James Joyce is one of the most revered
writers in the English language and a
central figure in the history of the
novel he is still hugely important to us
because of his devotion to some crucial
themes the idea of the grandeur of
ordinary life his determination to
portray what actually goes on through
our heads moment by moment what we now
know partly thanks to him as the stream
of consciousness and his determination
to capture on the page what language
really sounds like in our own minds born
in 1882 James Joyce spent the first 20
years of his life in and around Dublin
and the rest wandering in and between
the European cities of Trieste Zurich
and Paris in three decades he published
two books of poetry one collection of
short stories one play and three novels
all of them different in scope and scale
but sharing one thing in common
Dublin a city he loved and hated each of
my books he once explained to a friend
is a book about Dublin Dublin is a city
of scarcely 300,000 but it has become
the universal City in my work at the end
of the nineteenth century
Dublin was the second city of the
British Empire like his father
Joyce was fiercely opposed to Ireland’s
status as a British colony and supported
the cause of Irish independence Joyce
was educated by the Jesuits and early on
at school began to reveal his knack for
foreign languages by the time he arrived
at University College Dublin Joyce was
writing book reviews poems and short
stories but he also needed to find a
career he tried Medical School in Paris
but spent more time in brothels and bars
than the library in 1904 he met a young
woman from Galway named Nora Barnacle
who was uneducated but highly erotic and
compelling to Joyce when she first saw
him she thought he was a Nordic seaman
with electric blue eyes a yachting cap
and plimsolls but when he spoke well
then I knew him at once for just another
word
Phylis dublin boaster trying to chat up
a country girl but Nora fell in love
with him nevertheless and remained
devoted through all their difficult
years of life together after a few
months noir agreed to follow Joyce to
Europe for a self-imposed exile free
from the morality of the Catholic Church
and the subjugation of the British
Empire
they eventually landed in Trieste an
austro-hungarian port town where they
would spend the next 10 years raising
two children both of them given Italian
names Lucia and Giorgio Joyce eked out a
meager existence as a language teacher
at the Berlitz school and translating
Irish writers like Yeats and Oscar Wilde
into Italian 1914 turned out to be
Joyce’s year of breakthrough when a
publisher in London finally decided to
bring out his book of short stories
Dubliners which had been rejected 22
times and the American poet Ezra Pound
arranged to get his novel a portrait of
the artist serialized this was followed
by the serialization of Ulysses in 1918
the novel which made Joyce’s name around
the world for the next 23 years
Joyce’s reputation grew and he took his
experiments with language and literary
form ever further until his unexpected
and sudden death in Zurich in 1941 he
was buried in fronton Cemetery just near
Joyce’s principal work Ulysses is named
after the most dramatic adventure story
the ancient Greeks handed down to
Western civilization it is seen as a
pinnacle of high culture and tells the
story of the long wanderings of the hero
Ulysses on his journey back from the
siege of Troy death occur his home but
the major character of Joyce’s novel is
not a warrior king or a grand hero he is
instead a very flawed quite kindly and
quite foolish man named Leopold Bloom he
works as a minor player in the
advertising industry he’s married but
his wife is having an affair he’s been
sacked from a string of jobs and he’s
very much given to daydreaming about all
the things he would love to go right in
his life but which we know won’t happen
he farts he likes looking at women in
the street he dreams of winning
competitions in weekly magazines and of
owning a cottage by the sea being Jewish
he’s a bit of an outsider in Catholic
Dublin and there are various little
humiliations which he has to put up with
all the time
Bloom is very unlike a traditional hero
but he is representative of our average
unimpressive fragile but still rather
likable everyday selves
Joyce lavishes attention on Leopold
Bloom he treats him as deeply worthy of
respect and immense interest he someone
Joyce suggests that we should learn from
and try in certain ways to be liked just
as in the ancient world Ulysses was held
up as an inspiring model of resourceful
and brave conduct we follow bloom for a
