Joyce, James (Augustine Aloysius)
JOYCE, James (Augustine Aloysius)
Nationality: Irish. Born: Rathgar, Dublin, 2 February 1882. Education: Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare, 1888-91; Belvedere College, Dublin, 1893-98; University College, Dublin, 1898-1902, B.A. in modern languages 1902; briefly studied medicine in Paris, 1902-03. Family: Married Nora Barnacle in 1931 (lived with her from 1904); one son and one daughter. Career: Teacher in Dublin, 1903; English teacher at Berlitz schools in Pola, then in Trieste, 1904-15, 1918-21, Zurich, 1915-18; full-time writer from 1920; lived in Paris, 1920-39, and Zurich, 1940-41; suffered from glaucoma (nearly blind in later life.) Awards: Royal Literary fund grant, 1915; Civil List pension. Died: 13 January 1941.
Publications
Collections
The Portable Joyce, edited by Harry Levin. 1947; revised edition, 1966; as The Essential Joyce, 1948.
Letters, edited by Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann. 3 vols., 1957-66; Selected Letters, edited by Ellmann, 1975.
Poems and Shorter Writings, edited by Richard Ellmann and A. Walton Litz. 1990.
The Works of James Joyce. 1995.
The Complete Works. 1995.
Short Stories
Dubliners. 1914; edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz, 1969.
The Dead. 1993.
Novels
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916; edited by C. G. Anderson, 1968.
Ulysses. 1922; edited by Richard Ellmann, 1969; Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, edited by Clive Driver, 3 vols., 1975; Critical and Synoptic Edition edited by Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, 3 vols., 1984; corrected text, edited by Gabler, with Steppe and Melchior, 1986.
Anna Livia Plurabelle; Tales Told of Shem and Shaun; Haveth Childers Everywhere; Two Tales of Shem and Shaun; The Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies (fragments from Work in Progress). 5 vols., 1928-34.
Finnegans Wake. 1939; revised edition, 1950, 1964.
Stephen Hero (first draft of A Portrait of the Artist), edited by Theodore Spencer. 1944; edited by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, 1955, 1963.
Anna Livia Plurabelle: The Making of a Chapter, edited by Fred H. Higginson. 1960.
Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for Finnegans Wake, edited by Thomas E. Connolly. 1961.
A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, edited by DavidHayman. 1963.
The Cat and the Devil (for children), edited by Richard Ellmann. 1964.
Play
Exiles (produced in German 1919; in English 1925). 1918.
Poetry
Chamber Music. 1907; edited by William York Tindall, 1954.
Pomes Penyeach. 1927.
Collected Poems. 1936.
James Joyce: The Poems in Verse and Prose. 1992.
Other
Two Essays, with F. J. C. Skeffington. 1901.
James Clarence Mangan. 1930.
The Early Joyce: The Book Reviews 1902-1930, edited by StanislausJoyce and Ellsworth Mason. 1955.
Critical Writings, edited by Ellsworth Mason and RichardEllmann. 1959.
Giacomo Joyce, edited by Richard Ellmann. 1968.
Joyce in Padua, edited and translated by Louis Berrone. 1977.
Joyce's Notes and Early Drafts for Ulysses, edited by Phillip F. Herring. 1977.
Letters to Sylvia Beach 1921-1940, edited by Melissa Banta and Oscar A. Silverman. 1987.
The Lost Notebook: New Evidence on the Genesis of Ulysses, edited by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon. 1989.
James Joyce: Reflections of Ireland. 1993.
Translator, Before Sunrise, by Gerhart Hauptmann, edited by JillPerkins. 1978.
*Bibliography:
A Bibliography of Joyce by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, 1953; A Bibliography of Joyce Studies by Robert H. Deming, 1964, revised edition, 1977; An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Joyce by Thomas F. Staley, 1989.
