James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (February 2, 1882 – January 13, 1941) was an Irish writer and poet, a representative of modernism.

James Joyce was born in Rathgar, a Georgian neighborhood in south Dublin, into the large family of John Stanislas Joyce and Mary Jane Murray. Unsuccessful business management almost bankrupted his father, who was forced to change his profession several times. James managed to get a good education, but the poverty and unsettled life of his youth remained forever in his memory, which was partly reflected in his works.

At the age of 6, Joyce entered the Jesuit College Clongowes Woods in Clane, and then, in 1893, the Belvedere College in Dublin, from which he graduated in 1897. A year later, James began studying at the University of Dublin (so called University College), from which he graduated in 1902.

In 1900, the Dublin newspaper Fortnight published James Joyce's first publication - an essay on Ibsen's play When We Dead Awaken. At the same time, Joyce began to write lyric poems. Since 1916, he published in the American literary magazine Little Review, founded by Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson.

At the age of 20, Joyce left for Paris. This was his first departure to the continent, where, due to financial problems, he, like his father once, often changed professions.

Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Joyce and his wife moved to Zurich, where he began working on the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and later on the first chapters of Ulysses. While traveling around Europe, Joyce wrote poetry. Some works were published in Imagism anthologies. He also continued to work on Ulysses, a novel that was first published not in the writer’s homeland (where it was published only in 1933), but in France. This is Joyce's most famous work, where the author tells the story of one day (June 16, 1904) of the Dublin Jew Leopold Bloom on 600 pages. Despite the fact that Ulysses was created abroad, from this book, as Joyce himself argued, “Dublin could be restored if it were destroyed.” June 16th is celebrated by Joyce fans around the world as Bloomsday.

In Paris, James Joyce began work on his last large-scale work, the novel Finnegans Wake, published in 1939.

After the defeat of France and the occupation of part of its territory by German troops at the beginning of World War II, Joyce returned to Zurich. He suffered greatly from the effects of glaucoma. His health continued to deteriorate. On January 11, he underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer and on January 13, 1941, he died.

James Joyce, the father of literary postmodernism, the inventor of the “stream of consciousness,” was an inveterate drunkard and blasphemer. An Irishman, a compatriot of whiskey and Bono, he gravitated towards gigantomania and alcohol. Joyce was born on February 2, 1882 in a suburb of Dublin, into a poor Catholic family. His father suffered from alcoholism, was, according to friends, dead drunk 3.75 days a week and, as a result, became an alcoholic and lost his job. James, deprived of family support, completed his studies at a Jesuit college at public expense. Already at the age of 14, the young man became interested in writing essays, and also began to actively make friends with the bottle and girls of easy virtue. Soon Joyce left Catholicism, and then left his homeland (“Dublin is a disgusting city, and the people here are disgusting to me”). Joyce finished his novel Ulysses, which made Ireland famous (to put it very briefly, it describes one day of three Dubliners). He wandered around Europe, fed himself with English lessons and dreamed of fame. The life of his heroes, like his own, was spent more and more in the tavern.

A progressive alcoholic and Catholic apostate, Joyce maintained a religious respect only for texts until the end of his life. His wife Nora complained to her friends: “He asks me to sleep with someone else so that he has something to write about...”

Even after undergoing eleven eye surgeries and almost going blind, Joyce did not stop drinking and writing. In recent years, he became known not only as an alcoholic, but also as an eccentric. He was afraid of thunderstorms and dogs and carried ladies' panties with him, which he waved when he wanted to show sympathy to someone. Having achieved fame, Joyce decided that he was done with business in this world, and, to the surprise of doctors, he died suddenly after a simple stomach operation.

Joyce's posthumous fate is symbolic. Physicists borrowed the term “quark” from his Finnegans Wake. In his homeland, the voluntary exile was reluctantly recognized as great. Practical compatriots turned the useless genius into a totem for tourists. Signs with gastronomic quotes from Ulysses decorate the streets of Dublin, explaining to tourists where and what to eat and drink in the city. The writer's portrait appears on the 10 Irish pound note. And in almost every Irish pub there is a portrait of Joyce on the wall with a mug of beer in his hand.

Genius against use

1898 - 1902 First poems. When introduced to the poet William Butler Yeats, Joyce declares: “Your opinion means no more to me than the opinion of a passer-by.” Wants to study medicine, goes to Paris, where he acquires a bad habit of absinthe.