whole day as he wanders around Dublin we
see him having lunch buying a supper
drinking coffee and cocoa he worries
about his relationship with his wife and
daughter he goes to work he listens to
someone singing he has various
conversations Joyce is saying that the
apparently little things that happen in
daily life eating feeling sorry for
someone feeling sorry for oneself
putting the washing on the clothes line
these aren’t really little things at all
if we look at them through the right
lens they are revealed as beautiful
serious deep and fascinating our own
lives are just as interesting as those
of the traditional heroes
it’s just with less good at appreciating
them the helpful lens is supplied
initially by Joyce’s novel but ideally
we should internalize it and make it our
own we should accept ourselves as minor
legitimate heroes of our own dignified
traditionally novels like most films
today show us people speaking in
well-formulated
clear and relevant sentences and we tend
to suppose without really thinking about
it that this is a fair reflection of
their inner life
they speak thoughts and feelings that
they have but this isn’t Joyce’s way at
all
Joyce takes us into our minds and tries
to show us what thinking actually sounds
like at one point in Ulysses Leopold
muses on the cycle of life while he’s
watching the tram cars and people in the
street this is what it sounds like
through Joyce’s microphone trams past
one another in going out going clanging
clanging useless words things go on the
same day after day squads of police
marching out back trams in out those two
loonies mooching about Dignam carted off
minor Purefoy swollen belly on a bed
groaning to have a child tugged out of
her one born every second somewhere
other dying every second since I fed the
birds five minutes 300 kicked the bucket
other 300 born washing the blood off all
I washed in the blood of the lamb
bawling man it’s a strange and yet
actually perhaps rather familiar muddle
of high and low concerns bloom is
thinking about birth and death and the
random shortness of life and the idea of
religion but he’s also thinking about
how he fed some birds the ordinary
rhythms of daily life the noisy trams
and the fundamental oddity of language
in which sounds we make with our mouths
stand for things in the world if we
could slice the top of people’s heads
and get a view into the diverse thoughts
that circulate and cut across one
another contradicting and confusing we
have a much more accurate picture of our
fellow humans and one radically at odds
with the image we typically have that
people are psychological monoliths with
clear definite and fixed views who are
very certain what they believe and care
about Joyce like other modernists
describers of stream of consciousness
thoughts and feelings is suggesting that
if we knew more about what others in
ourselves
really thought and felt we’d have a
clearer sense of what it means to be
human and we’d perhaps also be slower to
anger quicker to forgive
we’d love more and hate less we’d be
more curious about the apparently
strange by ways of our own and others
the more Joyce went beneath the surface
of our utterances to reveal the
cacophony of our minds the more he felt
the need to twist and remould language
itself to capture how he sound to
ourselves in his last and truly puzzling
novel Finnegan’s Wake
Joyce decided to create his own version
of English a Tower of Babel he called it
by mixing together bits and pieces of
more than 40 languages sometimes the
words on the page look entirely foreign
but if you sound them out you can often
find the sense here we are again means
what it says it’s just that the words
are jammed together to reflect the speed
of the mind in action Joyce went in for
many portmanteau words two more words
stuck together to create a new one a fun
for all is a fun funeral or a fun for
all a bisects cycle is a bisexual or a
bicycle for sex
Joyce twisted prestigious names so
Shakespeare became shake his beard and
denty alligator was Dante Alighieri the
plot insofar as there is one in
Finnegan’s Wake is about a man called
Tim Finnegan who falls from a ladder
dies and comes back to life when someone
spills whiskey on his face during the
wake it’s intended as a universal story
about the fall of mankind and the
character of Tim Finnegan is also meant
to be simultaneously Adam Noah Richard
the third Napoleon and the Irish
nationalists Charles Parnell there is
indeed a plot in this book it’s just not
one Joyce explained sarcastically that
can be rendered sensible by the use of
wide-awake language cut and dry grammar
