James Joyce
A profound influence of literary innovations of Irish writer James Augustine Aloysius Joyce on modern fiction includes his works,
Ulysses
(1922) and
Finnegans Wake
(1939).
People note this novelist for his experimental use of language in these works. Technical innovations of Joyce in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels, drawn from the mythology, history, and literature, and he created a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions.
John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman and father of James Joyce, nine younger surviving siblings, and two other siblings who died of typhoid, failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of other professions, including politics and tax collecting. The Roman Catholic Church dominated life of Mary Jane Murray, an accomplished pianist and his mother. In spite of poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class façade.
Jesuits at Clongowes Wood college, Clane, and then Belvedere college in Dublin educated Joyce from the age of six years; he graduated in 1897. In 1898, he entered the University College, Dublin. Joyce published first an essay on
When We Dead Awaken
, play of Heinrich Ibsen, in the Fortnightly Review in 1900. At this time, he also began writing lyric poems.
After graduation in 1902, the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, as a teacher, and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. He spent a year in France, and when a telegram about his dying mother arrived, he returned. Not long after her death, Joyce traveled again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid, whom he married in 1931.
Joyce published
Dubliners
in 1914,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
in 1916, a play
Exiles
in 1918 and Ulysses in 1922. In 1907, Joyce published a collection of poems,
Chamber Music
.
At the outset of the Great War, Joyce moved with his family to Zürich. In Zürich, Joyce started to develop the early chapters of Ulysses, first published in France because of censorship troubles in the Great Britain and the United States, where the book became legally available only in 1933.
In March 1923, Joyce in Paris started Finnegans Wake, his second major work; glaucoma caused chronic eye troubles that he suffered at the same time. Transatlantic review of Ford Madox Ford in April 1924 carried the first segment of the novel, called part of Work in Progress. He published the final version in 1939.
Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. After the fall of France in World War II, Joyce returned to Zürich, where he died, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake.
“Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuee! Nuee! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream . . . there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears . . . for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!”
“Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”
“The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.”
“God made food; the devil the cooks.”
“Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. But the Christmas vacation was very far away: but one time it would come because the earth moved round always.-Stephen Dedalus-”
“I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.”
“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
“He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe?Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God's name just as his name was Stephen.”
“I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.”
“[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”
“Welcome, O life! 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.”
“A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. ”
“When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street.”
“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
“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.”
“Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.”
“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”
“And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?”
“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
“The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed.”
“But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.from “Araby”