From an early age, Joyce disdained what he saw as the shabby Philistinism of his birthplace, Dublin, rejecting the Catholicism that dominated Irish culture in favor of a literary faith and a rebel's stance. Absolutely convinced of his genius, Joyce left...
[more]From an early age, Joyce disdained what he saw as the shabby Philistinism of his birthplace, Dublin, rejecting the Catholicism that dominated Irish culture in favor of a literary faith and a rebel's stance. Absolutely convinced of his genius, Joyce left for self-imposed exile in Europe in 1904, and began a career of wandering, supporting himself and wife Nora with small teaching jobs. Placed by patrons upon the chaise longue of Carl Jung, Joyce rebelled again, but luckily found an advocate in Harriet Shaw Weaver, who supported him financially for much of his life.
Joyce's exile from Dublin is ironic considering that he looked to its characters and to his own formative experiences there for inspiration in all of his fiction. "Dubliners" (1914) is filled with sketches of the city, and Stephan Dedalus, who appears in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916) and "Ulysses" (1922), is a semi-autobiographical stand-in for the young Joyce himself. Joyce's fictions translate his personal history into intricately crafted allegories, using a matrix of often obscure symbols that crystallizes and resonates as the work advances. Hundreds of books and Ph.D.s have been built from the careful analysis of his symbology.
Joyce's early embrace of the identity of the alienated artist informs the scale and style of his works; the creation of such epic, psychologically intricate, and experimental novels as "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake" (1928-37) demanded an enormous amount of time, not to mention an obsessive attention to craft. His two monumental books aim to embrace -- and, in effect, rewrite -- all of human history, and to do so with humor, lyricism, and astounding innovation. In "Ulysses," Joyce re-envisions the wanderings of Odysseus through the unknown lands at the edges of the Mediterranean as the journey that the psyche makes in one day's worth of present-time consciousness, memories, and unconcious thoughts. Joyce seems to have been justifiably sure of his genius as almost all works of art produced after his Modernist monuments owe something to him.
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