and go ahead plot in attempting to be
completely faithful to real life in all
its true confusion and complexity Joyce
ended up writing a book that is
fascinating Lee instructively unreadable
the fourth sentence of the first chapter
runs like this rot a peg of PARs malt
had gem or Shen brewed by Arclight and
Rory end to the Regan brow was to be
seen ring ‘some on the Aqua face it’s a
reminder of how much fiction when it
seemed logical and understandable is
always necessarily a drastic
foreshortening of what is actually going
on in the world and the
minds of characters Joy’s pushed one
possibility of the realistic novel as
far as it could possibly go into a realm
as mysterious haunting and perplexing as
the dreams of a stranger joy spent the
greater part of his life writing what
was he hoping to achieve through his art
what is art for in his novel the
portrait of the artist as a young man
Joyce gets his spokesman Stephen to have
a go at spelling out an answer he
follows a surprisingly traditional route
using two terms from the medieval
philosopher sim Thomas Aquinas but the
first is Integra toss this means that an
artist is someone who attempts to grasp
with unusual vigor the true integrity
and identity of what is being studied it
might be a tree a moment of history or
the life of a fictional character in
20th century Dublin we don’t normally do
this
we don’t really concentrate on what a
person is saying or doing or what
objects around us really are and look
like we don’t normally isolate and study
carefully art has the job of doing this
for us and teaching us to do so
habitually the second step for an artist
in Joyce’s view is to bring clarity or
clarity to things which means shining
the light of reason into the murkier
parts of experience and life the paradox
is that Joyce did just this but it is
attempt to be utterly clear about what
being human is actually like he created
works which are in places uh turley
baffling to a reader in a hurry that
shouldn’t surprise us too long though
artist Joyce sees it should be a
corrective to unnatural but dangerous
blindness and inattention to cliche an
over rapid summary if art sometimes
puzzles us we know says Joyce that it’s
doing its job properly it’s really
killing us to the mysteries we have to quickly grown blind to
writers in the English language and a
central figure in the history of the
novel he is still hugely important to us
because of his devotion to some crucial
themes the idea of the grandeur of
ordinary life his determination to
portray what actually goes on through
our heads moment by moment what we now
know partly thanks to him as the stream
of consciousness and his determination
to capture on the page what language
really sounds like in our own minds born
in 1882 James Joyce spent the first 20
years of his life in and around Dublin
and the rest wandering in and between
the European cities of Trieste Zurich
and Paris in three decades he published
two books of poetry one collection of
short stories one play and three novels
all of them different in scope and scale
but sharing one thing in common
Dublin a city he loved and hated each of
my books he once explained to a friend
is a book about Dublin Dublin is a city
of scarcely 300,000 but it has become
the universal City in my work at the end
of the nineteenth century
Dublin was the second city of the
British Empire like his father
Joyce was fiercely opposed to Ireland’s
status as a British colony and supported
the cause of Irish independence Joyce
was educated by the Jesuits and early on
at school began to reveal his knack for
foreign languages by the time he arrived
at University College Dublin Joyce was
writing book reviews poems and short
stories but he also needed to find a
career he tried Medical School in Paris
but spent more time in brothels and bars
than the library in 1904 he met a young
woman from Galway named Nora Barnacle
who was uneducated but highly erotic and
compelling to Joyce when she first saw
him she thought he was a Nordic seaman
with electric blue eyes a yachting cap
and plimsolls but when he spoke well
then I knew him at once for just another
word
Phylis dublin boaster trying to chat up
a country girl but Nora fell in love
with him nevertheless and remained
devoted through all their difficult
years of life together after a few
months noir agreed to follow Joyce to
Europe for a self-imposed exile free
from the morality of the Catholic Church
and the subjugation of the British
Empire
they eventually landed in Trieste an
austro-hungarian port town where they
would spend the next 10 years raising
