James Joyce was born in Dublin, son of a
talented but feckless father who is accurately described by Stephen Dedalus
in A Portrait of the Artist as Young
Man as a man who had in his time been "a medical student, an
oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small
landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller,
somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a
bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past." The elder Joyce
drifted steadily down the financial and social scale, his family moving
from house to house, each one less genteel and more shabby than the
previous. James Joyce's whole education was Catholic, from the age of
six to the age of nine at Clongowes Wood College and from eleven to
sixteen at Belvedere College, Dublin. Both were Jesuit institutions and
were normal roads to the priesthood. He then studied modern
languages
at University College, Dublin.
From a comparatively early age Joyce regarded himself as a rebel
against the shabbiness and Philistinism of Dublin. In his early youth
he was very religious, but in his last year at Belvedere he began to
reject his Catholic faith in favor of a literary mission that he saw as
involving rebellion and exile. He refused to play any part in the
nationalist or other popular activities of his fellow students, and he
created some stir by his outspoken articles, one of which, on the
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, appeared in the Fortnightly Review for April 1900.
He taught himself Norwegian to be able to read Ibsen and to write to
him. When an article by Joyce, significantly titled The Day of the Rabblement, was
refused, on instructions of the faculty adviser, by the student
magazine that had commissioned it, he had it printed privately. By
1902, when he received his A.B. degree, he was already committed to a
career as an exile and writer. For Joyce, as for his character Stephen
Dedalus, the latter implied the former. To preserve his integrity, to
avoid involvement in popular sentimentalities and dishonesties, and
above all to be able to re-create with both total understanding and
total objectivity the Dublin life he knew so well, he felt that he had
to go abroad.
Joyce was sent to Paris after graduation, was recalled to Dublin by his
mother's fatal illness, had a short spell there as a schoolteacher,
then returned to the Continent in 1904 to teach English at Trieste and
then at Zurich. He took with him Nora Barnacle, an uneducated Galway
girl with no interest in literature; her native vivacity and peasant
wit charmed Joyce, and the two lived in devoted companionship until
Joyce's death, although they were not married until 1931. In 1920 Joyce
settled in Paris, where he lived until December 1940, when the war
forced him to take refuge in Switzerland; he died in Zurich a few weeks
later.
Proud, obstinate, absolutely convinced of his genius, given to fits
of
sudden gaiety and of sudden silence, Joyce was not always an easy
person to get along with, yet he never lacked friends, and throughout
his thirty-six years on the Continent he was always the center of a
literary circle. Life was hard at first. At Trieste he had very little
money, and he did not improve matters by drinking heavily, a habit
checked somewhat by his brother Stanislaus, who came out from Dublin to
act (as Stanislaus put it much later) as his "brother's keeper." His
financial position was much improved by the patronage of Mrs. Harold
McCormick (Edith Rockefeller), who provided him with a monthly stipend
from March 1917 until September 1919, when they quarreled, apparently
because Joyce refused to submit to psychoanalysis by Carl Jung, who had
been heavily endowed by her. The New York lawyer and art patron John
Quinn, steered in Joyce's direction by Ezra Pound, also helped Joyce
financially in 1917. A more permanent benefactor was the English
feminist and editor Harriet Shaw Weaver, who not only subsidized Joyce
generously from 1917 to the end of his life but occupied herself
indefatigably with arrangements for publishing his work.
Joyce's almost lifelong exile from his native Ireland had something
paradoxical about it. No writer has ever been more soaked in Dublin,
its atmosphere, its history, its topography; in spite of doing most of
his writing from Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, he wrote only and always
about Dublin. He devised ways of expanding his accounts of Dublin,
however, so that they became microcosmos, small-scale models, of all
human life, of all history, and of all geography. Indeed that was his
life's work: to write about Dublin in such a way that he was writing
about all of human experience.
Joyce began his career by writing a series of stories etching with
extraordinary clarity aspects of Dublin life. But these
stories—published as Dubliners
in 1914—are more than sharp realistic sketches. In each, the detail is
so chosen and organized that carefully interacting symbolic meanings
are set up, and as a result, Dubliners
is a book about human fate as well as a series of sketches of Dublin.
Furthermore, the stories are presented in a particular order so that
new meanings arise from the relation between them.