Critical Studies:
Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress by Samuel Beckett and others, 1929, as An Examination of Joyce, 1939; Joyce's Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert, 1930, revised edition, 1952; Joyce and the Making of Ulysses by Frank Budgen, 1934, revised edition, 1960; Joyce: A Critical Introduction by Harry Levin, 1941, revised edition, 1960; Joyce the Artificer: Two Studies of Joyce's Methods by Aldous Huxley and Stuart Gilbert, 1952; Dublin's Joyce, 1955, Joyce's Voices, 1978, and Joyce's Ulysses, 1980, revised edition, 1987, all by Hugh Kenner; My Brother's Keeper: Joyce's Early Years by Stanislaus Joyce, edited by Richard Ellmann, 1958; A Reader's Guide to Joyce, 1959, and A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake, 1969, both by William York Tindall; Joyce (biography), 1959, revised edition, 1982, Ulysses on the Liffey, 1972, revised edition, 1984, and The Consciousness of Joyce, 1977, all by Richard Ellmann; The Art of Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, 1961, and Joyce, 1966, revised edition, 1972, both by A. Walton Litz; The Classical Temper: A Study of Joyce's Ulysses by S. L. Goldberg, 1961; Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of Joyce's Ulysses, 1962, Joyce: Common Sense and Beyond, 1966, and Afterjoyce: Studies in Fiction after Ulysses, 1977, all by Robert Martin Adams; Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, 1962, and Joyce's Ulysses, 1968, both by Clive Hart, and Joyce's Dubliners: Critical Essays edited by Hart, 1969; Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to Joyce for the Ordinary Reader, 1965 (as Re Joyce, 1965), revised edition, 1982, and Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of Joyce, 1973, both by Anthony Burgess; The Workshop of Daedalus: Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man edited by Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, 1965; The Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Joyce's Ulysses, 1966, revised edition as The New Bloomsday Book, 1988, and Studying Joyce, 1987, both by Harry Blamires; The Conscience of Joyce by Brendan O Hehir, 1967; Joyce Remembered by Constantine Curran, 1968; Joyce and His World by C. G. Anderson, 1968; Joyce: The Critical Heritage 1902-1941 edited by Robert H. Deming, 2 vols., 1970; Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning, 1970, revised edition, 1982, and The Wake in Transit, 1990, both by David Hayman; A Scrupulous Meanness: A Study of Joyce's Early Works by Edward Brandabur, 1971; The Ordeal of Stephen Dedalus by Edmund L. Epstein, 1971; The Early Joyce by Nathan Halper, 1973; Joyce's Ulysses edited by Clive Hart and David Hayman, 1974; Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of Joyce's Ulysses, 1974, and Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1982, both by Don Gifford; A Conceptual Guide to Finnegans Wake by Michael H. Begnal and Fritz Senn, 1974; Narrator and Character in Finnegans Wake by Michael H. Begnal and Grace Eckley, 1975; Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist by Stan Gébler Davies, 1975; The Exile of Joyce by Hélène Cixous, 1976; Approaches to Joyce's Portrait: Ten Essays edited by Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock, 1976; The Book as World: Joyce's Ulysses by Marilyn French, 1976; Epic Geography: Joyce's Ulysses by Michael Seidel, 1976; The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake by Margot C. Norris, 1976; The Joyce Archive (manuscript facsimiles), edited by Michael Groden and others, 63 vols., 1977-78; Ulysses in Progress by Michael Groden, 1977; The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom: Ulysses as Narrative by J. H. Raleigh, 1977; Third Census of Finnegans Wake: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles by Adaline Glasheen, 1977; Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist by Charles H. Peake, 1977; Joyce: The Undiscovered Country, 1977, Joyce, 1985, and Narrative Con/texts in Ulysses, 1990, all by Bernard Benstock, and The Seventh of Joyce, 1982, Critical Essays on Joyce, 1985, Joyce: The Augmented Ninth, 1988, and Critical Essays on Joyce's Ulysses, 1989, all edited by Benstock; Joyce's Pauline Vision by Robert R. Boyle, 1978; A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer by Louis O. Mink, 1978; Joyce and