James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

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Quick Facts Born, Died ...

James Joyce
Joyce, c. 1918
Born	(1882-02-02)2 February 1882 Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland
Died	13 January 1941(1941-01-13) (aged 58) Zürich, Switzerland
Occupation	Novelist poet
Notable works	Dubliners (1914) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Ulysses (1922) Finnegans Wake (1939)
Spouse	Nora Barnacle
Children	Giorgio, Lucia

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Joyce was born in Dublin into a middle-class family. He attended the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, then, briefly, the Christian Brothers–run O'Connell School. Despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's unpredictable finances, he excelled at the Jesuit Belvedere College and graduated from University College Dublin in 1902. In 1904, he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and they moved to mainland Europe. He briefly worked in Pula and then moved to Trieste in Austria-Hungary, working as an English instructor. Except for an eight-month stay in Rome working as a correspondence clerk and three visits to Dublin, Joyce resided there until 1915. In Trieste, he published his book of poems Chamber Music and his short story collection Dubliners, and he began serially publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the English magazine The Egoist. During most of World War I, Joyce lived in Zürich, Switzerland, and worked on Ulysses. After the war, he briefly returned to Trieste and then moved to Paris in 1920, which became his primary residence until 1940.

Ulysses was first published in Paris in 1922, but its publication in the United Kingdom and the United States was prohibited because of its perceived obscenity. Copies were smuggled into both countries and pirated versions were printed until the mid-1930s, when publication finally became legal. Joyce started his next major work, Finnegans Wake, in 1923, publishing it sixteen years later in 1939. Between these years, Joyce travelled widely. He and Nora were married in a civil ceremony in London in 1931. He made a number of trips to Switzerland, frequently seeking treatment for his increasingly severe eye problems and psychological help for his daughter, Lucia. When France was occupied by Germany during World War II, Joyce moved back to Zürich in 1940. He died there in 1941 after surgery for a perforated ulcer, at age 58.

Ulysses frequently ranks high in lists of great books, and the academic literature analysing his work is extensive and ongoing. Many writers, film-makers, and other artists have been influenced by his stylistic innovations, such as his meticulous attention to detail, use of interior monologue, wordplay, and the radical transformation of traditional plot and character development. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, his fictional universe centres on Dublin and is largely populated by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there. Ulysses in particular is set in the streets and alleyways of the city. Joyce is quoted as saying, "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."^[1]

Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland,^[2] to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane "May" (née Murray). He was the eldest of ten surviving siblings. He was baptised with the name James Augustine Joyce^[a] according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church in the nearby St Joseph's Church in Terenure on 5 February 1882 by Rev. John O'Mulloy.^[b] His godparents were Philip and Ellen McCann.^[7] John Stanislaus Joyce's family came from Fermoy in County Cork, where they owned a small salt and lime works. Joyce's paternal grandfather, James Augustine, married Ellen O'Connell, daughter of John O'Connell, a Cork alderman who owned a drapery business and other properties in Cork City. Ellen's family claimed kinship with the political leader Daniel O'Connell, who had helped secure Catholic emancipation for the Irish in 1829.^[8]

Joyce's father was appointed rate collector by Dublin Corporation in 1887. The family moved to the fashionable small town of Bray, 12 miles (19 km) from Dublin. Joyce was attacked by a dog around this time, leading to his lifelong fear of dogs.^[9][c] He later developed a fear of thunderstorms,^[11] which he acquired through a superstitious aunt who had described them as a sign of God's wrath.^[12][d]

In 1891, nine-year-old Joyce wrote the poem "Et Tu, Healy" on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell that his father printed and distributed to friends.^[14] The poem expressed the sentiments of the elder Joyce,^[15] who was angry at Parnell's apparent betrayal by the Irish Catholic Church, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and the British Liberal Party that resulted in a collaborative failure to secure Irish Home Rule in the British Parliament.^[16] This sense of betrayal, particularly by the church, left a lasting impression that Joyce expressed in his life and art.^[17]

That year, his family began to slide into poverty, worsened by his father's drinking and financial mismanagement.^[18] John Joyce's name was published in Stubbs' Gazette, a blacklist of debtors and bankrupts, in November 1891, and he was temporarily suspended from work.^[19] In January 1893, he was dismissed with a reduced pension.^[20]

