James Joyce

James (Augustine Aloysius) Joyce 1882 - 1941 --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist, and critic.

INTRODUCTION: Joyce is considered the most prominent English-speaking literary figure of the first half of the twentieth century. His virtuoso experiments in prose contributed to a redefinition of the form of the modern novel. Some critics have asserted that Joyce's facility with language equals that of William Shakespeare or John Milton.

BIOGRAPHY: Joyce was born in a suburb of Dublin to middle-class parents. He was educated by Jesuits and underwent much the same emotional hardship and intellectual discipline as Stephen Dedalus, the hero of his first published novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. After graduating from University College in 1902, Joyce left Ireland, although his mother's serious illness caused his return in 1903. Following his mother's death in 1904, Joyce moved permanently to the continent with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. In France and Italy, where the couple's two children were born, Joyce struggled to support himself and his family by working as a language instructor. For a time they lived in Zurich, Switzerland, where Joyce wrote most of Ulysses (1922). In 1920 Joyce and his family moved to Paris. Among the expatriate Americans living there between the wars was Sylvia Beach, who published Ulysses under the imprint of her bookstore, Shakespeare and Co. Following the international renown accorded Ulysses, Joyce gained the financial patronship of Harriet Shaw and afterward was able to devote himself exclusively to writing. He spent nearly all of his remaining years composing his final work, Finnegans Wake (1939). Though free from poverty, these years were darkened by the worsening insanity of Joyce's daughter Lucia and by several surgical attempts to save his failing eyesight. After the publication of Finnegans Wake, Joyce fled Paris and the approaching turmoil of the Second World War. He died in Zurich of a perforated ulcer.

Joyce's work spans the extremes of naturalism and symbolism, from the spare style of Dubliners to the verbal richness of Finnegans Wake. Dubliners, a group of naturalistic stories concerned with the intellectual and spiritual torpor of Ireland, is the first product of his lifelong preoccupation with Dublin life. Though so disgusted by the narrowness and provincialism of Ireland that he spent most of his life in self-imposed exile, Joyce nevertheless made Ireland and the Irish the subject of all his fiction. These stories are also important as examples of his theory of epiphany in fiction: each is concerned with a sudden revelation of truth about life inspired by a seemingly trivial incident.

In many ways the collection is an indictment of the paralysis that Joyce felt gripped his city. As he told his initially reluctant publisher Grant Richards in a June, 1906, letter, "It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass." At the same time, the stories reflect a sense of the humanity of Dubliners caught in situations that they cannot fully comprehend or overcome. "The Dead," with its ambiguous ending, leaves open the possibility of some sort of salvation for the central character, Gabriel Conroy, projecting most overtly Joyce's sympathy for his fellow citizens, but even in stories with protagonists who are clearly doomed--"Eveline," "Clay," "A Painful Case" are examples--his depictions retain an empathy for the hopelessness and the apparent inevitability of their condition.

Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is at once a portrayal of the maturation of the artist, a study of the vanity of rebelliousness, and an examination of the self-deception of adolescent ego. The novel is often considered a study of the author's early life. Originally entitled Stephen Hero and conceived as an epic of autobiography, Portrait was thoroughly rewritten to provide an objective account of protagonist Stephen Dedalus's consciousness. To heighten sensitivity to the stages of Stephen's maturation, each episode unfolds in a style that approximates the intellectual level of the protagonist at the time. The narrative thus presents an evolving perspective parallel to but independent from Stephen's own nature. This emphasis on a fluctuating point of view within the narrative stands as the central feature of Joyce's new approach in A Portrait. It gives the reader a strong sense of Stephen's maturing consciousness, yet it allows one to maintain a detached and at times ironic perspective on his nature.

This method for establishing the tone of the work also influences the formal design of Joyce's chapters. Each is organized around a series of "epiphanies" which mark a turning point in Stephen's emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth. To balance these euphoric moments Joyce introduces throughout each chapter a series of "anti-epiphanies"--instances underscoring the misperceptions resulting from certain elevated attitudes. Moreover, he begins chapters two through five with "anti-epiphanies" aimed at directly undercutting the triumphs of the scenes immediately preceding them in the conclusions of chapters one through four.

A Portrait rests on such thematic paradoxes, for it charts Stephen's break with the constraints of the Irish world in which he grew up and his commitment to reform that world through his artistic powers. Stylistic experimentation and multiple perspective function in an efficient but muted manner in A Portrait; but in mastering their manipulation and in introducing the reader to the demands made by subtle shifts in tone and point of view, Joyce prepared for the more rigorous presentation of the same techniques in Ulysses.

Using the Odyssey of Homer as a frame, Joyce depicts in Ulysses the events of a single day in Dublin--June 16, 1904. Attention settles on three individuals. Stephen Dedalus, a bit older and more disillusioned than he was as the protagonist of A Portrait, spends the day seeking recognition from his fellow Dubliners for his artistic talent while drinking up the salary he has just received for teaching duties at Garret Deasy's school in Dalkey. Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jewish advertising canvasser for a Dublin newspaper, wanders around the city intent upon driving from his mind feelings of guilt over his father's death, remorse for the loss, eleven years earlier, of his infant son, apprehension over the maturity of his daughter Milly, and despair over his wife's impending infidelity. Molly Bloom, the wife of Leopold and the only one of the three not to spend her day criss-crossing Dublin, passes her time preparing for and engaging in her first act of adultery. Joyce overlays this interaction with a masterful depiction of minor characters, taking a a Rabelaisian delight in the seedy details of urban living. (Such details caused the novel to be banned from the United States until December, 1933, when Judge John M. Woolsey delivered the legal verdict that Ulysses was not obscene; it was published in America by Random House in early 1934, twelve years after Sylvia Beach's Paris edition appeared.) Despite Bloom, Molly, Stephen, and the other Dubliners' banal lives, Joyce imbues each with a dignity and fallibility that makes his or her experiences important to the reader.

As his earlier works, Joyce's style endows Ulysses with kinetic force. Its evolving form helps the reader to participate in the creation of the text by attempting to bring meaning (though not certitude) to it. The novel's introductory chapters establish its tone in a fairly conventional, if sometimes baroque, manner; but after progressing through the first third of the work, Joyce begins to vary the form of succeeding episodes, continually shifting narrative perspective and compelling his audience to reconstruct standards for interpretation. Within chapters Joyce confronts readers with the disjointed impressions of the central characters through various forms of interior monologue. The interspersion of these among more straightforward narration produces tension through overlapping depictions of the action; perhaps most significantly, Joyce alternately presents a range of perspectives throughout the text, giving no voice primacy. As a consequence the reader must establish, without the intervention or guidance of the author, a personal system of values for weighing the significance of events.

Ulysses stands as a logical extension of the stylistic innovation begun in Joyce's earlier works. The diffusion of narrative discourse in Dubliners and A Portrait manifests itself in every facet of Ulysses's textual structure, and the 1922 novel signals the continuing formal experimentation of Finnegans Wake. Unable to agree upon a formal classification for the latter work, critics hesitantly call it a novel. Meant to be the subconscious flow of thought of H. C. Earwicker, a character both real and allegorical, Finnegans Wake is literally a recreation of the English language. In this masterpiece of allusions, puns, foreign languages, and word combinations, Joyce attempted to compress all of human history into one night's dream. Admittedly a work for a select few, it has inspired a mass of critical exegesis. The author was probably serious when he remarked that a person should spend a lifetime reading it.

Critics have come to see the year 1922, with the appearance of Ulysses, of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, as the culmination of modernism. Although Joyce avoided association with artistic groups or literary movements, the characteristics distinguishing his works--antipathy towards institutions devoted to preserving the status quo, faith in the humanity of individuals, and a deep interest in stylistic experimentation--reflect the concerns animating the works of all the major artists of the period.

PERSONAL: Born February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland; died following surgery for a perforated ulcer, January 13, 1941, in Zurich, Switzerland; son of John Stanislaus (a tax collector) and Mary Jane (a pianist; maiden name, Murray) Joyce; married Nora Barnacle, July 4, 1931; children: Giorgio, Lucia.

EDUCATION: University College, Dublin, B.A., 1902.

CAREER: Novelist, short story writer, poet, and dramatist. Clifton School, Dalkey, Ireland, teacher, 1904; Berlitz School in Pola, Austria-Hungary (now Yugoslavia), and in Trieste, Austria-Hungary (now Italy), language instructor, 1904-06 and 1907; private language instructor in Trieste, 1907-1915, and sporadically in Zurich, Switzerland, 1915-19; Scuola Superiore di Commericio Revoltella, Trieste, language instructor, 1913-15 and 1919-20.

AWARDS/HONORS: Grants from the Royal Literary Fund, 1915, and the Civil List and the Society of Authors, both 1916.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (first published serially in Egoist, February 2, 1914-September 1, 1915), B. W. Huebsch, 1916, definitive edition, corrected by Chester G. Anderson, edited by Richard Ellmann, Viking, 1964, reprinted, 1982. Ulysses (some chapters first published serially in Little Review, March, 1918-September/December, 1920, and in Egoist, January/February, 1919-December, 1919), Shakespeare and Company (Paris), 1922, Random House, 1934, reprinted, with a foreword by Morris L. Ernst and the decision of the U.S. District Court rendered by Judge John M. Woolsey, Modern Library, 1942; published as Ulysses: The Corrected Text, edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, Random House, 1986.

Finnegans Wake (excerpts first published as fragments of Work in Progress [also see below]; portions also published in journals and anthologies, 1928-38), Viking, 1939, reprinted, 1967, recent edition, 1982.

Stephen Hero: A Part of the First Draft of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," edited with an introduction by Theodore Spencer, New Directions, 1944, revised edition with additional material published as Stephen Hero, edited by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, 1963.

SHORT FICTION

Dubliners (short story collection; three stories first published in Irish Homestead, 1904; contains The Sisters, An Encounter [also see below], Araby, Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House [also see below], A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case, Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, Grace, and The Dead [also see below]), Grant Richards, 1914, B. W. Huebsch, 1916, reprinted, edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz, Viking, 1969, recent edition, 1982.

Anna Livia Plurabelle (later published in Finnegans Wake [also see above]), preface by Padraic Colum, Crosby Gaige, 1928 (published in England as Anna Livia Plurabelle: Fragment of "Work in Progress," Faber, 1932); published as Anna Livia Plurabelle: The Making of a Chapter, edited with an introduction by Fred H. Higginson, University of Minnesota Press, 1960.

Tales Told of Shem and Shaun: Three Fragments From "Work in Progress" (later published in Finnegans Wake [also see above]; contains The Mookse and the Gripes, The Muddest Thick That Was Ever Heard Dump, and The Ondt and the Gracehoper), Black Sun Press (Paris), 1929.

Haveth Childers Everywhere: Fragment of "Work in Progress," Fountain Press, 1930, reprinted, Richard West, 1980.

The Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies: A Fragment From "Work in Progress," Servire Press, 1934.

Storiella as She Is Syung (fragment of "Work in Progress") Corvinus Press, 1937.