1903-1904 Having refused his dying mother’s request to go to confession, he drowns out his feelings of guilt with alcohol. Seeing D.B. Yeats, the poet’s father, on the street, he approaches him with a request: “Lend two shillings.” Yates Sr. replies: “Firstly, I have no money, and secondly, you would drink it away anyway.”

1905-1906 Meets future wife, maid Nora Barnacle, leaves for Trieste. He does book reviews and teaches English. Drinks with marauding sailors. He is writing a collection of short stories, Dubliners.

1907-1914 Writes “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” A daughter, Lucia, was born in a ward for the poor. Joyce is trying to fit in the Dubliners. The publisher burns the circulation. Having drunk out of grief, Joyce leaves Ireland.

1915-1919 Publication of the first chapters of Ulysses in the American Little Review ends with a trial on charges of obscenity. The novel is banned in the USA. In frustration, Joyce goes to Paris to drink her favorite absinthe.

1920-1929 Finishes Ulysses. The same absinthe in the novel is awarded the most passionate panegyric: “We will all drink green poison, and may the devil take the last of us.” Long-awaited glory. Drinks in the company of Hemingway, Samuel Beckett and Ezra Pound.

1930-1937 Lucia has schizophrenia and spends 47 years in the clinic. Joyce goes on a drinking binge. The court makes a decision: “Ulysses” is not pornography, it can be published in the USA.

1938 - 1939 “Finnegans Wake.” The name is taken from an Irish ballad about a drinker who fell to his death, but was resurrected at the wake by the smell of whiskey.

1940-1941 Moves to Switzerland. He ends up in the hospital with a stomach ulcer. Two soldiers from the canton of Neuchâtel are offering to donate blood for the operation. “It’s a good omen,” says Joyce. “I’ve always loved the wine there.” On January 13, Joyce died despite being in good condition after surgery.

James Joyce is a famous Irish writer and poet, considered one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. The master of literature, who contributed to the development of modernism, became famous thanks to the novels Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake, as well as the stories in the collection Dubliners.

Childhood and youth

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was a native of Ireland. He was born on 2 February 1882 in south Dublin to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane Murray, the eldest of 15 children. The family of the future writer came from farmers and owners of a salt and lime mining enterprise, and may have been related to Daniel O'Connell the Liberator, a famous politician of the 1st half of the 20th century.

Lacking business acumen and business skills, the father of the future writer often changed jobs. In 1893, after several layoffs, he retired, which was not enough to support his large family, went on a drinking binge and became involved in financial fraud.

For some time, John paid for James' studies at a Jesuit boarding school, and when the money ran out, the boy switched to home education. In 1893, thanks to his father's old connections, the future writer received a place at Belvedere College, where he joined the school church fraternity and became acquainted with philosophy, which greatly influenced him until the end of his life.

In 1898, James became a student at University College Dublin and began studying English, French and Italian. The young man attended literary and theater clubs, wrote plays and materials for the local newspaper. In 1900, a laudatory review of When We Dead Awaken was the first publication in a 2-week student review.

In 1901, Joyce wrote an article on Irish literary theater, which the university refused to publish. It was published in the city newspaper "United Irishman", thus introducing the author to a wider public.

After graduating from college, Joyce went to Paris to study medicine, which proved too difficult to understand and master. The young man followed in his father’s footsteps, often changed professions, trying to find a livelihood, spent a lot of time in the French National Library, and wrote poetry. Soon he received news from home about his mother's fatal illness and was forced to return to Dublin.

Books

Joyce's creative biography began in 1904, when he attempted to publish an essay entitled "Portrait of the Artist." The publishers did not like the material, and the author decided to rework it into the novel “Hero Stephen,” which reproduced the events of his own youth, but soon abandoned work on the work.

In 1907, James returned to the outline of the unfinished book and completely reworked them, resulting in the 1914 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which tells the story of the early years of the main character Stephen Dedalus, very similar to the writer himself in his youth.

In 1906, Joyce began work on a collection of 15 short stories called Dubliners, in which he gave a realistic portrayal of middle-class life in and around the capital at the beginning of the 20th century. These sketches were made when Irish nationalism was at its peak and focus on Joyce's idea of ​​human insight at turning points in life and history.