Joyce began his education in 1888 at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare, but had to leave in 1891 when his father could no longer pay the fees.^[21] He studied at home and briefly attended the Christian Brothers O'Connell School on North Richmond Street, Dublin. Joyce's father then had a chance meeting with the Jesuit priest John Conmee, who knew the family. Conmee arranged for Joyce and his brother Stanislaus to attend the Jesuits' Dublin school, Belvedere College, without fees starting in 1893.^[22] In 1895, Joyce, now aged 13, was elected by his peers to join the Sodality of Our Lady.^[23] Joyce spent five years at Belvedere, his intellectual formation guided by the principles of Jesuit education laid down in the Ratio Studiorum (Plan of Studies).^[24] He displayed his writing talent by winning first place for English composition in his final two years^[25] before graduating in 1898.^[26]

Joyce enrolled at University College^[e] in 1898 to study English, French and Italian.^[30] While there, he was exposed to the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, which had a strong influence on his thought for the rest of his life.^[31] He participated in many of Dublin's theatrical and literary circles. His closest colleagues included leading Irish figures of his generation, most notably, George Clancy, Tom Kettle and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington.^[32] Many of the acquaintances he made at this time appeared in his work.^[33] His first publication—a laudatory review of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken—was printed in The Fortnightly Review in 1900. Inspired by Ibsen's works, Joyce sent him a fan letter in Norwegian^[34][f] and wrote a play, A Brilliant Career,^[37] which he later destroyed.^[38][g]

In 1901 the National Census of Ireland listed Joyce as a 19-year-old Irish- and English-speaking unmarried student living with his parents, six sisters and three brothers at Royal Terrace (now Inverness Road) in Clontarf, Dublin.^[40] During this year he became friends with Oliver St. John Gogarty,^[41] the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses.^[33] In November, Joyce wrote an article, The Day of the Rabblement, criticising the Irish Literary Theatre for its unwillingness to produce the works of playwrights like Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, and Gerhart Hauptmann.^[42] He protested against nostalgic Irish populism and argued for an outward-looking, cosmopolitan literature.^[43] Because he mentioned Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel Il fuoco (The Flame),^[44] which was on the Roman Catholic list of prohibited books, his college magazine refused to print it. Joyce and Sheehy-Skeffington—who had also had an article rejected—had their essays jointly printed and distributed. Arthur Griffith decried the censorship of Joyce's work in his newspaper United Irishman.^[45]

Joyce graduated from the Royal University of Ireland in October 1902. He considered studying medicine^[46] and began attending lectures at the Catholic University Medical School in Dublin.^[47] When the medical school refused to provide a tutoring position to help finance his education, he left Dublin to study medicine in Paris,^[48] where he received permission to attend the course for a certificate in physics, chemistry, and biology at the École de Médecine.^[49] By the end of January 1903, he had given up plans to study medicine^[50] but he stayed in Paris, often reading late in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.^[51] He frequently wrote home claiming ill health due to the water, the cold weather, and his change of diet,^[52] appealing for money his family could ill-afford.^[53]

In April 1903, Joyce learned his mother was dying^[h] and immediately returned to Ireland.^[60] He would tend to her, reading aloud from drafts that would eventually be worked into his unfinished novel Stephen Hero.^[61] During her final days, she unsuccessfully tried to get him to make his confession and to take communion.^[62][i] She died on 13 August.^[64] Afterwards, Joyce and Stanislaus refused to kneel with other members of the family praying at her bedside.^[65] John Joyce's drinking and abusiveness increased in the months following her death, and the family began to fall apart.^[66] Joyce spent much of his time carousing with Gogarty and his medical school colleagues,^[67] and tried to scrape together a living by reviewing books.^[68]

Joyce's life began to change when he met Nora Barnacle on 10 June 1904. She was a twenty-year-old woman from Galway city, who was working in Dublin as a chambermaid.^[69] They had their first outing together on 16 June 1904,^[j] walking through the Dublin suburb of Ringsend, where Nora masturbated him.^[72] This event was commemorated as the date for the action of Ulysses, known in popular culture as "Bloomsday" in honour of the novel's main character Leopold Bloom.^[73] This began a relationship that continued for thirty-seven years until Joyce died.^[74] Soon after this outing, Joyce, who had been carousing with his colleagues,^[75] approached a young woman in St Stephen's Green and was beaten up by her companion. He was picked up and dusted off by an acquaintance of his father's, Alfred H. Hunter, who took him into his home to tend to his injuries. Hunter, who was rumoured to be a Jew and to have an unfaithful wife, became one of the models for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses.^[76]

