James Joyce
(1882–1941)

James Joyce is considered by many to be the most innovative, and also one of the most challenging writers of the twentieth-century. Joyce's brilliant use of myth and his radical experiments with language and stream-of-consciousness narrative technique produced a body of work that greatly influenced the course of Western literature.

James Joyce was born in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, the capital city of Ireland. He was educated in Catholic institutions run by the Jesuit order of priests: first at Clongowes Wood College, then at Belvedere, and finally at University College, Dublin, where Joyce studied modern languages.

The period of Joyce's youth was dominated by intense political debates on the subject of Irish nationalism. While still a teenager, Joyce began to rebel against what he perceived to be the narrowness of Irish nationalist fervor. He also had disdain for the bigotry he saw in Irish Catholicism, as well as for the cultural poverty of Dublin. By 1902, when he left the university, Joyce had decided on a career as a writer—a vocation he believed would lead to a life of rebellion and exile.

Joyce left Dublin for Paris in 1902, but returned home the following year to care for his fatally ill mother. In 1904 he met and fell in love with Nora Barnacle, a simple, relatively uneducated woman whose temperament could not have been more unlike that of her intense, cerebral husband. (She is said once to have asked Joyce, "Why don't you write sensible books that people can understand?") The couple moved to the Italian city of Trieste, where Joyce became a teacher of English. Joyce's literary career developed slowly for several reasons, including the demands of earning a living and the inaccessibility of his work to the literary community. His first major book was Dubliners (1914), a volume of carefully crafted short stories. These realistic sketches of Dublin life were enthusiastically reviewed by the American poet Ezra Pound, who then arranged to publish Joyce's next work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in serial form in The Egoist, an influential avante-garde literary magazine.

In the semi-autobiographical Portrait of the Artist, Joyce tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, a young boy whose feelings of rootlessness and alienation parallel his own at that age. The name Dedalus is an allusion to the Greek mythological character Daedalus, known for his artistic gifts. In Portrait of the Artist Joyce explores the relationship between the artist and society.

Although Joyce was much troubled by health problems during the second half of his life, he produced two more novels whose innovative features have few parallels in the history of English literature. The first was Ulysses (1922), an account of one day in the life of the city of Dublin. Every episode in the novel corresponds to an event in Homer's Odyssey—a structure that developed from Joyce's belief that Odysseus (Ulysses) was the most "complete" or universal man in all of world literature. Joyce's use of stream-of-consciousness narration in Ulysses helped to revolutionize the twentieth-century novel.

Attacked as obscene for some of its more explicit passages, Ulysses was at first banned in both Britain and the United States; however, a landmark court decision in late 1933 reversed the ban in the United States.

Even more challenging than Ulysses is the author's final work, Finnegans Wake (1939). Filled with puns in multiple languages, abounding in esoteric allusions and complex symbolism, and sprinkled with bawdy jokes, this novel completely abandons the narrative as a literary model. Joyce died in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1941.

Although James Joyce spent most of his adult life in exile from his native Ireland, his work is very much about Dublin. Dublin, for Joyce, was a microcosm of human experience.

For much of Joyce's childhood and early adulthood, Ireland was in the throes of a long, wrenching struggle for independence from Britain. One of the most important Irish nationalist leaders was Charles Stewart Parnell (1846—1891), mentioned several times in the excerpt from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A member of the British Parliament, Parnell was imprisoned briefly in 1881 for his activism. By the time of Joyce's birth he was known as "the uncrowned king of Ireland." A Protestant by birth, Parnell had lost the support of the Catholics in 1889 when he was implicated in a scandalous divorce suit. In A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce alludes to the controversy swirling around Parnell by portraying Stephen Daedalus' father as a supporter of Parnell and Aunt Dante as a vigorous opponent. Ireland did not achieve home rule until 1922.

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