer the city that it had been, they left Trieste in 1920 for Paris. Originally regarded as a temporary move, the Joyce family spent the next twenty years in Paris. In this same year the Society for the Prevention of Vice lodged a complaint against the Little Review for its serial publication of Ulysses. The court decision in 1921 was against Ulysses but was fairly mild. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editors, were enjoined against publishing further installments of Ulysses and were fined fifty dollars each. The defense of Ulysses by John Quinn was less than ideal and strayed from joining over any of the larger issues involved. The real importance of the decision was that it constituted a bar to publication of the completed work in either the United States or England. As a result Shakespeare and Company of Paris undertook its publication and a special first edition appeared in February 1922. It would be eleven years before Ulysses appeared legally in the United States and fourteen years before it would appear in England.

In 1923 Joyce began work on what was to prove his last work. Finnegans Wake. The history of his last years is mostly identified with his work on Finnegans Wake but his eye problems persisted and required operation after operation. His reputation continued to grow and he continued to be a selfcentered spendthrift with a somewhat cold personality and a tendency to manipulate those who fell within his influence. His friends recognized his shortcomings but liked him despite his faults.

So special was the language of Finnegans Wake (the title of which Joyce concealed from everyone except Nora until publication) that many of Joyce’s supporters expressed doubts about the book. Joyce, influenced by this, in 1927 even considered abandoning the book.

In 1930 Joyce became obsessed with opera tenor John Sullivan and did all in his power to promote his career. This obsession continued until 1934 when Joyce recognized the futility of his activity and the decline in Sullivan’s vocal powers. In 1930 Giorgio, himself a gifted singer, married Helen Kastor Fleischmann. In 1932 they would have their only child, Stephen James Joyce. Shortly before this, in late 1931, John Stanislaus Joyce died at the age of eighty-two. Into this mixture of family joys and sorrows intruded the tragedy of Lucia’s madness which became unmistakeable shortly after the birth of Stephen. From now until the end of his life Joyce would undertake everything in his power to cure his schizophrenic daughter. He was reluctant to admit her illness and employed pathetically conceived methods towards her improvement. Joyce’s graceless coldness to Harriet Shaw Weaver sprang from his conviction that she considered Lucia as incurably deranged and that she had reservations concerning Finnegans Wake.

And Finnegans Wake was sufficiently complete that Joyce could have a bound copy for his birthday celebration on February 2, 1939. The book was not available to the public until May.

Its reception was disappointing. Many had already read each of the installments as they appeared and most readers found it too difficult and of less import than the coming war. The Joyces again needed to seek refuge in Switzerland. They did so without Lucia who had not been transferred to unoccupied country quickly enough. Joyce had been ill for some time but the seriousness of his complaint was not recognized in time. In Zurich he was operated on for a perforated ulcer and he died on Friday, 13 January, 1941.

James Joyce: The Works

Joyce imposed such demands upon himself that his major works are of exceptionally high quality but not all of his works are major. The poetry and his play Exiles are works with special and not entirely admirable characteristics. It is possible, despite the high quality of a few pieces, to discuss the works of Joyce without discussing the poetry at all.

Exiles is a failure although not perhaps a hopeless one. In many of Joyce’s other works much takes place in Joyce’s head and the reader can intuit or do research to find out what it is but this can be dangerous with a drama, by definition requiring unhampered immediacy. As with many works Joyce creates imaginatively what his life would have been like had he remained or returned to Dublin. Joyce labored under great disadvantages caused by inner torments but made his pain meaningful in his other works. In Exiles Richard Rowan’s pain is an unexplained unpleasantness.

Dubliners gave Joyce or so he said little satisfaction. He had not, he wrote, posed himself sufficient problems to solve. This reflects the dissatisfaction of an artist who had gone on to other things and is not a fair assessment. Much of the revolutionary freshness of these stories now requires imaginative reconstruction since the best stories blazed a trail that through imitation by subsequent authors has created a highway and sometimes a parking lot.

The stories are not arranged in the order of their composition although interestingly the first and last written stories are also first and last in arrangement. They are grouped by the age of their protagonists and by - towards the end - public rather than private life. The picture of Dublin is bleak in all but the last story, a Dublin with little gaiety or good fellowship such as that of Ulysses. Although many have tried to make much of “paralysis,” “scrupulous meanness” and “epiphanies” - all terms used by Joyce regarding Dubliners - that much actually amounts to very little. It is more meaningful to examine the structure of the stories and the subtle relationships that connect them.

The original of the first story (‘The Sisters’) was 1,719 words long. It contained much tepid material. Joyce eliminated this but the story grew to 2,969 words. This additive tendency remained characteristic of Joyce.

The best stories are the longest ones and the ones that have the greatest number of off-stage persons (persons not present but referred to by those that are.) This contributes a richness of texture that has much to do with Joyce’s basic conception, a construction of layer after layer of details more like the methods of French Symbolist poets than of most practitioners of the short story.