The Dead, edited by William T. Moynihan, Allyn & Bacon, 1965.

An Encounter, illustrations by Sandra Higashi, Creative Education, 1982.

Boarding House, illustrations by Sandra Higashi, Creative Education, 1982.

POETRY

Chamber Music, Elkin Mathews, 1907, authorized edition, B. W. Huebsch, 1918, reprinted, edited with an introduction by William York Tindall, Columbia University Press, 1954, recent edition, Hippocrene Books, 1982 (also see below).

Pomes Penyeach, Shakespeare and Company, 1927, Walton Press, 1971, recent edition, Bern Porter, 1986 (also see below).

Collected Poems of James Joyce (contains Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, and Ecce Puer ), Black Sun Press (New York), 1936; published as Collected Poems, Viking, 1937, reprinted, 1974, recent edition, Penguin Books, 1986.

Also author of The Holy Office, c. 1904.

CRITICAL WRITINGS

Ibsen's New Drama, published in Fortnightly Review, April, 1900.

(With F. J. C. Skeffington) The Day of the Rabblement [and] A Forgotten Aspect of the University Question (the former by Joyce, the latter by Skeffington), Gerrard Brothers (Dublin), 1901, Folcroft, 1970.

The Early Joyce: The Book Reviews, 1902-1903, edited with an introduction by Stanislaus Joyce and Ellsworth Mason, Mamalujo Press, 1955, reprinted, Richard West, 1978.

The Critical Writings of James Joyce, edited by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, Viking, 1959, reprinted, Cornell University Press, 1989.

CORRESPONDENCE

Letters of James Joyce (includes The Cat and the Devil [also see below]), Viking, Volume I, edited by Stuart Gilbert, 1957, reissued with corrections, 1966, Volumes II and III, edited by Richard Ellmann, 1966.

The Cat and the Devil, illustrations by Richard Erdoes, Dodd, 1964, recent edition, with illustrations by Blachon, Schocken, 1981.

Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellmann, Viking, 1975.

James Joyce's Letters to Sylvia Beach, 1921-1940, edited by Melissa Banta and Oscar A. Silverman, Indiana University Press, 1987.

OTHER

Exiles (three-act play; German language version first produced in Munich, August 7, 1919; English language version first produced in New York at Neighborhood Playhouse, February 19, 1925), B. W. Huebsch, 1918, reprinted, with the author's own notes and an introduction by Padraic Colum, Viking, 1951, revised edition, 1965.

Epiphanies, introduction and notes by O. A. Silverman, Lockwood Memorial Library, 1956, reprinted, Richard West, 1979.

Scribbledehobble: The Ur-workbook for "Finnegans Wake," edited with an introduction by Thomas E. Connolly, Northwestern University Press, 1961.

A First-Draft Version of "Finnegans Wake," edited by David Hayman, University of Texas Press, 1963.

The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," collected and edited by Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, Northwestern University Press, 1965.

A Shorter "Finnegans Wake," edited by Anthony Burgess, Viking, 1967.

Giacomo Joyce (memoir), introduction and notes by Richard Ellmann, Viking, 1968.

Joyce's "Ulysses" Notesheets in the British Museum, edited by Phillip F. Herring, University Press of Virginia, 1972.

Ulysses: The Manuscript and First Printings Compared [and] Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, introduction by Harry Levin, annotations and bibliographical preface by Clive Driver, Octagon Books, 1975.

James Joyce in Padua, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Louis Berrone, Random House, 1977.

Joyce's Notes and Early Drafts for "Ulysses": Selections From the Buffalo Collection, edited by Phillip F. Herring, University Press of Virginia, 1977.

The James Joyce Archive (facsimiles of surviving manuscripts), sixty-three volumes, edited by Michael Groden, Hans Walter Gabler, David Hayman, A. Walton Litz, and Danis Rose, Garland Publishing, 1977-79.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS: Finnegans Wake was filmed by Expanding Cinema, 1965; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was filmed by Ulysses/Howard Mahler, 1979; "The Dead" was filmed by Vestron Pictures, 1987.

FURTHER READINGS:

BOOKS :

Anderson, Chester G., editor, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text and Criticism, Penguin, 1977.

Anderson, James Joyce and His World, Thames & Hudson, 1968.

Attridge, Derek, Post-Structuralist Joyce, Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Beja, Morris, and Shari Benstock, Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, Ohio State University Press, 1989.

Beja and others, James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Benstock, Bernard, editor, Critical Essays on James Joyce, G. K. Hall, 1985.

Benstock, James Joyce, Frederick Ungar, 1985.

Benstock, Shari, and B. Benstock, Who's He When He's At Home: A James Joyce Directory, University of Illinois Press, 1980.

Bowen, Zack, and James F. Carens, A Companion to Joyce Studies, Greenwood Press, 1984.

Budgen, Frank, James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses," University of Indiana Press, 1960.

Campbell, Joseph and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to "Finnegans Wake," Viking, 1961.

Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume 6: Modern Writers, 1914-1945, Gale, 1991.

Connolly, Thomas E., editor, Joyce's Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962.

Curran, Constantine, James Joyce Remembered, Oxford University Press, 1968.

Deming, Robert H., A Bibliography of James Joyce Studies, G. K. Hall, 1977.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 10: Modern British Dramatists, 1940-1945, 1982, Volume 19: British Poets, 1840-1914, 1983, Volume 36: British Novelists, 1890-1929: Modernists, 1985.

Dunleavy, Janet E, and others, editors, Joycean Occasions: Essays from the Milwaukee James Joyce Conference, University of Delaware Press, 1991.

Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, 1959, revised edition, 1982.

Ellmann, The Consciousness of James Joyce, Oxford University Press, 1977.

Gilbert, Stuart, James Joyce's "Ulysses," Random House, 1952.

Goldman, Arnold, The Joyce Paradox, Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Gottfried, Roy K., The Art of Joyce's Syntax in Ulysses, University of Georgia Press, 1980.

Hart, Clive, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Northwestern University Press, 1963.

Hayman, David, "Ulysses": The Mechanics of Meaning, Prentice-Hall, 1970, revised, 1982.

Herr, Cheryl, Joyce's Anatomy of Culture, University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Joyce, Stanislaus, My Brother's Keeper, Faber, 1958.

Kenner, Hugh, Dublin's Joyce, Chatto & Windus, 1955.

Kenner, Ulysses, Allen & Unwin, 1980.

Lawrence, Karen, The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses, Princeton University Press, 1981.

Litz, A. Walton, James Joyce, Twayne, 1966.

Maddox, Brenda, Nora, a Biography of Nora Joyce, Hamish Hamilton, 1988.

Magalaner, Marvin, Time of Apprenticeship: The Fiction of Young James Joyce, Abelard-Schuman, 1959.

McCarthy, Patrick A., The Riddles of Finnegans Wake, Associated University Press, 1980.

McGee, Patrick, Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce's Ulysses, University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

McHugh, Roland, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Morris, William E. and Clifford A. Nault, Jr., editors, Portraits of an Artist: A Casebook on James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Odyssey Press, 1962.

Rice, Thomas Jackson, James Joyce: A Guide to Research, Garland, 1982.

Riquelme, John Paul, Teller and Tale in Joyce's Fiction, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Rose, Danis, and John O'Hanlon, Understanding Finnegans Wake, Garland, 1982.

Scholes, Robert and Richard M. Kain, The Workshop of Daedalus, Northwestern University Press, 1965.

Scott, Bonnie Kime, editor, New Alliances in Joyce Studies, University of Delaware Press, 1988.

Scott, Joyce and Feminism, Indiana University Press, 1984.

Short Story Criticism, Volume 3, Gale, 1989.

Staley, Thomas F. and Bernard Benstock, editors, Approaches to Joyce's Portrait, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976.

Staley, An Annotated Critical Bibliography of James Joyce, St. Martin's Press, 1989.

Thomas, Brook, James Joyce's Ulysses: A Book of Many Happy Returns, Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Tindall, William York, A Reader's Guide to "Finnegans Wake," Farrar, Straus, 1959.

Tindall, A Reader's Guide to James Joyce, Noonday Press, 1959.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 3, 1980, Volume 8, 1982, Volume 16, 1985, Volume 26, 1988, Volume 16, 1985, Volume 35, 1990, Volume 52, 1994.

van Caspel, Paul, Bloomers on the Liffey, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

World Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.

PERIODICALS :

Accent, winter, 1952.

Atlantic Monthly, March, 1958.

Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1989.

International Fiction Review, No. 1, 1991, pp. 1-14.

James Joyce Quarterly.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 20, 1986.

Modern Fiction Studies, spring, 1969, pp. 105-82.

New Republic, February 17, 1982.

New York Times Book Review, December 31, 1944.

Partisan Review, summer, 1939.

Poetry, July, 1930.

Times Literary Supplement, February 10, 1984.

ESSAY QUESTIONS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

1. Account for Joyce's denigration of Catholicism in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

2. Explain the types of linguistic experimentation found in Joyce's more complex novels, Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses.

3. Locate examples of Irish mythology in Joyce's fiction.

SOURCE: DISCovering Authors, Gale Research Inc., 1996.

[Overview of Author's Works and Career.]

Richard Ellmann in the opening passage of his monumental biography, James Joyce, aptly summarized the writer's impact on twentieth-century letters: "We are still learning to be James Joyce's contemporaries, to understand our interpreter." Since the publication of Finnegans Wake, a critical commonplace has held that no author now writing in English can attempt to create a work of prose fiction without contending with the force of Joyce's reconstitution of the genre; but, as Ellmann's statement implies, such a presumption projects only a small measure of Joyce's intellectual and artistic achievement.

Contemporary readers can hardly take up a work of fiction without falling under the influence of the conventions that Joyce established for experiencing a text. Many feel his influence directly; editors regularly anthologize short stories from his 1914 Dubliners collection, and Joyce's first published novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), has become a popular text in high school and college literature courses. His last two books, Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), though not as widely read as Dubliners or A Portrait, stand as paradigms of aesthetic achievement: often quoted, paraphrased, alluded to, or simply invoked in the name of artistic excellence. Those who do not encounter the influence of Joyce's consciousness through direct exposure to his works most likely absorb it from the writings of one or more of his literary heirs. Elements within the styles of authors as different from one another as Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett, modern American novelist William Faulkner, English fiction writers Malcolm Lowry and John Fowles, and contemporary American novelists Thomas Pynchon and John Irving identify them as some of those most overtly shaped by Joyce's canon. But no author today can begin to compose without confronting in some way the impact on modern literature brought about by Joyce's new methods of composition, and, consequently, no reader today can take up a work of modern fiction without feeling the repercussions of Joyce's influence.

Although critics have argued over the precise elements that give Joyce his prominence, most would agree that the power within his writings comes not so much from the topics that they explore as from their complex formal structures. The fascination he had for the form of his work is very neatly illustrated in an anecdote recorded by Frank Budgen in James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Budgen tells of meeting Joyce one night on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich:

"I've been working hard on [Ulysses] all day," said Joyce.

"Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said.

"Two sentences," said Joyce.

I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of [French novelist Gustave] Flaubert.

