James Joyce - Detail narration of his life and explication of the cornerstone of his thought

In this note we are going to tell the story of James Joyce's life and we are going to focus on some crucial aspects of his thought and writing style in order to find out what he wanted to pass down to postery.

Born of a great and rebel writer

was born in Dublin in 1882.
His parents belong to the middle class and they were truly Catholic believers so that they make his son study in Jesuit schools.

Only in 1898 he reached to attend lessons at University College Dublin. Here he studied French, Italian and German and English literature and started to take inspiration from Dante, D'Annunzio and Ibsen for his literary works. He thinks about himself like an European man, and goes against Yeats, saing that to increase Ireland's awareness is necessary to offer a realistic portait of the social and political situation. This belief was reinforced by the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, a really influent activist who wanted Ireland free from English monarchy, since Joyce wrote his first poem.

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His mother’s illness

In the meantime in 1902 he graduated even though his family was living rainy days.
He left Ireland to go to France in order to study medicine but when he learned that his mother was dying he returned to Ireland. This event was so impressed in his mind that the prologue of “Ulysses” rotates around Stephen Dedalus’ nightmare about his guilt to not have prayed enough for his mother’s eternal deliverance.

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His staying in Italy and the influence of different intellectuals

On 16 June 1904 Joyce fell in love with Nora Barnacle but the couple got married only in 1931. With her the writer definitely left Ireland and went to Italy, in Trieste, because he feared that he is not immune from the soul of paralysis of his country. The years in Italy were difficult because of his daughter's schizophrenia and his financial problems. Anyway, here he had a relevant meeting for his career. Due to the fact that he was teaching in this city he got in touch with Italo Svevo who was hardly trying to get his novel, Senilità, published. Joyce empathised with him because he was also looking for someone that was willing to publish his collection of short stories, Dubliners.
Despite the fact that this literary work was published only in 1914 because of its so called outrageous content, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound cooperate with him to publish a volume in 1916 of his novel “A portrait of the Artist as a Young man” which has some personal connotations.
Both Dubliners and "The Portate" helped him to became a famous writer.

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His last years between the two wars

He moved to Zurich at the beginning of World War I and in 1920 his family and he went to Paris.
In 1917 he wrote "Ulysses". In 1923 he began to work on Finnegans Wake but his sight was decreasing so that he needed Samuel Beckett’s assistance.
At the beginning of World War II he moved again to Zurich in which he died in 1941.

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Dublin as a setting of his literary works

Dublin is the place where he set all his works because Joyce's mission is to give to his home-town literary importance. He want to give a realistic vision of the life of ordinary people, of everybody and not a limited view of population.
Here in Dublin he even made a rebellion againstchurch. As a matter of fact his hostility is the revolt of artist heretic against official doctrine and against the provincial church which had the possession of Irish minds.
On the other hand, what Joyce blame about his hometown this its paralysis, both physical and moral, since it is incapable to react at the facts that are happening in it. Everyone’s lives are always the same and cannot be changed. As an instance, in Dubliners there is a circular description of characters who at the end return at the same point of the beginning.

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Joyce’s writing style

Joyce was a modernist writer. It means that he use a new way of writing. The facts became confuses and they were explored by different point of view. The reality for Joyce stood in what all the subjective descriptions have in common.
Joyce's stories open in medias res, with the analysis of a particular moment. Time is not perceived as objective but as subjective, leading to psychological change. The description of Dublin, in fact, is not derived by external reality, but from character thoughts.
Moreover, in Dubliners the language is connected to the stage of the stories so the stories at the beginning will be easier to understand than the ones at the end where it abounds with symbolism.
Joyce believed in the impersonality of the artist like Eliot, Baudelaire, Flaubert. In fact the artist aim is to give a true image of reality and to do this necessary to isolate the artist from society.
His style is charaterized by the exploration of characters impressions by the use of the free direct speech and Epiphany, by interior monologue.
Interior monologue is a tecnique in which the language breaks down into a succession of words without puntuation or grammar connetions, in which the action takes places in the characters mind.
Joyce uses also the technique of the extreme interior monologue. The narration take place inside the mind of the charater while he is dreaming. The words and the free associations are fused to create new expression.

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Key words of Joyce’s prospective of his writing

: is the result of external forces and moral linked to religion and culture. Joyce's characters accept their condition and their are not able to escape.
Escape: is the opposite of paralisys. It is originated from an impulse that is caused by a sense of enclosure.
Epiphany: it is a sudden revelation which can make your mood change.
Perception: it is the re-emergence of what our consciousness have suppressed.