1.1 James Augustine Aloysius Joyce

Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius (1882-1941), Irish novelist and poet, noted for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods, whose psychological perceptions and innovative literary techniques, as demonstrated in his epic novel Ulysses, make him one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

His first long work of fiction, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), is largely autobiographical, re-creating his youth and home life in the story of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. Started as Stephen Hero in 1904 and based on the events of his own life, this work didn’t satisfy Joyce. His studies in European literature had interested him in both the Symbolists and the Realists; his work began to show a synthesis of these two rival movements. He decided that Stephen Hero lacked artistic control and form and rewrote it as “a work in five chapters” under a title—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—intended to direct attention to its focus upon the central figure. In this work Joyce made considerable use of the stream-of-consciousness technique. An autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist traces the intellectual and emotional development of Stephen Dedalus and ends with his decision to leave Dublin for Paris to devote his life to art.

Joyce gained international fame with the publication (1922) of Ulysses, a novel, constructed as a modern parallel to Homer's Odyssey. All of the action of the novel takes place in Dublin on a single day (June 16, 1904). The three central characters—Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce's earlier Portrait of the Artist), Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser (агитатор на выборах), and his wife, Molly Bloom—are intended to be modern counterparts of Te`lemachus, Ulysses, and Pe`nelope. By the use of interior monologue Joyce reveals the innermost thoughts and feelings of these characters as they live hour by hour, passing from a public bath to a funeral, library, maternity hospital, and brothel.

The main strength of Ulysses lies in its depth of character portrayal and its breadth of humour. Yet the book is most famous for its “stream-of-consciousness” technique. Joyce's major innovation was to carry the interior monologue one step further by rendering the myriad flow of impressions, half thoughts, associations, lapses and hesitations, incidental worries, and sudden impulses that form part of the individual's conscious awareness along with the trend of his rational thoughts. This stream-of-consciousness technique proved widely influential in much 20th-century fiction.

Sometimes the abundant technical and stylistic devices in Ulysses become too prominent. The famous last chapter of the novel, for example, in which we follow the stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom as she lies in bed, is written in eight huge unpunctuated paragraphs.

Ulysses, which was already well known because of the censorship troubles, became immediately famous upon publication.

Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce's last and most complex work, is an attempt to embody in fiction a cyclical theory of history. To demonstrate this the book begins with the end of a sentence left unfinished on the last page. The novel is written in the form of an interrupted series of dreams during one night in the life of the character Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Symbolizing all humanity, Earwicker, his family, and his acquaintances blend, as characters do in dreams, with one another and with various historical and mythical figures. Joyce carried his linguistic experimentation to its furthest point in Finnegans Wake by writing English as a composite language based on combinations of parts of words from various languages: Anna Livia has “vlossyhair”—włosy being Polish for “hair”; “a bad of wind” blows, bâd being Turkish for “wind.” Characters from literature and history appear and merge and disappear as “the intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators” dream on.

Using experimental techniques to convey the essential nature of realistic situations, Joyce combined in his greatest works the literary traditions of realism, naturalism, and symbolism which made him one of the most commanding influences on novelists of the 20th century.