"You've been seeking the mot juste?" I said.

"No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence."

Throughout his canon the style of Joyce's prose commands immediate attention and involvement because it disrupts traditional assumptions about the role and the perceptual abilities of readers while engaging those readers in the attempt to discover alternative methods for experiencing the text. In Dubliners Joyce subtly mitigates condemnations of the suffocating atmosphere of society with evocative portrayals of the humanity of its victims. While descriptions in his stories often seem to reflect the detachment characteristic of late nineteenth-century naturalistic fiction, they also introduce descriptive techniques able to draw from readers empathetic responses to the suffering that characters undergo.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man continues to develop methods of rendering alternating points of view and to enhance reader awareness of the limitations in the credibility of the narrative voice within the text. It presents a highly personal depiction of the childhood, the adolescence, and the emergence into maturity of the novel's central character, Stephen Dedalus, who moves from a bright, pious, confused child into a fiercely independent, strong-minded, irreverent young man and fledgling artist. At the same time, Joyce's depiction of his central character retains an ironic detachment that highlights the supercilious points of Stephen's rebellion and compels readers to reconstruct their impressions of his nature as it evolves over each chapter.

In Ulysses a deluge of precise and variegated details recreates for readers the tempo of a single Dublin day, but rapidly fluctuating perspectives inhibit full comprehension of the impressions created by Joyce's montage-like construction. Interior monologue makes one intimately aware of the needs, the aspirations, the strengths, and the failings of the major characters--Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Bloom's wife, Molly--but at the same time a protean succession of styles impedes the emergence of a dominant attitude that would serve as a standard for measuring the actions of any individual in the work.

Finally, Finnegans Wake, Joyce's last work, displaces all previous stylistic patterns in his canon as it presents a dream vision of Dublin that amalgamates the particular and the universal, the subjective and the objective. Its digressive form overturns the reader's sense of the primacy of a single attitude and instead gives legitimacy to a wide range of impressions and perceptions. Its sardonic yet sensitive presentations of characters, events, issues, and ideas representing the central features of Western culture survey modern society without clearly idealizing or denigrating it. If Joyce shows a reluctance in his writing to interpret, to lecture, or to make pronouncements, he imposes no such restraints upon his readers. Quite the contrary, in each work and with increasing power, Joyce calls upon his audience to impose meaning on the text rather than to embrace an interpretation dictated by the work itself; he thus inverts conventional assumptions of the reader as a docile and pliant individual approaching a piece of literature like a jigsaw puzzler searching for the pattern hidden by the author under its formal layers.

Joyce's education began in 1888 at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit school located about twenty miles west of Dublin. The Jesuit influence permeated every aspect of Joyce's early intellectual growth. In 1898 he enrolled at University College, Dublin, and quickly earned a reputation as a brilliant if idiosyncratic student. Joyce graduated in 1902 with a degree in modern languages and left Dublin for Paris with the idea of studying medicine there. His mother's illness brought him back to Ireland in April of 1903, and by this time he had committed himself to becoming an artist. He found, however, the Dublin literati antipathetic to his efforts. Despite Joyce's considerable achievement of publishing at the age of eighteen an essay on Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen in the Fortnightly Review, Irish editors seemed to take little interest in his work. Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain in The Workshop of Daedalus record that one such editor, William Magee, refusing an essay Joyce submitted to the journal Dana, declared an unwillingness "to publish what was to myself incomprehensible." In 1904, at the invitation of poet and editor George Russell, Joyce did succeed in placing three stories, later to appear in the Dubliners, in the Irish Homestead; but the parochial intellectual atmosphere of Dublin was becoming too much for him. In June of the same year Joyce had met Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom he would spend the remainder of his life, and he began to form plans for escaping the suffocating intellectual atmosphere of his native city.

Joyce was opposed to the idea of marriage. Writing to Nora Barnacle in an August, 1904, letter collected in Letters of James Joyce, he declared: "My mind quite rejects the whole present social order and Christianity--home, the recognized virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines. How could I like the idea of home? My home was simply a middle-class affair ruined by spendthrift habits which I have inherited." But he was also painfully aware that he could not live openly with Nora in Dublin outside the sanction of the church. Joyce was determined to leave Ireland and seek a more tolerant moral and intellectual climate. (The Joyces were, in fact, married on July 4, 1931, in order to safeguard their children's rights of inheritance.) In October, 1904, on the promise of a position as a language instructor for a Berlitz School, Joyce and Nora left for the continent. After a brief period in Pola, Joyce and Nora settled in Trieste where he gave language lessons and worked on his short stories and a novel. In July of 1905 the Joyces' first child, Giorgio, was born. Although Joyce would return to Ireland briefly in 1909 and again in 1912, for the rest of his life he lived abroad while keeping Dublin before him in his writing.

Dubliners grew out of the core of stories that Joyce began before he left Ireland. Each piece depicts some aspect of middle-and lower middle-class urban life in Dublin. According to Marvin Magalaner's Time of Apprenticeship, Joyce explained his choice of setting to his friend, Arthur Power: "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal." The stories in Dubliners emphasize the circumscription of the individual consciousness by the social institutions of family, church, and state. The collection divides itself into narratives of childhood ("The Sisters," "An Encounter," "Araby"), adolescence ("Eveline," "After the Race," "Two Gallants," "The Boarding House"), adult life ( "A Little Cloud," "Counterparts," "Clay," "A Painful Case"), and public experiences (politics, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"; the family, "A Mother"; religion, "Grace" ), with the final story ("The Dead") acting as a coda.

In many ways the collection is an indictment of the paralysis that Joyce felt gripped his city. As he told his at-first-reluctant publisher Grant Richards in a June, 1906, letter collected in Letters of James Joyce: "It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass." At the same time, the stories reflect a sense of the humanity of Dubliners caught in situations that they cannot fully comprehend or overcome. "The Dead," with its ambiguous ending, leaves open the possibility of some sort of salvation for the central character, Gabriel Conroy, projecting most overtly Joyce's sympathy for his fellow citizens, but even in stories with protagonists who are clearly doomed--"Eveline," "Clay," "A Painful Case" are all examples--his depictions retain an empathy for the hopelessness and the apparent inevitability of their condition.

Throughout the collection Joyce's subtle narrative manipulation balances feelings of understanding and detachment. Probing the consciousness of his characters, Joyce forces the reader to share the sense of desolation of these figures, yet he maintains a narrative distance that allows a clear perception of the flaws and the weaknesses in their natures. A passage from "Counterparts" describing a man's reaction to the sudden realization of the sorry state of his finances exemplifies this balance in Joyce's art: "He cursed his want of money and cursed all the rounds he had stood, particularly all the whiskies and Apollinaris which he had stood to Weathers. If there was one thing that he hated it was a sponge." The words, while echoing the feelings of the protagonist of the story, belong to its unnamed narrator. Experiencing the sharp disappointment that the character Farrington feels, the reader also retains enough detachment to see the full irony of the situation Farrington has brought upon himself. This same pattern, combining association and disengagement, repeats itself throughout the book. In each story Joyce delves into his characters' minds while maintaining a sense of distance, bringing to readers a clear rendition of the anxiety and suffering that individuals endure without absolving them of the venality or the complicity that contributed to their condition.

While composing and refining the short stories that would make up Dubliners, Joyce was also writing a novel, Stephen Hero. It traces the childhood and early adult life of a middle-class Dublin boy, Stephen Daedalus, from precocious intellectualism to the stirrings of an artistic vocation. Joyce's work, a fragment of which survived and was published posthumously in 1944, follows the linear, cause-and-effect pattern of a conventional nineteenth-century novel. Structured around the commonplace frame of self-effacing, third person narrative, it examines the features of Stephen's intellectual and physical maturation with minute attention to detail. Late in 1907, around the same time that he completed the first version of "The Dead," Joyce radically revised his novelistic approach. He decided to abandon his manuscript, at this point over nine hundred pages long and by Joyce's own calculation approximately half completed, and to begin the process again, this time following a much less orthodox method of composition.

In his new novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce retained the basic plot and themes of Stephen Hero. Even specific scenes like Stephen's discussion of aesthetics with the dean of studies reappeared, though Joyce reconstructed these scenes to suit the emphasis of his new work. At the same time he introduced fundamental changes in the narrative form and structure. Joyce drastically cut the work, dropping the number of chapters from the proposed fifty to five. To accomplish this formidable task of condensation, Joyce eschewed presentation of linked chronological events, depicting instead a series of lyrical episodes illustrating the developing consciousness of the artist. The changes produced an intimate knowledge of the character of Stephen Dedalus (whose surname too goes through a minor condensation with a single vowel replacing its initial diphthong) while preventing the reader's close association with Stephen's attitudes. This process also further distanced the novel from Joyce's own experiences in Dublin, and, although Ireland and Irish life had a profound effect upon Joyce's art, it is a mistake to read A Portrait as if it were his autobiography.

To heighten sensitivity to the stages of Stephen's maturation, each episode unfolds in a style that approximates the intellectual level of the protagonist at the time. Every chapter has its unique tone and cadence, but the novel's opening lines provide perhaps the most familiar and accessible example of this technique: "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo." The story is one that Stephen's father has told him, and the words are those that he, baby tuckoo, could understand, although they are a bit beyond his own ability to form, as the passage of his speech that immediately follows this section demonstrates; for "O, the wild rose blossoms/On the little green place," he sings, "O, the green wothe botheth." The narrative thus presents an evolving perspective parallel to but independent from Stephen's own nature. This emphasis on a fluctuating point of view within the narrative stands as the central feature of Joyce's new approach in A Portrait. It gives the reader a strong sense of Stephen's maturing consciousness, yet it allows one to maintain a detached and at times ironic perspective on his nature.

This method for establishing the tone of the work also influences the formal design of Joyce's chapters. Each is organized around a series of "epiphanies"--moments of lyrical insight derived from the seemingly banal occurrences of daily life leading towards an event at the close of the chapter which marks a turning point in Stephen's emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth. To balance these euphoric moments Joyce introduces throughout each chapter a series of "anti-epiphanies"--instances underscoring the misperceptions resulting from certain elevated attitudes. Moreover, he begins chapters two through five with "anti-epiphanies" aimed at directly undercutting the triumphs of the scenes immediately preceding them in the conclusions of chapters one through four.

