James Joyce, an Irish novelist, was one of the most impressive and the most potent figures of the 20th century. He was born in Dublin, Ireland and is deemed the quintessential Irish writer. He spent a part of his life out of Dublin wandering and roaming in European continents. During that while, he focused on creating the portrait of Ulysses; a note on Irish life as experienced by a Dubliner. This novel met a heavy controversy when published in 1922. Its publication was banned in many locations yet it was the most widely read book of the previous century.
Joyce belonged to a middle-class Catholic family. He received early education from Jesuits school. His training as a schoolboy under Jesuits gives an account of material for the initial chapters of his autobiography The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. During school days he received scholarships one after one and helped restore the deteriorating financial situation of his family. In the meantime, he openly opposed the social and religious orders of his time. He eventually left Catholicism and embraced aesthetic philosophy.
Joyce studied modern languages and proved to be a brilliant polyglot linguist. Ibsen’s work greatly influenced Joyce’s writing. He admired his unmatched intellect and choice of exile from his own land. Just like Ibsen, his writing was also attacked as ‘subversive’. When he was in Paris, he met exile by Irish nationalists and literary circles. He met with Nora Barnacle and developed his relationship with her as a lifelong companion.
After voluntary exile from Ireland, he settled in Croatia and then resided in Trieste. For Joyce, who effectively left Ireland for good in 1904, returning only for three brief visits, the supreme artist lives on in local time abroad, and “beats” time only the way a musician might at the podium.
Your genus its worldwide, your spacest sublime!
But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time?
(Finnegans Wake)
In 1914, his work Dubliners was published which couldn’t receive commercial success but attracted intellects and critics including Ezra Pound. Lately, he became his friend and helped him in publicizing works. He also supported him financially. He completed his famous novel Ulysses in Zurich which took seven years to complete. He moved to Paris and after the outbreak of war, returned to Zurich.
A Short Biography of James Joyce
James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland. He was enrolled in the Jesuit school of Clongowes Wood College at the age of six. His family was struggling financially so they eventually dropped him out of school, due to a lack of school fees. He then sent to study at Belvedere College, another private boys’ school where he studied from 1893-98. In 1898 he started school at University College, Dublin. He received his graduate degree in modern languages in 1902.
In 1903 he went to Paris where he studied medicine and published a review. That’s where he got the news of his mother’s illness who was on the deathbed and he returned to Dublin. That same year he met an Irish woman named Nora Barnacle. She developed a close bond with him and later became his lifelong friend. Their first date was set on the same date at which his masterpiece, Ulysses was to be published.
Literary Writing
Joyce’s literary career started in 1904 while serving as a teacher in a school in Ireland. His first published story was The Irish Homestead. In the same year, he started his first novel Stephen Hero that ultimately metamorphoses into A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. He traveled together with Nora Barnacle to Europe where he provided services in schools of Berlitz, Yugoslavia, Trieste and Italy. There, Giorgio, their son was born. In 1906, Joyce with Nora and Giorgio moved to Rome. He worked in a bank there and the next year his collection of poems, Chamber Music, was published in London. Her daughter Lucia was also born during this time.
During his short visit to Ireland in 1909, he opened a movie theatre in Dublin with the support of foreign investors and also signed a contract for the publication of his novel Dubliners. In 1912 he again had a chance to visit Ireland with his family. In 1914 his novel A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man was serialized by a magazine, The Egoist.
He began writing Ulysses. He moved to Switzerland in 1915 and at the same time his book The Portrait was published in NewYork. An American journal Little Review started writing his upcoming book Ulysses that received heavy attention from people and popularity. Hemingway and Churchill were one of the early buyers of this book.
In 1927 his poetic collection Pomes Penyeach was published. After four years of publication, Joyce and Nora got married in London. In 1933 Joyce was levied with the charge that his book Ulysses contains pornographic material so it was banned in the U.S. After a year, Random House Publication issued the banned novel again and after five years in 1939, Finnegans Wake appeared.
By the time of the publication of his novel, Finnegans Wake, Joyce suffered many health problems and he had to undergo many eye surgeries that he nearly got blind. During WWII, he fled to Switzerland to avoid the Nazis. He died there in 1941 after having stomach surgery.
Honors and Awards
As a controversial but influential writer, Joyce was less rewarded during his lifetime for his services in Literature. With the publication of his first collection of poetry, he received the attention of leading figures of that era including Yeats and Pound. Upon the appearance of Ulysses, he gained worldwide recognition and notoriety when his novel was banned in the United States and other countries. As far as the formal awards are concerned, he did not receive any.
In Spite of ebbs and flaws, Joyce’s work influenced many other literary giants ranging from Hemingway, Faulkner to Ellison and Roth. He had never gone out of fashion for his diversity and unique stylistic features and that is why he is considered the very embodiment in Modern Literature.
He continued inspiring even after his death to those renowned writers who want to write about ordinary things. In 1999 a panel of Modern Library categorized Ulysses as the most distinguished novel of the century and placed A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man at third in the list.
The Writing Style of James Joyce
Joyce’s distinct writing style varies in each work due to remarkable use of diction, innovative symbolism, interior soliloquies and monologues and epiphanies. His work is also marked by the amount of complexity exercised in writing. Critics and readers have noticed a multilayered but careful meaning fabrication in his prose works. He has also touched modern psychology in his fiction works.
