Youth
James Augustine Joyce was born on February 2, 1882 in the affluent Dublin suburb of Rathgar. His childhood was marked by his mother's many pregnancies and by numerous moves, as his father, who had to make more than his share of redundancies and personal bankruptcies, had to deal with them. In 1887, the family moved to Bray, where James met Eileen, the daughter of their Protestant neighbors. The love affair was not to the liking of Mrs. Conway, nicknamed "Dante", a devout Catholic and distant relative of his father, who lived with them and provided his education. The young boy studied at the Jesuits in Clongowes Wood, an important experience, but he had to leave the college three years later when he ran out of money. It was then that he left for Blackrock, the passage from "relative prosperity to real poverty", as his younger brother, Stanislaus Joyce, remembers in his story Le Gardien de mon frère (My Brother's Keeper), published in 1966 by Gallimard and now unfortunately out of print. But it was also the beginning of writing for James who had always shown an interest in literature and philosophy. His first poem, Et Tu Healy, composed at the age of 9, was dedicated to Charles Stewart Parnell, an emblematic figure in the struggle for independence in Ireland, which was then under English rule. It is said that his parents were so proud that they had his prose printed and even sent a copy to the Vatican.
James refused to enter the orders and joined the University of Dublin where he studied literature and foreign languages (French and Italian). The literary world opened up to him and he took his place in it by presenting an essay on the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, who thanked him for it. In this beautiful year 1903, with his diploma in hand, the world opened up to him. He chose Paris under the pretext of learning medicine, but in the end spent more time squandering his money in pubs in the company of his fellow citizens, William Butler Yeats and John Synge. Just a few months later, the announcement of his mother's cancer put an end to the party, he returned to the country to watch over her until she died, then continued to devote himself to the familiar demon of his father, alcohol. The following year will be important however, he composes poems, some of them are published, they will finally be gathered in the collection Musique de chambre (1907), but above all he writes a text with a strong autobiographical inspiration, Portrait of the artist, which will certainly be refused by the magazine Dana but will be used as a foundation for the more consequent novel that he decides to undertake, Stephen the hero. According to legend, the latter will succumb in part to the flames before being reborn under the title Dedalus, published in 1916, a work that we now know under its definitive name and version, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Folio). But there is also a date to remember from 1904, June 16. On that day, he had an appointment with a young woman he had met a few days earlier, Nora Barnacle, who was to become his companion, his great love and his muse. He will celebrate this event in his own way by making the plot of his future masterpiece, Ulysses, take place during this single day, because with Joyce, we quickly understand, everything is a symbol and recycling of elements of his life. In August, The Irish Homestead published a short story, The Sisters, another format that he would enjoy experimenting with many times in the years to come.
Exile
After a few sad events in Dublin, but also strong encounters, in particular that of Alfred H. Hunter who will serve as a model for the future Leopold Bloom, Joyce decides to leave Ireland. Hunter, who would serve as a model for the future Leopold Bloom, Joyce decided to leave Ireland, the couple went into exile in Zurich, then to Trieste where they settled after a short stay in Pola. Although very delicate financially speaking, these years are fertile, born two children, Giorgio in 1905, Lucia Anna in 1907, and a friendship with Ettore Schmitz that we know under his pen name, Italo Svevo. Having written about fifteen short stories, some published in magazines, Joyce decided to publish them together and signed a contract with Maunsel in 1909. But the agreement turns to discord, his publisher fears reprisals because Joyce, as usual, was inspired by people around him, not hesitating to report their words on political issues. He wrote to King George V, asking for permission, which was neither given nor refused. However, as Valéry Larbaud, a future enthusiastic admirer who wrote a preface to the book, reported, the day James came to take possession of his fascicles, the entire stock had already gone up in smoke, bought in its entirety and then burned on the spot by a man, visibly disgruntled, whose identity will remain a mystery. Joyce recovers a single copy, which will serve as the basis for Gens de Dublin (available in Folio under the title Dubliners), which will finally be published two years later in London by Grant Richards. Following this painful episode, which occurred in 1912, Joyce never returned to Ireland, but continued to bring his native city to life in his writings, with impressive accuracy.