The path of alternating feelings traced by these epiphanies and anti-epiphanies follows the thematic development of the novel. Chapter one ends with Stephen on the shoulders of his classmates at Clongowes Wood College celebrating his apparent triumph over Father Dolan's unjust punishment, yet the second chapter begins with an account of how the sinking fortunes of his family have forced Stephen to leave the college. The final scene of the second chapter, his encounter with a prostitute, marks the triumph of Stephen's erotic and romantic passion over what he perceives as hypocritical social repression, but the opening of the next chapter shows Stephen's current sense of the tawdriness of these pleasures. The third chapter, with its famous retreat sermon, ends with Stephen's reception of the Eucharist and his temporary, but at the time quite sincere, reconciliation with the forces of conformity. The first scene opening chapter four, however, shows that his religious practices have lost their efficacy; the aesthetic revelation of his vision on the beach of the birdgirl, which closes the chapter, redirects his psychological development by replacing religion with art as the moral center of his life. The shabby circumstances of the Dedalus household at the opening of chapter five seems to belie this sense of liberation, but the novel ends with a final moment of transcendence, Stephen's articulation of his motives behind his decision to leave Ireland: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." The statement summarizes the thematic paradoxes upon which the novel rests, for it marks both Stephen's break with the constraints of the Irish world in which he grew up and his commitment to reform that world through his artistic powers. Stylistic distinction and multiple perspective function in an efficient but muted manner in A Portrait; but in mastering their manipulation and in introducing the reader to the demands made by subtle shifts in tone and point of view, Joyce prepared for the more rigorous presentation of the same techniques in Ulysses.

In 1914, as Joyce was finishing Portrait, he began to receive the public notice that he had been striving to gain for a decade. Grant Richards, who had proposed in 1906 to publish Dubliners and who had subsequently abrogated the agreement after a prolonged conflict with Joyce over cuts in particular stories, renewed his offer. (The collection appeared in June of 1914.) American poet and editor Ezra Pound, put in touch with Joyce by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, took an interest in A Portrait, and through his influence the Egoist began serial publication of the novel in February. Two more years would pass before Joyce found a publisher, B. W. Huebsch, to bring out the novel in book form, but the increased interest in his work reinforced Joyce's determination to continue his writing.

During 1914, as work on A Portrait was coming to a close and planning for Ulysses had already begun, Joyce abruptly took up a new project, the composition of his play Exiles (1918). The drama focuses on the return to Ireland of Richard Rowan, a successful, middle-aged author, after years of self-imposed exile on the continent. Exiles highlights the inevitable clash between an individual who values personal freedom above all else and a society whose central concerns are conformity and superficial appearances. Its 1919 premier in Munich was described by Joyce as "A flop!," according to Ellmann's biography, and subsequent performances have met with mixed success at best. Its composition, however, proved an important stage in Joyce's artistic development, for it enabled him to examine questions of fidelity, loyalty, and control that would stand at the center of the action of Ulysses.

Shortly after the completion of the play, Joyce again became an exile himself. With the onset of World War I his British passport made him a hostile alien in Trieste, a city at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and he was forced in 1915 to move with his family to neutral Switzerland. From 1915 to 1919 Joyce lived in Zurich, where he completed drafts of the first twelve episodes of Ulysses. After the war he returned briefly to Trieste, and in 1920, at the urging of Pound, he went to Paris where he hoped to find accommodations less chaotic than those in postwar Trieste. Joyce intended the move only as a temporary displacement, meant to last no longer than the few months he judged necessary to finish Ulysses, but life in Paris proved more congenial than expected. Among the friends whom Joyce made early in his stay was a young American, Sylvia Beach, owner of the book shop Shakespeare and Company, who agreed to bring out Ulysses under her own imprint. By the time the book appeared on February 2, 1922, Joyce and his family were firmly established in Paris and would remain in the city for the next twenty years.

Using the Odyssey of Homer as a frame, Joyce depicts in Ulysses the events of a single day in Dublin--June 16, 1904. Attention settles on three individuals. Stephen Dedalus, a bit older and more disillusioned than he was as the protagonist of A Portrait, spends the day seeking recognition from his fellow Dubliners for his artistic talent while drinking up the salary he has just received for teaching duties at Garret Deasy's school in Dalkey. Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jewish advertising canvasser for a Dublin newspaper, wanders around the city intent upon driving from his mind feelings of guilt over his father's death, remorse for the loss, eleven years earlier, of his infant son, apprehension over the maturity of his daughter Milly, and despair over his wife's impending infidelity. Molly Bloom, the wife of Leopold and the only one of the three not to spend her day crisscrossing Dublin, passes her time preparing for and conducting her first act of adultery. Joyce overlays this interaction with a masterful depiction of minor characters and a Rabelaisian delight in the seedy details of urban living. (Such details caused the novel to be banned from the United States until December, 1933, when Judge John M. Woolsey delivered the legal verdict that Ulysses was not obscene; it was published in America by Random House in early 1934, twelve years after Sylvia Beach's Paris edition appeared.) Despite the banality surrounding the lives of Bloom, Molly, Stephen, and the other Dubliners, Joyce gives each a dignity and fallibility that makes his or her experiences important to the reader.

As in Joyce's earlier works, style endows Ulysses with kinetic force. Its evolving form supplies narration with the power to make mundane characters and events interesting while constraining the reader to participate in the creation of the text by attempting to bring meaning (though not certitude) to it. The novel's introductory chapters establish its tone in a fairly conventional, if sometimes baroque, manner; its first lines read, "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air." After progressing through the first third of the work, Joyce begins to vary the form of succeeding episodes, continually shifting narrative perspective and compelling his audience to reconstruct standards for interpretation: for example, the first line of the "Sirens" episode reads, "Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing imperthnthn thnthnthn." Within chapters Joyce confronts readers with the disjointed impressions of the central characters through various forms of interior monologue, as in the following example of Leopold Bloom's ruminations on the household cat: "Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it." (This passage, of course, in a rather prosaic way also illustrates how Joyce conditions his readers to impose meaning, since few will read the passage without inserting a comma after Bloom's "Curious.") The interspersion of more straightforward narration produces tension through overlapping depictions of the action, and perhaps most significantly, Joyce alternately presents a range of perspectives throughout the text, giving no voice primacy. As a consequence the reader must establish, without the intervention or guidance of the author, a personal system of values for weighing the significance of events.

Ulysses stands as a vigorous but logical extension of the stylistic innovation begun in Joyce's earlier works. The diffusion of narrative discourse in Dubliners and A Portrait manifests itself in every facet of Ulysses 's textual structure, and the 1922 novel signals the continuing formal experimentation of Finnegans Wake. On a broader level, the publication of Ulysses also marks the high point of the dominant literary impulse of its time. Critics have come to see the year 1922, with the appearance of Ulysses, of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, as the culmination of modernism. Although Joyce avoided association with artistic groups or literary movements, the characteristics distinguishing his novel--antipathy towards the institutions devoted to preserving the status quo, faith in the humanity of individuals, and a deep interest in stylistic experimentation--reflect the concerns animating the works of the major artists of the period.

Almost immediately after the publication of Ulysses, Joyce began the project that would occupy him for the remainder of his life, Finnegans Wake. As Ellmann recorded in his biography, from the start the nature of this new work puzzled and disturbed many of Joyce's old friends. Early in the process of his writing, he sent a draft of the opening passage to Harriet Shaw Weaver, who had provided financial and moral support since Joyce's Zurich days. She wrote to him, noted Ellmann, that "the poor hapless reader loses a very great deal of your intention; flounders, helplessly, is in imminent danger, in fact, of being as totally lost to view as that illfated vegetation [the shamrock] you mentioned." Ellmann related that Ezra Pound was left equally nonplussed by his encounter with a selection from the manuscript: "I will have another go at it, but up to present I make nothing of it whatever. Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp [sic] can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization." Conditions surrounding its composition were as unsettling as the text itself. Financial troubles continued to plague Joyce at sporadic intervals. Problems with his vision that had begun while he was writing Ulysses proved steadily debilitating, and his daughter Lucia came increasingly under the influence of the mental disorder that would eventually institutionalize her. Through it all, Joyce proceeded with an unwavering faith in his "Work in Progress" (the name he used to designate Finnegans Wake, refusing to divulge its true title until its publication), and the book appeared, after seventeen years of planning, writing, and revising, on May 4, 1939.

As Ulysses examines the culture and society of Ireland by recording the events surrounding a single Dublin day, Finnegans Wake traces the prominent features of Western culture through its account of the activities of one Dublin night. Putatively the book concerns itself with the family of a Protestant Dublin pub-keeper living near Phoenix Park on the western border of the city: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (commonly referred to in the text as HCE), the father; Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), his wife; Shem and Shaun, their twin sons; and Issy, their daughter. In fact, from the opening pages Joyce extends the topical limits of the text by using HCE and his family to serve as representative manifestations of a range of psychological, theological, political, and sociological questions. Episodes in the book operate on both the microcosmic and the macrocosmic levels. They present archetypal views of the institutions and of the attitudes that have traditionally shaped the evolution of European society; simultaneously they offer a sensitive rendition of the complex relations that characterize the makeup of the modern family. Earwicker and others in the family assume a variety of transparent roles--historical and mythological--giving a local habitation to Joyce's ideas while at the same time recalling figures and events from history, mythology, and folklore already well known to the reader. By incorporating both the particular and the universal in his depictions of the major themes of the text, Joyce insures that his work will simultaneously appeal to a range of individuals on a variety of levels.

Joyce intended Finnegans Wake less as a critique of Western society than as a reflection of its cyclical nature that acted, as the work itself notes, as "one continuous present tense integument [that] slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history." Its sardonic humor and multiplicity of allusions can, however, create the impression that the text aims at censure. By their very nature the central concerns of Finnegans Wake lend themselves to clashes between the spectacular and the absurd, and the figurative language that Joyce employs in his descriptions accentuates the reader's sense of the ridiculous elements in the human condition.

As part of Joyce's efforts to encompass in his work as much of Western civilization as possible, the narration makes repeated reference to cataclysmic events, both historical and mythological, that shaped the evolution of our culture--the stock market crash of 1929, the battle of Waterloo, the medieval Irish battle of Clontarf, the resurrection of Jesus, the murder of Abel by Cain. At the same time it defamiliarizes conventional associations with these events through comical distortion: the Duke of Wellington becomes "Sraughter Willingdone"; Napoleon Bonaparte, Wellington's opponent at Waterloo, is now "Lipoleum"; Joyce rechristens Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, "flop hattrick"; and its last king, Brian Boru, has his name transformed into "Brewinbaroon." The text also explores more personal elements of society--the rise and fall of the father figure; the bitter struggles of sibling rivalry; the impulses, at times conflicting and at times complementary, of sensual love and sexual depravity; and the perceptions of woman as matriarch and concubine--with the same wry tone with which the novel describes public characters and events. If the juxtaposition of these impressions and observations seems haphazard or contradictory, it is because Joyce repeatedly refused to oversimplify the world as he saw it or to take a polemical position regarding the way one should spend one's life.

In Finnegans Wake form does not simply follow content; it enhances and, to a large degree, defines it. The syntactical structure of the text adheres to a circular rather than a linear configuration. The final sentence breaks off at its midpoint to be completed by the fragment opening the text. This pattern is repeated on the thematic level by progressively extravagant re-introductions of dominant issues and by the analogies created between individual experience and cultural events. In one instance, for example, Joyce examines the ramifications of the figurative and literal fall of the father by connecting it with the fall of the Roman Empire, the fall of Adam, and the fall of Humpty-Dumpty, and throughout the entire passage the dissolution of its descriptive language both records and parodies the events it depicts.

