James Joyce


James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (February 2, 1882 - January 13, 1941) was an
expatriate Irish writer and poet, and is widely considered one of the most
significant writers of the 20th century.

Life

James Joyce was born into a well-off Catholic family in Dublin which
suffered numerous setbacks and slid into poverty. He studied literature at
University College Dublin, where he rejected Catholicism.

Joyce made his first visit to Paris in 1902 to be part of the growing artist
movement in Montparnasse and Montmartre at the time. He left the city in
1904 to return to Ireland as his mother was dying. He met Nora Barnacle, a
chambermaid, on June 16th of the same year and later the pair went into
"exile" (his only play was titled Exiles) to spend the rest of his life on
the Continent. He returned to Paris in 1920 and, apart from two visits to
Ireland, would remain there for the next twenty years until just before his
death in 1941.

His Irish experiences are essential to his writings, and provide all of the
settings for his fiction and much of their subject matter. The early volume
of short stories, Dubliners, is a penetrating analysis of the stagnation and
paralysis of Dublin society. The stories are epiphanies, a word used
particularly by Joyce, by which he meant a sudden consciousness of the
"soul" of a thing.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, largely autobiographical, shows the
process of attaining maturity and self-consciousness by a young gifted man.
The main character is Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's representation of himself. In
this novel some glimpses of Joyce's later techniques are evident, in the use
of interior monologue and in the concern with the psychic rather than
external reality.

In Ulysses, Joyce employs stream of consciousness, parody, jokes, and
virtually every other literary technique to present his characters. The
action of the novel, which takes place in a single day, June 16, 1904, sets
the ancient myth of Ulysses, Penelope and Telemachus in modern Dublin and
represents them in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and
Stephen Dedalus, parodically contrasted with their lofty models. The book
explores various areas of Dublin life, dwelling on its squalor and monotony.

Joyce's method of stream of consciousness, literary allusions and free dream
associations was pushed to the limit in Finnegans Wake, which abandoned all
conventions of plot and character construction, and is written in a peculiar
and obscure language, based mainly on complex multi-level puns. (His
approach here is similar to, but far more extensive than, that used by Lewis
Carroll in "Jabberwocky".)

This series of works makes up a volume of short stories and three novels,
all three of which would be named as part of the 100 best English-language
novels of the 20th century by the editorial board of the American Modern
Library. In their selection, the board chose Ulysses as #1 book of the
century and his other two novels as #3 and #77.

   * Dubliners (1914)
   * A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
   * Ulysses (1922)
   * Finnegans Wake (1939)

He also wrote a play and two collections of poetry:

   * Exiles — the play
   * Chamber music
   * Pomes Penyeach

Joyce's work has been subject to intense scrutiny by scholars of all types,
and he is one of the most noted writers of the twentieth century. Finnegans
Wake is the source of the physicist's word "quark", the name of one of the
main kinds of elementary particles. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida
has written a book on the use of language in Ulysses, and the American
philsopher Donald Davidson has written similarly on Finnegans Wake in
comparison with Lewis Carroll. Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges often
drew on Joyce as well.

James Joyce died on January 13, 1941 at Zurich, Switzerland and is buried in
the Fluntern Cemetery, in Zurich with his wife, Nora.

The life of Joyce is celebrated annually on June 16, Bloomsday, in Dublin
and in an increasing number of cities worldwide.

Quotations

from Joyce

   * "Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an
     esthetic end." — Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as
     a Young Man
   * "They lived and laughed and loved and left." — Finnegans Wake
   * The end of Molly Bloom's Soliloquy, the last words in Ulysses (and
     perhaps the best-known):
          "yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used
          or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish
          wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked
          him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes
          to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him
          yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all
          perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I
          will Yes."

about Joyce

   * "James Joyce — an essentially private man who wished his total
     indifference to public notice to be universally recognized." —
     Tom Stoppard