Background

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, Ireland. He was the eldest of ten surviving siblings; two died of typhoid. His father, John Stanislaus Joyce, an amateur actor and popular tenor, was employed first in a Dublin distillery, then as tax collector for the city of Dublin. His mother, Mary Jane Murray Joyce, was a gifted pianist.

Education

Joyce was educated entirely in Jesuit schools in Ireland: Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, Belvedere College in Dublin, and University College, where he excelled in philosophy and languages (he mastered Norwegian in order to read Henrik Ibsen's plays in the original). After his graduation in 1902, he left Ireland in a self-imposed exile that lasted for the rest of his life.

Career

In 1902, Joyce left Ireland in a self-imposed exile that lasted for the rest of his life. He returned briefly in 1903 for his mother's last illness but left for Paris in 1904 after her death, taking with him Nora Barnacle, his future wife.

Until 1915 he taught English in Trieste, then moved to Zurich with his wife and two children. In 1920 they settled in Paris, living in virtual poverty even after the successful publication of Ulysses in 1922. The intervention of literary friends such as Ezra Pound secured for Joyce some much-needed financial assistance from the British government.

Although his fame rests upon his fiction, Joyce's first published work was a volume of 36 lyric poems, Chamber Music (1907). His Collected Poems (including Poems Penyeach and Ecce Puer) appeared in 1938. Much of his fiction is lyrical and autobiographical in nature and shows the influence of his musical studies, his discipline as a poet, and his Jesuit training. Even though he cut himself off from his country, his family, and his Church, these three are the basis upon which he structured his art. The city of Dublin, in particular, provided Joyce with a universal symbol; for him the heart of Dublin was "the heart of all the cities of the world," a means of showing that "in the particular is contained the universal."

Dubliners (1914) is a collection of 15 short stories completed in 1904 but delayed in publication because of censorship problems, which arose from a suspected slur against the reigning monarch, Edward VII. Among various devices such as symbolism, motifs (paralysis, death, isolation, failure of love), mythic journeys, and quests for a symbolic grail which is never there, Joyce employs his literary invention, the epiphany.

Ulysses (1922), generally considered Joyce's most mature work, is patterned on Homer's Odyssey. Each of the 18 chapters corresponds loosely with an episode in the Greek epic, but there are echoes of Joyce's other models, Dante's Inferno and Goethe's Faust, among other sources. Joyce's technical innovations, particularly his extensive use of stream of consciousness, his experiments with form, and his unusually frank subject matter and language made Ulysses an important milestone in the development of the modern novel.

Finnegans Wake (1939) is the most difficult of all Joyce's works. The novel has no evident narrative or plot and relies upon sound, rhythm of language, and verbal puns to present a surface beneath which meanings lurk. Considered a novel by most critics, it has been called a poem by some, a nightmare by others. Joyce called his final book a "nightmaze."

With the outbreak of World War II, he and his family fled, on borrowed money, from France to Switzerland, leaving a daughter in a sanatorium in occupied France.

On 11 January 1941, Joyce underwent surgery in Zurich for a perforated duodenal ulcer. He fell into a coma the following day. He awoke at 2 a.m. on 13 January 1941, and asked a nurse to call his wife and son, before losing consciousness again. They were still en route when he died 15 minutes later, less than a month short of his 59th birthday.

Achievements

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  James Joyce contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. He is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, perhaps most prominently stream of consciousness.
  
  The work and life of Joyce is celebrated annually on 16 June, known as Bloomsday, in Dublin and in an increasing number of cities worldwide, and critical studies in scholarly publications, such as the James Joyce Quarterly, continue.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Chamber Music

    (The collection originally comprised thirty-four love poem...)

    1907
  • Cats of Copenhagen

    (The Cats of Copenhagen was first written for James Joyce’...)

    2012
  • Dubliners

    (This work of art reflects life in Ireland at the turn of ...)

    1914
  • The Dead

    (The Dead is one of the twentieth century’s most beautiful...)