Joyce was dissatisfied with ‘After the Race’ and ‘A Painful Case.’ In the first too much was based on characters from outside the Dublin ambiance, a situation in which Joyce was incurably and fatally uncomfortable. In the second story - another imagined example of a Joyce who stayed in Dublin: either James or Stanislaus - Joyce had not made his own thoughts final regarding his intentions in the story and this leaves the reader at a great disadvantage.

Fortunately for the integrity of ‘Two Gallants’ Joyce’s ill-advised trick ending falls flat.

It is worth mentioning the magnificence of ‘The Boarding House.’ It has an opening of which any writer would be proud. “Mrs Mooney was a butcher’s daughter” and from that beautifully blunt opening Joyce unfolded the whole story of lust entrapped by craft. In keeping with her parentage Mrs. Mooney, the time being ripe, deals with her problem “as a cleaver deals with meat.”

‘A Mother’ may be too unrelieved to be altogether satisfactory but William York Tindall made a very funny comparison between the unpleasant Mrs. Kearney and the Catholic Church. She slips “the doubtful items between the old favorites” (in making up a concert program); she offers bread (biscuits) and wine to visitors whom she dominates; she insists on being paid; and she excommunicates people who disagree with her but they don’t care.

‘The Dead’ is the odd story out. It is twice as long as the next longest story and it presents a jollier Dublin. The talk is good, the gaiety is real and the food, lovingly described by a Joyce starving in Trieste, is glorious.

Gabriel Conroy - another image of the author who stayed in Ireland - makes the painful discovery that his wife had a lover before him, a lover that died of love for her. He sees his own love as a poor thing but as the snow falls he finds himself as part of the union of the living and the dead. By this union, much like the Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints, he can escape the crushing sense of his own limitations.

At the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (hereafter referred to as A Portrait) are the places and dates “Dublin, 1904, Trieste, 1914.” Thus Joyce includes as part of his work on A Portrait the work he had done on its earlier incarnation, Stephen Hero. One may with some reason be uneasy about this since Stephen Hero, to judge from the surviving fragments, is a very different work. For all its virtues, Stephen Hero would have been an ungainly successor to Dubliners and a troublesomely conventional predecessor to Ulysses. A Portrait, unless we mislead ourselves with knowledge gained after the fact, is a seamless fit. It is modern as Stephen in the somewhat unmodern Stephen Hero defines modernism - as vivisection rather than categorization.

A Portrait has five chapters each of which is subdivided into anywhere from three to seven parts. With the breaks between chapters there are twenty-five interruptions. Joyce uses these breaks to bridge intervals of time, place and alterations of experience. It follows the example of Dubliners in this and uses this device to replace the cruder ones (e.g., “After a few days …”) of Stephen Hero.

A Portrait begins boldly. An unnamed child is the focus of a narrative that is expressed in terms of his understanding. This understanding is solipsistic but is not equal to the task of self-identification. The reader is well into the story before the protagonist’s name, Stephen, appears and it is not until part two of Chapter I that the reader learns the full name, Stephen Dedalus. As we will see at the end solipsism is not only a simple manifestation of childhood, it can also be the state of the dedicated artist.

As the story progresses the expression broadens from the narrow focus of the child to the student, the adolescent and the young man. But Joyce does not tie himself to the limitations that such a scheme, rigorously pursued, would dictate. In the famous Christmas dinner scene, for one example among many, Joyce forsakes young Stephen’s limited consciousness and narrates objectively.

Stephen’s development projects an upward curve that is in opposition to the downward curve of the family fortunes. As a result he is unsure and protectively reserved in his social relations. As an outsider he grows away from and out of sympathy with the world that he inhabits. At puberty he exploits sexual opportunities early and, as he is intimidated by a horrendous hellfire and brimstone sermon, he repents violently.

But this situation has much concealed humor that is too seldom and too little observed. As he repents, everything has a cosmic significance and he envisions a world destroyed by flood because of his sins. This is a comic reversal of the sinless savior who died for the sins of all. For Stephen’s sins everybody must perish.

The temptation - T.S. Eliot almost described it as an obligation - to look for foundation in Joyce’s own life for what happens to Stephen should be pursued cautiously. Ironically and instructively the conversation with Father Darlington (the scene in which the priest lights the fire in the school lecture room) took place between Father Darlington and John Francis Byrne (the model for Cranly) and Byrne was displeased that his innocent conversation had, in the words of Ellmann, “been converted into a reflection of Stephen’s strained relations with the Church.”

The closing pages of A Portrait consist of excerpts from Stephen’s diary. It is a mature mirror image of the solipsistic opening, jaunty in tone with a hard edge to its wit. The last words Stephen writes are in the voice of Icarus.

In style and concept A Portrait, like Dubliners, has no relevant predecessors. The energy of Dubliners sometimes met serious obstacles, inappropriate attempts outside Joyce’s natural scope, limitations of scale for a writer at his best with a generous boundries, but A Portrait is efficient and suitable to his genius. Eclipsed by Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, it has the very serious advantage of economy of expression.

In the period between 1904 and 1914 Joyce produced poetry, a play, fifteen short stories and a novel. In the next eight years he would produce Ulysses.

