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James Joyce: A New Biography Hardcover – June 5, 2012

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A revealing new biography―the first in more than fifty years―of one of the twentieth-century's towering literary figures

James Joyce is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, his novels and stories foundational in the history of literary modernism. Yet Joyce's genius was by no means immediately recognized, nor was his success easily won. At twenty-two he chose a life of exile; he battled poverty and financial dependency for much of his adult life; his out-of-wedlock relationship with Nora Barnacle was scandalous for the time; and the attitudes he held towards the Irish and Ireland, England, sexuality, politics, Catholicism, popular culture―to name a few―were complex, contradictory, and controversial.

Gordon Bowker draws on material recently come to light and reconsiders the two signal works produced about Joyce's life―Herbert Gorman's authorized biography of 1939 and Richard Ellman's magisterial tome of 1959―and, most importantly by binding together more intimately than has ever before been attempted the life and work of this singular artist, Gordon Bowker here gives us a masterful, fresh, eminently readable contribution to our understanding, both of Joyce's personality and of the monumental opus he created.

Bowker goes further than his predecessors in exploring Joyce's inner depths―his ambivalent relationships to England, to his native Ireland, and to Judaism―uncovering revealing evidence. He draws convincing correspondences between the iconic fictional characters Joyce created and their real-life models and inspirations. And he paints a nuanced portrait of a man of enormous complexity, the clearest picture yet of an extraordinary writer who continues to influence and fascinate over a century after his birth. Widely acclaimed on publication in Britain last year, perhaps the highest compliment paid was by Chris Proctor, of London's Tribune : "Bowker's success is to lead you back to the texts, perhaps understanding them better for this rich account of the maddening insane genius who wrote them."

• Print length 656 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date June 5, 2012
• Dimensions 6 x 1.5 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0374178720
• ISBN-13 978-0374178727
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

“[Bowker] offer[s] a less awestruck, more warts-and-all account of the writer's life and character . . . Bowker writes clearly and forcefully . . . Gordon Bowker's ‘new biography' is well worth reading, even if Joyce comes across as brilliant but exploitative, admirable as an artist but often mortifying as a man. It's not always a pretty picture, but it seems like a true one.” ― Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Gordon Bowker's life, the first significant volume for more than 50 years since Richard Ellmann's version, is a masterly example of how to trace the life of a writer, particularly one as difficult as Joyce. Mr Bowker begins by skillfully describing his early years in Dublin, filling in the background details of an Ireland which Joyce would draw upon, for the rest of his life, as material for his fiction. Mr Bowker evokes the dark and occasionally cramped conditions of the Joyces' various family homes, and refers to meteorological reports, school timetables and details of Joyce's father's various mortgages, his biography meticulously researched. Out of these facts, a picture of a brilliant but troubled writer emerges . . . It is apt, 90 years after ‘Ulysses' was published, that Joyce is celebrated on ‘Bloomsday', June 16th. This biography is an excellent reminder of why he deserves such a celebration.” ― The Economist

“[A] brilliant work by Gordon Bowker . . . clear and straightforward, beautifully written and meticulously researched . . . [Bowker] has produced a portrait of the artist in full. He places Joyce's fiction solidly within the context of his life, relating fictional episodes to their real-life counterparts. Few biographies of Joyce have so clearly established these relationships.” ― John M. Formy-Duval, About.com

“Gordon Bowker's James Joyce: A New Biography is a fascinating and insightful portrait of the artist as a young, then middle-aged, and then old man, and goes a long way to explaining the Western world's most enigmatic literary giant . . . Bowker's narrative concentrates on the existential struggle of Joyce's life, going beyond the complex relationship he had with his wife, Nora Barnacle, his muse and template for Molly Bloom. Bowker reveals the yin of this fundamentally bourgeois family man with the yang of his hyper-bohemian and rebellious soul . . . Bowker vividly sets the turbulent life of James Joyce in the context of his time and place, dominated as it was by the über-provincialism of his native Ireland, the land that he loved and scorned, immortalized and repudiated.” ― Doug McIntyre, The Lost Angeles Daily News

“It is a great boon that British biographer Gordon Bowker, who has written lives of Malcolm Lowry, George Orwell and Lawrence Durrell, should have taken on this task, and better yet that he has produced such a fine portrait of the artist and the man who was James Joyce . . . Instead of being daunted by Joyce having in a sense got there before him, Bowker makes this a strength, as he skillfully presents incidents and experiences both as they happened in life and, suitably transformed to varying degrees, on the page . . . the reader has the best of both worlds, being informed--or in the case of those already familiar with the books, reminded--both of the glories of Joycean fiction and of their roots in his life. Never reductive, genuinely attuned to both Joyce's fictive methodology and his human qualities, Bowker manages to be immensely sympathetic to his subject while managing to preserve necessary critical distance and acuity.” ― Martin Rubin, The San Francisco Chronicle

“In his unfussy way Bowker gives a sound account of Joyce's maturation as an artist, one who could weather the many vicissitudes, rejections, and appalling bouts of ill-health with which he had to contend . . . Gordon Bowker has written a solidly readable life of one of the great figures of the twentieth century . . . If it succeeds in bringing new and younger readers to these marvelous fictions, his book is to be warmly welcomed.” ― John Banville, The New Republic

“Joyce himself emerges from these pages as oddly heroic in his seriousness and perseverance . . . The distance between Joyce the man suffering and Joyce magisterial at his desk seems large and mysterious. The story of his life, told here with verve and pace, nonetheless remains a fascinating version of making it new under the most severe pressures.” ― Colm Toibin, The New York Times Book Review

“The biographer of Orwell, Lowry and Durrell returns with a massively detailed narrative of the life of the author of Ulysses . Bowker ( Inside George Orwell , 2003, etc.) begins with several of the myriad epiphanies Joyce valued--the first, a moment when he was 16 and lost both his virginity and the Virgin (he decided that was fun , and no Jesuit priesthood for me ). The author then announces his intentions--to show the complexities and contradictions of the man--and proceeds to do so in detail that is . . . impressive . . . Our guide is wise and the journey is wondrous.” ― Kirkus

“Bowker's splendid, insightful, and witty biography illuminates the connection between Joyce's erotic imagination and humane spirit, offering a clear-eyed celebration of his perverse comic genius . . . Drawing on material published since the 1982 revision of Richard Ellman's classic Joyce biography, including biographies of Nora herself and their troubled daughter, Lucia, Bowker . . . explores Joyce's inner landscape, most of it shaped by Dublin and his Jesuit education. Bowker captures the human comedy that surrounded Joyce, describing Ezra Pound, whose review of Dubliners in 1913 launched Joyce's career, as ‘Literature's own fairy godmother.' As Joyce's reputation grew, he retreated into a circle of friends and family and the increasingly interior world of his writing. His last years were increasingly darkened by illness and concern for his family. Joyce thought his daughter Lucia's strangeness was untapped genius similar to his own and fought to keep her out of the hands of doctors and clinics--egocentric in the extreme, but far from heartless.” ― Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Wonderfully detailed and gripping . . . It is different from most literary biographies because Joyce's life and work are so tightly bound. Bowker sets it down: there would have been no Stephen Dedalus without James' father, no Molly Bloom without Nora, no Leopold Bloom without Alfred Hugh Hunter . . . Here we meet the models for everybody . . . And the final success of this book is that when you snap shut the final page there is nothing your hand wants to reach for except a volume of Joyce.” ― Chris Proctor, Tribune Magazine (London)