Tha last story in Dubliners, The Dead,
was not part of the original draft of the book but was added later, at
a time when Joyce was preoccupied with the nature of artistic
objectivity. A series of jolting events frees the protagonist,
Gabriel, from his possessiveness and egotism; the view he attains at
the end is the mood of supreme neutrality that Joyce saw as the
beginning of artistic awareness. It is the view of art developed by
Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man. Dubliners represents
Joyce's first phase: he had come directly to terms with the meaning of
his own developement as a man dedicated to writing. He did this by
weaving his autobiography into a novel so finely chiseled and carefully
organized, so stripped of everything superfluous, that each word
contributes to the presentation of the theme: the parallel movement
toward art and toward exile. A part of Joyce's first draft has been
posthumously published under the original title of Stephen Hero (1944); a comparison
between it and the final version that Joyce gave to the world, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), will show how carefully Joyce reworked and compressed his
material for maximum effect. The Portrait
is not literally true as autobiography, although it has many
autobiographical elements, but it is representatively true not only of
Joyce but of the relation between the artist and society in the early
twentieth century.
In the Portrait Stephen
worked
out a theory of art that considers that art moves from the lyrical
form—which is the simplest, the personal expression of an instant of
emotion—through the narrative form—no longer purely personal—to the
dramatic—the highest and most nearly perfect form, where "the artist,
like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above
his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring
his fingernails." This view of art, which invokes the objectivity, even
the exile, of the artist (even though the artist uses only the
materials provided for him or her by his or her own life), is related
to that held by the poets of the 1890s. More widely, it is related to
the rejection by the artist of the ordinary world of middle-class
values and activities that we see equally, tough in different ways, in
Matthew Arnold's war against the Philistines and in the concept (very
un-Arnoldian) of the artist as bohemian. Joyce's career belongs to that
long chapter in the history of the arts in Western civilization that
begins with the artist's declaring independence and ends with his or
her feeling inevitable alienation. But if Joyce was alienated, as in
certain ways he clearly was, he made his alienation serve his art: the
kinds of writing represented by Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake
represent the most consummate craftsmanship put at the service of a
humanely comic vision of all life. Some of Joyce's innovations in
organization and style have been imitated by other writers, but these
books are, and will probably remain, unique in our literature.
From the beginning, Joyce had trouble with the Philistines. Publication
of Dubliners
was held up for many years while he fought with both English and Irish
publishers about certain words and phrases that they wished to
eliminate. (It was one of the former who finally published the book).
His masterpiece Ulysses was
banned in both Britain and America on its first appearance in 1922; its
earlier serialization in an American magazine, The Little Review
(March 1918-December 1920) had had to stop abruptly when the U.S. Post
Office brought a charge of obscenity against it. Fortunately, Judge
Woolsey's history-making decision in favour of Ulysses
in a U.S. district court on December 6, 1933, resulted in the lifting
of the ban and the free circulation of the work first in America and
soon afterward in Britain.
Ulysses
Ulysses is an account
of one day in the lives of citizens of Dublin in the year 1904; it is
thus the description of a limited number of events involving a limited
number of people in a limited environment. Yet Joyce's ambition—which
took him seven years to realize—is to make his action into a microcosm
of all human experience. The events are not, therefore, told on a
single level; the story is presented in such a manner that depth and
implication are given to them and they become symbolic of the activity
of the individual in the World. The most obvious of the devices that
Joyce employs to make clear the microcosmic aspect of his story is the
parallel with Homer's Odyssey:
every episode in Ulysses
corresponds in some way to an episode in the Odyssey.
Joyce regarded Homer's Ulysses as the most "complete" man in
literature, a man who is shown in all his aspects—both coward and hero,
cautious and reckless, weak and strong, husband and philanderer, father
and son, dignified and ridiculous; so he makes his hero, Leopold Bloom,
an Irish Jew, into a modern Ulysses and by so doing helps make him
Everyman and make Dublin the world.
The book opens at eight o'clock on the morning of June 16, 1904.
