James Joyce

James Joyce is as essential to an understanding of modern fiction as T. S. ELIOT[19]and W. B. YEATS [17] are to modern poetry and Pablo Picasso is to modern art. His achievement is nothing less than a great artistic explosion in which we are still sifting through the debris and dealing with the fallout. We are still learning how to read him, and novelists continue to show his influence, as the history of the novel can be divided with only slight exaggeration into two periods: before and after Joyce. Some writers in despair of ever surpassing him have lamented that Joyce took the novel as far as it can go, as SHAKESPEARE [1] took drama. 

Others have complained that Joyce stretched the form of fiction past a breaking point, and the aftermath is a chaos of meaning that many feel was Joyce’s principal legacy Joyce’s collected works are few: two collections of poetry, a play, a volume of short stories, and three novels. Although hardly an innovative or preeminent poet or dramatist, his achievement in fiction was to effect a revolution at literature’s core. Dubliners sets the pattern and technique for the modern short story. With A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Joyce took on the solidly traditional novel of education and development and re-imagined it in an absolutely new manner that has caused other treatments of this theme to seem shallow and routine. With Ulysses, Joyce created a modern epic out of the common place events of a single day in the life of Dublin with a modern Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, a Jew and a cuckold, as his hero. 

In Finnegans Wake, a novel shaped by dream logic and the destruction of the barriers of time and space, Joyce developed an entirely new literary language to write a universal history based on the life and times of a pub owner, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Each step in Joyce’s artistic development challenged previous assumptions and perfected new techniques to capture consciousness and the complexity of experience. To my mind, among the world’s novelists, only TOLSTOY [4] and DICKENS [6] have fashioned a richer imaginative world.Born on February 2, 1882, Joyce was the eldest of 10 children. His par-ents, who came from an upper-middle-class background, declined, due to the improvidence of Joyce’s father, into shabby gentility and eventually worse during Joyce’s youth. 

Between 1882 and 1902, when Joyce first left Ireland, he had resided at 14 different addresses, each one step lower on the ladder of respect-ability. Joyce’s father is captured in Stephen Dedalus’s catalogue of his father, Simon, in Portrait: “a medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past.” For Joyce, the forces opposing his growth and artistic development were a succession of fathers: his own, his fatherland Ireland, and God the father, represented by the Catholic Church. In his art, Joyce would confront and attempt to master each.At the age of six and a half Joyce was sent to a Jesuit boarding school, Clongowes Wood, where he was the youngest boy at the school. 

His experiences there are reflected in Portrait, in which Stephen Dedalus’s glasses are broken, and he is subsequently beaten, or “pandied,” for neglecting his school-work. There are obvious differences between the young Joyce and his fictional reflection, however. Joyce’s nickname at school was “Sunny Jim.” He excelled at sports, and unlike the dour and isolated Stephen Dedalus, he was well liked and generally fun-loving. 

When his father’s financial distress led to his withdrawal from Clongowes, he eventually continued his studies at a Jesuit school in Dublin. As Joyce later remarked, “You allude to me as Catholic. Now for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour of me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit.” Like Stephen in Portrait, Joyce followed a similar cycle of religious devotion, followed by a decline in religious faith, and a growth of faith in art.

As a student at University College, Dublin, Joyce studied languages and began to acquire a literary reputation when, as an early proponent of HENRIK IBSEN [36], he published a review of the Norwegian playwright’s work in an English magazine. In 1902, Joyce departed Ireland intent on becoming a doctor, but with the rather exotic notion of studying medicine in Paris. He returned after a few months because of the death of his mother and remained in Dublin until 1904. Joyce taught for a short time, began an autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, and wrote short stories for an Irish farmers’ magazine. His first date with a Galway born chambermaid, Nora Barnacle, on June 16, 1904, would be forever memorialized as “Bloomsday,” the day that encompasses the action of Ulysses. 

The couple left Dublin together in October 1904 to begin a life together in exile from their homeland, about which Joyce never stopped writing. They lived in Trieste, Rome, Paris, and Zurich, supported by Joyce’s occasional language teaching, infrequent earnings from his writings, and support from a variety of patrons. The couple raised two children and were finally married in 1931.Joyce began his writing career with lyrical poetry. He also collected what he called silhouettes: brief prose sketches of scenes, conversations, and incidents of observed Dublin life. From these Joyce developed his literary technique of the epiphany, the sudden “revelation of the whatness of a thing” in which the “soul of the commonest object . . . seems to be radiant.”Transformation, therefore, is the key function of the epiphany, and for Joyce the artist is “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of ever living life.” The technique of the epiphany, the foundation of Joyce’s art, shows him working out the central problem for the novelist in the 20th century, expressed in the choice between realism and symbolism. 

On the one hand, the novel was opening up new ter-ritory of reality rarely examined in fiction before; on the other, writers were searching for a way of penetrating reality to express its essential truths in symbolic patterns. Joyce is at the center of these tendencies. No realist has offered a more exhaustive and unsparing depiction of the immediacies of com-monplace life; no symbolist has spun a more subtle or complicated network of meanings.At their best, Joyce’s stories and novels work simultaneously on both levels, culminating in the extraordinary accomplishment of Ulysses, which attempts nothing less than a complete reconstruction of a day in the life of Dublin, underlaid with a correspondence of myth and symbol borrowed from HOMER[3].

Leopold Bloom is the modern Odysseus and everyman, defined by his ordinariness, whose spiritual son is the romantic and self-absorbed Stephen Dedalus. The novel arranges a conjunction of their experience into a grand and epic totality. Experience is fragmented and elusive, captured in the flow of consciousness of Joyce’s characters, in which sensory data form patterns of meaning shaped by the invisible but controlling vision of the novelist. 

Ulysses was published on Joyce’s 40th birthday in 1922 to a storm of controversy that surrounded virtually all of his published works. Banned in England­ and America as obscene for more than 10 years, the book asserted its influence in smuggled copies printed in France. Joyce devoted the rest of his life to the production of his “night” book, Finnegans Wake, a dream sequence of Earwicker’s unconscious associations through the course of one night, as a complement to the “day” book, Ulysses, the story of a typical Dublin day. With its dream logic, portmanteau words, and punning from multiple lan-guages, Finnegans Wake is even more experimental than the daring innovation of Joyce’s previous work, and to unlock its considerable riches in comedy and linguistic virtuosity, it requires far more labor than most readers are willing to devote. To the end, through two world wars, the mental breakdown of his daughter, and his own failing eyesight, as one of the greatest innovators in world literature, Joyce persisted in shaping a radical redefinition of fictional form, technique, and language to capture modern experience.