James Joyce

James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2nd February 1882.  He is thought by many to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century and is best remembered for his novel Ulysses which is set in Dublin and takes place on a single day, 16h June 1904.  Ulysses is considered to be one of the most important novels of Modernist Literature.  The novel follows the main character, Leopold Bloom, on an ordinary day in Dublin and accompanies him on his journey across the city.  The title of the novel alludes to Homer's Odyssey and anyone familar with that text will find many similarities between the two stories.

Joyce had a lot of problems getting Ulysses published and it was initially serialised in an American journal and extracts from the novel also appeared in the London journal The Egoist.  After the chapter with the masturbation scene was published in The Little Review the magazine was declared obsence and the novel was banned in the US, it was also banned in the UK until the 1930s.

Joyce's first publication was a short story collection called Dubliners which was first published in 1914.  It is a collection of 15 stories which depict Irish middle class life during the early part of the 20th century.  A number of the characters we encounter in these stories we will later meet again in Ulysses although in minor roles.

In 1916 Joyce published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is said to be auto-biographical and the main character, Stephen Dedalus, also appears in Ulysses.  His last novel, Finnegan's Wake is said my many to be impenetrable.  The language is difficult and abstract and the stream of concsiousness and free dream association are not easy to follow.  It is a book that sits on many a bookshelf but has not often been read, although we all know of it.  One of Joyce's earliest publications was the poem Et Tu Healy which he wrote on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell. 

Joyce studied modern languages at University College Dublin and after that managed to make small amounts of money by writing reviews teaching and singing.  In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, whom he later married.  They went on their first date on 16th June 1904, which was the date on which Ulysses is set.  James Joyce and Nora eloped first to Zurich and moved from there to Trieste.  James managed to get some work teaching modern languages, which brought in a little money.  They stayed in Trieste for ten years and both their children were born there.

In 1915 Joyce moved to Switzerland, a neutral country during the WW1 and here Ezra Pound introduced him to Harriet Shaw Weaver, who became Joyce's patron and kept him supplied with money over the next 25 years so that he could give up teaching and concentrate on his writing.

James Joyce died on 13 January 1941 and is buried in Switzerland - the Irish government would not give permission for the repatriation of Joyce's remains.  Ulysses was finally published in 1922 and 16th June is celebrated annually in Dublin as Bloomsday named after Leopold Bloom, one of the main characters in the novel.  People often dress up in Edwardian costume and there are many events from the reading of the extracts of the novel to pub crawls and a lot of the events are organised by the James Joyce Centre.  On the centenary in 2004 much was made of the book and James Joyce.   If only he could have been there to see it - if ever someone was born out of his time it was James Joyce - wouldn't he just have loved 21st century Dublin!