Stephen Dedalus (the same character we saw in the Portrait,
but this is two years after our last glimpse of him there) had been
summoned back to Dublin by his mother's fatal illness and now lives in
an old military tower on the shore with Buck Mulligan, a rollicking
medical student, and and Englishman called Haines. In the first three
episodes of Ulysses,
which
concentrate on Stephen, he is built up as an aloof, uncompromising
artist, rejecting all advances by representatives of the normal world,
the incomplete man, to be contrasted later with the complete Leopold
Bloom, who is much more "normal" and conciliatory. After tracing
Stephen through his early-morning activitites and learning the main
currents of his mind, we go, in the fourth episode, to the home of
Bloom. We follow closely his every activity: attending a funeral,
transacting his business, eating his lunch, walking through the Dublin
streets, worrying about his wife's infidelity with Blazes Boylan—and at
each point the contents of his mind, including retrospect and
anticipation, are presented to the reader, until all his past history
is revealed. Finally, Bloom and Stephen, who have been just missing
each other all day, get together. By this time it is late, and Stephen,
who has been drinking with some medical students, is the worse for
liquor. Bloom, moved by a paternal feeling toward Stephen (his own son
had died in infancy and in a symbolic way Stephen takes his place),
follows him during subsequent adventures in the role of protector. The
climax of the book comes when Stephen, far gone in drink, and Bloom,
worn out with fatigue, succumb to a series of hallucinations where
their subconscious and unconscious come to the surface in dramatic form
and their whole personalities are revealed with a completeness and a
frankness unique in literature. Then Bloom takes the unresponsive
Stephen home and gives him a meal. After Stephen's departure Bloom
retires to bed—it is now two in the morning on June 17—while his wife,
Molly, representing the principles of sex and reproduction on which all
human life is based, closes the book with a long monologue in which her
experiences as woman are remembered.
On the level of realistic description, Ulysses
pulses with life and can be enjoyed for its evocation of early
twentieth-century Dublin. On the level of psychological exploration, it
gives a profound and moving presentation of the personality and
consciousness of Leopold Bloom and (to a lesser extent) Stephen
Dedalus. On the level of style, it exhibits the most fascinating
linguistic virtuosity. On a deeper symbolic level, the novel explores
the paradoxes of human loneliness and sociability (for Bloom is both
Jew and Dubliner, both exile and citizen, just as all of us are in a
sense bothe exiles and citizens), and it explores the problems posed by
the relations between parent and child, between the generations, and
between the sexes. At the same time, through its use of themes from
Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare and from literature, philosophy, and
history, the book weaves a subtle pattern of allusion and suggestion
that illuminates many aspects of human experience. The more one reads Ulysses,
the more one finds in it, but at the same time one does not need to
probe into the symbolic meaning to relish both its literary artistry
and its human feeling. At the forefront stands Leopold Bloom, from one
point of view, a frustrated and confused outsider in the society in
which he moves, from another, a champion of kindness and justice whose
humane curiosity about his fellows redeems him from mere vulgarity and
gives the book its positive human foundation.
Readers who come to Ulysses
with expectations about the way the story is to be presented derived
from their reading of Victorian novels or even of such
twentieth-century novelists as Conrad and Lawrence will find much that
is at first puzzling. Joyce presents the consciousness of his
characters directly, without any explanatory comment that tells the
reader whose consciousness is being rendered (this is the stream of
consciousness method). He may move, in the same paragraph and without
any sign that he is making such a transition, from a description of a
character's action—e.g. Stephen walking along the shore or Bloom
entering a restaurant—to an evocation of the character's mental
response to that action. That response is always multiple: it derives
partly from the character's immediate situation and partly fro the
whole complex of attitudes that his past history has created in him. To
suggest this multiplicity, Joyce may vary his style, from the flippant
to the serious or from a realistic description to a suggestive set of
images that indicate what might be called the general tone of the
character's consciousness. Past and present mingle in the texture of
the prose because they mingle in the texture of consciousness, and this
mingling can be indicated by puns, by sudden breaks into a new kind of
style or a new kind of subject matter, or by some other device for
keeping the reader constantly in sight of the shifting, kaleidoscopic
nature of human awareness. With a little experience, the reader learns
to follow the implications of Joyce's shifts in manner and content—even
to follow that at first sight bewildering passage in the "Proteus"
episode in which Stephen does not go to visit his uncle and aunt but,
passing the road that leads to their house, imagines the kind of
conversation that would take place in his home if he had gone to visit his uncle
and had then returned home and reported that he had done so. Ulysses
must not be approached as though it were a novel written in a
traditional manner; all preconceptions must be set aside and we must
follow wherever the author leads us and let the language tell us what
it has to say without our troubling whether language is being used
"properly" or not.