The composition of the collection is divided into 3 parts: childhood, youth and maturity. Some characters were subsequently reincarnated as minor characters in the novel Ulysses. Joyce first tried to publish Dubliners in 1909 in his homeland, but was refused. The struggle for the publication of the book continued until 1914, when the collection was finally published.

In 1907, James became close to one of his students, Aron Hector Schmitz, a Jewish writer and playwright known under the pseudonym Italo Svevo, who became the prototype for the hero of the new novel Ulysses by Leopold Bloom. Work on the work began in 1914 and lasted 7 years. The novel has become a key literary work in the history of English-language modernism and the writer's bibliography.

In Ulysses, Joyce used stream of consciousness, parody, jokes, and other techniques to introduce the characters. The action of the novella was limited to one day, June 16, 1904, and echoed Homer's Odyssey. The writer transported the ancient Greek heroes Ulysses, Penelope and Telemachus to modern Dublin and recreated them in the images of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, in parodic contrast to the original prototypes.

The book explored various spheres of metropolitan life, with an emphasis on its wretchedness and monotony. At the same time, the work is a lovingly detailed description of the city. Joyce argued that if Dublin were to be destroyed in some disaster, it could be rebuilt, brick by brick, through the pages of a novel.

The book consists of 18 chapters that cover approximately one hour of the day. Each episode had its own literary style and correlated with a specific event in the Odyssey. The main action took place in the minds of the characters and was supplemented by plots from classical mythology and sometimes intrusive external details.

Serial publication of the novel began in March 1918 in the New York magazine The Little Review, but was discontinued two years later due to accusations of obscenity. In 1922, the book was published in England under the patronage of editor Harriet Shaw Weaver. An interesting fact is that the work was soon banned, and 500 copies of the novel sent to the USA were seized and burned at English customs.

After completing work on Ulysses, Joyce was so exhausted that for a long time he did not write a single line of prose. On March 10, 1923, he returned to creativity and began work on a new work. By 1926, James had completed the first 2 parts of the novel Finnegans Wake, and in 1939 the book was published in full. The novel was written in a peculiar and obscure English, based mainly on complex, multi-layered puns.

Reaction to the work was mixed. Many criticized the book for being unreadable and lacking a unified narrative thread. Defenders of the novel, including the writer Samuel Beckett, spoke about the significance of the plot and the integrity of the images of the central characters. Joyce himself said that the book would find an ideal reader who would suffer from insomnia and, having completed the novel, would turn to the first page and start again.

Personal life

In 1904, Joyce met Nora Barnacle, a Galway woman working as a hotel maid. The young people fell in love and left Ireland together in search of work and happiness. First, the couple settled in Zurich, where James was a teacher at a language school. Joyce was then sent to Trieste, then part of Austria-Hungary, and assigned to the position of English teacher in a class where naval officers were trained.

In 1905, Nora gave birth to her first child, a boy named Joggio. In 1906, tired of the monotonous life in Trieste, Joyce briefly moved to Rome and got a job as a clerk in a bank, but he did not like it there either. Six months later, James returned to Nora in Austria-Hungary and was in time for the birth of his daughter Lucia in 1907.

Joyce and Nora's financial situation was difficult. The writer could not devote himself entirely to creativity, since he had to earn a living. He was a representative of the film industry, tried to import Irish fabrics to Trieste, did translations, and gave private lessons. The family occupied one of the main places in the writer’s personal life; despite all the difficulties, he remained with Nora until the end of his life, who became his wife 27 years after they met.

In 1907, James began to have vision problems, which subsequently required more than a dozen surgical operations. There were suspicions that the writer and his daughter suffered from schizophrenia. They were examined by a psychiatrist, who concluded that Joyce and Lucia were "two people heading to the bottom of the river, one diving and the other drowning."

In the 1930s, money problems receded into the background thanks to Joyce's acquaintance with the editor of Egoist magazine, Harriet Shaw Weaver. She provided financial support to the writer's family, and after his death she paid for the funeral and became the administrator of the property.

Death

On January 11, 1941, Joyce underwent surgery in Zurich to remove a duodenal ulcer. The next day he fell into a coma. On January 13, 1941, he woke up at 2 a.m. and asked the nurse to call his wife and son before losing consciousness again. Relatives were on the road when the writer died, less than a month before his 59th birthday. The cause of death was a perforated intestinal ulcer.

