JOYCE, James
Irish novelist and short-story writer (1882-1941)
Although Joyce settled in Italy at 27, and spent the rest of his life there, he never left the Ireland of his memory: his work is a ceaseless exploration of Irish scenery, education, history, religion, habits of thought and patterns of daily life. His early writings -- the short stories in Dubliners (1914) and the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915), based on his own school and university life -- are stylistically straightforward. They are also notable for precise evocation of sensation and atmosphere. By giving a mosaic of tiny impressions (the feel of wooden desks in a schoolroom, the taste of mud on a rugby field, the smell of gas-lamps in student digs) Joyce builds up a detailed picture which is both factually and emotionally compelling. (Proust used a similar idea in the childhood sections of Remembrance of Things Past.) In his two long novels, Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce developed this mosaic structure further: Ulysses relates the events of a single day, FinnegansWake a man's thoughts and dreams during a single night. Parts of these books are stream-of-consciousness monologues, a tumble of apparently unrelated sentences threading a path through the maze of one person's mind. Joyce often seems to be collapsing language itself: syntax splits apart; words blur into one another; each page is a kaleidoscope of puns, parodies, half-quotations, snatches of song and snippets from half a dozen languages. Some people find this style unreadable; for others it is endlessly rewarding, a mesmeric impression of the jumble of thought itself.
ULYSSES (1922) The book follows two people, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, from dawn to midnight on a single day in Dublin in 1904. At one level what they do is ordinary: they shave, go to the privy, eat, drink, argue in bars, go to a funeral, borrow money, flirt with girls on a beach, visit Dublin's red-light area. But Joyce also shows us their thoughts, the fragmentary responses and impressions evoked by each real incident. The book ends with a 60-page interior monologue', the inconsequential, erotic reverie of Bloom's wife Molly as she lies beside him, drifting into sleep.
Joyce's works are Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (based on an earlier, unfinished novel, Stephen Hero, which has also been published); Ulysses; Finnegans Wake; Chamber Music and Pomes Penny each (poetry).
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To Ulysses : see also pathway
Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds where both Joyce's experimental writing and the whole concept of Irishness are spectacularly sent up Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (a multi-volume work which provides a female stream of consciousness to match the very male version served up by Joyce) John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces is a kind of comic Ulysses set in New Orleans Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
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