“ James Joyce by Gordon Bowker is the finest biography of the year . . . but this new work is a consummate and more complete understanding of James Joyce and the source of his inspirations . . . If you care about the making of a new language by the most revolutionary Irish writer who ever lived, you will also find how the persons and incidents in his life became the fragments for Ulysses and more. This is also a brilliant study of young Pound, Yeats, Synge, Eliot. It’s also a potboiler. How could it be anything but? The young James Joyce was licentious, sentient, fearless, and interested in a sexually active world. Literature may be a high form of gossip and this has all the rich and powerful details, as well as a history of European literature in the early 20th century . . . It would be impossible to read this book and not be transported and privileged to be led through the doors and mirrors with this tortured―self-created genius. Gordon Bowker’s exhaustive research has given us a triumph of literary scholarship.” ― Ruth Cavalieri, The Washington Independent Review of Books

“The strength in James Joyce: A New Biography is that Bowker knew exactly what he was dealing with . . . he's crafted a powerful, insightful, and compelling biography of a man who is scarcely better understood than his work. His tone is confident but never familiar, and very rarely speculative--a pleasure given the trends in recent biography . . . You hold in your hands the best ‘approximation' of a life--no less, but so much more. It's not a novel, or a soulless two-dimensional collection of facts. Instead, it's a more than capable, fast-flowing narrative that is buttressed by facts that contributed to some of the greatest and boldest literature of the twentieth century . . . A portrait of the artist, and a not so flattering one at that, emerges . . . Bowker's approach outshines what people come in knowing, destroys rumor, provides fact, and paints a vivid portrait . . . of the scarred life of a genius . . . Each corollary between life and literature, made by Bowker, is enriching and exciting as the knowledge of Joyce's works (major and minor alike) is continually expanded . . . [A] terrific biography . . . . Read the Bowker, and reach to Joyce.” ― Josh Zajdman, Bookslut

“[A] deft, accomplished biography . . . It shows Joyce's recognition of his creative vocation as a gift to the world, though it cost so much in the way of poverty, misery and mortification.” ― Richard Davenport-Hines, The Telegraph

“No book on James Joyce goes half as far as this one in establishing connections between passages in the classic texts and incidents in the artist's life . . . This study will be valuable to students as a summation of our current biographical knowledge of Joyce. It captures recurring features of his art [and] shows how difficult he could be even to his greatest admirers; yet it also evokes the heroism of a man who, confronted by poverty, ill health and endless uprootings, somehow found in himself the courage to write epics in celebration of ordinary people and the intricacies of their minds. It is in its way an example as well as an account of dignified audacity.” ― Declan Kiberd, The Guardian

“Both learned and readable . . . There have only ever been three important biographies of Joyce, including the present volume.” ― Edmund Gordon, The Sunday Times (London)

“This new book extends the record--and not only the record, but the entire epistemology of the Joycean discourse. Taking previous biographies and published records as a series of knowing but politicised texts, Bowker has restored Joyce to his contradictory, ambivalent humanity. Digging deeper into personal archives, Bowker explores the complex family background . . . [A] shrewd and highly readable biography.” ― Thomas McCarthy, Irish Examiner

“In James Joyce , Gordon Bowker does an efficient job of presenting the often bleak realities of Joyce's childhood. Since that childhood became the raw material of so much of his fiction, Mr. Bowker is wise to emphasize it . . . Mr. Bowker's endearing advocacy--‘when [Joyce] wrote, all boundaries fell before the force and sweep of his imagination'--is touching and . . . revealing of truth . . . This is a well-researched, accessible book . . . It is refreshingly free of the jargon of literary-critical theory . . . Ultimately, Mr. Bowker's biography leaves the reader with a picture that feels true--of a brilliant, somewhat broken but ineffably brave author who set out while very young to do something impossible and was willing to accept any consequence . . . Joyce is a powerful reminder that only one thing matters: the words on the page and getting them right. He worked hard at that task. It seems only fair that his readers might be asked to meet him halfway, as Mr. Bowker does, to his credit.” ― Joseph O'Connor, The Wall Street Journal

“Gordon Bowker . . . gives us a massive, intricate, contemporary take on Joyce, making use of newly discovered materials . . . Bowker . . . create[s] a sharp, memorable portrait of Joyce, particularly the youthful Joyce whose ‘merry comedic spirit,' along with ‘his brilliance, his wit and his amusing streak of contrariness' comes across vividly . . . [The biography] remind[s] us of the enormous talent and dedication [Joyce] possessed.” ― Floyd Skloot, The Boston Globe

“Gordon Bowker's new James Joyce . . . [is] a pleasure, for Joyce fans as well as those fascinated by writers' lives . . . Bowker writes knowledgeably and engagingly about his subject, clearly fascinated by how the life led to the words that survive it. Early on, he compares biography to confronting the wreckage of a deserted house. ‘Amid the chaos,' he writes, ‘we may catch a fleeting impression of what the place once was like when occupied, a presumption of lives lived, of memories stored and passions spent.' Here, he's found a life--and a mind--well worth a second glance.” ― Moira Macdonald, The Seattle Times

“Veteran writer Gordon Bowker's James Joyce: A New Biography is a deft and delightful left turn, a graceful avoidance of the sternly traditional approach to literary biography . . . Gordon Bowker walks through the deserted, century-old ‘rooms' of James Joyce's life, duly noting the location of the furniture, the details, the fabrics, which windows or doors are closed, which ones are open. He fingers the curios on the shelf, but, unlike Richard Ellmann before him, he dares to spin the gramophone, uncover the chair in the corner and try it out, see how it feels; he sits down, noticing the view from that corner of the long-dead room. He shares it with us, helps us see the life of a great writer . . . One of the strengths of Bowker's approach is his presentation of the roots and origins of the famous characters--Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, all drawn from the streets and people of Joyce's Dublin, his friends, enemies, relations. We know them now, we see them . . . It is Bowker's style and grace that illumines and enchants. You will be inspired to reread. Or first read. Finnegans Wake on the beach this summer? It could happen.” ― Barry Wightman, The Washington Independent Review of Books

“There are obvious autobiographical resonances throughout Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , and Bowker is helpful in drawing these out . . . Bowker carefully unpicks these characters, settings, and events from Joyce's work, both annotating the life fictionally and allowing biography to ‘foreshadow the work' . . . Describing Joyce's death in 1940, Bowker writes that ‘his condition deteriorated and he lost consciousness, waking only to ask that Nora's bed be placed next to his as his had been close to hers in the hospital once. ("He might die before his mother came," thought young Stephen Dedalus.)' Flights of biographical fancy like this one--where the writing serves as a direct substitute for the writer's thought--have a beautiful, mirror-like quality . . . Bowker . . . conjure[s] sparks.” ― Jenny Hendrix, The Christian Science Monitor

