Youth
James Augustine Joyce was born in the affluent Dublin suburb of Rathgar on February 2, 1882. His childhood was marked by his mother's pregnancies - of which there were many - and numerous moves as his father, who lifted his elbows more than he should have, had to deal with redundancies and other personal bankruptcies. In 1887, the family moved to Bray. Here James met Eileen, the daughter of their Protestant neighbors. The romance was not to the liking of Mrs Conway, nicknamed "Dante", a devout Catholic and distant relative of his father, who lived with them at the time and was responsible for his education. The young boy studied with the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood, a memorable experience. However, he had to leave the college three years later when financial resources ran out. It was then that he left for Blackrock, the passage from "relative prosperity to real poverty", as his younger brother, Stanislaus Joyce, recalls in his story Le Gardien de mon frère, published in 1966 by Gallimard and now unfortunately out of print. But it was also the beginning of writing for James, who had always shown an appetite for literature and philosophy - his first poem, Et Tu Healy, composed at the age of 9, is dedicated to Charles Stewart Parnell, an emblematic figure in the struggle for independence in Ireland, then under English rule. It is said that his parents were so proud that they had his prose printed and even sent a copy to the Vatican.
This was followed by other establishments and a gradual rejection of Catholic authority. James refused to take Holy Orders and joined Dublin University, where he studied literature and foreign languages (French and Italian). The literary world opened up to him, and he took his place in it by presenting an essay on the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, for which the latter thanked him. In 1903, with his degree in hand, the world opened up to him: he chose Paris on the pretext of learning medicine, but ended up spending more time squandering his money in pubs in the company of fellow countrymen William Butler Yeats and John Synge. Just a few months later, the news of his mother's cancer signaled the end of the party. He returned home to look after her until she died, then continued to devote himself to his father's familiar demon, alcohol. The following year, however, was an important one: he wrote poems, some of which were published. They were eventually collected in Musique de chambre (1907). Above all, he wrote a strongly autobiographical text, Portrait de l'artiste (Portrait of the Artist), which, although rejected by Dana magazine, served as the foundation for the more substantial novel Stephen le héros (Stephen the Hero). Legend has it that the latter succumbed in part to the flames before being reborn as Dedalus, published in 1916, a work we now know under its definitive name and version, Portrait de l'artiste en jeune homme (Folio). But there's another date to remember from 1904: June 16. On that day, he had a rendezvous with a young woman he had approached a few days earlier, Nora Barnacle, who was to become his companion, his great love and his muse. In his own way, he would celebrate this event by fitting the plot of his future masterpiece, Ulysses, into this single day, for with Joyce, as we soon learn, everything is symbol and recycling of elements from his life. In August, The Irish Homestead published a short story, The Sisters, another format he would experiment with repeatedly in the years to follow.
Exile
After some sad adventures in Dublin, but also some powerful encounters, notably with Alfred H. Hunter, who was to serve as a model for the future Leopold Bloom, Joyce decided to leave Ireland. Hunter, who would serve as a model for the future Leopold Bloom, Joyce decided to leave Ireland. The couple went into exile in Zurich, then Trieste, where they settled after a brief foray into Pola. Although financially very delicate, these were fruitful years: they had two children - Giorgio in 1905, Lucia Anna in 1907 - and a friendship with Ettore Schmitz, whom we know by his pen name, Italo Svevo. Having written some fifteen short stories, some of which appeared in magazines, Joyce decided to publish them together and signed a contract with Maunsel in 1909. But the agreement turned sour. His publisher feared reprisals, since Joyce, as usual, had drawn inspiration from people close to him, not hesitating to report their comments on political issues. He wrote to King George V, asking for permission which was neither given nor refused, and Maunsel gave in. However, as Valéry Larbaud, a future enthusiastic admirer who would later write a preface to the book, reports, by the time James came to collect his fascicles, the entire stock had already gone up in smoke, bought in its entirety and then burned on the spot by a visibly disgruntled man whose identity would remain a mystery. Joyce recovered a single copy, which served as the basis for Gens de Dublin (available from Folio under the title Dublinois), finally published two years later in London by Grant Richards. Following this painful episode in 1912, Joyce never returned to Ireland, but continued to bring her hometown to life in her writings, with impressive accuracy.