the Revolution of the Word by Colin MacCabe, 1979, and Joyce: New Perspectives edited by MacCabe, 1982; Joyce's Exiles: A Textual Companion by John MacNicholas, 1979; Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of Joyce by Europeans edited by Willard Potts, 1979; Who's He When He's at Home: A Joyce Directory by Bernard Benstock and Shari Benstock, 1980; The Art of Joyce's Syntax in Ulysses by Roy K. Gottfried, 1980; Annotations to Finnegans Wake, 1980, and The Finnegans Wake Experience, 1981, both by Roland McHugh; The Riddles of Finnegans Wake by Patrick A. McCarthy, 1980; Joyce's Politics by Dominic Manganiello, 1980; The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses by Karen Lawrence, 1981; Joyce's Cities: Archaeologies of the Soul by Jackson I. Cope, 1981; Joyce's Metamorphoses, 1981, and Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary, 1986, both by John Gordon; Joyce: An International Perspective edited by S. B. Bushrui and others, 1982; Understanding Finnegans Wake by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, 1982; A Starchamber Quiry: A Joyce Centennial Volume edited by E. L. Epstein, 1982; Joyce and Modern Literature edited by W.J. McCormack and Alistair Stead, 1982; Women in Joyce edited by Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless, 1982; Teller and Tale in Joyce's Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives by J. P. Riquelme, 1983; Work in Progress: Joyce Centenary Essays edited by Richard F. Peterson and others, 1983; The Aesthetics of Dedalus and Bloom by Marguerite Harkness, 1984; Light Rays: Joyce and Modernism edited by Heyward Ehrlich, 1984; Joyce by Patrick Parrinder, 1984; Joyce and Feminism, 1984, and Joyce, 1987, both by Bonnie Kime Scott, and New Alliances in Joyce Studies edited by Scott, 1988; A Companion to Joyce Studies edited by Zack Bowen and James F. Carens, 1984; Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French edited by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer, 1984; Joyce the Creator by Sheldon Brivic, 1985; Joyce and Sexuality by Richard Brown, 1985; Children's Lore in Finnegans Wake by Grace Eckley, 1985; Backgrounds for Joyce's Dubliners by Donald T. Torchiana, 1986; Joyce's Anatomy of Culture by Cheryl Herr, 1986; Assessing the 1984 Ulysses edited by C. George Sandulescu and Clive Hart, 1986; Joyce: The Centennial Symposium edited by Morris Beja and others, 1986; International Perspectives on Joyce edited by Gottlieb Gaiser, 1986; Reading Joyce's Ulysses by Daniel R. Schwarz, 1986; Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake by John Bishop, 1986; Joyce's Uncertainty Principle by Phillip F. Herring, 1987; Joyce's Ulysses: The Larger Perspective edited by Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thornton, 1987; Joyce's Ulysses: An Anatomy of the Soul by T. C. Theoharis, 1988; Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce by Brenda Maddox, 1988; Dreamscheme: Narrative and Voice in Finnegans Wake by Michael H. Begnal, 1988; Reauthorizing Joyce by Vicki Mahaffey, 1988; Dubliners: A Pluralist World by Craig Hansen Werner, 1988; Joyce and the Jews by I. B. Nadel, 1988; Ulysses: A Review of the Three Texts: Proposals for Alterations to the Texts of 1922, 1961, and 1984 by Philip Gaskell and Clive Hart, 1989; Ulysses as a Comic Novel by Zack Bowen, 1989; Writing Joyce: A Semiotics of the Joyce System by Lorraine Weir, 1989; Joyce: Interviews and Recollections edited by E. H. Mikhail, 1990; Joyce and the Politics of Desire by Suzette Henke, 1990; The Cambridge Companion to Joyce edited by Derek Attridge, 1990; Joyce upon the Void by Jean-Michel Rabeté, 1990; Re-viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism by Janet Egleson Dunleavy, 1991; Modernism's Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce by Christine Froula, 1996; James Joyce by Steven Connor, 1996; Reading Joyce Politically by Trevor L. Williams, 1997; The Sensual Philosophy: Joyce and the Aesthetics of Mysticism by Colleen Jaurretche, 1997; States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment by Vicki Mahaffey, 1997; James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses by Paul Vanderham, 1998; Joyce's Abandoned Female Costumes, Gratefully Received by Elisabeth Sheffield, 1998; Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon by Joseph Kelly, 1998.
