I once had a bank manager in Red Books who spent ten minutes examining a copy of Ulysses before placing it back on its shelves and saying that he didn’t feel capable of reading Joyce. This is unfortunately a common reaction and isn’t helped by certain neo-yuppies that have hijacked the legacy of Joyce and have worked hard to reinvent him as the proto metrosexual dandy of Dublin.
Let’s be clear. James Joyce was a genius. He was also an argumentative, contrary drunkard with more than a mild interest in masturbation, watersports and rather bizarrely, farts. The man was human and not the Saint of peacocks or an early candidate for Doctor Who that some of the bloomsday crowd have tried to portray him as having been.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. Though born into the middle class, Joyce would struggle with financial and domestic uncertainness in his early years caused mainly by his alcoholic father. He was a bright boy and excelled in school but his true turning point would begin in 1904.
On the 7th of January 1904 Joyce submitted an essay on aesthetics to a liberal magazine called Dana. His work, The Portrait of an Artist, was promptly rejected. This rejection was something that Joyce would become accustomed to throughout his life. On his 22nd birthday he decided to rewrite Portrait as a novel called ‘Stephen Hero.’
In the early months of 1904 Joyce met a chambermaid from Galway called Nora Barnacle. On the 16th of June they walked out together for the first time. Joyce would later immortalise this date as the setting of his seminal novel ‘Ulysses’ and the date is now celebrated every year around the world as Bloomsday.
Nora Barnacle would soon realise that James Joyce was not the darling that future revisionists would try to paint him as. He was a heavy drinker prone to fist fights, which he usually came out on the wrong side of due to his light frame and drunken state. He narrowly survived being shot by a student colleague in Martello Tower during a binge.
Nora and Joyce left Dublin, probably for these very reasons. He began his self imposed exile in Zurich but would live in over 30 different addresses across Europe during the rest of his life as he ran from boredom, bills and failure.
In fact there’s no doubt that Joyce loved Nora deeply and that there relationship was less than conventional as can be seen from this extract from one of their letters, “My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter."
Strangely enough the Bloomsday committee rarely mention that when they’re dressing up on the 16th of June!
Joyce managed to get his first book of Poetry published in 1904 with the release of ‘The Holy Office’, followed by ‘Chamber music’ in 1907 and ‘Gas from a burner’ in 1912.
In 1909 he returned to Dublin to help open Ireland’s first cinema, the doomed Volta Cinematograph. He also planned on publishing a book of short stories which he had finished in 1906 called Dubliners. He made contact with Dublin publisher George Roberts but after three years of arguments and disputes, their relationship ended in 1912 during Joyce’s last visit to Ireland.
It would be two more years before ‘Dubliners’ was finally published. The book contained fifteen short stories based on the lives of wealthier Dublin citizens in the early years of the 20th century. The overwhelming focus in each story is on a moment of epiphany or illumination for a character.
‘Portrait of an Artist as a young man’ was published in 1916. A rewrite of ‘Stephen Hero’ which in itself was a rewrite of the original Portrait, Joyce produced a classic coming of age novel which, along with Dubliners, is probably the best entry point to Joyce. Despite introducing literary techniques which he would champion like the stream of consciousness and interior monologue, Portrait is a far easier read than his future epics.
Joyce also produced his only play during the first world war. ‘Exiles’ was started in 1914 and completed in 1918. It rifted off of ‘The Dead’, the final story in ‘Dubliners’.
It was also during this first world war period that Joyce was engaged in writing his most ambitious novel to date, a book which would truly change literature and give Joyce a permanent place in literary history. In 1914 he began ‘Ulysses’. Originally he had planned to include a story called Ulysses as the sixteenth story in Dubliners. Instead it became Joyce’s Magnum Opus. Famous poet Ezra Pound managed to get the novel serialised in the American publication, the little review, in 1918. This would eventually lead to the editors being prosecuted for publishing obscenity in 1921 and a ban on Ulysses in the states until 1933.
“They had to ban the book sure,” the Rabbit Flood enlightens me, “It was non stop sex. Makes 50 shades of grey look like a fecking Maeve Binchy book. Lads tugging and peeping. And loads of farting stuff too.”
Due to the controversy surrounding the book, Joyce struggled to find a publisher. Eventually it fell to Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous ‘Shakespeare & Company’ bookshop in Paris, to publish ‘Ulysses in 1922. The novel was banned in American, the UK and Ireland.
Set in a single day – June 16th 1904, ‘Ulysses’ sets the characters and incidents of Homers Odyssey in Dublin. The eighteen chapters each amount to roughly one hour of the day Joyce first took Nora out.
“Eighteen hours of smut,” The Rabbit Flood reminisces warmly, “It was beautiful boy.”
Joyce began his next novel in 1923. Due to the incredible magnitude of the project, Joyce’s personal despair (Both his daughter and daughter-in-law were sectioned due to mental health problems) and continued alcoholism and moving, ‘Finnegans Wake’ would not be completed until 1939. Samuel Beckett assisted Joyce, who’s eyesight was failing, to finish the epic.
The novel received mix reviews due to its advanced nature including multilingual puns that would require the reader to be skilled in multiple languages as well as pocessing the intelligence to understand the pun to truly get the book. Terence McKenna would say that, “(Finnegans Wake is) about as close to LSD on the page as you can get.” Philip K Dick wrote, “I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until centuries after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work.”
“I was a little disappointed to be honest boy, not enough nudity,” the Rabbit Flood says.
On the 11th of January 1941 Joyce underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer. He fell into a coma and died the following day. Three years later ‘Stephen Hero’, the novel Joyce had tried to burn after it’s rewrite, was published as a wave of goodwill for the controversial writer spread.
Many creators would name James Joyce as their influence including Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O' Brien, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Philip K Dick, Joseph Campbell and Robert Anton Wilson but infamous occultist Aleister Crowley may have put it best when he said, “I am convinced personally that Mr. Joyce is a genius all the world will have to recognize.”
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