James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish modernist writer whose “interior monologue,” a groundbreaking technique of narrative epiphany, influenced generations of writers.
Joyce’s collected works are few: two collections of poetry, a play, a book of short stories, and three novels. He is best known for his novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922, Paris; 1936, England.)
Joyce was born in Rathgar, now a suburb of Dublin. Even at a young age, Joyce was independent and scholarly. He learned Norwegian at the age of 19, intending to read the plays of Henrik Ibsen in their original language. While at University College in Dublin, he also studied Dante Alighieri, Aristotle, and many Elizabethan poets. He went to Paris for a year in 1902, determined to study medicine. He lived in poverty and wrote a book of short stories called Dubliners (1914.)
Joyce’s significant literary accomplishment is Ulysses, an extensive and remarkably original work charting a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin. The storyline follows the wanderings of Bloom, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus (the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) in Dublin, and their eventual meeting. The various chapters parallel the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey. Many early readers were awestruck by the highly allusive style; others were outraged by its sexual content and boldly scatological humor. The novel was banned in England and America for more than ten years. Today Ulysses is widely regarded as the most excellent example of literary modernism. It remains one of the most discussed novels ever written.
June 16, 1904, the day that encompasses the action of Ulysses, is the day that James Joyce met the love of his life, Nora Barnacle, a hotel chambermaid from Galway. The couple lived in exile, raised two children, and were ultimately married in 1931. Every year, on June 16, in Dublin and other cities around the world, people gather to commemorate “Bloomsday” and relive the events in Ulysses.
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An Irishman needs three things: silence, cunnning, and exile.
—James Joyce
Topics: Humor
A nation is the same people living in the same place.
—James Joyce
Topics: Nationality, Nations, Nationalism, Nation
I think a child should be allowed to take his father’s or mother’s name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.
—James Joyce
Topics: Names, Identity
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 call 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
Topics: Identity, Defense
I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s mortality.
—James Joyce
Topics: Arguments
While you have a thing it can be taken from you… but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.
—James Joyce
Topics: Giving, Charity
He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?
—James Joyce
Topics: Christianity
What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?
—James Joyce
All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.
—James Joyce
Topics: Faith
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
—James Joyce
Topics: Discovery
Sentimentality is unearned emotion.
—James Joyce
A man’s errors are his portal to discovery.
—James Joyce
Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another’s soul.
—James Joyce
Topics: Love
There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
—James Joyce
Topics: Churches, Religion
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.
—James Joyce
Topics: Mistakes
I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.
—James Joyce
Topics: Names, Identity
A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen’s friendliness.
This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.
Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful.
My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy that I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?
For our freedom, said Davin.
No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Wolfe Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I’d see you damned first.
They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me.
Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant…
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets … Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
—James Joyce
Topics: Patriotism
The present is the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
—James Joyce
Topics: The Present
Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.
—James Joyce
Topics: Genius
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
—James Joyce
Topics: Language, Authors & Writing
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
—James Joyce
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art
You cannot eat your cake and have it.
—James Joyce
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom
When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.
—James Joyce
Topics: Exile
When I heard the word “stream” uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn’t new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there’s Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.
—James Joyce
Topics: Fiction
Heart of my heart, were it more,
More would be laid at your feet.
—James Joyce
Topics: Charity
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
—James Joyce
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
He is incapable of a truly good action who finds not a pleasure in contemplating the good actions of others.
—James Joyce
Topics: Genius
You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.
—James Joyce
Topics: Violence, Heaven
When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.
—James Joyce
Topics: Soul, Light, Try
Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.
—James Joyce
Topics: Beauty
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