    1914
  • Finn's Hotel

    (Finn's Hotel' is a serio-comic collection of ten 'epiclet...)

    2013
  • Pomes Penyeach

    (Pomes Penyeach is a collection of thirteen short poems wr...)

    1927
  • Ulysses 1922
  • Finnegans Wake 1939
  • The Cat and the Devil 1965

• bopk

  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

    (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a fictional re...)

    1916

Religion

The issue of Joyce's relationship with religion is somewhat controversial. Early in life, he lapsed from Catholicism, according to first-hand testimonies coming from himself, his brother Stanislaus Joyce, and his wife. However, Leonard Strong, William T. Noon, Robert Boyle and others have argued that Joyce, later in life, reconciled with the faith he rejected earlier in life and that his parting with the faith was succeeded by a not so obvious reunion.

Politics

James Joyce wrote his brother in 1905: "It is a mistake for you to imagine that my political opinions are those of a universal lover: but they are those of a socialistic artist."

Views

Joyce's intellectualism and his grasp of a wide range of philosophy, theology, and foreign languages enabled him to stretch the English language to its limits. The trial of his novel Ulysses on charges of obscenity and its subsequent exoneration marked a breakthrough in the limitations previously placed by social convention upon the subject matter and language of the modern English novel.

Quotations: "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

"Shut your eyes and see."

"And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes."

"All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday."

"Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead."

"Life is too short to read a bad book."

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."

"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."

"My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions."

"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."

"A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk."

"All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light."

Personality

With his upbeat and often inspiring personality, James Joyce made friends easily and attracted people from all walks of life. James was multi-talented and possessed a variety of diverse abilities.

Physical Characteristics: James Joyce was described by his brother Stanislaus as tall, thin, and loose-jointed, with "a distinguished appearance and bearing."

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Aristotle

• Writers

  Flaubert, Ben Jonson, Ibsen, Tolstoy and Shelley

Connections

In 1904 Joyce met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway city who was working as a chambermaid. He married her in 1931, she survived him by 10 years. The couple had two children - Giorgio and Lucia.

Father:

John Stanislaus Joyce

(July 4, 1849 - December 29, 1931)

John Stanislaus Joyce was a well known Dublin man about town.

Mother:

Mary Jane Murray

(May 12, 1859 - August 13, 1903)

Mary Jane Murray was the mother of James Joyce.

Spouse:

Nora Barnacle

(March 21, 1884 - April 10, 1951)

Nora Barnacle was the muse and wife of James Joyce.

Sister:

Eileen Joyce

(1889 - 1963)

Eileen Isabella Joyce was a sister of James Joyce.

Sister:

Eva Joyce

Eva Joyce was a sister of James Joyce.

Son:

Giorgio Joyce

(July 27, 1905 - June 12, 1976)

Giorgio Joyce was a son of James Joyce.

Brother:

John Stanislaus Joyce

(December 17, 1884 - June 16, 1955)

John Stanislaus Joyce was an Irish teacher, scholar, diarist and writer. He lived for many years in Trieste.

Daughter:

Lucia Joyce

(July 26, 1907 - December 12, 1982)

Lucia Anna Joyce was a professional dancer. Joyce was diagnosed as schizophrenic in the mid-1930s and institutionalized at the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich. In 1951, she was transferred to St Andrew's Hospital in Northampton, where she remained until her death.

Friend:

James Stephens

References

• James Joyce Richard Ellmann has revised and expanded his definitive work on Joyce's life to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, previously unknown letters, and much more.
  1959
• James Joyce: A New Biography In James Joyce, 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 Ellmann's magisterial tome of 1959. By intimately binding together the life and work of this singular Irish novelist, Bowker gives us a masterful, fresh, eminently readable contribution to our understanding both of Joyce's personality and of the monumental opus he created.
  2011
• James Joyce: The Artist and the Labyrinth
  1990
• James Augustine Joyce
  1949
• Some Aspects of the Life and Works of James Augustine Joyce
  1952