James Joyce

James Joyce: The Man Who Rebuilt the Novel

On 16 June 1904, a 22-year-old Dubliner went walking in Ringsend with a Galway chambermaid named Nora Barnacle. It was their first outing. Eighteen years later he handed that date to Leopold Bloom and made it the single day on which *Ulysses* takes place. Bloomsday is now observed annually in cities Joyce never visited, which is a strange kind of monument: the most private moment of a man's life, converted into a public holiday for literature.

Rathgar, and a Father's Decline

Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, the eldest of ten surviving children of John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray. The family's descent was steep and formative. By 1891 his father's drinking and financial mismanagement had pushed them into poverty and pulled James out of his first school. The father is the great recurring presence in the work — charming, ruinous, unkillable — and the shabby-genteel Dublin the family fell through became the only landscape Joyce ever wrote about.

Jesuits and Languages

He was educated by Jesuits: Clongowes Wood College near Clane from 1888 until the fees became impossible in 1891, then Belvedere College from 1893 to 1898 without charge through a priest's intervention, where he took prizes for English composition. At University College Dublin, 1898 to 1902, he read English, French and Italian, absorbed Thomistic scholasticism, and made himself conspicuous in Dublin's literary circles. He learned Norwegian well enough to write a fan letter to Henrik Ibsen and later picked up Modern Greek in Zurich. The multilingualism is not a biographical ornament; it is the raw material of the last book.

Nora, and the Departure

He met Nora Barnacle on 10 June 1904. In October they left Ireland together, aiming at a Berlitz post in Zurich that did not exist and being redirected to Pola, in what is now Croatia, where he taught English to Austro-Hungarian naval officers. By March 1905 they were in Trieste, where they stayed, with interruptions, until 1915. He never lived in Ireland again after 1912. They remained together for thirty-seven years and married, civilly, in London in 1931.

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Ten Years to Publish Dubliners

*Dubliners* is the least experimental of his books and had the worst publication history of any of them. Grant Richards in London accepted it, then withdrew when his printers refused to set passages they thought actionable. George Roberts of Maunsel in Dublin strung Joyce along for three years over libel fears and then had the 1912 Dublin printing destroyed. Richards finally published it on 15 June 1914, eight and a half years after Joyce first submitted it. The delay taught him something he never forgot: that the obstacle to his work would be censorship, and that he would have to write past it rather than around it.

Trieste, Zurich, Paris

Trieste was his workshop. There he finished *Dubliners*, hammered the abandoned *Stephen Hero* into *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*, wrote the play *Exiles*, and conceived *Ulysses* — originally, during a brief and miserable stint as a bank clerk in Rome in 1906–07, as a short story. *A Portrait* was serialised in *The Egoist* from 1914 and published complete by B. W. Huebsch in 1916. When Italy entered the war in 1915 he moved the family to neutral Zurich, an Irishman on a British passport married to a Triestine on parole from Austria-Hungary. In July 1920 he went to Paris intending a short stop and stayed twenty years.

He was poor for most of it. Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats secured him grants from the Royal Literary Fund and the British civil list. Harriet Shaw Weaver, editor of *The Egoist*, supported him for decades and eventually paid for his funeral. Edith Rockefeller McCormick gave him a Zurich stipend and withdrew it when he refused analysis with Jung. Sylvia Beach kept him going in Paris. Without these people the major books would not exist.

Ulysses on Trial

He drafted *Ulysses* from about 1914 and finished at the end of 1921, mapping a single Dublin day onto Homer's *Odyssey* and switching narrative style with almost every episode. Leopold Bloom was drawn partly from Alfred H. Hunter, a man who had picked Joyce up after a street brawl, and partly from his Triestine pupil Italo Svevo. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap began serialising it in *The Little Review* in March 1918; two 1919 instalments were suppressed as obscene, and in September 1920 an unsolicited copy of the "Nausicaa" episode reached the daughter of a New York attorney. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice prosecuted. In February 1921 Anderson and Heap were fined $50 each and ordered to stop.

Sylvia Beach published the book from Shakespeare and Company in 1922. Postal authorities confiscated copies; smugglers carried them into Britain and America. Britain banned it until 1936 and it was not legally publishable in the United States until the mid-1930s.

Sixteen Years of Finnegans Wake

He began the last book in 1923 and published it in 1939. *Finnegans Wake* abandons English as a fixed medium in favour of portmanteau construction and multilingual punning — Triestine dialect surfaces throughout — organised as a cyclical dream of universal history. He wrote it going blind. Chronic uveitis, dating from a 1907 bout of rheumatic fever, required repeated surgeries and constant trips to Switzerland. His daughter Lucia, born 26 July 1907, suffered severe mental illness that consumed his money and attention through the 1930s.

Why James Is Called a Genius

The claim here is unusually easy to specify because it is technical. Joyce solved a problem that had defeated the nineteenth-century novel: how to render consciousness as it actually runs, unsorted, without a narrator standing between the reader and the mind. Interior monologue existed before him in fragments; he made it structural, sustained it across an entire book, and then proved it could be modulated — Bloom's mind does not sound like Stephen's, and neither sounds like Molly's. He then did something rarer, which was to demonstrate that style itself could be the subject, cycling *Ulysses* through parody, catechism, journalism and pastiche so that the form of each episode comments on its content. The Poetry Foundation's summary is flat and accurate: he is "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the 20th century." His own account of the method was equally flat: "if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

The counter-case cannot be waved away. The difficulty is real and, in the last book, close to total. *Finnegans Wake* has produced a scholarly apparatus vastly larger than its readership, and a reasonable person can argue that a work requiring a lifetime's annotation to yield its pleasures has failed at something basic. Even *Ulysses* is more often owned than finished. And the influence is uneven: writers borrowed his interior monologue enthusiastically and almost nobody has followed him into the Wake. Joyce is a genius of technique whose technique outran the audience for it — which is a different, and smaller, thing than being the greatest novelist.

Legacy

Joyce fled occupied France for Zurich in 1940 and died there on 13 January 1941, aged 58, after surgery for a perforated ulcer. He never returned to Ireland. His two collections of verse, *Chamber Music* (1907) and *Pomes Penyeach* (1927), had been noticed by Pound and Eliot — Pound heard Elizabethan wording and metres suggesting Herrick — but he abandoned poetry entirely by 1932. What survives is a body of prose that permanently enlarged what a novel is permitted to do, and a city he left at twenty-two and never stopped describing.