James Joyce

1882-1941

During the nineteenth century England gave a somewhat grudging and uncertain approval to the abilities of contemporary foreign writers. But today when modern literature is spoken of, the term is naturally understood to refer to literary works in several languages and implies that great works in any one of these languages have been built, in part, upon an awareness and appreciation of literature in other tongues.

James Joyce, whose work is at once intensely local and universal, is a striking instance of this in­terdependence. He attributed his most famous in­novation in fictional method to a Frenchman, Edouard Dujardin, and he ransacked the world's languages and literatures for his own purposes, yet he never wrote anything of consequence that did not deal with his native Dublin and his life there. He is known for six works: a book of poems, a play, and four works of fiction — DuMiners (1914), A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Joyce came to manhood in an Ireland full of the stirrings of the Irish Renaissance, whose mos.t no­table figures were W. B. Yeats, George Moore, Lady Gregory, and J. M. Synge. Ireland was at this time trying rather self-consciously to achieve a sense of national identity, and, as part of this endeavor, an attempt was made to revive Gaelic as a national language. Believing this movement would separate Ireland further from the mainstream of European culture, Joyce was resolutely against it. He thought it superficial and sentimental and preferred to tell the bitter truth about Dublin; and since for him this involved telling the truth about growing up there, he planned Dubliners very carefully to re­flect the grim reality of Irish life. However, the stories in Dubliners reveal a certain lyricism as well: the wild cry of youth is in the book, muted but always seeking an escape from ugliness. Joyce said of this collection of short stories that it was written "for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness." This does not apply to certain passages in "Araby," but it is a good way to note the histori­cal position of Dubliners, for this book marks a sharp break with the techniques of nineteenth-cen­tury fiction. Each word and phrase has a precise function; incident and plot are minimized, the au- does not seem to be manipulating characters and emotions; form and theme are intimately con­nected. Lyricism springs not only out of the prom­ise that youth offers us all, but out of a strong sense of the power of art to shape a world no matter how wretched and shabby it may be. This power en­ables Joyce ultimately to triumph over the meanness that betrays itself in the impoverished emotions and the cadences of speech which are so faithfully recorded in Dubliners.

A Portrait of the Artist is much more directly au­tobiographical, although its hero, Stephen Deda-lus, is a "young man" on whom the writer looks back with sometimes ironical detachment. This young man renounces his family and country and sets out to "encounter the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." In French, conscience means "consciousness," and, if we combine this with the English meaning, we arrive at a notion of Joyce's ambition. He named his hero after Daeda­lus, the legendary Greek inventor who designed the labyrinth of Crete, was imprisoned to protect its secret, and then made wings to escape. Stephen similarly escapes from Ireland and takes flight, only to penetrate the labyrinth of Irish conscious­ness from afar and to judge all he has known.

Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist do not present the difficulties of Ulysses, a work that reflects the consciousness of its characters in a lit­eral sense: that is, the book is composed of the characters' internal monologues. This device, often referred to as "stream of consciousness" (see page 720), is the innovation Joyce said he had found in Dujardin. Although the use of stream of con­sciousness was a radical shift in fictional tech­nique, the aim of Ulysses was newer still. Ulysses is told chiefly through the consciousness of its principal figure, Leopold Bloom. Bloom's con­sciousness is made to embrace not only the multi­tudinous details of the life of the city of Dublin on just one day—June 16, 1904 —but the whole jour­ney of human beings from birth to grave. In this novel Joyce attempts to embody the significance of all human history, the meaning of the family, of manhood and womanhood, war, politics, and human achievement of every sort, but preemi­nently the achievements of those artists who have found in words the means of binding people to­gether. Words are Joyce's obsession, his delight, the source of his power. So wonderfully are words used by this great artificer that the whole world of Dublin springs up out of their sounds, colors, re­verberations, and linkages with each other. Almost nothing is seen in this book. We hear, rather, tor­rents of words that flow out into rivers of meaning.

The content of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Ar­tist, and Ulysses is in a sense all the same: Joyce's childhood and youth in Dublin. It is no surprise, therefore, to learn that his final achievement, Fin-negans Wake, is also based on Dublin. In this book, however, the artificer is no longer content with ex­isting words; he takes apart, combines, and re­builds words into a pattern of meanings that no single language alone (but all languages taken to­gether) affords. Joyce was a linguist who for many years earned his living by teaching English to for­eigners. He knew Latin, Italian, French, German, and numerous other tongues, and in this final work drew upon all his knowledge.

As Ulysses is an account of a day, Finnegans Wake is the account of a night, or rather a night dreamed by a man in whose consciousness all recorded history finds a meaning and a home. It is interesting that wake is not only the Irish term for funeral, but a part of the verb to awaken. Thus the novel is concerned with the death and rebirth of Finnegan, builder of cities and a Dublin bricklayer, a compound of all the heroes of myth. Full of riddles, allusions, and ambiguities, it is a tremen­dous performance, a book about everything.

Joyce spent most of his adult life trying to make sense of an environment that must have been hard for a youngster to endure or understand. His father, John Joyce, who had inherited some property, frit­tered it away. The family kept moving to meaner quarters, and the father, who was jovial, savage, ex­travagantly affectionate, and brutal by turns, was more likely to come home drunk than with food for his family. John Joyce had been devoted to Charles Stewart Parnell, the advocate of Irish free­dom, and his betrayal and death affected both the elder Joyce and his son James deeply.

Joyce's mother tried to hold the large family to­gether. After her death, Joyce finally fled Dublin for good, in the company of Nora Barnacle, the beautiful and maternal woman who was to become his wife. The mileposts in the years that followed are the names of the cities in which Joyce succes­sively lived, the publication of the books over which he labored for years, the gradual deterio­ration of his always poor eyesight, and the names of the patrons who gave him the financial freedom which he needed in order to write. Joyce acquired his first patron himself by getting his steady, re­sponsible brother, Stanislaus, to share (and help support) his household in Trieste, where he had settled as a teacher of English at the Berlitz School. On the surface his life seemed to be one of improvi­dence very much like his father's, but in fact it was centered wholly on his writing. World War I forced him to Switzerland, where he remained until he was able to move to Paris in 1920. There he lived through the triumphant period of the publication of Ulysses. Driven again to Switzerland by the Nazi occupation of France, he died in 1941, nearly blind and almost worn out by a combination of hard work and hard living. Joyce lived in an atmo­sphere of conspiracy at times. He was quick to feel insulted and equally quick to return defiance to the world. At other times he was full of gaiety and a delightful companion. But, in reviewing his trou­bled life, the most vivid picture is that of a man fiercely guarding his talent and doing the work that he knew he alone could do.