two children both of them given Italian
names Lucia and Giorgio Joyce eked out a
meager existence as a language teacher
at the Berlitz school and translating
Irish writers like Yeats and Oscar Wilde
into Italian 1914 turned out to be
Joyce’s year of breakthrough when a
publisher in London finally decided to
bring out his book of short stories
Dubliners which had been rejected 22
times and the American poet Ezra Pound
arranged to get his novel a portrait of
the artist serialized this was followed
by the serialization of Ulysses in 1918
the novel which made Joyce’s name around
the world for the next 23 years
Joyce’s reputation grew and he took his
experiments with language and literary
form ever further until his unexpected
and sudden death in Zurich in 1941 he
was buried in fronton Cemetery just near
Joyce’s principal work Ulysses is named
after the most dramatic adventure story
the ancient Greeks handed down to
Western civilization it is seen as a
pinnacle of high culture and tells the
story of the long wanderings of the hero
Ulysses on his journey back from the
siege of Troy death occur his home but
the major character of Joyce’s novel is
not a warrior king or a grand hero he is
instead a very flawed quite kindly and
quite foolish man named Leopold Bloom he
works as a minor player in the
advertising industry he’s married but
his wife is having an affair he’s been
sacked from a string of jobs and he’s
very much given to daydreaming about all
the things he would love to go right in
his life but which we know won’t happen
he farts he likes looking at women in
the street he dreams of winning
competitions in weekly magazines and of
owning a cottage by the sea being Jewish
he’s a bit of an outsider in Catholic
Dublin and there are various little
humiliations which he has to put up with
all the time
Bloom is very unlike a traditional hero
but he is representative of our average
unimpressive fragile but still rather
likable everyday selves
Joyce lavishes attention on Leopold
Bloom he treats him as deeply worthy of
respect and immense interest he someone
Joyce suggests that we should learn from
and try in certain ways to be liked just
as in the ancient world Ulysses was held
up as an inspiring model of resourceful
and brave conduct we follow bloom for a
whole day as he wanders around Dublin we
see him having lunch buying a supper
drinking coffee and cocoa he worries
about his relationship with his wife and
daughter he goes to work he listens to
someone singing he has various
conversations Joyce is saying that the
apparently little things that happen in
daily life eating feeling sorry for
someone feeling sorry for oneself
putting the washing on the clothes line
these aren’t really little things at all
if we look at them through the right
lens they are revealed as beautiful
serious deep and fascinating our own
lives are just as interesting as those
of the traditional heroes
it’s just with less good at appreciating
them the helpful lens is supplied
initially by Joyce’s novel but ideally
we should internalize it and make it our
own we should accept ourselves as minor
legitimate heroes of our own dignified
traditionally novels like most films
today show us people speaking in
well-formulated
clear and relevant sentences and we tend
to suppose without really thinking about
it that this is a fair reflection of
their inner life
they speak thoughts and feelings that
they have but this isn’t Joyce’s way at
all
Joyce takes us into our minds and tries
to show us what thinking actually sounds
like at one point in Ulysses Leopold
muses on the cycle of life while he’s
watching the tram cars and people in the
street this is what it sounds like
through Joyce’s microphone trams past
one another in going out going clanging
clanging useless words things go on the
same day after day squads of police
marching out back trams in out those two
loonies mooching about Dignam carted off
minor Purefoy swollen belly on a bed
groaning to have a child tugged out of
her one born every second somewhere
other dying every second since I fed the
birds five minutes 300 kicked the bucket
other 300 born washing the blood off all
I washed in the blood of the lamb
bawling man it’s a strange and yet
actually perhaps rather familiar muddle
of high and low concerns bloom is
thinking about birth and death and the
random shortness of life and the idea of
religion but he’s also thinking about
how he fed some birds the ordinary
rhythms of daily life the noisy trams
and the fundamental oddity of language
in which sounds we make with our mouths
stand for things in the world if we
could slice the top of people’s heads