“Particularly during his account of Joyce's final two decades, Bowker provides useful updates to what Ellmann wrote, thanks to more recent biographies of Nora and Lucia Joyce, Stuart Gilbert's often catty journal and materials involving Ulysses publisher Sylvia Beach. Bowker also draws helpful connections between biographical details in Joyce's life and fragments of Finnegans Wake , where even the most intrepid and devoted Joyce reader can always use more help.” ― Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“Bowker's work focuses more on Joyce's inner life . . . As a biographer of Malcolm Lowry, George Orwell, and Lawrence Durrell, Bowker is well-placed to take on those English writers' high-modernist Irish predecessor and contemporary . . . The first half moves along at an efficient pace as many anecdotes demonstrate how Joyce applied everyday details that would be used decades later in his texts . . . Along the long way, Bowker corrects common misnomers such as the assumed Jewish identities of Reuben J. Dodd and Alfred Hunter, and he regales readers with bawdy and witty snippets from Joyce and his cronies, notably his ‘Mephistopheles' Oliver St. John Gogarty . . . Bowker's work is a necessary contribution to the study of Joyce, and should be welcomed by any serious student or scholar . . . The biography ends . . . poignantly; what emerges is the tale of a man whose books often brim with the mingled anguish and hopes of his fellow Dubliners and the milieu which paralyzed them first, and then their maker.” ― John L. Murphey, Pop Matters

“Gordon Bowker's biography, based on many new sources, must now be considered the definitive life of Joyce, and it is most welcome.” ― Tim Redman, The Dallas Morning News

“[An] engrossing new life.” ― Bill Tipper, Barnes and Noble Review

“For those seeking a terse account of the life, Edna O'Brien's James Joyce will do the job. For those wishing strictly literary criticism, John Gross's James Joyce is recommended. But for readers who want both in sufficient and up-to-date detail, nothing beats Bowker's book . . . Outstanding about Bowker are his judiciousness and readability on top of thorough research . . . Bowker's book becomes a paradigm of how brilliant fictional strategy works up bits of reality, how genius transfigures the givens of life . . . Bowker has further strengths, such as a dry wit that complements Joyce's own, frequently and hilariously quoted. Also keen psychological insight into such matters as Joyce's stupendous love-hate for his native Dublin . . . Joyce's entire life [is] deftly evoked by Bowker . . . I warmly suggest your reading Bowker's spellbinding biography.” ― John Simon, Uncensored John Simon

About the Author

Gordon Bowker has written highly acclaimed biographies of Malcolm Lowry ( Pursued by Furies , a New York Times Recommended Book of the Year), George Orwell, and Lawrence Durrell, and articles and reviews for The Observer (London), The Sunday Times (London), The Independent , The New York Times , and The Times Literary Supplement . He lives in Notting Hill, London.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (June 5, 2012)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 656 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374178720
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374178727
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.98 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.5 x 9 inches
• #10,093 in Author Biographies

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James Joyce

(1882-1941)

Who Was James Joyce?

James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet and short story writer. He published Portrait of the Artist in 1916 and caught the attention of Ezra Pound. With Ulysses , Joyce perfected his stream-of-consciousness style and became a literary celebrity. The explicit content of his prose brought about landmark legal decisions on obscenity. Joyce battled eye ailments for most of his life and he died in 1941.

Early Life and Education

Born James Augustine Aloysius Joyce on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland, Joyce was one of the most revered writers of the 20th century, whose landmark book, Ulysses , is often hailed as one of the finest novels ever written. His exploration of language and new literary forms showed not only his genius as a writer but spawned a fresh approach for novelists, one that drew heavily on Joyce's love of the stream-of-consciousness technique and the examination of big events through small happenings in everyday lives.

Joyce came from a big family. He was the eldest of ten children born to John Stanislaus Joyce and his wife Marry Murray Joyce. His father, while a talented singer (he reportedly had one of the finest tenor voices in all of Ireland), didn't provide a stable household. He liked to drink and his lack of attention to the family finances meant the Joyces never had much money.

Because of his intelligence, Joyce's family pushed him to get an education. Largely educated by Jesuits, Joyce attended the Irish schools of Clongowes Wood College and later Belvedere College before finally landing at University College Dublin, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a focus on modern languages.

Early Works: 'Dubliners' and 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

Joyce's relationship with his native country was a complex one and after graduating he left Ireland for a new life in Paris where he hoped to study medicine. He returned, however, not long after upon learning that his mother had become sick. She died in 1903.

Joyce stayed in Ireland for a short time, long enough to meet Nora Barnacle, a hotel chambermaid who hailed from Galway and later became his wife. Around this time, Joyce also had his first short story published in the Irish Homestead magazine. The publication picked up two more Joyce works, but this start of a literary career was not enough to keep him in Ireland and in late 1904, he and Barnacle moved first to what is now the Croatian city of Pula before settling in the Italian seaport city of Trieste.

There, Joyce taught English and learned Italian, one of 17 languages he could speak, a list that included Arabic, Sanskrit and Greek. Other moves followed as Joyce and Barnacle (the two weren't formally married until some three decades after they met) made their home in cities like Rome and Paris. To keep his family above water (the couple went on to have two children, Georgio and Lucia), Joyce continued to find work as a teacher.

All the while, though, Joyce continued to write and in 1914, he published his first book , Dubliners , a collection of 15 short stories. Two years later, Joyce put out a second book, the novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .

While not a huge commercial success, the book caught the attention of the American poet, Ezra Pound, who praised Joyce for his unconventional style and voice.

'Ulysses' and Controversy

The same year that the Dubliners came out, Joyce embarked on what would prove to be his landmark novel: Ulysses . The story recounts a single day in Dublin. The date: June 16, 1904, the same day that Joyce and Barnacle met. On the surface, the novel follows the story three central characters: Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife Molly Bloom, as well as the city life that unfolds around them. But Ulysses is also a modern retelling of Homer 's Odyssey , with the three main characters serving as modern versions of Telemachus, Ulysses and Penelope.

With its advanced use of interior monologue, the novel not only brought the reader deep into Bloom's sometimes lurid mind but pioneered Joyce's use of stream of consciousnesses as a literary technique and set the course for a whole new kind of novel. But Ulysses is not an easy read, and upon its publication in Paris in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, an American expat who owned a bookstore in the city, the book drew both praise and sharp criticism.

All of which only helped bolster the novel's sales. Not that it really needed the help. Long before Ulysses ever came out, debate raged over the content of the novel. Parts of the story had appeared in publications in the United States and the United Kingdom, the book was banned for several years after it was published in France. In the United States, Ulysses 's supposed obscenity prompted the Post Office to confiscate issues of the magazine that had published Joyce's work. Fines were levied against the editors, and a censorship battle was waged that only further hyped the novel.

Still, the book found its way into the hands of eager American and British readers, who managed to get hold of bootlegged copies of the novel. In the United States, the ban came to a head in 1932 when in New York City Customs Agents seized copies of the book that had been sent to Random House, which wanted to publish the book.

The case made its way to court where, in 1934, Judge John M. Woolsey came down in favor of the publishing company by declaring that Ulysses was not pornographic. American readers were free to read the book. In 1936, British fans of Joyce were allowed to do the same.

While he sometimes resented the attention Ulysses brought him, Joyce saw his days as a struggling writer come to an end with the book's publication. It hadn't been an easy road. During World War I, Joyce had moved his family to Zurich, where they subsisted on the generosity of English magazine editor, Harriet Weaver, and Barnacle's uncle.

Later Career and 'Finnegans Wake'

Eventually, Joyce and his family settled into a new life in Paris, which is where they were living when Ulysses was published. Success, however, couldn't protect Joyce from health issues. His most problematic condition concerned his eyes. He suffered from a constant stream of ocular illnesses, went through a host of surgeries, and for a number of years was near blind. At times, Joyce was forced to write in red crayon on sheets of large paper.

