James Joyce

Life

Joyce was an Irishman, and he was born in 1882 in Dublin. He was son of John Stanislaus Joyce, that had a good job and a reasonable economic position. James's father is a big influence in his work, thanks to his many faults: in fact John Joyce started to lose a lot of work, and his family was kicked down by the social ladder.

In 1888 Joyce was sent away to the Clonglowes Wood College, a Chatholic schhol of Jesuits that were very important to hi sfuture culture and to his earlier chapters, like we can see in "A Portrait of the artist as a Young Man".

Among the important influence in his childhood was that  of Irish nationalist politics, especially the tragedy of Parnell, the Protestant leader of the Irish Home Rule. After Parnell's death, in 1891, Joyce's father, detached from Irish extremism, and took little interest in Irish nazionalist movement. Joyce, deafeated and disappointed, detached from Irish extremism and nazionalist literary movement.It must be said that, for this indifference, Joyce's works had immense difficulty to be printed in Ireland.

Joyce was a brilliant student, he won a lot of scolarship, but grow up in himself a rebellion against the religious and social conventions; in 1890 he came under the Ibsen's influence in which he admired the intellectual honesty and his choice of exile.

In 1898 Joyce entered in University College, a Catholic Institution, where he studied modern languages; in 1902, having take his degree, Joyce make a trip to Paris, where he met a lot ofexpatriate Irish nationalist; he made a second trip to Paris, but was cut short by mother's death.

So he turned in Ireland where he established for a long period, and where he start to drink (together with father) and to go with prostitutes.

In 1904 Joyce's life had a progress: he met Nora Barnacle, his longlife companion, and left with her ireland for a voluntary exile on the Continent. Nora Barnacle was a simple country girl that met Joyce in a motel where she worked to escape from his father that was a drunkman. Their realationship was happy and enduring.

In the same year the couple left Ireland, and wnet to Pula, in Istria, where Joyce attempted for english teacher; then they moved to Trieste (where he started to write "Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Young Artist as a Young Man") and to Rome that he found uninspiring. Then he returned to Trieste where met his future pupil, Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo), that was still an unknown writer. Finally in 1914 was published Dubliners that wasn't very successfully in commercial terms, but that attracted interest of some critics: in the same year he published "A Portrait of the Young Artist as a Young Man" in the periodical "The Egoiste".

With the outbreak of the First World War he moved to Zurich, where he worked for his new novel, Ulysses. In 1920 he moved to Paris, that was the european intellectual capital, where he had a lot of successe for his works, and he was able to push his technical experimentation to the limit, with Finnegans Wake, published in 1939. With the outbreak of Second World War he returned to Zurich where he died in 1941.

Works

Dubliners (1914) : It's a collection of fifteen short stories of everyday life in Dublin, linked by the common theme of the decay and the stagnation of the city's life.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) : Here we can see the growth in maturity of Joyce and his dedication to art; here the style is less realist than Dubliners, and it's a rehanding of autobiographical material. The central ure is Stephan Dedalus (Stephan was the first Christian martyr, while Dedalus succedeed to escape from the labirint creasting two wings).

Ulysses (1922) : generally regarded like the Joyce's masterpiece.

Finnegans Wake (1939) : It's the last work, more complex than Ulysses, in which Joyce talk about one night in the life of a Dublin publican.

Stephen Hero (1944) : An incomplete work published after his death in 1944.

Features and Themes

The importance of Joyce is that he had renewed the literature. His books are very different from the tradition. Joyce uses the technique of the manipulation of time and he doesn't respect the chronological order; he uses the association of ideas and flashback. In his stories there isn't only one point of view, but he expresses the points of view of many characters. He became famous with his neologism and his 'exploration' of the language, but he always uses the same theme: the dryness of his time.

Joyce's conception of artist is too much near to that of Italian Realist: in fact he tought that the writer must be invisible in his works, and he haven't to express his own viewpoint;

Joyce rejected Irish life "in toto", and at the same time he set all his novels in Dublin, the city in which he was grow up;

He spent neraly of his adult life in voluntary exile (Trieste, Paris, Zurich), becoming the most cosmopolitan of Irish writers and becoming open to other intellectual traditions;

Like the other European writers of the time he was deeply influenced by the modern culture, especially in Freudian phsycoanalisys, that was affecting all the art (Picasso, Svevo);

Other two important features in Joyce are the realism and the symbolism;

As a result of experimentation, he created a new kind of dream language, that was the mixture of non-existent words, existing words and inventive word combination; sintax is disordered, punctuation non-existent.

Dubliners

One of the most important works of this period is Dubliners, made up by fifteen stories, in which Joyce talk about stories of everyday life in Dublin. There is a realistic technique, very far for the last Joyce of Finning Wakes, the plot is linear and the language is that of everyday life.

All the stories were written in 1905, except The Dead that was written in 1907, and are arranged into four sections, each of which represent one stage in life: childhood, adolescence, maturity, public life, an epilogue (The Dead).

The style of the book is essentially realistic, with large descriptions of details and remarkable moments of sudden insight: this moments are called by Joyce like Epiphanies.

The original meaning of epiphany is the showing of jesus child to the Magi, but Joyce use this term to call a sudden revelation, something that was hidden in one mind and that suddenly surface and that start a long painful mental labour.

One of the best example of epiphany is The Dead, that is the last stories in Dubliners, and it's the stories that forms the climax to the theme of decay and stagnation and spiritual paralisys of Dublin.

The Dead

In this story Joyce's technique passes from realism and objectivity to symbolism and interior monologue. The first part Is set in Morkan sisters' house for the evening of the epiphany. They represent irish mediocrity. The second part Gabriel and Gretta Conroy are in the hotel, where she reveals him her past love and Gabriel starts an interior reflection about the futility of irish lives.

Ulysses

The most known Joyce's work is Ulysses. We can put this work in an ideal second period of Joyce's literature, in which he developed the language, rejecting logical sequences and conventional syntax, but the themes are the same of Dubliners (here too there are two dubliners as principal characters, and Joyce wanted to demonstrate the paralisys of Dublin).

The stories is centred arouns three principal character, and for each one there is dedicated an ideal part.

The principal character of the first part is Stephen Dedalus, the Joycean alter ego. He took the name of the first Catholic martyr and of the legendary Greek artificer, Dedalus. Stephen is a young man with intellectual ambitions, it's the enemy of his own country and a martyr to art. Stephen desyres to convert the Irishman to the cult of beauty inherited from the Greeks.

The second part of Ulysses is dominated by Leopold Bloom, the ulysses of the title, that wandered in Dublin like Ulysses wandered in Mediterranean, encountering adventures like can ed to the adventure of Ulysses.

The third part is dominated by Molly Bloom, the Leopoldo's wife, that can be ed to Ulysses's wife Penelope, just as Stephen Dedalus can be comapred to Telemachus.

Bloom day is projected against the story of Ulysses, and each scene in the book is related to a specific episode of the Odyssey. In the first part of the book Dedalus, come back home from Paris, set off to find his friend and 'spiritual father' Bloom, who is in search of a 'spiritual son'. When the two friends meet, Bloom 'adopt' Dedalus and offers to take him home and give him shelter. At home Molly Bloom waits for them, like Penelope, thinking of her past and present life, with a mental, interior monologue. This 'river of words' called 'stream of consciousness' ends with the words 'yes', like a total, non-judgemental, acceptance of life.

Parallel with the Odyssey

The parallel with Odyssey is developed in all the chapter (18) in which the book is divided. Each chapter in fact correspond to one of the episodes of Odyssey. For Example The first chapter, called Telemachus, it echoes the theme of the first book of Odyssey.