* * *For a major novelist James Joyce wrote very few works of fiction, and among them there is only one collection of short fiction—Dubliners. His novels, notably Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, are immensely long. Even Dubliners might in some ways be seen as doubtful for inclusion in the short fiction category, as the 15 stories in the collection are closely linked to the point that they could be seen as a sort of disjointed novel. Yet Joyce is considered one of the most influential short-story writers of the twentieth century; Dubliners is an extraordinarily efficient machine for the control of the response of its readers, and it is a model of the economic presentation of meaning. Katherine Mansfield and Samuel Beckett are only two of the great writers of the century to owe a considerable debt to Joyce's technique.
The stories in Dubliners are collectively a portrait of the Irish capital (as Joyce saw it) at the turn of the century. They are linked thematically rather than by the repetition of named characters; for example, the death of the old priest in the first story ("The Sisters") is connected to the last story in the volume ("The Dead"), and numerous references to death run through the stories. In particular, the idea of paralysis in the first story, where the word is dwelt on by the young boy through whom "The Sisters" is focalized, hovers over the other stories. There is an element of self-portraiture in this boy—the first-person narrator of the first three stories—that must be interesting in the light of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and, although the other characters we encounter in the remaining (third-person) narratives are unconnected at the narrative level, there is a sense of overall structure conveyed by the fact that the collection starts in childhood and progresses through various possibilities of love, marriage, profession, political allegiance, and religion to the final tableau of stasis and mortality.
The stories, then, although they stand in their own right as miniatures of the Dublin scene, portraits of individual Dublin types in all their inadequacies, also reinforce each other in that they circle round the same topics. "The Sisters" is a boy's view of the failure and death of a priest. "An Encounter" is the same boy's view of what seems to be a sexual approach from a pervert who frightens him on a truant expedition with a school friend and then masturbates. "Araby" chronicles the boy's disillusionment when he finally manages to get to a bazaar where he expects magical delights but finds only vanity and frustration. "Eveline" shows a young woman unable to leave the dreary life that Dublin has made for her in spite of a promising offer from a young man. "After the Race" chronicles a night of "living" by a rich young Dubliner who is duped and outclassed by a quartet of foreigners (here the theme of the provinciality of the Dubliners is prominent). "Two Gallants" tells of a sordid encounter that earns one of the "gallants" half a sovereign for an evening's sexual encounter. "The Boarding House" pursues the theme of "love" by narrating the entrapment of a young man into marrying the daughter of his landlady against his own real wishes. In "A Little Cloud" an insignificant clerk with poetic pretensions meets a friend returned from success on the London press, and the meeting stirs ambition in him that is at once quenched by his wailing baby and his hard-hearted wife. "Counterparts" is the counterpart of "A Little Cloud": bullied beyond endurance in his dull office job, the hero takes revenge by getting drunk and beating his little son. "Clay" is a story of a grotesque and pathetic little woman who, although she has aspirations, meets only indifference and disappointment in her circumscribed life (and for whom death is foretold as the principal thing she has to look forward to). "A Painful Case" tells of failed love: the hero is incapable of committing himself to love offered just as he is unable to engage properly with the arts of politics, and he will remain "an outcast from life's feast." "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" presents (to the accompaniment of bottles being opened, as they are in many of these stories) the abject failures of Irish politics. "A Mother" shows how an artistic vocation can be nullified by a grasping materialism. "Grace" is a devastatingly ironic treatment of the Catholicism of Ireland with its tendency for details and emotion to replace clear thinking and truly religious behavior. And "The Dead" rounds off the whole sorry tale.
Joyce's Dublin, in this volume, is possessed by its past and by inertia; every word is carefully weighed so that the point is unmistakable. The first paragraph of "A Painful Case," for instance, seems to be a fairly neutral, even boring description of a Dublin bachelor, but our responses are controlled in detail; James Duffy lives in a "sombre house" looking over a "disused distillery" and a "shallow river," his furniture is largely black, iron, cold, unwelcoming, his books are ordered according to size, and everything is excessively neat and, ultimately, without life or warmth. Vocabulary guides us unerringly towards character interpretation, and this in turn creates story; in Joyce the line from linguistic detail to narrative meaning is direct. We are quite unsurprised when James Duffy fails utterly in the chance of life that he is offered in the shape of Mrs. Sinico, a passionate widow. In Joyce form is content; the language and even the grammar of Dubliners are the stories' meaning.
—Lance St. John Butler