In an effort to break the dominance of rigid linguistic codes, Joyce gives words in Finnegans Wake a sensuous, organic quality of their own. To emphasize the range of perceptions and feelings conveyed by what passes for straightforward communication, he twists, stretches, supplements, and reshapes ordinary conversations and descriptions to reform them into multilayered statements. Topical puns on the names of psychologists Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud emerge in a sentence expressing concern for preadolescent girls who "were yung and easily freudened." A familiar scriptural passage suffers the variations of etymology and entomology: "In the bugininning is the woid." And in a sentence asking how a man was hurt the words rearrange themselves to extend their range by combining commentary with inquiry: "What then agentlike brought about that tragoady thundersday this municipal sin business?" Through it all Joyce remains aware of the interpretive demands that his methods place on his readers, but even when he offers a bit of comfort he cannot resist the freeplay of language. "You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means."

On first encounter the virtuosity of Finnegans Wake can move a reader to perceive it and Joyce as his or her adversaries, sardonically mocking any attempt to bring comprehension to a conglomeration of unfamiliar or newly created words and disconnected imagery. Such a response is understandable and, to some extent, accurate. While Joyce did not write Finnegans Wake out of a perverse wish to destroy language or to render meaning superfluous, he did intend to overthrow the notion that a single interpretation of a work of art could enjoy primacy over all others. To achieve this end he attempted to draw the reader into active, creative reconstruction of the text, not the physical artifact but the metaphysical concept: the product of the imagination responding to words on a page. The digressions, the redundancies, the non sequiturs of his book are not meant to impede understanding but rather to enlarge it. Joyce refuses in Finnegans Wake to dictate a single, inclusive meaning informed by a faith in the authority of cause-and-effect logic. He aims, instead, as he says in the novel, at "that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia." He wishes to inspire an intense involvement with the work that will reveal the opportunities of interpretation implicit in the ranges of responses that one can make to his polymorphous material. To label this intention as perverse, however, does an injustice to Joyce, for it demands that he conform to the standards set by the tradition of the nineteenth-century English novel. Judged along those lines, Finnegans Wake is a hopeless failure, but such methods deny the very imaginative impulse that art is meant to celebrate, for, as the work itself declares, "the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude." Joyce would rather have readers trust in their instincts and in the text itself, which at one point asserts: "He is cured of faith who is sick of fate."

The advent of World War II quickly followed the publication of Finnegans Wake, and Joyce sardonically expressed the opinion that the war was a plot to undermine interest in his book. Late in 1940, after the German Army had occupied Paris, Joyce and his family left France to return again to neutral Switzerland. In Zurich Joyce became ill; Ellmann in his biography noted that the writer suffered a perforated duodenal ulcer. After an apparently successful operation, Joyce lapsed into a coma, and at 2:15 on the morning of January 13, 1941, he died. The final lines of Finnegans Wake may provide a fitting epitaph: "We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a love a long the"

SOURCE: Julian B. Kaye, "The Wings of Daedalus: Two Stories in Dubliners," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring, 1958, pp. 31-41.

[In the following excerpt, Kaye focuses on two of the stories in Dubliners, "An Encounter" and "The Dead." He argues that Dubliners is equal in literary merit to Joyce's later works.]

Recent textual studies of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake have tended to make Dubliners look thin, simply because it has not been "read" with the same critical attention. Moreover, Hugh Kenner's founding of a "Stephen-hating" school of Joyce criticism has led inevitably to the depreciation of Dubliners. The critics who hold that Joyce portrays the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses as a hopeless failure must, willingly or unwillingly, give the impression that the stories Stephen is writing are inferior Joyce. Consequently, there has been a tendency to make two Joyces--one for Dubliners and A Portrait, the other for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake--and to see the first Joyce as a mere literary apprentice.

I believe this view of Joyce's career to be both unfortunate and--more important--untrue. Although Joyce's prose in Dubliners is conventional in syntax and vocabulary, it often has the richness of texture of that of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. By giving it the same kind of attention, I hope to demonstrate that ... by the time Joyce wrote "The Dead" (1906) he was already at the height of his powers.

The only explication of "An Encounter"--that of Marvin Magalaner in Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation--treats the excursion of two truant schoolboys as an attempt to escape from the paralysis of Dublin life by visiting the Pigeonhouse Fort, which is interpreted as a religious and paternal symbol. "The Pigeonhouse, then, is identified in Joyce's mind with the `father' of Christ and with fathers in general." The pervert whom the boys encounter after they have abandoned their attempt to reach their destination is, according to this interpretation, both a perverted God and a perverted father.

This excellent reading is solidly based not only on the story itself but on Joyce's treatment of Stephen Dedalus's search for a father and for religious faith in A Portrait and Ulysses. Nevertheless, I feel that a detailed re-examination of the text is necessary if we are to appreciate the rich ambiguity of Joyce's symbolism and the dramatic intensity of the story.

"An Encounter" is a story of escape. The boys who play hooky are weary of the routine of school life; and we are prepared for their adventures by three pages (one quarter of the story) about their previous attempts to vary the monotonous routine of their days, all of which were unsatisfactory because, in the words of the boy narrator, " ... I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad."

Therefore, it is not surprising that the boys plan to "go along the Wharf Road until we came to the ships, and then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the Pigeon House." When they reach the ships they feel an impulse to run away to sea. Instead they cross the Liffey in a ferryboat and the narrator looks about for a foreign sailor with green eyes, "for I had some confused notions ... [author's ellipsis]." The narrator breaks off and does not tell us what his confused notion was, perhaps because he cannot verbalize it. At any rate, his expectations are not fulfilled: the only sailor with green eyes whom he sees does not seem to be foreign and the boy does not reach the Pigeonhouse because "it was too late and we were too tired ...".

For a long time I did not understand why a visit to the Pigeonhouse should be the climax of a day spent in seeing foreign ships; I then learned that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the Pigeonhouse was the Irish terminus of the Irish-English packet service. Certainly some one so well informed about Dublin local history as Joyce must have known the history of the landmark that so strongly stimulated his imagination. The fact that the packet service had been established at Kingstown and the North Wall before Joyce's birth is not significant. For one thing, children distinguish past from present much less exactly than adults. The boy narrator of "An Encounter" may very well have read an old story which mentions the landing of a packet at the Pigeonhouse--e.g., The Absentee of Maria Edgeworth--and may have assumed the Pigeonhouse was still used as a terminus.

More important, it seems to me, is the theme of belatedness that pervades all the fictional representations of Joyce as child and adolescent. In "The Sisters" we see the boy narrator with the dead Father Flynn and his two aged and decrepit sisters. He seems bound to them and to the dead and dying past which they represent. In "Araby" he arrives at a bazaar--the object of another enthusiastic expedition--just before closing time on the last day; and he sees only the winding up of things in the almost deserted and half-darkened hall. Stephen Dedalus, his alter ego, is wounded to think that his " ... monkish learning ... was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle and curious jargon of heraldry and falconry" (Portrait).

Thus, much of the pathetic futility of the boys' attempt to escape lies in the fact that they try a path that had been closed before they were born....

The boys, although they are unable to attain their goal, do have an adventure. We may say that, unable to escape, they are confronted with Ireland itself. Instead of the green-eyed sailor, who represents the romance of the exotic, they encounter the green-eyed pervert (green for Ireland).

The perversion of love into cruelty is one of the most common themes in Dubliners. To Joyce it is one of the characteristics of Dublin life. The working out of this theme is explicit in "Counterparts" and is implicit in such stories as "The Boarding House," "Two Gallants," and "A Little Cloud." In Irish political life the bitterness and personal animosity of the battle that followed the Bishops' condemnation of Parnell, described so powerfully in A Portrait, is an analogous example of disappointed love delighting in the infliction of pain.

The sterile autoeroticism and sadism of the pervert is an excellent symbol of Joyce's view of political Ireland after Parnell--the Ireland of "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." It may be significant that the narrator insists that he and his friend give the pervert the false names of Smith and Murphy if he should ask their identity. Beyond psychological realism and the primitive superstition that plays an important role in the Lohengrin legend and in the Cyclops episode of the Odyssey, there is Joyce's fear of Ireland's hatred of its artists--a fear which he often voices.

There is yet another level--in my opinion, the most important one--on which the symbols of the story function. Stanislaus Joyce has pointed out that the first three stories of Dubliners are about early adolescence. Of all three "An Encounter" deals most explicitly with sex. One may say that the three principal characters--the boy narrator (Joyce), his friend Mahony, and the pervert--are defined by their attitude towards sex. The restlessness and desire for adventure and escape that motivate the day's "miching" are principally puberty. The narrator is fascinated by the "unkempt fierce and beautiful girls" of American detective stories. At about the same age (Stanislaus Joyce, in his "Background to Dubliners"), says that his brother was about fourteen at the time of the incident recorded in "An Encounter") Stephen Dedalus is impelled to restless wandering and romantic fantasy: "He returned to Mercedes and, as he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood. Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening.... He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld.... They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured.... Weakness and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment."

Joyce quite explicitly connects Stephen's fantasy with the desire to escape to foreign lands which is stimulated by roaming around the docks of Dublin:

He [Stephen] passed unchallenged among the docks and along the quays.... The vastness and strangeness of the life suggested to him by the bales of merchandise stocked along the walls or swung aloft out of the holds of steamers wakened again in him the unrest which had sent him wandering in the evening from garden to garden in search of Mercedes.... A vague dissatisfaction grew up within him as he looked on the quays and on the river and on the lowering skies and yet he continued to wander up and down day after day as if he really sought someone that eluded him.

Thus the itinerary of the boys' trip may be viewed as an attempt to find an object that will assuage their restlessness. Experience itself--i.e., the foreign, the exotic--seems to be an abstraction of that object.

Marvin Magalaner has observed that the Pigeonhouse may function as a phallic image of fatherhood as well as a religious symbol of God as father and as paraclete. W. Y. Tindall has pointed out that some of the historic functions of the Pigeonhouse ("successively a fort, a lighthouse, and a power station") may be interpreted symbolically (James Joyce, 1950). All these themes are part of the meaning of the Pigeonhouse to the narrator. Since he lives with his aunt and uncle, he is presumably an orphan; and he seems anxious to find a father. Significantly, Stephen Dedalus thought of himself as an orphan when he was the narrator's age.

We know from A Portrait that Stephen's adolescence was extremely painful because of his family's decline from affluence to scarcely genteel shabbiness and that he held his father responsible for the family misfortune; and we may guess that Stephen's diffidence about sex was partially due to the feeling of insecurity caused by his family's loss of wealth and his father's loss of status.

In "An Encounter" the insecure and diffident narrator is contrasted with the aggressive and self-confident Mahony, who accompanies him on the outing. Mahony does not care about reaching the Pigeonhouse; instead, he wants to have some fun with his catapult. "While we were waiting he brought out the catapult which bulged from his inner pocket and explained some improvements which he had made in it." He intends "to have some gas with the birds," from which one may surmise that Mahony and the narrator have widely differing conceptions of the Pigeonhouse. We do not, however, hear anything about Mahony shooting birds; instead, "he chased a crowd of ragged girls, brandishing his unloaded catapult ...". The next independent action he performs is to chase a cat. When the boys decide that they will have to give up the expedition to the Pigeonhouse, Mahony seems concerned only because he has not been able to use his catapult. During the boys' conversation with the pervert, Mahony answers the pervert's questions about their sweethearts by saying that he has "three totties," while the narrator answers that he has none. Later Mahony goes off to chase a cat and leaves the narrator alone with the pervert.