In 1915, the war drove the family to Zurich, their income was still meager, but Ezra Pound, whom he had met a few years earlier, intervened to have him granted literary scholarships, and found him a patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver. Joyce's fame grew, and he kept working on his play, The Exiles, and his major work, Ulysses, both begun just before he left for Switzerland. In 1917, his eyes, which had already caused him pain, had to undergo an operation following a glaucoma, he nevertheless managed to complete the first chapters of his novel and his play, which, performed in 1919 in Munich, caused a real scandal. The reception ofUlysses, published in fragments in the American magazine The Little Review from 1918, is rather good, for the moment, because in October 1920 the serial must stop following a complaint for obscenity filed by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
Consecration
At 71, rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, in the Parisian capital he had returned to after the war, Joyce put the finishing touches to his novel. On February 2, 1922, the manuscript was published by Sylvia Beach, the founder of the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company, who authorized this unique publishing adventure that had become an epic, since the typographers at the Darantière printing works had no command of the English language and, suddenly, their stock of "w "s seemed too limited, which explained the many typos in this first printing. The first French version, by Auguste Morel, was not published until 1929 by La Maison des amis des livres, thanks to the commitment of Adrienne Monnier, who admitted that she hadn't fully understood the text. A second, collaborative translation was published by Gallimard in 2004. In light of the past, it is obviously complicated to imagine the actual reception of the text at the time. Suffice it to say that the book was censored in the U.S. until 1933 on the grounds of pornography (it was eventually published there the following year, then two years later in England), that Virginia Woolf, who knew a thing or two about stream-of-consciousness, confided to her diary that it was indecent (before retracting her statement and evoking a certain genius), and that Hemingway was so enthusiastic about it that he smuggled copies to his fellow Americans. In a word, Ulysses leaves no one indifferent. But what is this novel about, about which so many have an opinion without having opened, finished or loved it? At first glance, the number of pages suggests a substantial project, and the title, a second clue, evokes theOdyssey, but when you delve into the structure of the text, an approach that makes it easier to grasp, you realize just how ambitious Joyce was. And yet the plot can be summed up in a single line: the day of June 16, 1904, as Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus) and Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) pass through Dublin from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m.. The former is the author's double, the latter wanders the streets to avoid finding his unfaithful wife, then engages in strange activities. The original text had no subdivisions, but to make it easier to read, Joyce had provided a kind of explanatory outline in eighteen episodes, each linked to a time, a place, but also to an organ, a color, an art, a symbol.. The novel is experimental and daring in this respect: we enter through a conversation in which we understand nothing, because nothing is explained to us; we leave through the interior monologue (without punctuation) of Leopold Bloom's wife, but, to tell the truth, nothing compels us to read it in a linear fashion. In short, Ulysses is a reading experience, in the plural, which since 1954 has inspired an annual Bloomsday celebration in Ireland, and lengthy studies by scholars in search of explanations and references to Joyce's real life.
The writer had not said his last word: in 1923, on March 10, he embarked on a work that he republished in fragmentary form in various magazines, notably Transition. This was his Work in Progress, in which his assistant Samuel Beckett assisted him. In its definitive title and complete form, Finnegans Wake would not appear until May 1939, published by Faber&Faber in London. Its writing was complicated by the fact that Joyce had to deal with several problems in his personal life: his father died in 1931, his daughter Lucia began to show serious signs of schizophrenia, and he himself had increasingly failing eyesight. But the complexity also stems from his new ambition: the text is even more arduous thanUlysses, mixing several languages; reading the first fragments leaves many doubtful. To reassure people that he was in good mental health, Joyce decided to publish a collection of poems, Pomes Penyeach , in 1927, and in 1939, some of his admirers published Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination, a kind of manifesto in favor of the writer, if not an encouragement. Two years after the publication of his last novel, on January 13, 1941, James Joyce died in Zurich of a perforated ulcer. He left behind Nora Barnacle, who outlived him by 10 years, but also a grandson, Stephen, whose birth he had celebrated in the poem Ecce Puer (1932), in which he also evoked the death of his father. Stephen Joyce, born in France, was to become his grandfather's testamentary heir, reigning terror on the literary world and horrifying scholars by smilingly admitting to having burned some of his correspondence. His devotion to his grandfather, his willingness to sue anyone who dared touch even a comma of the original texts, his desire to protect the family's privacy, even if it meant destroying priceless archives, and the astronomical royalties he demanded, all added up to a diabolical reputation. James Joyce's work fell into the public domain in 2012, much to the relief of Joycians, and Stephen Joyce died eight years later with no one knowing exactly what he took to his grave.