Finnegans
Wake
Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake,
was published in 1939; it took more than fourteen years to write, and
Joyce considered it his masterpiece. In Ulysses he had made the symbolic
aspect of the novel at least as important as the realistic aspect, but
in Finnegas Wake
he gave up realism altogether. This vast story of a symbolic Irishman's
cosmic dream develops by enormous reverberating puns a continuous
expansion of meaning, the elements in the puns deriving from every
conceivable source in history, literature, mythology, and Joyce's
personal experience. The whole book being (on one level at least) a
dream, Joyce invents his own dream language in which words are
combined, distorted, created by fitting together bits of other words,
used with several different meanings at once, often drawn from several
different languages at once, and fused in all sorts of ways to achieve
whole clusters of meaning simultaneously. In fact, so many echoing
suggestions can be found in every word or phrase that a full annotation
of even a few pages would require a large book. It has taken the
cooperative work of a number of devoted readers to make clear the
complex interactions of the multiple puns and pun clusters, through
which the ideas are projected, and every rereading reveals new
meanings. It is true that many readers find the efforts of explication
demanded by Finnegans Wake
too arduous; some, indeed, feel that the law of diminishing returns has
now begun to operate, and that the effort of both author and reader is
disproportionate. Nevertheless, the book has great beauty and
fascination even for the casual reader. Students are advised to read
aloud—or to listen to the record of Joyce reading aloud—the extract
printed here to appreciate the degree to which the rhythms of the prose
assist in conveying the meaning.
To an even greater extent than Ulysses,
Finnegans Wake
aims at embracing all of human history. The title is from an
Irish-American ballad about Tom Finnegan, a hod carrier who falls
off a ladder when drunk and is apparently killed, but who revives when
during the wake (the watch by the dead body) someone spills whiskey on
him. The theme of death and resurrection, of cycles of change coming
round in the course of history, is central to Finnegans Wake,
which derives one of its main principles of organization from the
cyclical theory of history put forward in 1725 by the Italian
philosopher Giambattista Vico. Vico held that history passes through
four phases: the divine or theocratic, when people are governed by
their awe of the supernatural; the aristocratic (the "heroic age"
reflected in Homer and in Beowulf);
the democratic and individualistic; and the final stage of chaos, a
fall in into confusion startles humanity back into supernatural
reverence and starts the process once again. Joyce, like Yeats, saw his
own generation as the final stage awaiting the shock that will bring
humans back to the first.
A mere account of the narrative line of Finnegans Wake
cannot, of course, give any idea of the content of the work. If one
explains that it opens with Finnegan's fall, then introduces his
successor Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who is Everyman, and whose dream
constitutes the novel, that he is presented as having guilt feelings
about an indecency he committed (or may have committed) at Phoenix
Park, Dublin; that his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle or ALP (who is also
Eve, Iseult, Ireland, the river Liffey), changes her role just as he
does; that he has two sons, Shem and Shaun (or Jerry and Kevin), who
represent introvert and extrovert, artist and practical man, creator
and popularizer, and symbolize this basic dichotomy in human nature by
all kinds of metamorphoses; and if one adds that, in the four books
into which Finnegans Wake is
divided (after Vico's pattern), actions comic or grotesque or sad or
tender or desperate or passionate or terribly ordinary (and very often
several of these things at the same time) take place with all the
shifting meanings of a dream, so that characters change into others or
into inanimate objects and the setting keeps shifting—if we explain all
this, we still have said very little about what makes Finnegans Wake
what it is. The dreamer, whose initials HCE indicate his universality
("Here Comes Everybody"), is at the same time a particular person, who
keeps a pub at Chapelizod, a Dublin suburb on the river Liffey near
Phoenix Park. His mysterious misdemeanor in Phoenix Park is in a sense
Original Sin: Earwicker is Adam as well as a primeval giant, the Hill
of Howth, the Great Parent ("Haveth Childers Everywhere" is another
expansion of HCE), and Man in History. Other characters who flit and
change through the book, such as the Twelve Customers (who are also
twelve jurymen and public opinion) and the Four Old Men (who are also
judges, the authors of the four Gospels, and the four elements), help
weave the texture of multiple significance so characteristic of the
work. But always it is the punning language, extending significance
downward—rather than the plot, developing it lengthwise—that bears the
main load of meaning.
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