The reiteration of the images of brandished catapult and pursued cats, the pursuit of birds and girls, the bold assertion that he has three sweethearts, the insouciant indifference to the pervert--this is essentially all we are told about Mahony, and it is all we need to know. His character, for this story, is his aggressive sexuality, which is conceived primarily as a contrast to the confusion and tortured uncertainty of the boy narrator. Mahony does not seem to need the support of a father--earthly, heavenly, or national--to confirm his manhood. Living for instinctual satisfactions, he remains unperturbed by the paralysis of family, church, and state that is the theme of Dubliners. He is the first of a series of males whom Joyce contrasts with his fictional surrogates: Cranly in A Portrait and Buck Mulligan in Ulysses with Stephen Dedalus; and Shaun the Post with Shem the Penman in Finnegans Wake.

Unlike the happy-go-lucky Mahony, the boy narrator is disappointed by his failure to reach the Pigeonhouse and to find the green-eyed foreign sailor. It is therefore significant that the pervert is dressed in greenish-black (like another symbol of unsuccessful paternity, Father Flynn of "The Sisters") and has green eyes. When he begins talking about "Sir Walter Scott and Lord Lytton," the boy narrator, who is of course literary, attempts to impress his interlocutor by pretending that he has read every book the former mentions. He is therefore presumably pleased when the pervert says of Mahony: "Now ... he is different; he goes in for games." When Mahony asks a question which the narrator thinks is stupid, he is both ashamed of his friend and afraid "the man would think I was as stupid as Mahony."

The pervert then changes the subject to girls, and the narrator, detecting the lack of conviction in the pervert's praise of normal sexuality, begins to feel vaguely uneasy about his new friend. Then the pervert walks across the field away from the boys and performs the unnamed act which the boy narrator--unlike Mahony, who observes the pervert's exhibitionism with scientific curiosity--"I say ... He's a queer old josser!"--refuses to acknowledge that he has seen. He immediately, however, insists that they give the pervert false names; and we can infer, from the horror and guilt that Stephen Dedalus feels about his autoeroticism when he is about the same age, the painfulness of the narrator's observation, in the man with whom he momentarily hoped to identify himself, of a perverse form of the behavior he detests in himself.

The pervert returns to the boys and Mahony runs off in pursuit of a cat, leaving the boy narrator and the man together. The pervert again begins talking about sex, but this time he says what he believes--sex is cruelty. Here he speaks not only as a priest instructing a catechumen--as, for example, Father Flynn in "The Sisters" instructing the same boy narrator--but also as a father telling his son about life: "He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him."

The mystery--and the word is applicable to sex as well as religion--disgusts the boy narrator, who is now anxious only to escape the father whom he has been seeking and by whom he has been welcomed. He calls for the recently disavowed Mahony. When the latter responds immediately to his summons, he feels ashamed of himself. "And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little."

The words of penitence with which the narrator concludes the story measure his loss of hope, of which the story is the record. The narrator hoped for escape, hoped for a father who would give him the counsel and companionship he needs; instead he encounters the epitome of all he detests. He is obliged to ask for help not from the superior being for whom he is searching but from Mahony, whom he has thought his inferior. He is reduced to accepting the friendship of a commonplace contemporary for the fostering love and wisdom of a father.

Thus "An Encounter" is a symbolic history of the boy narrator's rejection of the authority of father, church, and state as perverted and degenerate and his despairing substitution of the friendship of a contemporary who, although mediocre, can assuage his loneliness.

"The Dead" is the acknowledged masterpiece of Dubliners. Even those critics who have poohpoohed many of Joyce's stories as mere sketches have expressed admiration for it; and it has probably received as much critical attention as all the other stories put together. It is therefore surprising that students of Joyce have left so many questions unanswered. They have not even been able to agree on what happens to Gabriel Conroy: some think he suffers spiritual death; others believe that he is reborn.

Several critics have pointed out that "The Dead" contains the ultimate epiphany of Dubliners; but no one has observed that the story takes place on Epiphany. The Misses Morkan's annual dance takes place at the end of the Christmas season. Aunt Kate says of Mr. Browne that "He has been laid on here like the gas ... all during the Christmas." She also comments on the fact that Freddy Malins has come drunk to her party: "`Now, isn't he a terrible fellow!' she said. `And his poor mother made him take the pledge on New Year's Eve'." In Europe the end of the Christmas season is not New Year's Day--which is, moreover, ruled out by the absence of New Year's greetings at the party--but Epiphany or Twelfth Night, traditionally associated with Christmas festivities.

The most convincing reason for reading "The Dead" as an Epiphany story, however, is that it works. Mr. Brewster Ghiselin has pointed out [in his essay "The Unity of Dubliners,"] that in Ireland every one must accept material substitutes for spiritual values and that the feast in "The Dead" is a material substitute for spiritual communion. In my opinion, the principal incidents of "The Dead" are a bitter parody of the events celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church in its Epiphany Offices: the marriage at Cana, the visit of the Magi, and the Baptism of Christ. In Joyce's Ireland, these revelations are mocked.

The marriage at Cana is represented in "The Dead" by the encounter of Gabriel with Lily, the caretaker's daughter. Gabriel gaily suggests that "we'll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?"

The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness: "The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you."

Girls who cannot afford enough wine for the wedding do not usually get married at all in Joyce's Dublin. And Gabriel is reduced to consoling Lily for the loss of love by giving her a gold coin--a poor substitute for the turning of water into wine.

The visit of the Magi to the Christ child and their showering of gifts upon Him becomes the Misses Morkan's annual dance. Gabriel refers to the three hostesses as "the Three Graces of the Dublin musical world" and praises them for their hospitality. But although they are genuinely kindly and hospitable, they are certainly not searching for a new revelation. Their name--Morkan--suggests that they are mawkins or spectres. They are the "three potatoes"--probably cold--which Lily reserves for Gabriel.

Mary Jane, the niece, saves the best slices of goose for her pupils. Her artistic gift to the party is an elaborate academy piece which no one enjoys and which is performed principally to exhibit her technical virtuosity and to advertise her merits as a teacher. Aunt Julia--who, like one of the Three Kings, is rather hard of hearing--sings "Arrayed for the Bridal" "with great spirit," but Gabriel sees her arrayed for the bridal of death. Her voice is alive, but she is not. Aunt Kate, although she gives piano lessons, has very little knowledge of music. She does not realize that the singer Bartell D'Arcy is hoarse, but she stoutly maintains that a tenor of her youth named Parkinson--which is also the name of a disease symptomatized by progressive paralysis--is the greatest of all singers. One must admit that, despite their loyalty and lovableness, Aunt Julia and Aunt Kate are, in Gabriel's words, "only two ignorant old women"--mawkins rather than Magi.

Their world suffers, like the rest of Joyce's Dublin, from Parkinson's disease. The possibility of rebirth, of regeneration--the revelation commemorated in the Epiphany service as the Baptism of Christ--is very small indeed. Brother Pat (Patrick for Ireland, perhaps) has long been dead, and his daughter Mary Jane is a middle-aged spinster.

Their sister Ellen seemingly attempted to escape from the sterility of Ireland. At any rate, she married T. J. Conroy of the Port and Docks. Describes as "the brain carrier of the Morkan family" and as "serious" and "matronly," she "had chosen the names of her sons for she was very sensible of the dignity of family life." Unable to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to see the Infant Jesus, like the Magi, or to discover the Cross, like her prototype St. Helena, Ellen instead devotes her son Constantine to the Church. St. Helena went to the East; her son Constantine made the city of Constantinople his capital, primarily to facilitate the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire against the opposition of the conservative, pagan Roman aristocracy. Ellen also seems instinctively to have recognized the East as a source of life. Constantine is part of the Roman Catholic Church, which is of course international and centered on the Continent.

Her other son, Gabriel, with his university education--for which, we are told, his mother is largely responsible--attempts to remain in touch with contemporary Europe. He spends his vacations on the Continent to keep up his languages, and he tells Miss Ivors, who wants him to vacation in the Aran Isles instead, that Irish is not his language. He makes a pitiful attempt to be European, for Europe is life to him too. But he lives in Monkstown, and his wife Gretta, whom his mother had disliked as "country cute," comes from Nuns' Island in Galway. His children Tom and Eva, at home with their nurse Bessie (a variant of Eliza), belong to the transatlantic world of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and his very name, as Gerhard Friedrich has noted, belongs to the hero of Bret Harte's Gabriel Conroy, which begins by describing a group of pioneers trapped by a blizzard in the Far West. His cousin and aunts, who live on Usher's Island--a place doubly significant because it suggests not only the decadent house of Usher but the transatlantic origin of Poe--have also "gone west."

In the climactic scene of the story, Gabriel hopes to win his wife to a new life with him--in a sense, to escape with her from Ireland: " ... he felt that they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure" (my italics). He had been thinking of their honeymoon abroad--an escape from Ireland--and he felt that they could escape again. But the attempt is doomed to failure. Gretta belongs completely to the west. Even the word goloshes, which to Gabriel represents the progressiveness of European life, reminds her of the west--that is, "of Christy Minstrels." Moreover, she has been deeply moved by Bartell D'Arcy's singing of a song in "the old Irish tonality," "The Lass of Aughrim."

At the hotel Gabriel hopes to begin a new life--i.e., to be baptized, as Jesus was by John on Epiphany. But the other Epiphany revelations have been parodied rather than celebrated, and Gabriel's failure to fulfill his scriptural role as consoler is repeated. All the omens foretell disaster. The electricity in the hotel has failed, and Gabriel rejects the candle which the porter offers him. The light from the street--which Joyce describes as ghastly--will be enough for them, he says. The natural symbolism of the rejection of light is strongly reinforced by the symbolism of the lighted candle in the Epiphany ritual of the Primitive Church, in which lighted candles were carried in procession to "symbolize the spiritual illumination of Baptism."

In the "ghastly" light he learns that not only are he and Gretta not to escape again, but also that they never had escaped; that Gretta has always loved Michael Furey, her girlhood sweetheart from the West of Ireland, who, she believes, died for her. The dead had been with them from the very beginning.

The final revelation of "The Dead" is of the dead Michael Furey, Gretta's dead saviour--not the risen Christ. And the change in Gabriel--interpreted by some critics as the birth of a new and better man from the death of an outworn self--is his final acquiescence in death. He can afford to weep "generous tears" because he accepts the fact that he belongs among the dead. "It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept, as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife." Later he confesses to himself that he has never loved. "He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love." Then "His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.... The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward."