Joyce was buried in Zurich at the Fluunter cemetery. Initially, the body was buried in an ordinary grave, but in 1966, after the Dublin authorities refused relatives permission to transport the remains to their homeland, a memorial to the writer was created in its place. After some time, next to a granite plaque on which quotations from the works of the Dublin modernist were carved, a statue was placed that was strikingly similar to the author of Ulysses.

Quotes

“I always write about Dublin because if I can understand the essence of Dublin, I can understand the essence of all cities in the world.”

“To feel the beauty of music - you need to listen to it twice, but to feel the beauty of nature or a woman - at one glance”

“The idea that you don’t pay for lunch is the best sauce for dinner.”

“A genius makes no mistakes. His mistakes are deliberate."

Bibliography

• 1904 - “Holy Office”
• 1904-1914 – “Dubliners”
• 1912 – “Gas from the Burner”
• 1911-1914 - "Giacomo Joyce"
• 1907-1914 – “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
• 1914-1915 – “Exiles”
• 1914-1921 - “Ulysses”
• 1922-1939 – “Finnegans Wake”

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce- Irish writer and poet, representative of modernism.

James Joyce is born February 2, 1882 in Rathgar (south Dublin). James managed to get a good education, but the poverty and unsettled life of his youth were reflected in his works.

At the age of 6, Joyce entered a Jesuit college Clongowes Woods in Klein, and then, in 1893, to Belvedere College in Dublin, from which he graduated in 1897. A year later, James began studying at Dublin University, from which he graduated in 1902.

In 1900 the first one was published and he began to write his first lyric poems. Since 1916, he published in the American literary magazine Little Review.

At the age of 20, Joyce went to Paris, worked as a journalist, teacher, etc. A year later he returned to Ireland due to his mother’s illness. After the death of his mother in 1904, Joyce again left his homeland (settling in Trieste), this time with the maid Nora Barnacle, whom he later married (27 years later).

Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Joyce and his wife moved to Zurich, where he worked on the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and later on the first chapters of Ulysses.

In Paris, James Joyce began work on his last large-scale work, the novel Finnegans Wake, published in 1939.

/ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was largely autobiographical and described the writer’s studies in a Jesuit boarding school.

“The one who read “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” James Joyce, probably remembers the terrifying opening scene in which little Stephen Dedalus is bullied by a superstitious servant. He tells the boy that if he does not apologize for a certain “sin”, eagles will fly and peck out his eyes. Stephen hides under the table, but the threat continues to pulse through his mind:

“They’ll peck out your eyes - apologize - apologize - they’ll peck out your eyes...”

Researchers Joyce They consider this episode autobiographical. An early passage from Joyce, quoted in The Cornell Collection, also includes an episode in which young Joyce is frightened by eagles that peck out his eyes. When Joyce began to write novels exposing the sexual side of life in Catholic Ireland - the great unspoken secret in that country - he became the target of a campaign of vilification for which there is no parallel in literary history. At this time his eyes began to bother him. He turned to one ophthalmologist after another, but each time it gave only temporary relief. One of the specialists said that Joyce's problem had psychological roots, but could not suggest what exactly was preventing him from seeing or how to get rid of it. Others immediately resorted to a scalpel. Over the course of seventeen years, Joyce underwent eleven operations and by the end of his life was declared blind - although in fact he was not completely blind."

Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology, M., “Sofia”, 2006, p.132.

The most famous and widely imitated work of the writer is the novel: Ulysses/ Ulysses, published in 1922. Some critics called this novel "an encyclopedia of modernism."

And in later “...in "Finnegans Wake", wishing to depict "thunder" or "cry in the street" denoting a highly collective action, James Joyce uses a word akin to those found in ancient manuscripts: "Fall (babadalgarag
tuonntanntrovarrounaunskauntuhuhurdenenternak!)"

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: the formation of a typing man, M., Mir, 2005, p. 159.

