James Joyce (1882-1941)

When James Joyce was a young man he often spent entire days walking around the streets of Dublin. He used this time to observe the local people and every facet of Irish city life. The things he saw became his inspiration and the stories he produced has since become the inspiration for every other Irish writer. Like many great writers, Joyce was not appreciated fully while he was alive. People never asked him important questions that historians today would love the answers to. He was a literary genius, perhaps the best there has ever been. Unfortunately his talent extended beyond his own generation's grasp. Much of his work was considered outrageous and his countrymen did not want to listen. Unlike Yeats who went before him, Joyce was not romantic. He had no intention of describing Ireland as a mythological paradise because he knew that simply was not the case. Joyce wanted to be critical because he saw nothing on the streets of Dublin to be particularly proud of, so he left Ireland, returned occasionally but never permenantly.

In 1904, at the age of 22 James Joyce left Ireland with his girlfriend Nora Barnacle after Joyce became increasingly frustrated with life in Dublin. Over the next four decades Joyce spent most his time in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. He visited Ireland in 1912 and after that he never returned to his homeland. During his initial years of self-imposed exile he worked as a teacher and as a critic. However he eventually became successful enough at writing that he no longer needed to work at anything else. His first main work to be published was Dubliners in 1914 by a London based publishing company. This work comprises of fifteen short stories, all of which are based in and around Dublin at a time when Irish nationalism was beginning to awake in the people. Joyce next published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916. It is a story that parallels the childhood experiences of James Joyce and often shows the contempt he had for his fellow countrymen. The novel was an experimental work as Joyce first deployed his famous 'stream of consciousness' approach. This leads directly to Ulysses which was published in Paris in 1922. Considered by most to be the greatest novel ever, Joyce employs the 'stream of consciousness' throughout his depiction of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, an ordinary man on a normal day. The stream of consciousness structure basically refers to how our thoughts lead us on to other thoughts throughout any given day. It attempts to mirror, in writing, the workings of the human mind. This style of writing can be very complicated to read for some people as it does not follow popular conventions and gives no explanations as to how or when or why a story has taken a different direction.

In 1939 Joyce finished his last major work, Finnegan's Wake which was seventeen years in the making. Even more complex than his previous works, this novel abandons all conventions of plot and character construction. Instead it deals with the description of dreams and tries to recreate the experience of dreaming.

In 1941 James Joyce died and was buried in Zurich having devoted his entire adult life to creating literature, and without knowing at the end of it whether his work would survive the ages.