and get a view into the diverse thoughts
that circulate and cut across one
another contradicting and confusing we
have a much more accurate picture of our
fellow humans and one radically at odds
with the image we typically have that
people are psychological monoliths with
clear definite and fixed views who are
very certain what they believe and care
about Joyce like other modernists
describers of stream of consciousness
thoughts and feelings is suggesting that
if we knew more about what others in
ourselves
really thought and felt we’d have a
clearer sense of what it means to be
human and we’d perhaps also be slower to
anger quicker to forgive
we’d love more and hate less we’d be
more curious about the apparently
strange by ways of our own and others
the more Joyce went beneath the surface
of our utterances to reveal the
cacophony of our minds the more he felt
the need to twist and remould language
itself to capture how he sound to
ourselves in his last and truly puzzling
novel Finnegan’s Wake
Joyce decided to create his own version
of English a Tower of Babel he called it
by mixing together bits and pieces of
more than 40 languages sometimes the
words on the page look entirely foreign
but if you sound them out you can often
find the sense here we are again means
what it says it’s just that the words
are jammed together to reflect the speed
of the mind in action Joyce went in for
many portmanteau words two more words
stuck together to create a new one a fun
for all is a fun funeral or a fun for
all a bisects cycle is a bisexual or a
bicycle for sex
Joyce twisted prestigious names so
Shakespeare became shake his beard and
denty alligator was Dante Alighieri the
plot insofar as there is one in
Finnegan’s Wake is about a man called
Tim Finnegan who falls from a ladder
dies and comes back to life when someone
spills whiskey on his face during the
wake it’s intended as a universal story
about the fall of mankind and the
character of Tim Finnegan is also meant
to be simultaneously Adam Noah Richard
the third Napoleon and the Irish
nationalists Charles Parnell there is
indeed a plot in this book it’s just not
one Joyce explained sarcastically that
can be rendered sensible by the use of
wide-awake language cut and dry grammar
and go ahead plot in attempting to be
completely faithful to real life in all
its true confusion and complexity Joyce
ended up writing a book that is
fascinating Lee instructively unreadable
the fourth sentence of the first chapter
runs like this rot a peg of PARs malt
had gem or Shen brewed by Arclight and
Rory end to the Regan brow was to be
seen ring ‘some on the Aqua face it’s a
reminder of how much fiction when it
seemed logical and understandable is
always necessarily a drastic
foreshortening of what is actually going
on in the world and the
minds of characters Joy’s pushed one
possibility of the realistic novel as
far as it could possibly go into a realm
as mysterious haunting and perplexing as
the dreams of a stranger joy spent the
greater part of his life writing what
was he hoping to achieve through his art
what is art for in his novel the
portrait of the artist as a young man
Joyce gets his spokesman Stephen to have
a go at spelling out an answer he
follows a surprisingly traditional route
using two terms from the medieval
philosopher sim Thomas Aquinas but the
first is Integra toss this means that an
artist is someone who attempts to grasp
with unusual vigor the true integrity
and identity of what is being studied it
might be a tree a moment of history or
the life of a fictional character in
20th century Dublin we don’t normally do
this
we don’t really concentrate on what a
person is saying or doing or what
objects around us really are and look
like we don’t normally isolate and study
carefully art has the job of doing this
for us and teaching us to do so
habitually the second step for an artist
in Joyce’s view is to bring clarity or
clarity to things which means shining
the light of reason into the murkier
parts of experience and life the paradox
is that Joyce did just this but it is
attempt to be utterly clear about what
being human is actually like he created
works which are in places uh turley
baffling to a reader in a hurry that
shouldn’t surprise us too long though
artist Joyce sees it should be a
corrective to unnatural but dangerous
blindness and inattention to cliche an
over rapid summary if art sometimes
puzzles us we know says Joyce that it’s
doing its job properly it’s really
killing us to the mysteries we have to quickly grown blind to
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