James Joyce (1882-1941)

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin in 1881, where he received his first education from the Jesuits and attended University College in 1898. He rebelled against the moral, religious  and political conditions of his native city, both because of the dominance of the Catholic Church and the contradictions inherent in the nationalist cause.

He graduated in 1902 and left Dublin forever in 1904. So he spent the rest of his life in Europe. He settled first in Trieste with Nora Barnacle, and they had a son and a daughter, although they were not married until 1931; later in Zurich, in 1915, and in Paris, after the First World War. Joyce supported himself and his family for many years by teaching, but it was above all a writer.

 His first book of thirty-six love poetry, Chamber Music, came out in 1907 and was influenced by the Elizabethan and the English poets of the end of nineteenth century.

It was followed by the prose work Dubliners in 1914, a collection of fifteen short stories about his hometown's youth with faithful and unforgettable portraits of his fellow-citizens.

He wrote a play Exiles which was performed in Munich in 1918.

His next important work was the autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), based on Joyce's adolescence in Dublin. Here Joyce assumes the part of Stephen Dedalus, from the first Christian martyr St. Stephen and Daedalus of Greek mythology (who built the famous labyrinth). It is an evidence of his revolt against both Dublin and Catholic Church, and also of his interest to break away from the traditional vocabulary and rules of the language.

His masterpiece is Ulysses (1922), a long novel composed by 400,000 words and nineteen chapters. Here Joyce transforms Homer's Odyssey into the exploration of one day (and three main characters) in Dublin on 16 June 1904. This work is remarkable for the way in which Joyce uses the stream of consciousness technique to illuminate the characters of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. The book represents the whole of human experience by a language which had nothing at all in common with the traditional novel. Ulysses is also remarkable for the stylistic innovation known as the interior monologue, which had never before been used systematically in English, and which Joyce took from the French writer Édouard Dujardin. It claims to represent the stream of consciousness of characters'unspoken thoughts as they flow through their minds. The last chapter is one interior monologue without any punctuation and reading is very difficult. Ulysses was banned as obscene in England and the U.S.A. until 1937.

In 1927 published thirteen poetry in Poems Penyeach.

Joyce's last work, Finnegan's Wake (1939), is the summary of his litterary life. If Ulysses lasted one day, Finnegan Wake lasts one night and describes the dreams of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, his family and friends. Joyce knew many languages and in this work invents new words often formed by uniting words from the English and other     languages. The interior monologue has now pratically abolished all distinction between speech and inner thoughts, so that the greater part of the book becomes almost unintelligible.

In 1944 was published Stephen Hero, the complete tale of all his life.

In Ulysses and Finnegan Wake Joyce was influenced by Giambattista Vico's theory of history. But, above all, he adopted the theories of Freud and Jung, and these theories, partly directly and partly through Joyce, have influenced several contemporary English novelists. Joyce's refined and obscure language, which can be highly poetic as well as impenetrably, made him one the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century.

                    Nicoletta Di Ciano