As far the language is concerned, he followed traditional and formal diction of Dublin. He often employs Irish slang especially in Finnegans Wake, he noticeably use foriegn words to create puns and allegory.
He has also been involved in literary waves of his time; realism and symbolism (which are further followed by sub waves like futurism, impressionism and surrealism). But he negated his involvement in any such movement. Instead he experimented with a combination of these currents as both the approaches can be found simultaneously in his works. This way he created a new dream language; a mixture of existing and non existing or inventive words to give a dense and allegorical effect among his immense stock of words. The most salient features of his writing style include the following trends.
Stream of Consciousness
Joyce’s writing style is enhanced through a variety of literary devices and terms both classic and modern. To trigger interior monologues and soliloquies, he uses stream of consciousness technique. For this he avoids punctuations, puns and onomatopoeic elements in texts. Joyce adapted this style from 18th Century novelist, Sterne. By using these elements he jumps into the mind of his character and lets the reader experience the way the character is feeling.
Epiphany
Epiphany is one of the inspiring concepts of Joyce’s writing style. In his epiphany narratives, we can find a discontinuous construction of the outside world. His character Stephan Dedalus tells us to distinguish between the constructed and real world. His normality in treating the subject refers to the mystical essence of things.
This essence is what epiphany reveals. As Fournier remarks that “[e]piphanies, like intentionality, are the bridge between our consciousness and reality. The difference is that intentionality is an essential and continuous structure of consciousness, whereas epiphanies are evanescent, discontinuous, and mysterious”
In Joyce’s world epiphanies are of much importance because they deal with conscious mind, continuous and discontinuous structures. If we take a look at Ulysses, he is not concerned with constructing the outside world rather his thoughts, desires, speech acts and epiphanic revelations help construct the map of the world. In the case of Dublin, the city is deemed as an intentional cognitive object. It is constructed on discontinuous patterns which gradually turns to solid continuous narrative.
Myth
One of Joyce’s modernist approaches is the use of myths and projecting and old story onto a modern plain. His eminent novel Ulysses also revolves around a mythical search for a father that grabs the whole narrative firmly. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the character of Stephan Dedalus is both Telemachus, the lost son and Dedalus, a mythical figure. In Dubliners and Portrait mythicism is mixed with naturalistic current.
Symbolism
Joyce’s work had an influence on the French Symbolists. He makes use of symbols not only in poetry but also in prose. He recollects them from nature as in The portrait, flying of birds, nests and escapes recur. In Dubliner ‘windows’ are the threshold between internal upheavals and external phenomena. This novel constantly mentions darkness and dusk which represent gloom and sorrow of the character. At certain places food is also used as a symbol that adheres to monotonous routine life to sustain life.
Themes in Joyce’s works
Psychological Realism
Joyce’s mastery in fabricating narratives is unmatched. He let flow from his pen random and useful thoughts just as they actually are. This approach to writing is called psychological realism. It leads to analyse the inner thoughts of the characters and how they perceive the realities of the world.
In A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man Joyce followed Stephen’s life from childhood through adolescence to manhood using one of the most artistic and remarkable techniques ever used in English Novel . Stephen grew up amid various family problems consequently he began to disdain his family, religion, and nation.
Modernism
Just like other modernists, he was interested in modern psychoanalysis, cultural experimentation and other artistic trends in the field of arts. He particularly touched the themes of sexual oppressiveness, social taboos and dualistic moral values.
Finnegans Wake, a bolder text of technical innovations is dazed with a web of allusions. Joyce considered this novel a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature. It possesses almost all the characteristics of modernism: engagement with myth and history, complexity and iterative form, obscurity and a sense of humor.
Nationalism
Though Joyce rejected nationalistic attitude in his writing yet nearly all the works are set in Dublin, the capital of Ireland. He rejected his country and remarked ‘I’m sick of my own country, sick of it’. This shows his reaction to the repressive environment of the country.
Dublin is portrayed as a walker´s city in all the works of Joyce. As in Dubliners and Ulysses the characters are seen to travel on their feet or by cab or tram. Joyce has portrayed Dublin as a center of geographical, religious, political and cultural trends. This kind of new nationalism is a part of Joyce’s satiric impatience, especially in Dubliners.
Exile
Most part of Joyce’s life was spent in abroad countries especially in Europe. He made the choice of voluntary exile out of nausiase created by fanatics. He lived in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. He came upon the screen as the most cosmopolitan Irish writer for his open mindedness. Joyce preferred the life exile upon patriotic writers. He was of the view that an artist had to be an outlander in order to observe the outside world objectively.
As we can find in his novel The portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, his representative character Stephen who escapes from his own country to find intellectual wisdom and spiritual wisdom.
Catholicism
Joyce schooling was done in a Jesuits school. This training sets the stance for his literary and philosophical viewpoints. In the opening of the novel Ulysses, Buck Mulligan sets a half serious and half ironic tone against Catholicism. Religion in terms of repentance, guilt and sin dominates all over his thematic constructions.
His mouthpiece character Stephen Dedalus in The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man attacks the “essentialized collective identity” of Catholic Church. He admired Giordano Bruno for recognizing science from the level above from religion and questioning its authorities.