In 1939, Joyce published Finnegans Wake , his long-awaited follow-up novel, which, with its myriad of puns and new words, proved to be an even more difficult read than his previous work. Still, the book was an immediate success, earning "book of the week" honors in the United States and the United Kingdom not long after debuting.

A year after Finnegan s' publication, Joyce and his family were on the move again, this time to southern France in advance of the coming Nazi invasion of Paris. Eventually, the family ended back in Zurich.

Sadly, Joyce never saw the conclusion of World War II. Following an intestinal operation, the writer died at the age of 59 on January 13, 1941, at the Schwesternhause von Roten Kreuz Hospital. His wife and son were at his bedside when he passed. He is buried in Fluntern cemetery in Zurich.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: James
• Birth Year: 1882
• Birth date: February 2, 1882
• Birth City: Dublin
• Birth Country: Ireland
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: James Joyce was an Irish, modernist writer who wrote in a ground-breaking style that was known both for its complexity and explicit content.
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• University College Dublin
• Belvedere College
• Clongowes Wood College
• Nacionalities
• Death Year: 1941
• Death date: January 13, 1941
• Death City: Zurich
• Death Country: Switzerland

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: James Joyce Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/writer/james-joyce
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 31, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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Silence, Exile and Cunning

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By Colm Toibin

• Aug. 17, 2012

If you walk in Dublin along Nassau Street and continue straight into South Leinster Street and then look up at the gable end of the red-brick building on the left, you can see the old sign that says “Finn’s Hotel.” The hotel is long gone, but an event that took place nearby in June 1904 gave an emotional context, a strange nourishing power, to James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses,” and the name of the hotel became one of the words he played with in the title of his novel “Finnegans Wake.”

Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom he would share his life, worked in the hotel. On June 10, 1904, Joyce, age 22, saw her on the street and spoke to her. She was 20 years old. They made a date for four days later, and when she failed to appear, they changed the date to June 16, when they went for a walk together. This date became Bloomsday, the day on which “Ulysses” takes place. Four months later the couple left Ireland together; they spent their exile first in Trieste and later in Paris and finally in Zurich, where Joyce died in 1941 and Nora 10 years later.

A specter haunts anyone embarking on a new biography of Joyce. It is the specter of Richard Ellmann, whose biography appeared in 1959. Ellmann had the advantage of being able to interview many people who had known Joyce, but he was also a formidable literary critic with a fine prose style. His book seemed to be the definitive biography. Since Ellmann’s book appeared, however, more letters have come to light (his own revised edition, published in 1982, made use of some of them), and other biographers have set to work on the figures around Joyce, most notably Brenda Maddox in “Nora” and Carol Loeb Shloss in her biography of Joyce’s troubled daughter, Lucia. Also, in his book “The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904-1920,” John McCourt succeeded in reinterpreting that intriguing city, where many languages were spoken and many races mixed, and what it meant for a young Irishman in the early years of the 20th century.

There was also the feeling that while Ellmann admired the work and the dedication of the artist, he was less happy with the way Joyce handled money and dealt with his family. In a new biography, “James Joyce,” Gordon Bow­ker also charts his subject’s spendthrift habits and financial fecklessness, but with greater understanding. He disapproves of something else, however: Joyce’s sexual openness. He finds Joyce’s letters to Nora, written from Dublin in 1909, “pornographic.” Joyce, he writes, “had acquired a taste for extreme forms of sexual debauchery, including excremental fetishes and sadomasochistic practices, acted out with a running commentary of obscene cries and whispers,” and he notes Nora’s “toleration of his four-letter excesses and overt lechery, and eagerness to share in his more deviant sexual fantasies.”

It may be the Irish Catholic in me, but I interpret these letters as signs of a great love between Joyce and Nora, proof of a wonderful sexual freedom in their relationship that made its way into the very core of “Ulysses” and appeared in more mysterious ways in “Finnegans Wake.”

Bowker, who has written biographies of Malcolm Lowry and George Orwell, concentrates on seamless storytelling rather than constant displays of literary judgments or summaries of plots. The story is one of a constant battle against publishers and censors and Joyce’s fierce belief in his art as his eyesight failed, as family problems became more intense and as he continued working on his last book, “Finnegans Wake.” While Joyce himself emerges from these pages as oddly heroic in his seriousness and perseverance, he is also presented as an egotistical genius causing damage to those around him almost by necessity.

Those who came to his rescue, who understood his importance and tolerated his single-mindedness, seem more deserving of our sympathy. Certainly, Harriet Shaw Weaver, the Englishwoman who bankrolled him and read work in progress and dealt with his myriad problems between 1914 and his death, emerges here as a woman of intelligence, patience and immense generosity. Also, in the few years when Joyce most needed his support, Ezra Pound recognized his talent and did everything he could to make him known to the world, as did Sylvia Beach, who first published “Ulysses.”

It took more than eight years for “Dubliners,” Joyce’s collection of stories, to find a publisher willing to take the risk of bringing out a book with images and phrases that could have led to prosecution. So, too, it took more than a decade for “Ulysses,” after its initial publication in Paris, to become freely available in the English-speaking world. The enemies were not only the censors, but snobbish elements in the literary community itself, including Prof. John Pentland Mahaffy of Trinity College Dublin, who said, “James Joyce is a living argument in defense of my contention that it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigines of this island — for the corner boys who spit into the Liffey.” Or Virginia Woolf, who noted in her diary that she found “Ulysses” an “illiterate, underbred book . . . the book of a self-taught working man.” Or Edmund Gosse: “He is of course not entirely without talent, but he is a literary charlatan of the extremest order.”

The problem Bowker has in dealing with Joyce’s life between the publication of “Ulysses” in 1922 and “Finnegans Wake” 17 years later is that so much that happened is so well documented. This includes the battles over “Ulysses,” the slow decline of Joyce’s daughter into mental illness, the large number of eye operations that Joyce underwent, the holidays, the spending sprees, the many dinners and singing parties, and the work on “Finnegans Wake.”

It is easy to see why Bowker, who uses lines from “Finnegans Wake” to throw light on the life in a useful but sporadic way throughout the book, wishes to dwell on personal rather than artistic questions in the later chapters. To attempt to interweave the dream life and the imaginative energy, not to speak of the sheer difficulty, of “Finnegans Wake” into the daily life of the author would be very difficult indeed. It should be said that Ellmann did not much attempt this either.

Thus we get the later Joyce, the artist working in the 1920s and ’30s, as a broken, sad, drunken egotist rather than someone trying to reinvent the whole idea of narrative fiction. We get Bowker’s suggestion of “a strangely vampiric presence . . . at the heart of a family” rather than a portrait of a great creator, an exemplary imaginative spirit. It is perhaps a problem at the very root of the method of any biographer that we can learn that in 1924 Joyce “was working nonstop from 8 a.m. to 12:30 and from 2 to 8 p.m.” on his novel, but we can never know what was happening during those hours unless we look at the actual drafts of the work, or indeed the finished book. The distance between Joyce the man suffering and Joyce magisterial at his desk seems large and mysterious. The story of his life, told here with verve and pace, nonetheless remains a fascinating version of making it new under the most severe pressures.

JAMES JOYCE

A new biography.