In Ulysses Joyce carried a step further his refusal to coddle the reader. He does not recognize, as most other authors do, any obligation to keep his readers informed. He is solely concerned with keeping his characters informed so that they, not the reader, will be able to negotiate the fictional world that he creates for them. The informed reader of most novels really navigates an artificial world with a consciousness of events that is unlike reality. Joyce establishes for his readers an experience very like life itself. It follows necessarily that re-reading is essential. The extraordinary popularity of Ulysses, while no guarantee by itself of merit, certainly attests to the durable satisfactions that the book provides.

Joyce progresses by motifs and indirections. Bloom’s concern, for example, with the advertising account for Keyes and with keys in general is never more poignant than when he returns home at night and cannot get in because he has left his house keys in another pair of pants.

Most chapters involve an organ of the human body, a special technique, a color, a parallel with an incident in The Odyssey and who knows what. Most of this is transparent to the reader who decides to ignore it and only somewhat relevant to the reader who decides to search it all out. As with prior works the fascination is or should be with connections, relationships and subtle layering of detail.

Ulysses is often summarized as Telemachus (Stephen) in search of his father, the father being the Odysseus of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom. This requires careful and special amendment for it to mean anything relevant. Stephen has a father, Simon, and Simon is a bit more than he can deal with. He so little wants a father of any sort that in the Scylla and Charybdis section he applies abundant mental energy to dissolving the notion of fatherhood entirely. But the work does turn on Stephen’s meeting Bloom and the kindness with which Bloom treats him. It fulfills, in other words, the Homeric pattern but it was obviously never Joyce’s intention to deal on this level with any more than patterns. There are not the emotional resonances or physical consequences that Homer attached to the union of his father and son.

The book begins with difficulties - where are we, who is the clownish figure cavorting blasphemously about the dour and moody Stephen? The text clears these matters up as it progresses but each clarification is solidly lodged into another difficulty and the unpatterned alternation between objective narrative and stream of consciousness produces some difficulties of its own. Questions arise and the answer will be several lines or several pages later. An inattentive reader will be lost but there is yet light enough for the attentive reader, one who ideally will read the book again.

It is at the midway that the book changes. Each chapter will then have a different pattern from anything that has preceded it. Some of these will be more difficult than others although to the hardened Joycean the more difficult the chapter the more fun it will be. And this is the key to Ulysses, it is fun. It is much more fun for example than A Portrait, the humor of which runs somewhat deeply below the surface.

Ulysses has outlived the drama of its bad reception by the censors and by many critics. It has proved itself by persistence and by the close attention that it has received from devoted readers and scholars. Unintelligent overpraise is more of a threat to it now than anything else although one still reads affectations of dislike by those who cultivate singularity.

Finnegans Wake is the ultimate test of reader endurance. It is over 600 pages of puns, riddles and puzzles with a generous amount of languages other than English. Joyce spent much of the years between 1923 and 1938 in its construction. In form it is a dream and in content it is the history of the world. As with Ulysses, many pages of which seem like a premonition of Finnegans Wake, chapters employ different approaches.

Many readers devote themselves to exegetics and attempt to track down every nuance of meaning. But it is a book to be read not a code to be broken. The immediate compensations for its difficulties are the wit and the poetry that float very accessibly on most of the surface. The poetry is especially notable, a poetic work of high quality by a writer whose deliberate poetry was not nearly as good.

The hero of the book is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker whose HCE initials occur on almost every page. He committed an indecent act, was observed and is disgraced. But those that would disgrace him cannot do without him. Faulty as he is, civilization depends on him. This is the story and the book unfolds in one place with one aspect after another of the basic theme. There is, in other words, no plot in the conventional sense and the personages are more types than characters. The book ends with the death of Anna. She is HCE’s wife as well as the River Liffey and her death is the passage of the river out to the sea. Joyce’s works often ended with emphasis on the woman and here he reaches the height of his eloquence in brilliant, sustained and moving pages. Anna’s last words reintroduce the book. The last word she utters is “the” and the first word of the book is the uncapitalized “riverrun.” They connect but, as one must expect with Joyce, not mechanically since it is obviously somebody other than Anna that says “riverrun.”

Possibly not a book for everyone but the only book for those who have become entranced by its beauty and wit.

One of the interesting omissions in Joycean literature is an appreciation of his position and accomplishments. Among Joyceans this is all an accepted thing but in the introduction to Joyce A - Z the editors A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael P. Gillespie remedy this defect. It is too long to quote in its entirety but this portion is specially relevant and fitting as a conclusion to this brief study:

“In every respect, James Joyce is probably the most influential writer of the twentieth century - and not only on those who read and write in English. Though acknowledged as a ‘difficult’ writer, Joyce is now very likely the most widely read, studied and taught of all modern writers.

“To read the work of James Joyce is to commit oneself to a world of brilliant artifice, a ‘chaosmos’ (FW 118.21) of poetic mystery, that few writers have achieved. Not to read at least some of his work is to deprive oneself of the life-enhancing (to use an old-fashioned phrase) richness of a body of work that has radically altered the character of literature. Joyce’s writings place demands upon the reader that can be difficult and even upsetting at times, but the rewards are well worth the effort.”