« Victor Hugo threw out the slogan: “Guerre au vocabulaire et paix a la syntaxe” - “War on the dictionary, peace on syntax.” James Joyce, during the creation of Finnegans Wake, would have called the slogan Hugo the fruit of childish timidity or simply cowardice. This amazing work by Joyce is not popular, and there is every reason to assume that it will never become popular. If it had not been preceded by Ulysses and several other books that managed to glorify Joyce, I do not think that even his most ardent admirers would have had the courage and desire to remain faithful to him. Reading Finnegans Wake requires dedication unless the reader is caught up in the passion of the commentator. Joyce created his own language here and came into conflict not only with syntax, but also with inflections, phonetics and the traditional form of words. He set himself - as he himself told me about it - a grandiose and daring goal: to create a new language for expressing things that had not been expressed in human speech before. To do this, he drew material not only from English in all its variants, but also from other languages. Like all cocktails, this one turned out to be an extremely strong drink: after reading a few pages you begin to feel dizzy. Joyce with his experiment was not the first and not the only one, you can find such tests everywhere, in Poland Witkacy did this, but rather as a joke. Joyce did not allow himself to joke with such things and considered his creation the greatest of all that appeared in our era. He was mistaken, of course, but it was a mistake of majestic proportions...”

Jan Parandovsky, Alchemy of the word. Olympic disc, M., “Progress”, 1982, p. 217.

"How Joyce - for many years he dictated his final novel, Finnegans Wake, completely incomprehensible texts , and it took the Polish researcher M. Slomczynski twenty years to decipher just one chapter from this novel... Joyce was completely blinded by this work and soon died. And the solution to this incomprehensible text, in my opinion, is nearby - poor Joyce’s beloved daughter went crazy, and he tried, perhaps, to write a novel in her language, a language in which all the individual words are understandable, but together they mean nothing - or mean everything. Try to make up a phrase that doesn't mean anything. It won't work. I once inserted such texts into my play “Bifem”. But they simply meant interference in the microphone, illegibility. And Joyce wrote an entire novel!

Petrushevskaya L.S. , The little girl from “Metropol”: stories, stories, essays, St. Petersburg, “Amphora”, 2006, p. 19.

Joyce“... who borrowed the internal monologue discovered by Desjardins, but went further: “Joyce went further. There is nothing in common between his internal monologue and Desjardins. He brought his own “I” into it. His own world... He did it better...” (Sarraute Nathalie. Les Fruits d'Or. Paris, 1973. P. 130). Joyce's inner monologue in Ulysses is an agrammatic speech stream depicting the unconscious mind of Marion Bloom, the wife of one of the main characters, Leopold Bloom. Joyce not only develops here the form of internal monologue: he achieves such mastery, the level of which has not been surpassed to this day. Before us is a picture of a chaotic avalanche-like flow of words as an image of embodied movement, characteristic of our perception, where it is impossible to stop. And although Joyce was reproached for the obscenity of the very subject of the description, since we are talking about erotic experiences, the image he created gives such an amazing sense of life, which has no equal in literature either before or after Joyce. Correctly noted Virginia Woolf After reading the novel “Ulysses,” “if we want life itself, then, undoubtedly, it is here before us.”

Chernitskaya L.A., Invariance in literary metatext, St. Petersburg, Renome, 2016, p. 33-34.

Rating M.I. Weller - philologist by training:“The basis of prose is fact. The basis of poetry is feeling. Great events and great feelings lie at the heart of literature. The Iliad is an artist's account of the heroes' expeditionary campaign. "Ulysses" is an artist's account of one day in the life of a microbe. Joyce more voluminous and aesthetically richer Homer. With all its sophisticated arsenal of acquired means, literature has ingrained itself into the little man: he, too, is deep! interesting! great! hero! Yes: but also. Two hundred years ago, turning to a small person and an ordinary event was a discovery, a turn, an act of justice. The telescope was turned to the other end: what a wealth of small flora and fauna! This is the level at which existence, it turns out, is inherent! And Akaki Akakievich obscured the Prophetic Oleg, and the tea party drowned out the roar of the battles. A new stage has begun. At this stage, literature was recommended to be ordinary: characters and events, feelings and language. What is art? And in the consciousness of a subtle system of polysemantic conventions, in the taste and beauty of presentation that are based on mastery of tradition. Digestion began within oneself: in a space enclosed by restrictions, the subject of literature became the development of literary means. Which naturally led to self-consumption. […] That is, just as there is pure and applied science, pure literature and applied literature have emerged: one for professionals, the other for all consumers.”

Weller M.I. , Word and profession, “Ast”, 2008, p. 49.