By Gordon Bowker

Illustrated. 608 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.

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Biography of James Joyce, Influential Irish Novelist

Eccentric Author of Ulysses Changed Literature Forever

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James Joyce (February 2, 1882 - January 13, 1941) was an Irish novelist who is widely considered to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. His novel Ulysses was controversial when published in 1922 and was banned in many locations, yet it has become one of the most discussed and studied books over the past century.

Born in Dublin, Joyce grew up in Ireland and is considered the quintessential Irish writer, yet he often rejected his homeland. He spent most of his adult life living on the European continent, obsessing over Ireland while creating in Ulysses a portrait of Irish life as experienced by Dublin's residents during one particular day, June 16, 1904.

Fast Facts: James Joyce

• Full Name: James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
• Known For: Innovative and highly influential Irish writer. Author of novels, short stories, and poetry
• Born: February 2, 1882 in Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland
• Parents: John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray
• Died: January 13, 1941 in Zurich, Switzerland
• Education: University College Dublin
• Movement: Modernism
• Selected Works: Dubliners , A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Ulysses , Finnegans Wake .
• Spouse: Nora Barnacle Joyce
• Children: son Giorgio and daughter Lucia
• Notable Quote: "When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove." (Lecture Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages )

James Joyce was born February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a Dublin suburb. His parents, John and Mary Jane Murray Joyce, were both musically talented, a trait which was passed along to their son. The family was large, with James the oldest of ten children who survived childhood.

The Joyces were part of an emerging Irish nationalist middle class of the late 1800s, Catholics who identified with the politics of Charles Stewart Parnell and expected the eventual home rule of Ireland. Joyce's father had a job as a tax collector, and the family was secure until the early 1890s, when his father lost his job, possibly because of a drinking problem. The family began to slide into financial insecurity.

As a child, Joyce was educated by Irish Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College in Kildare, Ireland, and later at Belvedere College in Dublin (through some family connections he was able to attend at reduced tuition). He eventually attended University College Dublin, focusing on philosophy and languages. Following his graduation in 1902 he traveled to Paris, intent on pursuing medical studies.

Joyce found he could not afford the fees for the schooling he sought, but he stayed in Paris and subsisted on money earned teaching English, writing articles, and with money occasionally sent to him by relatives back in Ireland. After a few months in Paris, he received an urgent telegram in May 1903 calling him back to Dublin as his mother was ill and dying.

Joyce had rejected Catholicism, but his mother asked him to go to confession and take Holy Communion. He refused. After she slipped into a coma, his mother's brother asked Joyce and his brother Stanislaus to kneel and pray at her bedside. They both refused. Joyce later used the facts surrounding his mother's death in his fiction. The character Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man refused his dying mother's wish and feels tremendous guilt for it.

Meeting Nora Barnacle

Joyce remained in Dublin following his mother's death and managed to make a modest living teaching and writing book reviews. The most important meeting of Joyce's life occurred when he saw a young woman with reddish-brown hair on the street in Dublin. She was Nora Barnacle, a native of Galway, in the west of Ireland, who was working in Dublin as a hotel maid. Joyce was struck by her and asked her for a date.

Joyce and Nora Barnacle agreed to meet in a few days and walk about the city. They fell in love, and would go on to live together and eventually marry.

Their first date occurred on June 16, 1904, the same day during which the action in Ulysses takes place. By selecting that particular date as the setting of his novel, Joyce was memorializing what he considered a momentous day in his life. As a practical matter, as that day stood out so clearly in his mind, he could remember specific details while writing Ulysses more than a decade later.

Early Publications

• Chamber Music (collection of poems, 1907)
• Giacomo Joyce (collection of poems, 1907)
• Dubliners (collection of short stories, 1914)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (novel, 1916)
• Exiles (play, 1918)

Joyce was determined to leave Ireland, and on October 8, 1904, he and Nora left together to live on the European continent. They would remain fiercely devoted to each other, and in some ways Nora was Joyce's great artistic muse. They would not legally marry until 1931. Living together outside of marriage would have been an enormous scandal in Ireland. In Trieste, Italy, where they eventually settled, no one seemed to care.

In the summer of 1904, while still living in Dublin, Joyce began publishing a series of short stories in a newspaper, the Irish Homestead. The stories would eventually grow into a collection titled Dubliners . On their first publication, readers wrote to the newspaper to complain about the puzzling stories, but today Dubliners is considered an influential collection of short fiction.

In Trieste, Joyce rewrote a piece of autobiographical fiction he had first attempted back in Dublin. But he also worked on a volume of poetry. His first published book was thus his poetry collection, Chamber Music , which was published in 1907.

It ultimately took Joyce ten years to get his short story collection into print. Joyce's realistic portrayal of city dwellers was considered immoral by a number of publishers and printers. Dubliners finally appeared in 1914.

Joyce's experimental fiction proceeded with his next work, an autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . The book follows the development of Stephen Dedalus, a character much like Joyce himself, a sensitive and artistically inclined young man determined to rebel against society's strictures. The book was published in 1916, and was reviewed widely by literary publications. Critics seemed impressed by the author's obvious skill, but were often offended or simply puzzled by his portrayal of life in Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century.

In 1918 Joyce wrote a play, Exiles . The plot concerns an Irish writer and his wife who have lived in Europe and return to Ireland. The husband, as he believes in spiritual freedom, encourages a romantic relationship between his wife and his best friend (which is never consummated). The play is considered a minor work of Joyce's, but some of the ideas in it appeared later in Ulysses .

Ulysses and Controversy

• Ulysses (novel, 1922)
• Pomes Penyeach (collection of poems, 1927)

As Joyce was struggling to publish his earlier work, he began an undertaking that would make his reputation as a literary giant. The novel Ulysses , which he began writing in 1914, is loosely based on the epic poem by Homer , The Odyssey . In the Greek classic, the protagonist Odysseus is a king and a great hero who is wandering homeward following the Trojan War. In Ulysses (the Latin name for Odysseus), a Dublin advertising salesman named Leopold Bloom, spends a typical day traveling about the city. Other characters in the book include Bloom's wife, Molly, and Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictitious alter ego who had been the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .

Ulysses is structured in 18 untitled chapters, each of which correspond to particular episodes of The Odyssey . Part of the innovation of Ulysses is that each chapter (or episode) is written in a different style (as the chapters were not only unmarked but unnamed, the change in presentation is what would alert the reader that a new chapter had begun).

It would be difficult to overstate the complexity of Ulysses , or the amount of detail and care that Joyce put into it. Ulysses has become known for Joyce's use of stream of consciousness and interior monologues. The novel is also remarkable for Joyce's use of music throughout and for his sense of humor, as wordplay and parody are employed throughout the text.

On Joyce's 40th birthday, February 2, 1922, Ulysses was published in Paris (some excerpts had been published earlier in literary journals). The book was immediately controversial, with some writers and critics, including novelist Ernest Hemingway , declaring it a masterpiece. But the book was also considered obscene and was banned in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States. After a court battle, the book was finally ruled by an American judge to be a work of literary merit and not obscene, and it was legally published in America in 1934.

Ulysses remained controversial, even after it was ruled to be legal. Critics battled over its worth, and while it is considered to be a classic work, it has had detractors who found it baffling. In recent decades the book has become controversial because of battles over which particular edition constitute the genuine book. As Joyce made so many changes to his manuscript, and it is believed printers (some of whom could not understand English) made mistaken changes, various versions of the novel exist. A version published in the 1980s sought to correct many mistakes, but some Joyce scholars objected to the "corrected" edition, claiming it injected more mistakes and was itself a faulty edition.

