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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From Faber and Faber
To see Annie Liffey trip, tumble and caper.
Sevensinns in her singthings,
Plurabelle on her prose,
Seashell ebb music wayriver she flows.
—James Joyce
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
—James Joyce
Topics: Poetry, Poets
He is incapable of a truly good action who finds not a pleasure in contemplating the good actions of others.
—James Joyce
Topics: Genius
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.
—James Joyce
Topics: Mistakes
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
—James Joyce
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
An Irishman needs three things: silence, cunnning, and exile.
—James Joyce
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
—James Joyce
Topics: Genius, Courage, Intelligence, Mistakes, Discovery
A man’s errors are his portal to discovery.
—James Joyce
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: Charity, Giving
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
—James Joyce
Topics: Artists, Art
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