THE AUTHOR
Nearly as popular as St. Patrick's Day, Bloomsday celebrates the influence of James Joyce's novel, Ulysses, taking place on June 16. On that day, people throughout Ireland read aloud from Joyce's book and eat the favorite foods of its main character, Leopold Bloom, including kidneys and other innards of various beasts.
Author James Joyce was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, the son of John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray. John was an impoverished gentleman who had failed in a distillery business and tried his hand at several other professions, including politics and tax collecting. Mary Jane, ten years her husband's junior, was an accomplished pianist whose life was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. Despite their poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class facade.
From the age of six, Joyce was educated by Jesuit priests. Later, he thanked the Jesuits for teaching him to think straight, even though he rejected much of their religious instruction.
At school, Joyce once broke his glasses and could not complete his lessons. This episode was recounted in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In 1898, he entered the University College, Dublin, where he found his early inspirations in the works of Henrik Ibsen, St.Thomas Aquinas, and W.B. Yeats. Joyce's first publication was an essay on Ibsen's play When We Dead Awaken. It appeared in Fortnightly Review in 1900.
After graduation in 1902, Joyce, now twenty, traveled to Paris, where he worked as a journalist and teacher, as well as at other occupations. He spent a year in France, returning when a telegram advised him that his mother was dying. Not long after her death, he met the love of his life.
Nora Barnacle entered the writer's life on June 16, 1904. A few days earlier, he had seen a tall, beautiful woman with long red hair walking on Nassau Street. He stopped to talk to her, and they got together that evening. They walked out on the wide fields by the banks of the River Dodder as the sun was setting. They smelled the sweet air, and Joyce spoke of sweet things and fell in love. The following October, just a few months after they'd met, they left Ireland together.
Barnacle came from western Ireland, which most Dubliners considered the backward part of the country. Some people thought she wasn't smart enough for him, but Joyce loved her unpretentious ways. He often wrote down things that she said. She once declared of a rundown apartment, "That place wasn't fit to wash a rat in." The couple lived like nomads in Rome, Zurich, Trieste, and Paris.
Joyce began writing Ulysses--which he set on June 16, 1904, in honor of his first date with Nora--when he was thirty-six. The book took seven years to complete. He wanted to describe Dublin as accurately as he could. He inquired in letters to friends about shop names, street awnings, the number of steps leading down to 7 Eccles Street, and how long it took to walk from one part of the city to another. He used rhyming dictionaries, maps of Dublin, street directories, and Golbert's Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland. For the final "Molly Bloom" section of the book, he borrowed Nora's unpunctuated writing style and quoted from many of her letters.
By the time he had completed the work, his eyesight was so poor that he had to write in different colored inks just to see what he had written. The book ends with Molly's soliloquy:
"O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
Despite Joyce's best efforts, the book was not universally well-received. When in 1920 a literary magazine named The Little Review published an episode of Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom masturbates while getting a glimpse of a young woman's undergarment as fireworks go off over a beach, it was called obscene. Although finding pornography wasn’t difficult in 1920, Ulysses stood out to officials for its highbrow aura and the publicity it attracted as the newest, most advanced thing in literature.
The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice brought The Little Review to trial under the state's obscenity law. The episode in the book was ruled obscene, and Ulysses was banned in the United States.
In 1933, Random House decided to import a single version of the French edition of Ulysses, and the company had people waiting at the New York docks for the book's arrival. Random House made sure that one book was seized, and a second trial, United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, was held over the fate of that copy.
Judge John Woolsey ruled that the book had no "dirt for dirt's sake" and was not, in fact, pornographic. His ruling changed the standards for literary obscenity. He disregarded the traditional standard for obscenity--whether or not the work would "deprave and corrupt" a vulnerable young reader--and said that the proper test is whether it would "lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts" in the average adult. Woolsey pointed out that the book was so difficult to understand that people would be unlikely to read it for titillation. The Court of Appeals agreed and called Ulysses "a sincere portrayal" and "executed with real art." After that, the novel was finally put up for sale in the states.
In March 1923, Joyce began his second major work, Finnegans Wake, in Paris. His eyesight was failing as a result of glaucoma. Still, he introduced the first segment of the novel in Ford Madox Ford's Transatlantic Review in April 1924. Joyce continued working on the book for the next sixteen years. The final version was completed late in 1938, and a copy of the novel was present at Joyce's birthday celebration in February of the following year.
Joyce's daughter, Lucia, born in Trieste in 1907, studied dance in her teens. Later, The Paris Times praised her skills as choreocrapher, linguist, and performer. With her father, she collaborated in Pomes Penyeach (1927), for which she did some illustrations. Lucia's great love was Samuel Beckett, who was not interested in her. In the 1930s, she began behaving erratically. At Carl Jung’s Burghölz psychiatric clinic in Zurich, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. Joyce was left bitter at Jung's analysis. For revenge, the author mocked Jung'e concepts of Animus and Anima in Finnegans Wake. Lucia died in a mental hospital in Northampton, England, in 1982.
