Joyce, James (Augustine Aloysius) (1882–1941)

Irish writer. His originality lies in evolving a literary form to express the complexity of the human mind, and he revolutionized the form of the English novel with his linguistic technique which had a far-reaching influence on many modern authors. His works include the short story collection Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). Ulysses, which records the events of a single day in Dublin, experiments with language and parody, imitating and sometimes mocking different styles of writing. It combines direct narrative with the unspoken and unconscious reactions of the characters, which is sometimes known as the stream of consciousness technique. Banned at first for obscenity in the USA and the UK, it made a great impact and is generally regarded as Joyce's masterpiece. He is known as a major figure in the artistic movement of modernism.

Joyce was born in Dublin, one of a large and poor family, and educated at University College, Dublin. He showed strong literary tendencies very early in life and after graduating wrote a few stories but was unable to make a living. He travelled to Italy, where he taught English, accompanied by Nora Barnacle (1883–1951; his wife from 1931). In 1909 he returned to Dublin. Until this point, Joyce's only published work was a book of lyrics called Chamber Music (1907); his other verse appeared in Pomes Penyeach (1927). Dubliners was published after a nine-year delay caused by wrangling with publishers over their demands for excisions, while the partly autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was serialized by Ezra Pound in The Egoist (1914–15). At this time Joyce was under ‘free arrest’ in Austria, but was later allowed to go to neutral Switzerland where he lived in Zürich until the end of World War I. There he formed a company of Irish players who performed his drama Exiles (1918), modelled on Ibsen's work. In Zürich, Joyce's eyesight began to fail, and a few years after the war he moved to Paris, where Ulysses was published in 1922. Finnegans Wake, a story about a Dublin publican and his family, continued Joyce's experiments with language. Having worked in poverty for much of his life, and after enduring numerous eye operations, Joyce returned to Zürich in 1940, but died soon afterwards.

Ulysses relates the mental and physical history of Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertisement canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, scholar-philosopher, during a single day in Dublin. Bloom's day is paralleled to the wanderings of Odysseus in the Homeric epic. Joyce claimed to have discovered the literary device of the interior monologue, used in Ulysses, from Edouard Dujardin's forgotten work Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888). The device was used by Marcel Proust and Dorothy Richardson, among other writers. The device of parody is at work throughout the work; Joyce parodies the conventions of different literary genres as Bloom's day progresses. In Finnegan's Wake the word-coining which is a feature of Ulysses was pushed to its limits; punning language and allegory are used to explore various levels of meaning. This difficult but engrossing work breaks with many literary conventions, creating a continuous entity (the opening words run on from the last words of the book) which can be entered at any point. It also breaks with the basic convention of using a single language throughout – in its merging of different languages it has been hailed as an extreme example of modernism. Its evasion of conventional form and its linguistic obscurities make the work so complex that few readers can follow the meaning without the assistance of a commentary.