Joyce and Nora, their son Giorgio, and daughter Lucia had moved to Paris while he was writing Ulysses . After the book's publication they remained in Paris. Joyce was respected by other writers and at times would socialize with people like Hemingway or Ezra Pound. But he mostly devoted himself to a new written work which consumed the rest of his life.

Finnegans Wake

• Collected Poems (collection of previously published poems and works, 1936)
• Finnegans Wake (novel, 1939)

Joyce's final book, Finnegans Wake , published in 1939, is puzzling, and it was no doubt intended to be. The book seems to be written in several languages at once, and the bizarre prose on the page seems to represent a dream-like state. It has often been noted that if Ulysses was the story of a day, Finnegans Wake is the story of a night.

The title of the book is based on an Irish-American vaudeville song in which an Irish worker, Tim Finnegan, dies in an accident. At his wake, liquor is spilled on his corpse and he rises from the dead. Joyce deliberately removed the apostrophe from the title, as he intended a pun. In Joyce's joke, the mythical Irish hero Finn MacCool is waking, therefore Finn again wakes . Such wordplay and complicated allusions are rampant through more than 600 pages of the book.

As might be expected, Finnegans Wake is Joyce's least-read book. Yet it has its defenders, and literary scholars have debated its merits for decades.

Literary Style and Themes

Joyce's writing style evolved over time, and each of his major works can be said to have its own distinct style. But, in general, his writings are marked with a remarkable attention to language, an innovative use of symbolism, and the use of interior monologue to portray the thoughts and feelings of a character.

Joyce's work is also defined by its complexity. Joyce exercised great care in his writing, and readers and critics have noticed layers and layers of meaning in his prose. In his fiction, Joyce made references to a wide variety of subjects, from classical literature to modern psychology. And his experiments with language involved the use of formal elegant prose, Dublin slang, and, especially in Finnegans Wake , the use of foreign terms, often as elaborate puns holding multiple meanings.

Death and Legacy

Joyce had been suffering from various health problems for many years by the time of the publication of Finnegans Wake . He had undergone many surgeries for eye problems, and was nearly blind.

When World War II broke out, the Joyce family fled from France to neutral Switzerland to escape the Nazis. Joyce died in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 13, 1941, after surgery for a stomach ulcer.

It is virtually impossible to overstate the importance of James Joyce on modern literature. Joyce's new methods of composition had a profound impact, and writers who followed him were often influenced and inspired by his work. Another great Irish writer, Samuel Beckett , considered Joyce an influence, as did the American novelist William Faulkner.

In 2014, the New York Times Book Review published an article headlined "Who Are James Joyce's Modern Heirs?" In the opening of the article, a writer notes, "Joyce’s work is so canonical that in some sense we are all inescapably his heirs." It is true that many critics have noted nearly all serious writers of fiction in the modern era have, directly or indirectly, been influenced by Joyce's work.

Stories from Dubliners have often been collected in anthologies, and Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , has often been used in high school and college classes.

Ulysses changed what a novel could be, and literary scholars continue to obsess over it. The book is also widely read and loved by ordinary readers, and every year on June 16th, "Bloomsday" celebrations (named for the main character, Leopold Bloom) are held in locations around the globe, including Dublin (of course), New York, and even Shanghai, China .

• "Joyce, James." Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature, vol. 2, Gale, 2009, pp. 859-863.
• "James Joyce." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed., vol. 8, Gale, 2004, pp. 365-367.
• Dempsey, Peter. "Joyce, James (1882—1941)." British Writers, Retrospective Supplement 3, edited by Jay Parini, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2010, pp. 165-180.
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FAMOUS AUTHORS

James Joyce

James Joyce is undoubtedly the most influential writer of the early 20th Century. A master of the stream of consciousness technique, Joyce’s career defining work was the Ulysses (1922), a modern version of Homer’s Odyssey with three main characters similar to the ones in Odyssey. Ulysses has gained the reputation of being amongst the finest novels ever written.

Belonging to a big family, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland on February 2, 1882. He was the eldest son of John Stanislaus Joyce and Marry Murray Joyce who had 9 more children. His father was a singer whose disinterest and drinking led the Joyces to live in tight financial conditions. An exceptional child, James was very fond of writing and exploring literature. Not wanting to waste his talents, Joyce’s family encouraged him to get an education. He attended the Irish schools of Clogowes Wood College and Belvedere College moving on to earning a Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in modern languages from the Royal University in Dublin.

Joyce moved to Paris in 1902 where he pursued journalism and teaching. However, he returned to Dublin a year later upon receiving a telegram informing him of his mother’s critical condition but left again after her death, this time with Nora Barnacle, who would later become his wife. They settled in Trieste, Italy. He made a living by teaching English, one of the 17 languages he spoke.

Joyce’s first book entitled Dubliners (1914) was a collection of 15 short stories. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his second publication two years later was a novel. Although the books did not gain much recognition, they were noticed by American poet, Ezra Pound who acknowledged the author’s avant-garde style. Joyce started developing the foundation of his masterpiece Ulysses in the onset of World War I when he moved to Zürich with his family. The book was first published in France and was banned in the US and UK due to censorship rules where it became legally available in 1933 after much struggle and debate which only added to the hype of the book.

The publication of Ulysses ended the struggling days of Joyce and he moved to Paris with his family. In 1923 Joyce started work on his next famous work, Finnegans Wake. It was during this time that Joyce developed an eye condition due to glaucoma that would cause him to go near blind for some years. The first part of the novel was published in Madox Ford’s transatlantic review in April 1924 and was referred to as Work in Progress. The second and final part appeared in 1939. While some people called it a masterpiece, others criticized it for being a very difficult read. However, the book became popular and earned the title of book of the week both in the US and UK.

Joyce spent the last days of his life in Zürich where he moved after the collapse of France in World War II. He died on January 13, 1941. Today, the contribution of James Joyce to literature is celebrated every year on June 16 in Dublin where a statue of Joyce also stands on North Earl Street. The library at the University College in Dublin is also named after James Joyce.

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Where to start with: James Joyce

Always wanted to tackle the great Irish writer but not sure Ulysses is for you? This handy primer may just help you find a way in

T he books of James Joyce, along with Middlemarch and War and Peace, were among the titles that many vowed to read when the UK was plunged into its first coronavirus lockdown. Almost two years later, we now know that most of us filled all that time indoors with Netflix and Zoom quizzes rather than catching up on lengthy classics (apart from the author David Mitchell, who did read Ulysses in 2020 ). But with this month marking the centenary of Ulysses and 140 years since Joyce’s birth, perhaps now really is the time to familiarise or re-familiarise yourself with the influential modernist writer.

The entry point

Dubliners , a collection of frank, direct short stories that find moments of epiphany amid ordinary Irish life, was published in 1914 after nearly a decade of setbacks and censorship. The Dead, the story of a Christmas feast, is its finale and crowning glory. Complete with singsongs, political arguments and annoying drunken guests, its bittersweet apprehension of the fragility of celebration amid the passing of time has never been surpassed.