Joyce was a talented tenor and explored becoming a musical performer.^[77][k] On 8 May 1904, he was a contestant in the Feis Ceoil,^[79] an Irish music competition for promising composers, instrumentalists and singers.^[80] In the months before the contest, Joyce took singing lessons with two voice instructors, Benedetto Palmieri and Vincent O'Brien.^[81] He paid the entry fee by pawning some of his books.^[82] For the contest, Joyce had to sing three songs. He did well with the first two, but when he was told he had to sight read the third, he refused.^[83] Joyce won the third-place medal anyway.^[l] After the contest, Palmieri wrote Joyce that Luigi Denza, the composer of the popular song "Funiculì, Funiculà" who was the judge for the contest,^[88] spoke highly of his voice and would have given him first place but for the sight-reading and lack of sufficient training.^[89] Palmieri even offered to give Joyce free singing lessons afterwards. Joyce refused the lessons, but kept singing in Dublin concerts that year.^[90] His performance at a concert given on 27 August may have solidified Nora's devotion to him.^[91] Although Joyce did not ultimately pursue a singing career, he would include thousands of musical allusions in his literary works.^[92]

Throughout 1904, Joyce sought to develop his literary reputation. On 7 January he attempted to publish a prose work examining aesthetics called A Portrait of the Artist,^[93] but it was rejected by the intellectual journal Dana. He then reworked it into a fictional novel of his youth that he called Stephen Hero that he labored over for years but eventually abandoned.^[m] He wrote a satirical poem called "The Holy Office",^[95] which parodied W. B. Yeats's poem "To Ireland in the Coming Times"^[96][n] and once more mocked the Irish Literary Revival.^[99] It too was rejected for publication; this time for being "unholy".^[100] He wrote the collection of poems Chamber Music at this time;^[101] which was also rejected.^[102][o] He did publish three poems, one in Dana ^[105] and two in The Speaker,^[106] and George William Russell^[p] published three of Joyce's short stories in the Irish Homestead. These stories—"The Sisters", "Eveline", and "After the Race"—were the beginnings of Dubliners.^[109]

In September 1904, Joyce was having difficulties finding a place to live and moved into a Martello tower near Dublin, which Gogarty was renting.^[110] Within a week, Joyce left when Gogarty and another roommate, Dermot Chenevix Trench, fired a pistol in the middle of the night at some pans hanging directly over Joyce's bed.^[111] With the help of funds from Lady Gregory and a few other acquaintances, Joyce and Nora left Ireland less than a month later.^[112]

On 11 January 1941, Joyce underwent surgery in Zürich for a perforated duodenal ulcer. He fell into a coma the following day. He awoke at 2 am on 13 January 1941, and asked a nurse to call his wife and son. They were en route when he died 15 minutes later, at age 58.^[320]

His body was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery in Zürich. Swiss tenor Max Meili sang "Addio terra, addio cielo" from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at the burial service.^[321] Joyce had been a subject of the United Kingdom all of his life, and although two senior Irish diplomats were in Switzerland at the time, only the British consul attended the funeral. When Joseph Walshe, secretary at the Department of External Affairs in Dublin, was informed of Joyce's death by Frank Cremins, chargé d'affaires at Bern, Walshe responded, "Please wire details of Joyce's death. If possible find out did he die a Catholic? Express sympathy with Mrs Joyce and explain inability to attend funeral."^[322] Buried originally in an ordinary grave, Joyce was moved in 1966 to a more prominent "honour grave", with a seated portrait statue by American artist Milton Hebald nearby. Nora, whom he had married in 1931, survived him by 10 years. She is buried by his side, as is their son Giorgio, who died in 1976.^[322]

After Joyce's death, the Irish government declined Nora's request to permit the repatriation of Joyce's remains,^[323] despite being persistently lobbied by the American diplomat John J. Slocum.^[322] In October 2019, a motion was put to Dublin City Council to plan and budget for the costs of the exhumations and reburials of Joyce and his family somewhere in Dublin, subject to his family's wishes.^[324] The proposal immediately became controversial, with the Irish Times commenting: " ... it is hard not to suspect that there is a calculating, even mercantile, aspect to contemporary Ireland's relationship to its great writers, whom we are often more keen to 'celebrate', and if possible monetise, than read".^[325]

