James Joyce was born on
February 2, 1882, in
Dublin, Ireland, into a Catholic middle-class family that would
soon become poverty-stricken. Joyce went to Jesuit schools, followed
by University College, Dublin, where he began publishing essays.
After graduating in 1902, Joyce went to Paris
with the intention of attending medical school. Soon afterward, however,
he abandoned medical studies and devoted all of his time to writing
poetry, stories, and theories of aesthetics. Joyce returned to Dublin
the following year when his mother died. He stayed in Dublin for
another year, during which time he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle.
At this time, Joyce also began work on an autobiographical novel
called Stephen Hero. Joyce eventually gave up on Stephen
Hero, but reworked much of the material into A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which features the
same autobiographical protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, and tells the
story of Joyce’s youth up to his 1902 departure
for Paris.
Nora and Joyce left Dublin again in 1904,
this time for good. They spent most of the next eleven years living
in Rome and Trieste, Italy, where Joyce taught English and he and
Nora had two children, Giorgio and Lucia. In 1907 Joyce’s
first book of poems, Chamber Music, was published
in London. He published his book of short stories, Dubliners, in 1914,
the same year he published A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man in serial installments in the London journal The
Egoist.
Joyce began writing Ulysses in 1914,
and when World War I broke out he moved his family to Zurich, Switzerland,
where he continued work on the novel. In Zurich, Joyce’s fortunes
finally improved as his talent attracted several wealthy patrons,
including Harriet Shaw Weaver. Portrait was published
in book form in 1916, and Joyce’s play, Exiles, in 1918.
Also in 1918, the first episodes of Ulysses were
published in serial form in The Little Review. In 1919, the
Joyces moved to Paris, where Ulysses was published
in book form in 1922. In 1923,
with his eyesight quickly diminishing, Joyce began working on what
became Finnegans Wake, published in 1939.
Joyce died in 1941.
Joyce first conceived of Ulysses as
a short story to be included in Dubliners, but
decided instead to publish it as a long novel, situated as a sort
of sequel to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses picks
up Stephen Dedalus’s life more than a year after where Portrait leaves
off. The novel introduces two new main characters, Leopold and Molly
Bloom, and takes place on a single day, June 16, 1904,
in Dublin.
Ulysses strives to achieve a kind of
realism unlike that of any novel before it by rendering the thoughts
and actions of its main characters— both trivial and significant—in
a scattered and fragmented form similar to the way thoughts, perceptions,
and memories actually appear in our minds. In Dubliners, Joyce
had tried to give his stories a heightened sense of realism by incorporating
real people and places into them, and he pursues the same strategy
on a massive scale in Ulysses. At the same time
that Ulysses presents itself as a realistic novel,
it also works on a mythic level, by way of a series of parallels
with Homer’s Odyssey. Stephen, Bloom, and Molly
correspond respectively to Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope, and each
of the eighteen episodes of the novel corresponds to an adventure
from the Odyssey.
Ulysses has become particularly famous
for Joyce’s stylistic innovations. In Portrait, Joyce
first attempted the technique of interior monologue, or stream-of-consciousness.
He also experimented with shifting style—the narrative voice of Portrait changes
stylistically as Stephen matures. In Ulysses, Joyce
uses interior monologue extensively, and instead of employing one
narrative voice, Joyce radically shifts narrative style with each
new episode of the novel.
Joyce’s early work reveals the stylistic influence of
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Joyce began reading Ibsen as
a young man; his first publication was an article about a play of
Ibsen’s, which earned him a letter of appreciation from Ibsen himself. Ibsen’s
plays provided the young Joyce with a model of the realistic depiction
of individuals stifled by conventional moral values. Joyce imitated
Ibsen’s naturalistic brand of realism in Dubliners,A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and especially in
his play Exiles.Ulysses maintains
Joyce’s concern with realism but also introduces stylistic innovations
similar to those of his Mo-dernist contemporaries. Ulysses’s
multivoiced narration, textual self-consciousness, mythic framework,
and thematic focus on life in a modern metropolis situate it close
to other main texts of the Modernist movement, such as T. S. Eliot’s
mythic poem The Waste Land (also published in 1922)
or Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novel, Mrs.
Dalloway (1925).
Though never working in collaboration, Joyce maintained
correspondences with other Modernist writers, including Samuel Beckett,
and Ezra Pound, who helped find him a patron and an income. Joyce’s
final work, Finnegans Wake, is often seen as bridging
the gap between Modernism and postmodernism. A novel only in the
loosest sense, Finnegans Wake looks forward to
postmodern texts in its playful celebration (rather than lamentation)
of the fragmentation of experience and the decentered nature of
identity, as well as its attention to the nontransparent qualities
of language.
Like Eliot and many other Modernist writers, Joyce wrote
in self-imposed exile in cosmopolitan Europe. In spite of this fact,
all of his work is strongly tied to Irish political and cultural
history, and Ulysses must also be seen in an Irish
context. Joyce’s novel was written during the years of the Irish
bid for independence from Britain. After a bloody civil war, the
Irish Free State was officially formed—during the same year that Ulysses was
published. Even in 1904, Ireland had experienced
the failure of several home rule bills that would have granted the
island a measure of political independence within Great Britain.
The failure of these bills is linked to the downfall of the Irish
member of Parliament, Charles Stewart Parnell, who was once referred
to as “Ireland’s Uncrowned King,” and was publicly persecuted by
the Irish church and people in 1889 for conducting
a long-term affair with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea. Joyce saw
this persecution as an hypocritical betrayal by the Irish that ruined
Ireland’s chances for a peaceful independence.
Accordingly, Ulysses depicts the Irish
citizens of 1904, especially Stephen Dedalus,
as involved in tangled conceptions of their own Irishness, and complex
relationships with various authorities and institutions specific
to their time and place: the British empire, Irish nationalism,
the Roman Catholic church, and the Irish Literary Revival.