The autobiographical one

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road …” In the opening pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , a consciousness flexes and expands before our eyes. The language develops along with the young Stephen Dedalus as he begins to process his surroundings, from the mysteries of adult relationships to the brutal hierarchies of school. Joyce’s groundbreaking first novel goes on to follow his fictional alter ego as he grapples with the constrictions of Catholicism, family and social convention, and sets in motion his overwhelming need to escape his homeland and create something new.

If you only read one

“Apart from everything that you could possibly imagine, nothing much happens in Ulysses,” wrote Anne Enright in her recent celebration of its centenary. A young man and an older one wander Dublin, their paths repeatedly crossing, and a woman lies in bed thinking, on 16 June 1904. Each section pushes at least one new style of telling to the limits, as the narration flits from mind to mind. It is still revolutionary today, as well as being knotty, funny, humane and endlessly rewarding.

If you’re in a rush

“I prefer the poetry” would be a madly contrarian position, but the slim volumes Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach will give you snatches of Joyce in seconds. They provide a fascinating angle on his literary development and showcase his musicality, moving from traditional romantic swoons to a fragile, sincere beauty. Pomes Penyeach was my own gateway to Joyce, after my dad, never usually a spontaneous present giver, left a copy in my room when I was 12. The delicate fragments sparked my interest in the oversized paperback of Ulysses that loomed over the Len Deightons and Le Carrés on his bookshelf. Now we always have something to talk about.

The one to give a miss

Stephen Hero, an earlier, more traditionally realistic treatment of the material that became Portrait of the Artist, was rescued by Joyce’s sister after he threw it on the fire. As an unfinished novel, it has an unimprovable last line – “He remained behind gazing into the canal near the feet of the body, looking at a fragment of paper on which was …” – but today it’s one for the scholars.

The one to cheat a bit with

Joyce teased that his “big long wide high deep dense prosework” Finnegans Wake, 17 years in the writing, would “keep the critics busy for 300 years”. If you read the final words, “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”, then turn back to page one – “rivverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay …” – you are swept around again. It’s a Freudian family psychodrama crossed with the fall of man, taking in the history of Ireland, myths, legends, jokes, shame, desire, sin, cycles of time, death, chaos and resurrection.

Ulysses tracked a single day; Finnegans Wake, a single night. Governed by dream logic, it’s written in a dream language built out of multilingual puns, compounds and nonsense words: more than 600 dense pages of the stuff. Joyce said you should simply read aloud if you get stuck, but if that doesn’t work you could try A Shorter Finnegans Wake, abridged by Joyce superfan Anthony Burgess. Burgess’s friendly interjections, illuminating what’s going on, give the reader the confidence to wander alone and to stir in personal preoccupations and associations. For more than any other book, perhaps, Finnegans Wake is created afresh each time – as Joyce put it : “I give readers the opportunity to supplement what they read with their own imagination.” It’s always a Work in Progress, to use the original title; we all dream the Wake.

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James Joyce has an impressive body of work, among which includes his masterpiece, 'Ulysses'.

Quick Facts

Article written by Charles Asoluka

Degree in Computer Engineering. Passed TOEFL Exam. Seasoned literary critic.

James Joyce is one of the foremost pioneers and popularizers of the modernist avant-garde literary style of writing. His works have had a tremendous effect on Western literature.

‘Dubliners’ is a collection of short stories that, despite the lack of a unified plot, are arranged to reflect the passage through different stages of life. The first three tales center on young people. Focusing on young, single adults in their late teens to early thirties, the stories “Eveline,” “After the Race,” “Two Gallants,” and “The Boarding House” are among the best. The protagonists of “A Little Cloud” and “Counterparts” are both family guys with unfulfilling careers; both stories feature major characters who are well-established in adulthood. The remaining tales center on people in their early to late middle years, some of whom have more stable lives than others.

‘Dubliners’ has a clear structure with recurrent symbols that weave in and out of one another. The first three stories are told in the first person and focus on children. The following four stories deal with young adults and, like the other stories, are told in the third person. The tone and sensibility of the narration change to reflect the shifting perspectives of the protagonists. The final three stories discuss public life in politics, art, and religion. The fifteenth and last story, “The Dead,” is regarded as both the collection’s crown jewel and a great work of literature.

A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man

James Joyce’s autobiographical book ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,’ which was serialized in ‘The Egoist’ from 1914 to 1916 and then published as a book in 1916, is often regarded as the best bildungsroman ever written in the English language. Stephen Dedalus, who later resurfaced as one of the key characters in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ , is depicted in the book’s early years (1922).

From Stephen’s earliest memories, which are written in a simple, childlike language, to his ultimate decision to leave Dublin for Paris and dedicate his life to art, which is written in obscure Latin-sprinkled stream-of-consciousness prose, each of the novel’s five sections is written in a third-person voice that reflects the age and emotional state of its protagonist.

‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,’ which is set in Ireland at the turn of the century, charts the growth of Stephen Dedalus from a brilliant young student to a promising clergy student to an artist. It starts with his earliest childhood recollections and moves on to his momentous epiphany when he tells his closest friends that he has decided to pursue art instead of religious life. Combining his temperament, which influences his perceptions of the world, his relationships with others, and his interpretation of societal dynamics, Stephen makes his choice.

Joyce’s later works were predicted by the novel’s rich symbolic language and masterful use of stream of consciousness. The second installment of Joyce’s cycle of works chronicling the spiritual history of humans from Adam’s Fall through the Redemption is a radical modification of an earlier version titled ‘Stephen Hero’ . The cycle started with ‘Dubliners,’ a collection of short stories published in 1914, and proceeded with ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ (1939).

‘Ulysses’ takes place in Dublin on June 16, 1904, and Leopold Bloom, the protagonist, is a middle-aged Jew who travels throughout the city every day as part of his employment as an advertisement canvasser. While Stephen Dedalus, the autobiographical figure from Joyce’s first book, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ , is the younger protagonist of the book, Bloom is Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ character. While Joyce creates the young student’s character, Bloom is the main subject for the majority of the book.

Early on June 16, Bloom learns that his wife Molly, a singer, is having an affair with Blazes Boylan, a coworker. Molly plans to bring Boylan into their bed later that afternoon, according to Bloom. The Blooms’ 15-year-old daughter Milly is away at college studying photography. Molly gave birth to a son named Rudy ten years ago, but he passed away at the age of eleven days. Bloom frequently reflects on the similarity between his dead son Rudy and his deceased father Rudolph, who committed suicide several years prior.

The three chapters that make up Part I of ‘Ulysses’ initial section center around Stephen Dedalus. Dedalus, an academic and a teacher, had traveled to Paris from Ireland but was compelled to go back when learning that his mother was in critical condition. The early portrayals of Stephen suggest that he is guilty since he left the Catholic Church and disobeyed his mother’s pleas to pray by her bedside. Although Stephen has literary ambitions, his desire to pen Ireland’s first great epic is constrained by his worry that the island will make it impossible for him to achieve success.

In terms of style, ‘Ulysses’ is exceptional not just because it varies with each chapter but also because the narrative refuses to follow the tale; instead, it increasingly veers off course and engages in independent raillery of the reader above the heads of the characters. The story “wanders” in a way that honors the art, humor, and significance of discovery, drawing comparisons to other well-known wanderers like Odysseus, Bloom, the Jews, and Bloom’s concurrently faithful and adulterous wife, Molly.