Throughout his life, Joyce stayed actively interested in Irish national politics^[326] and in its relationship to British colonialism.^[327] He studied socialism^[328] and anarchism.^[329][al] He attended socialist meetings and expressed an individualist view influenced by Benjamin Tucker's philosophy and Oscar Wilde's essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism".^[333] He described his opinions as "those of a socialist artist".^[334] Joyce's direct engagement in politics was strongest during his time in Trieste, when he submitted newspaper articles, gave lectures, and wrote letters advocating for Ireland's independence from British rule.^[335] After leaving Trieste, Joyce's direct involvement in politics waned,^[336] but his later works still reflect his commitment.^[337] He remained sympathetic to individualism and critical of coercive ideologies such as nationalism.^[338][am] His novels address socialist, anarchist and Irish nationalist issues.^[341] Ulysses has been read as a novel critiquing the effect of British colonialism on the Irish people.^[342] Finnegans Wake has been read as a work that investigates the divisive issues of Irish politics,^[343] the interrelationship between colonialism and race,^[344] and the coercive oppression of nationalism and fascism.^[345]

Joyce's politics is reflected in his attitude toward his British passport. He wrote about the negative effects of British occupation in Ireland and was sympathetic to the attempts of the Irish to free themselves from it.^[346] In 1907, he expressed his support for the early Sinn Féin movement before the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922.^[347] However, throughout his life, Joyce refused to exchange his British passport for an Irish one.^[348] When he had a choice, he opted to renew his British passport in 1935 instead of obtaining one from the Irish Free State,^[349][an] and he chose to keep it in 1940 when accepting an Irish passport could have helped him to leave Vichy France more easily.^[351] His refusal to change his passport was partly due to the advantages that a British passport gave him internationally,^[352] his being out of sympathy with the violence of Irish politics,^[353] and his dismay over the Irish Free State's political alignment with the Catholic Church.^[354][ao]

Joyce had a complex relationship with religion.^[357] Firsthand statements by him^[ap] and Stanislaus,^[aq] attest that he did not consider himself a Catholic, though his work is deeply influenced by Catholicism.^[360] In particular, his intellectual foundations were grounded in his early Jesuitical education.^[361][ar] Even after he left Ireland, he sometimes went to church. When living in Trieste, he woke up early to attend Catholic Mass on Holy Thursday and Good Friday^[363][as] or occasionally attended Eastern Orthodox services, stating that he liked the ceremonies better.^[365]

Some critics have argued that Joyce firmly rejected the Catholic faith.^[366] He lapsed from the Church early in life ^[367] and Nora refused to allow a Catholic service when he died.^[at] His works frequently critique, ridicule, and blaspheme Catholicism,^[369] and he appropriates Catholic rituals and concepts for his own artistic purposes.^[370] Nevertheless, Catholic critics have argued that Joyce never fully abandoned his faith,^[371] wrestling with it in his writings and becoming increasingly reconciled with it.^[372] They argue that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are expressions of a Catholic sensibility,^[373] insisting that the critical views of religion expressed by the characters in his novel do not represent the views of Joyce the author.^[374]

Other critics have suggested that Joyce's apparent apostasy was less a denial of faith than a transmutation,^[375] a criticism of the Church's adverse impact on spiritual life, politics, and personal development.^[376] Joyce's attitude toward Catholicism has been described as an enigma in which there are two Joyces: a modern one who resisted the power of Catholicism and another who maintained his allegiance to its traditions.^[377] He has been compared to the medieval episcopi vagantes (wandering bishops), who left their discipline but not their cultural heritage of thought.^[378]

Joyce's responses to questions about his faith were often ambiguous. For example, during an interview after the completion of Ulysses, Joyce was asked, "When did you leave the Catholic Church?" He answered, "That's for the Church to say."^[379]

Joyce's work still has a profound influence on contemporary culture.^[412][ax] Ulysses is a model for fiction writers, particularly its explorations into the power of language.^[400] Its emphasis on the details of everyday life has opened up new possibilities of expression for authors, painters and film-makers.^[413] It retains its prestige among readers, often ranking high on 'Great Book' lists.^[414] Joyce's innovations extend beyond English literature: his writing has been an inspiration for Latin American writers,^[415] and Finnegans Wake has become one of the key texts for French post-structuralism.^[416]

The open-ended form of Joyce's novels keeps them open to constant reinterpretation.^[417] They inspire an increasingly global community of literary critics. Joyce's studies—based on a relatively small canon of three novels, a small short story collection, one play, and two small books of poems—have generated over 15,000 articles, monographs, theses, translations, and editions.^[418]

In popular culture, 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.^[419]