After the fall of France during WWII, Joyce returned to Zürich, bitterly disappointed with the poor reception of his latest opus. He had based Finnegans Wake partly on Freud's dream psychology, Bruno's theory of the complementary but conflicting nature of opposites, and the cyclic theory of the history of Giambattista Vico.
It was the last and most revolutionary of the author's works. Sporting little plot and few characters, this peek into all human experience, viewed as fragmented and less than professional by some readers, was considered a masterpiece by others. When American writer Max Eastman asked Joyce why the book was written in such a difficult literary style, Joyce replied: "To keep the critics busy for three hundred years."
James Joyce died in Zurich on January 13, 1941.
THE ETHICIST
James Augustinian Joyce had maintained a complex relationship with religion throughout much of his life. As a young man, he strayed from Roman Catholicism. His children, Stanislaus and Nora, attested that he no longer considered himself a Catholic. Nevertheless, while he may not thought of himself as a Catholic, his work displays a deep-rooted influence of Catholicism. His intellectual foundations were grounded particularly in his early Jesuit education. Betraying his lifelong antithesis to religion, he occasionally attended mass even after he left Ireland. In Trieste, he woke up early to attend Catholic services on Holy Thursday and Good Friday and occasionally attended Eastern Orthodox services, saying in his defense that he liked the ceremonies more.
To say that his faith proved an effective sounding board--and proving grounds--for Joyce through the characters in his writings is apparent. Himself a writer from an early age, Joyce wrote the poem "Et Tu, Healy"--on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell--at age nine. His father printed and distributed it to friends. The poem expressed the sentiments of the elder Joyce, who was angry at Parnell's apparent betrayal by the Irish Catholic Church, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and the British Liberal Party, resulting in Ireland failing to secure home rule in British Parliament. This sense of betrayal left a lasting impression that Joyce expressed in his life and art.
In the same year, 1891, Joyce's family began its slow descent into poverty due primarily to his father's drinking and poor financial management. John Joyce's name was published in Stubbs' Gazette, a blacklist of debtors and bankrupts, that November. He was soon after dismissed from his job with a reduced pension.
But for all the turmoil Joyce ascribed to the Church, Catholicism greatly molded both the boy and the man from his earliest recollection in 1888 at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare. Young Joyce was forced to leave the school in 1892 when his father could no longer pay the tuition. He studied at home and briefly attended the Christian Brothers O'Connell School on North Richmond Street, Dublin. Then, in a propitious meeting, Joyce's father spoke about the situation to Jesuit priest John Conmee, who knew the family and its financial woes. Conmee arranged for Joyce and his brother Stanislaus to attend the Jesuits' Dublin school, Belvedere College, for free. In 1895, Joyce was elected by his peers to join the prestigious Sodality of Our Lady. In all, he spent five years at Belvedere, his intellectual formation guided by the principles of Jesuit education outlined in the Ratio Studiorum (Plan of Studies). He put his innate literary talents to good use, winning first place in English composition in his final two years before being graduated in 1898.
Over the years, several Catholic critics suggested that Joyce never fully abandoned his faith, wrestling with it in his writings and becoming increasingly reconciled with it. Their argument is that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are expressions of a Catholic sensibility. Even the critique of the Church expressed by Stephen, the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, are out of step with the views of Joyce as an author and a man.
Joyce's attitude toward Catholicism has been described as an enigma comprised of two Joyces: a modern one who resisted Catholic tradition and another who maintained his allegiance to it, if stoically. It has alternatively been described as a dialectic that both men affirm and deny its forces. Stephen Dedalus's statement in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ("non-serviam--I will not serve) is qualified and interpreted most often as "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe." In fact, the non-serviam will always be balanced by Stephen's "I am ... [a] servant too" and the "yes" soliloquy of Molly Bloom's words in Ulysses.
Some critics suggest that Joyce's apparent apostasy was less a denial of faith than a transmutation of it, a reactionary revolt against the Church's confining influences on spiritual life and personal growth. Along those lines, he has been compared to the medieval episcopi vagantes (wandering bishops), who left their discipline but not their cultural heritage of thought--much as in taking the man out of the Church but not the Church out of the man.
Joyce's own responses to questions about his faith were often ambiguous. One time, during an interview after the completion of Ulysses, he was asked, "When did you leave the Catholic Church?" His reply: "That's for the Church to say."
Whether or not the Church would actually do so is immaterial. To Joyce, Catholic dogma went only as far as his true conscience would allow--a precept not coincidentally of not only Catholicism but also of Christianity since the beginning of modern time. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the author expressed his beliefs clearly enough:
"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning."
James Joyce, a revolutionary not only in Celtic but also in world literature, believed above all in the ethical acuity of his own inner self. That self, he sensed, is where ethics and morality meet.
And so they did.
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