Finnegans Wake

A complex book that combines a dream realm and the actual world is called ‘Finnegans Wake’ . Giambattista Vico, an Italian philosopher who lived in the 18th century, served as the inspiration for the novel’s central notion that history repeats itself. This is illustrated by the fact that the book concludes with the first phrase of the first paragraph. As a result, the first line and the last line are parts of the first line. Considering that the novel examines a number of disjointed story threads, the plot itself is challenging to follow. However, the juxtaposition of reality and dream, which is accomplished by varying the individuals and situations, creates the primary source of suspense.

Book 1 opens in the middle of a dream by a Dublin publican, or tavern keeper, who is named Porter and who does so fittingly. The tavernkeeper and his family reside above his bar in the Chapelizod neighborhood. It is close to Phoenix Park, a sizable park located immediately to the north of the Liffey River. Porter transforms into numerous personas throughout the night as his dreams play out, most notably Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker or other versions of the initials HCE, such as Here Comes Everybody.

What is the most popular book by James Joyce?

‘Ulysses’ is James Joyce’s most popular book. This hefty volume packs an array of literary styles that make it difficult to read by the average reader. Nonetheless, it is his most commercially successful book, as well as his critically acclaimed work.

What is the most accessible book from James Joyce?

‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ are notorious for being inaccessible and convoluted in style. ‘Dubliners’ is a collection of short stories loosely held together by a central theme, which can be digested by the average reader.

What were some of James Joyce’s lesser-known books?

Most of James Joyce’s lesser-known works include annotated versions of his magnum opus, ‘Ulysses’ . Some are also posthumous releases, which include: ‘Stephen Hero’ (precursor to A Portrait; written 1904–06, published 1944) ‘The Cat and the Devil’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1965) ‘The Cats of Copenhagen’ (Ithys Press, 2012) ‘Finn’s Hotel’ (Ithys Press, 2013)

Does James Joyce have a holiday?

On June 16, often known as Bloomsday in popular culture, Joyce’s work and life are commemorated in Dublin and a growing number of other places throughout the world. It is an obvious homage to the character of Leopold Bloom in ‘Ulysses’ .

About Charles Asoluka

Charles Asoluka is a seasoned content creator with a decade-long experience in professional writing. His works have earned him numerous accolades and top prizes in esteemed writing competitions.

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James Joyce Books In Order

Publication order of standalone novels, publication order of short stories/novellas, publication order of collections, publication order of non-fiction books, publication order of anthologies.

About James Joyce

When it comes to James Joyce, he’s a writer who for many needs little to no introduction, having been a highly acclaimed author during his lifetime. An Irish novelist known for transforming the English language and the fundamental understanding of words themselves, he was a writer ahead of his time. Experimenting with form, he would take the contemporary novel of the time and turn its head, not only playing with language but turning narrative on its head too. This unique approach has led to a whole host of literary innovations, as he would come to shape the face of literature throughout the twentieth century.

Joyce’s legacy for the literary world is undeniable, with many aspiring authors citing him as a critical influence. Setting the standard for years to come, hot debate surrounds his work to this day, with scholars and academics still finding layers of meaning within his texts. While his later work tends to get more complex, it remains hugely rewarding for anyone willing to dig a little deeper. Speaking on a range of different issues, he was a singular voice, and his outspoken nature would often get him into trouble.

Exuding a strong philosophy through his work, many praise Joyce as an astute observer of human nature. Featuring iconic characters, from Stephen Dedalus to Leopold Bloom, the people that populated his novels have stood the test of time since. Stephen Dedalus was an alter-ego for Joyce, allowing him to observe and chart his progress. Still recognized to this day, Joyce’s legacy resonates with readers from around the world.

Early and Personal Life

Born in 1882 on the 2nd of February, in Dublin, Ireland, at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Joyce grew up as the eldest of ten surviving siblings. His parents were Mary Jane ‘May’ and John Stanislaus Joyce, who brought him up Catholic while retaining Irish nationalist sentiments. Attending Clongowes Wood College in 1888, he went to the Christian Brothers O’Connell School after leaving in 1892.

Later, he would study at University College in 1898, during which time the Thomas Aquinas school of scholasticism would become a core interest. Following this, he would become a vital member of the many literary and theatrical circles within and around Dublin. Living in Dublin, he would later live in Zürich, continuing to write until his passing in 1941 on the 11th of January.

Writing Career

Starting his literary career in 1904, Joyce attempted to publish ‘A Portrait of an Artist,’ which got rejected initially. He would then take the opportunity to create ‘Stephen Hero,’ which would later be published post-humously in 1944 but would form the basis of ‘Portrait of an Artist.’ Writing a series of poems before releasing a collection of short stories in the ‘Irish Homestead,’ with these seeing the formation of his much-loved collection ‘The Dubliners,’ released in 1914.

It would be in 1916 that ‘A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man’ would come out, followed by ‘Exiles’ in 1918, looking at Joyce’s relationship with Ireland. Next, he would publish ‘Ulysses,’ which many would regard as one of his most important works, and later going on to write ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ in 1939 before his passing. He was also well known for writing letters and critical essays, many of which would also see publication, as his legacy lives on.

Beginning as a serialized piece in ‘The Little Review’ during March 1918, authorities suppressed two installments in January and May 1919. This controversy would lead to it being officially banned in the UK until 1936 for supposed obscenity and subversion, leading to it surreptitiously passed around after being published by Sylvia Beach. Gaining notoriety, it would, in time, achieve the status of a literary masterpiece, as it would finally reach the reading public at large.

Following the lives of ordinary Dubliners in 1904, Joyce based this tome loosely upon ‘The Odyssey.’ Charting a single day within the life of one Leopold Bloom, it follows him along with Stephen Dedalus and his wife Molly, as well as Buck Mulligan. There’s a whole cast of characters, too, as its sweeping lyrical narrative incorporates a lifetime into just one Irish day. As countless allusions and historical reference points weave through the experimental structure, each character represents everything.

While the book is highly complex, with many of the best academics still arguing over it to this day, the reading of the work remains hugely rewarding. Many adjectives describe the novel, including exciting, confounding, informative, and, ultimately, stimulating. This last aspect is likely to be the most important as, regardless of how someone interacts with the book, it’s what they get at the end of it all.

Finnegan’s Wake

This book would be Joyce’s final novel, published on the 4th of May 1939, just over a year before passing away. Suffering from illness while finishing it, the book stands testament to his status as one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century. There’s a wealth of meaning within its pages, as it provides a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ written in Paris over seventeen years.

Ulysses doesn’t have a ‘beginning’ or an ‘end’ in the traditional sense, lending its narrative a circular structure. Summarizing the plot itself is one for the ages, as the themes of fall and resurrection swim through a dream-like narrative. The nocturnal flow of consciousness represents Finn’s final thoughts as he lies beside the river Laffey, watching Ireland’s past, present, and future collide. While this was one interpretation Joyce himself gave as he was conceiving it, the book has taken on many different meanings, as it encompasses so much.

Again, this is down to the reader and their interpretation, as academics and critics continually debate it. With the names of characters and locations constantly shifting, it’s not a simple book to follow, but therein lies a large part of its appeal. The challenging nature of the book and how it confronts the very heart of language itself is what will ensure this novel’s legacy remains steadfast for years to come.

One Response to “James Joyce”

Thanks for so good informations about Joyce. Keep in touch.

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