Michael, the Archangel of snow, has conquered Gabriel, the Archangel of fire. When Gabriel goes west (i.e., dies), the world is left to Michael, and Joyce's ultimate epiphany is of Ireland covered by snow. It is the domain of a dead man, not of the leader of the Messiah's Hosts at the Armageddon which precedes the Day of Judgment. Although surrounded by the emblems of the Passion--crosses, spears, thorns--Michael's grave is filled, not empty. His cross is covered with snow (frozen water), not dipped in flowing water, as it is in the Greek Church's commemoration of the Baptism on Epiphany. Gabriel sees the snow "falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." The Day of Judgment has come, but Michael is dead. The epiphany of "The Dead" is a revelation of death....

SOURCE: Harry Levin, in his James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, revised edition, New Directions, 1960, 256 p.

[Levin is an American educator and critic whose works reveal his wide range of interests and expertise, from Renaissance culture to the contemporary novel. Among his best-known critical works is James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (1941), a work partly inspired by Joyce's comment that Levin had written the best review of Finnegans Wake. In the following excerpt from the revised and enlarged edition of James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, Levin presents an overview of the literary techniques, subjects, and themes of Dubliners.]

The reader of Joyce is continually reminded of the analogy between the role of the artist and the priestly office. The focal situation of Dubliners is that described in "Araby," where we walk through the streets of the city, glimpsing places "hostile to romance" through the eyes of a child: "These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes." The same symbol is given a darker purport in the first story of the book, "The Sisters," when it is recalled that the dying priest had disgraced himself by breaking a chalice. The broken chalice is an emblem, not only of Joyce's interrupted communion, but of the parched life of the metropolitan Waste Land. This early story is also glimpsed from the point of view of a small boy. The very first sentence consists entirely of monosyllables, and the paragraph proceeds toward a childish fascination with the word "paralysis."

Joyce's intention, he told his publisher, "was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis" [see excerpt dated 1906]. In every one of these fifteen case histories, we seem to be reading in the annals of frustration--a boy is disappointed, a priest suffers disgrace, the elopement of "Eveline" fails to materialize. Things almost happen. The characters are arrested in mid-air; the author deliberately avoids anything like an event. In "The Boarding House" --when there is some hope of a wedding--the aggressive landlady, the compromised daughter, and the abashed young man are presented in turn, and an actual interview becomes unnecessary. Joyce's slow-motion narrative is timed to his paralyzed subject. Both are synchronized with his strangely apocalyptic doctrine, which assigns to both author and characters a passive part. The author merely watches, the characters are merely revealed, and the emphasis is on the technique of exposure.

Realism had already established the artist as an observer; naturalism made him an outsider. In contrast to the promiscuous documentation of earlier novelists, the tranche de vie ["slice of life"] was sliced thin. A writer like Balzac, claiming to be only the secretary of society, could take a rather officious view of his position. The modern writer stands apart, waiting for a chance encounter or a snatch of conversation to give his story away. Strictly speaking, he has no story, but an oblique insight into a broader subject. Things happen just as they always do--the things you read about in the papers. There is business as usual, but it is none of his business. He is not concerned with romantic adventure or dramatic incident. He is concerned with the routines of every-day life, the mechanisms of human behavior, and he is anxious to discover the most economical way of exposing the most considerable amount of that material.

This is simply an attempt to define what is so often referred to as the nuance. The epiphany, in effect, is the same device. Though grounded in theology, it has now become a matter of literary technique. It has become Joyce's contribution to that series of developments which convert narrative into short-story, supplant plot with style, and turn the raconteur into a candid-camera expert. The measure of success, in so attenuated a form, is naturally the degree of concentration. The achievements of Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield, or Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter, can almost be computed in terms of specific gravity. And Joyce, with "Two Gallants," can say as much in fifteen pages as James T. Farrell has been able to tell us in volume after volume. It is hard to appreciate the originality of Joyce's technique, twenty-five years after the appearance of Dubliners, because it has been standardized into an industry. This industry is particularly well equipped to deal with the incongruities and derelictions of metropolitan life. Its typical products are the shrewd Parisian waifs of Les hommes de bonne volonte and the well-meaning nonentities who blunder through the pen and pencil sketches of the New Yorker.

In their own way, the tangential sketches of Dubliners came as close to Joyce's theme--the estrangement of the artist from the city--as does the systematic cross-section of Ulysses. They look more sympathetically into the estranged lives of others. They discriminate subtly between original sin and needless cruelty. "Counterparts," in its concatenation of petty miseries, suggests the restrained pathos of Chekhov's "Enemies": it begins with an employer rebuking a clerk, and ends--after several drunken rounds--with the clerk beating his little son. Joyce's point of view, like Dickens', is most intimately associated with the children of his stories. He arranged his book under four aspects--childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. As the stories detach themselves, they assume what Joyce called "a style of scrupulous meanness." But "the special odour of corruption," in which he took pride, was by no means peculiar to Dublin. It was also endemic in middlewestern villages like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio....

If the vices of Dublin are those of any modern city, the virtues of "the seventh city of Christendom" are unique. An unconscionable amount of talking and singing and drinking goes on in Dubliners. This promotes style and poetry and fantasy--all peculiarly Irish qualities, and talents of Joyce. "The imagination of the people and the language they use is rich and living," Synge was discovering. The richness of Irish conversation mitigates the sordid realities of Joyce's book. He was always ready to take full advantage of the common speech of his fellow townsmen--the most expressive English he could have encountered anywhere. He could always portray life most vividly when he was writing by ear. What seems an aimless political discussion, in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," is really tight dramatic exposition. In the end the dead figure of Parnell dominates the campaign headquarters. It is his birthday, and an amateur poet is persuaded to recite a maudlin and mediocre eulogy. The finishing touch is the comment of the hostile Conservative, when pressed for his opinion: "Mr. Crofton said that it was a very fine piece of writing."

Notice the irony, so frequent with Swift, in the use of indirect discourse. In Joyce's attitude, however, there is an underlying ambiguity: he eats his cake and has it. We, too, are moved by the poem, in spite of--or perhaps because of--its cheapness. We are asked to share both the emotion and the revulsion. In "Clay," with a different situation, we are subjected to the same treatment. The epiphany is no more than the moment when an old laundress stands up and sings "I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls." She is made to boast of wealth, rank, beauty, and love--none of which she has ever possessed--"in a tiny quavering voice." A listener, affected by this pathetic incongruity, explains his tears by remarking that there is "no music for him like poor old Balfe." Here, as so often in Joyce, the music is doing duty for the feeling. The feeling is deliberately couched in a cheap phrase or a sentimental song, so that we experience a critical reaction, and finally a sense of intellectual detachment. Emotionally sated, we shy away from emotion.

Such passages have the striking and uncertain effect of romantic irony. Jean Paul's formula--"hot baths of sentiment followed by cold showers of irony"--still describes them. They show Joyce, in his isolation from society, confronted by the usual romantic dichotomy between the emotional and the intellectual. At his hands, the problem becomes a characteristically verbal one, which allows him to dwell upon the contrast between the rich connotations and the disillusioning denotations of words. Since the days of Don Quixote this has been a major premise for fiction. The point of "Araby" is the glamor of the name, and the undeception of the small boy when he learns that it stands for a prosaic church bazaar. Yet no disillusionment would seem cruel enough to justify the last sentence, which should be contrasted with the objective description of Mr. Crofton's comment: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."

Another point is scored by the same method in "Grace," where the distance measured lies between the benign effulgence of religious doctrine and the hangover which brings a group of businessmen back to church. The distinction between words and things, in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" and in "Grace," is ground for political and religious satire. Church and state should enrich the lives of the citizens and impose a pattern on the city, but for Joyce they are tarnished symbols, broken chalices. Meanwhile, the Dubliners go their own ways. Martin Cunningham, the prominent layman, goes to church in "Grace" and appears at the funeral in Ulysses. Bartell D'Arcy, the tenor, sings a few hoarse notes in "The Dead" and figures in Mrs. Bloom's reminiscences. Mr. O'Madden Burke goes on writing for his paper, and Lenehan goes from bar to bar and book to book.

Joyce puts himself into his early book, not directly this time, but as he might have been if he had remained a Dubliner. Mr. Duffy, the timid socialist clerk in "A Painful Case," is translating Michael Kramer. He meets a lady whose husband does not understand her, and who for some reason bears the name of Joyce's Italian music-master, Sinico. Though he considers falling in love with her, he continues to brood on "the soul's incurable loneliness." One day he reads in the newspaper that she has been killed in an accident of her own seeking--again the title is an echo. Again, in Ulysses, we hear of her funeral. Death is one of the few things that happen in Dubliners; it is the subject of the first and last stories in the volume. The last and longest story, "The Dead," concerns the brother of a priest we meet in Ulysses. Gabriel Conroy is a Stephen Dedalus who stayed on to teach school and write occasional reviews, and who is already beginning to show symptoms of middle age. He is a pompous master of ceremonies at the Christmas party of his musical maiden aunts--incidentally Joyce's--and godmothers of Stephen Dedalus. Among others, he meets there a girl he knew, a Gaelic student who earnestly upbraids him for having taken his holidays abroad.

But he is a less significant character than his wife, Gretta, and she is not so significant as a memory awakened in her by a snatch of song at the end of the evening. It is the memory of a boy named Michael Furey, who had once loved her and who had died. Gabriel, who had not known of him before, feels a pang of the soul's incurable loneliness. He can never participate in this buried experience, even though it has become a part of the person he has known most intimately; he suddenly recognizes that he and Gretta are strangers. And, as he tries to imagine the dead boy, he realizes that his own identity is no more palpable to others than Michael Furey's is to him. In the light of this epiphany, the solid world seems to dissolve and dwindle, until nothing is left except the relics of the dead and the hosts of the dying. "One by one, they were all becoming shades." The final paragraph, in slow, spectral sentences, cadenced with alliteration and repetition, takes a receding view of the book itself. It sets up, like most departures, a disturbing tension between the warm and familiar and the cold and remote. In one direction lies the Class of Elements at Clongowes Wood, in the other the Universe:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

SOURCE: Francis Fergusson, "A Reading of `Exiles'," in Exiles by James Joyce, New Directions, 1945, pp. v-xviii.

[Fergusson is an American critic, editor, translator, and educator. In the essay below, he lauds Joyce for verisimilitude in Exiles.]

[In Exiles, Joyce] paused for a last look at the soul which Stephen Daedalus had been impiously constructing, a vehicle winged for the exploration of new and perhaps forbidden realms, a fresh "conscience of his race." The Portrait shows us the process of construction; Exiles gives us the completed masterpiece. The timeless artifact of Richard Rowan is an image on the mind's eye..., a work of art as Stephen Daedalus defines art. Exiles is thus at once, and by the same token, a singularly elegant and self-conscious piece of dramaturgy, and a brilliant image of the ethical being of the young Joyce. When the author finished it and returned to his labors on Ulysses he lost interest for good in the "artist as man," and his vitality passed into the narrative itself and its characters. Joyce himself is henceforth lost to sight behind or beyond his work.