In 1915, the war drove the family to Zurich, and income was still meager, but Ezra Pound, whom he had met a few years earlier, intervened to get him literary grants, and found him a patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver. Joyce's fame grew. He continued to work on his play, The Exiles, and his magnum opus, Ulysses, both begun just before he left for Switzerland. In 1917, his eyes, which had already made him suffer, had to be operated on for glaucoma. Nonetheless, he managed to complete the first chapters of his novel and his play, which was staged in Munich in 1919 and caused quite a scandal. The reception ofUlysses, published in fragments in the American magazine The Little Review from 1918, was rather good, for the time being, since in October 1920 the serial had to be stopped following an obscenity complaint lodged by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
Consecration
At 71, rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, in the Parisian capital he had returned to after the war, Joyce put the finishing touches to his novel. On February 2, 1922, the manuscript was published by Sylvia Beach, the founder of the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company, who authorized this unique publishing adventure that had become an epic, since the typographers at the Darantière printing works had no command of the English language and, suddenly, their stock of "w "s seemed insufficient, which explained the many typos in this first printing. The first French translation, by Auguste Morel, didn't appear until 1929 at La Maison des amis des livres, thanks to the commitment of Adrienne Monnier, who admitted she hadn't fully understood the text. A second, collaborative translation was published by Gallimard in 2004. In light of the past, it's obviously difficult to imagine how the text was actually received at the time: let's just say that the book was censored in the U.S. until 1933 on the grounds of pornography (it was finally published there the following year, then 2 years later in England), that Virginia Woolf, who knew a thing or two about stream-of-consciousness, confided in her diary that it was indecent (before retracting and evoking a certain genius), and that Hemingway was so enthusiastic about it that he smuggled copies to his fellow Americans. In a word, Ulysses leaves no one indifferent. But what is this novel about, about which so many have an opinion without having opened, finished or loved it? At first glance, the number of pages suggests a substantial project, and the title, a second clue, evokes theOdyssey, but when you delve into the structure of the text, an approach that makes it easier to grasp, you realize just how ambitious Joyce was. And yet the plot can be summed up in a single line: the day of June 16, 1904, as Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus) and Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) pass through Dublin from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m.. The former is the author's double, the latter wanders the streets to avoid finding his unfaithful wife, then engages in strange activities. The original text had no subdivisions, but to make it easier to read, Joyce had provided a kind of explanatory outline in eighteen episodes, each linked to a time, a place, but also to an organ, a color, an art, a symbol... Each chapter concerns a character and allows itself a particular style, making the novel experimental and daring. We enter through a conversation we don't understand, because nothing is explained, we leave through the interior monologue (without punctuation) of Leopold Bloom's wife, but, to tell the truth, nothing compels us to read it in a linear fashion. In short, Ulysses is a reading experience, in the plural, which since 1954 has inspired an annual Bloomsday celebration in Ireland, and lengthy studies by scholars in search of explanations and references to Joyce's real life.
The writer had not said his last word: on March 10, 1923, he embarked on a work that he published again in fragments in various magazines, notably Transition. This was his Work in Progress, in which his assistant Samuel Beckett assisted him. In its definitive title and complete form, Finnegans Wake would not appear until May 1939, published by Faber&Faber in London. Its writing was complicated by the fact that Joyce had to deal with several problems in his personal life: his father died in 1931, his daughter Lucia began to show serious signs of schizophrenia, and he himself had increasingly failing eyesight. But the complexity also stems from his new ambition: the text is even more arduous thanUlysses, mixing several languages; reading the first fragments leaves many doubtful. To reassure people that he was in good mental health, Joyce decided to publish a collection of poems, Pomes Penyeach , in 1927, and in 1939, some of his admirers published Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination, a kind of manifesto in favor of the writer, if not an encouragement. Two years after the publication of his last novel, on January 13, 1941, James Joyce died in Zurich of a perforated ulcer. He left behind Nora Barnacle, who outlived him by 10 years, but also a grandson, Stephen, whose birth he had celebrated in the poem Ecce Puer (1932), in which he also evoked the death of his father. Stephen Joyce, born in France, was to become his grandfather's testamentary heir, reigning terror on the literary world and horrifying scholars by smilingly admitting to having burned some of his correspondence. His devotion to his grandfather, his willingness to sue anyone who dared touch even a comma of the original texts, his desire to protect the family's privacy, even if it meant destroying priceless archives, and the astronomical royalties he demanded, all added up to a diabolical reputation. James Joyce's work fell into the public domain in 2012, much to the relief of Joycians. Stephen Joyce died eight years later, but it's not clear what he took to his grave.