Exiles is thus important for the understanding both of Joyce and of modern drama between Peer Gynt, say, and Murder in the Cathedral; but it has been studied less than any of the other works in the canon. The more obvious wealth and virtuosity of Ulysses and the more explicit discursive clarity of A Portrait of the Artist have eclipsed it. It is in itself an austere and difficult work. Being naturalistic drama, it represents in its three acts as much life and thought as we are accustomed to getting in the looser bulk of a long novel. The reader must let his thought and imagination play over the characters and their stories a long time if he is to appreciate the weight of experience which they can convey....

Richard Rowan's complete rejection of " the mob in himself," as Mr. T. S. Eliot has put it, makes his agony very much like that of the "purely heroic" drama of French Seventeenth Century Rationalism. Undeluded, unsurprisable, fixed on the tragic split between freedom and intellectual integrity on one side and love on the other, he is own brother to the heroes of Racine and Corneille who face without flinching the irreconcilable conflict of Reason and Duty against Love or Passion....

It is in his relation to Bertha that the split between his intellectual integrity and love--never, in any of its forms, quite digestible by the intellect; always, in our experience, somewhat ambiguous--becomes truly tragic. The scenes between Richard and Bertha, especially the last one, are as beautiful as any love scenes in modern drama. In their quietness, their tender refusal of a passion which is always present, they are like the grave farewells of Racine's monarchs, who are poised for five acts on that point of vibrant stillness, that motionless turn from love to duty. Yet they differ from Racine's scenes in one important respect: Richard is the only character on or off stage who understands the issues, while in Racine or Corneille the characters and the audience are all supposed to share the common light and glory of Reason....The neoclassic hero's integrity is identical with his place, his responsibility, and his gloire; but Richard's is presented as the law of his own nature only, and hence as his exile and his invisibility....[The] freedom which Richard has, attaches and subjects Bertha, because she cannot understand it. The "reasons of his heart" she grasps, but the reasons of his reason, which he always obeys, she does not see; and between his intellectual integrity and her love she is held prisoner more completely than she could have been by the ritual sacrifice of the conventional marriage promise....

SOURCE: Morton Dauwen Zabel, "The Lyrics of James Joyce," in Poetry, Vol. XXXVI, No. IV, July, 1930, pp. 206-13.

[In the following essay, Zabel discusses Joyce's poetic technique and compares it to his novelistic technique.]

Throughout his career Joyce has been regarded in many quarters as fundamentally a poet. When Ulysses appeared in 1922, its first readers and critic, encountering problems for which their earlier experiences with revolutionary forms of art had not prepared them, at once sought refuge behind the large assumptions that go disguised under the name of poetry. Most of the early notices called it "essentially a poem," "a poet's concept," etc....

In spite of this testimony, we have little evidence that Joyce is not fundamentally a genius in prose....[Conventional ] definitions apart, his novels lack specific poetic elements, as well as poetry's absolute sublimation of experience. It is equally apparent that his lyrics are the marginal fragments of his art, minor in theme and too often, for all their precise and orderly felicities, undecided in quality....

The verse in Chamber Music has not the finality of single intention. Its deficiencies have been ascribed to the fact that, where it does not reflect the vaporous mysticism of the early Yeats, AE, and the other Irish revivalists, it is a patent imitation of the Elizabethan song-books....

It is clear that in such poems one has, instead of direct and unequivocal poetic compulsion, a deliberate archaism and a kind of fawning studiousness which attempt to disguise the absence of profounder elements. Yet the archaism...was converted into Joyce's own material in two or three lyrics which, for spiritual suavity and logic, approach the minor work of Crashaw....

The later lyrics in Pomes Penyeach go so far in integrating [Joyce's disparate influences that he] achieved in the little booklet his own poetic character for the first time. The sedulous understudy which kept him from attaining intimacy or a unifying personality in his earlier work is largely avoided....Archaisms are still present, and the humid emotionalism of impressionist verse still prevails in Alone and Bahnhofstrasse. But the pattern is constricted by severer form, the lyric accent gains edge, and the emotional content is more secure in its power. Ultimately the tragic surge and wrath of Ulysses finds voice in A Prayer and in A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight....

Even within this narrow range, Joyce's eclecticism, the long reach of his artistic interests, is revealed. Yet one sees likewise the limitations which have kept his lyric output small. The real functions of free-verse have escaped him, and his lyric ideas must otherwise submit to conventional stanzaic formalities. Diffusion mars the outline of many poems, and unnatural sobriety and caution hinder the spontaneity of others. But in four or five pages he has achieved a complete fusion of rapture and lucidity, and written with mastery. Simply must rank as one of the purest lyrics of our time....

The lyric motive and discipline have not been forgotten by Joyce among the problems and ingenuities of his prose epics. Wherever Ulysses avoids parody or satire, it is likely to soar in a lyric utterance.... Yet the poetic temper which has played an indubitable part in his career has given us, by the way, a small offering of exquisite poems, valuable both as diversions of one of the first literary geniuses of our day, and as lyrics which at their best have the mark of classic beauty upon them.

SOURCE: Anthony Burgess, in his Re Joyce, Norton, 1965, 272 p.

[One of the most prolific and versatile English novelists of his generation, Burgess is also recognized for his vast knowledge of music and linguistics and, in particular, for his erudite criticism of James Joyce's works. In the following excerpt, he comments on Joyce's technical ambitions in Ulysses.]

There are a lot of things to marvel at [in Ulysses] but, first, a lot of questions to ask. Most of these questions are assumed in one fundamental question: Why did Joyce write the book at all?

Ulysses is a big book (933 pages in the 1960 Bodley Head edition), and its bigness is one answer. Every novelist wishes to prove to himself and to others that he can tackle a large canvas....

Starting with this vague and general and traditional intention, Joyce then (or simultaneously, or before) conceived another ambition--make a modern novel not merely rival classical achievement but contain it. Classical epic was expansive; classical drama was contractive. Homer covers heaven, earth, the sea and a great slab of time; Sophocles stays in one small place and confines the time of his action to twenty-four hours. And so Joyce stays in Dublin on June 16th, 1904, but also uses delirium and imagination to encompass a great deal of human history and even the End of the World. Greek epic and Greek drama are both contained within the framework of a modern bourgeois novel.

Epic length and the strictures of dramatic form can be reconciled not merely by imaginative `loops' but by a more detailed examination of the characters' acts and motives than traditional novelists thought either necessary or decent. Bloom must not only eat but defecate; Molly Bloom must meditate not only on her lovers but also on what her lovers are like in bed. With so large a canvas, no human detail may be left out. But the traditional techniques for expressing unspoken thoughts are bound to be insufficient. Hence the `stream of consciousness' of the `interior monologue'--an endless commentary from the main characters on the data thrown at them by life, but unspoken, often chaotic, sometimes reaching the thresholds of the unconscious mind. This device had been used before--by Dickens and Samuel Butler, even by that great primitive Jane Austen--but never on the scale or to the limits employed by Joyce....

There are two artistic problems raised by the extensive use of interior monologue. The first is concerned with characterisation: how does one make one person's interior monologue sound different from another's, so that we instantly recognise which character is thinking without tiresome mechanical pointers like `Stephen thought' or `Bloom thought'? Part of the problem here lies in the fact that the `stream of consciousness' is essentially pre-verbal: we do not say to ourselves: `Where's light-switch? Very dark in here. Must be careful. Chair over there, I know. Damn. Barked shin on it'--rather we react without words to stimuli and memories, and any attempt to set down such a process in words is highly conventional. Joyce solves the problem by assigning a characteristic rhythm to the thought-stream of each of his three main personages. Stephen's is lyrical, subtle, somewhat clotted, and, since Stephen is a poet, his interior monologue is much more aware of words--not words as conventional signs for images but words as data for meditation--than that of either Bloom or his wife. Bloom's own rhythm is quick, jaunty, jerky, darting, clipped--appropriate for a man more given to pub-talk than to aesthetic disquisitions, expressive of the very soul of an intelligent, but not over-educated, advertising canvasser. As for Molly Bloom's rhythm, it somehow combines the practical and the poetical, short words organised into long flowing phrases which--as we are made to take her mind all in one piece, not in instalments--coalesce into a single mammoth sentence which makes up the last chapter of the book.

The other problem is concerned with what the characters shall think about. The mind naturally strays and wanders, holding to nothing very long, coming back frequently to the same point again and again but rarely staying there. A naturalistic representation of the human mind monologuising to itself may be of scientific interest, but it has nothing to do with art. Themes must be imposed on the three main minds of the novel, and these themes must move in towards each other, suggesting purposeful movement and the unity proper to a work of literature. The main subject of the book--the creative relationship between spiritual father, spiritual son, and nonspiritual mother-wife--will clamp the consciousness of each member of the main trio down, preventing over-much free flight, but--in so spacious a book--more than that is needed. We have to consider not only the theme of the book but its structure. We are back to Joyce's epic intention. He is not only emulating Homer but taking him over. The title Ulysses is no mere ironical reference to the decline of the heroic as exemplified in the emergence of the bourgeois novel from the original epic form: the title is the key to the structure. Bloom is Ulysses having his little adventures in Dublin; Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus in search of a father; Molly Bloom is both the beguiling Calypso and the faithful Penelope. These identifications would be merely fanciful if there were not a more solid parallel with the Odyssey built into the structure of the work itself: a little study shows the parallel to be both profound and detailed. Each episode of Ulysses corresponds to an episode of the Odyssey, and the correspondence proliferates in a mass of subtle references....

But the Homeric parallel is only the beginning. Shape and direction are primarily imposed on each chapter by means of an Odyssean reference, but that reference suggests related references, sub-references, and these have much to do with not only the direction and subject-matter of the interior monologue but the action itself, and even the technique used to present that action. Thus, a Dublin newspaper-office is a reasonable parallel to the cave of Aeolus--the god of the winds whose enmity Ulysses earned--and, so that the scriptures may be fulfilled, Bloom goes to the office of the Freeman's Journal and National Press. It is appropriate that the scene should be wind-swept, galleys flying about the place, but also appropriate that wind should suggest the lungs, the windiness of newspaper rhetoric, the art of rhetoric itself, the wind-swift transmission of news, the history of the art of the presentation of news (expressed in headlines which punctuate the text) and the technique through which the action, talk, and thought are presented. We end up with a formidable battery of clamps--the scene, the art, the presiding physical organ, the technique. Above everything puffs and blows the wind-god himself--the Editor. If we look deepest of all we shall find that the episode even has a predominant colour--red. Red is right for the art of inflaming passions through words and the journalistic cult of the sensational.

What applies in this chapter applies nearly everywhere in the book: to the Homeric parallel we add a presiding organ, art, colour, symbol, and an appropriate technique....

So far we have answered the question about Joyce's purpose in writing Ulysses purely in terms of a kind of technical ambition. There is always the danger that, bemused by the sheer skill of the book, we may ignore what the book is about. It is difficult in any work of art to fillet subject-matter from the presentation of subject-matter, and we may find in Joyce's attempt to make a sort of encyclopaedia with a heart, as well as a rainbow, a sufficient artistic, as opposed to technical, intention. The fundamental purpose of