Joyce, James - Life, themes and works

Joyce, James - life and works

Joyce is the first and the most important European writer. In one of his works "A portrait of an artist as a young man", a semi-autobiographical novel, he finished with an important sentence: "I don't belong to Dublin more or less. I belong to Dublin, I belong to Ireland, I belong to Europe, I belong to the world, I belong to the universe.” So he is a cosmopolitan writer. He was first of all Irish and he was born in Dublin in 1882 and spent the first part of his life studying here, he went to Trinity College and then he studied, at the University, a lot of European languages: Italian, French, Latin, Greek, Ebrew (old and modern languages). Then he abandoned Dublin, it was a voluntary exile. This because he was against the Gaelic revival movement, a movement of strong nationalism which wanted to reevaluate Gaelic. Joyce was against the use of Gaelic and against nationalism, because he wanted to be open, he wanted to be European. He understood that it was a mistake to keep Ireland close in its nationalism, he wanted to open Ireland to exchange influences, so he left Ireland and went on exile. He moved to Paris, in France, where he studied at the Sorbonne, but then due to his problems, moved back to Dublin. This is the time when he fell in love with Nora Barnacle, he met her on 16th of June, an important date because he met the woman of his life and every year, even nowadays, it's celebrated all over Ireland, this event it's called Bloomsday.
This meeting will change his life because they loved a lot and together decided to move to Italy and in particular they settled down in Trieste, after a long period in which they decided to get married. They also had two children to whom they gave Italian names (Giorgio and Lucia).

In Trieste, Joyce met Italo Svevo and they started a really important friendship. Joyce, in this period, had a lot of financial problems. Even if he published his first novel, it was not enough to get on living. Then because of the war, he and his family were forced to move to Zurig to be safe. His first important work is called Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories. Another important novel is A portrait of an artist as a young man, in which he is the protagonist, so it's a semi-autobiographical novel. But his masterpiece is considered Ulysses, in which he used a massive use of the stream of consciousness technique and here we can find the new idea of time: Ulysses, in fact takes place in just one day, but the pages of the book are about 500. The last work, it's Finnegans Wake, that is still under studies, it's impossible to understand the meaning, it's very complex because he wrote it in a lot of languages: Latin, Greeks, Sanscreet, Italian.
The theme he deals with is Dublin, he spent all his life writing and thinking about Dublin. He describes Dublin in an ordinary way to show reality as it really was in Dublin. The style is relatively simple because he wanted to reproduce the exact way of living in that city and also the type of life held by Dubliners. The style is increasingly more complex even within the Dubliners because it suits the character: if the character is a child, the language and the style is relatively simple but when the character grows up it becomes more complex. Moreover, every single episode of the Dubliners is an epiphany.
What is the Epiphany?
It is a sudden revelation, an understanding of a reality in its full significance and meaning, a kind of out of darkness: in a moment of trouble, epiphany is the moment you understand, the moment in which you have the idea. Even something trivial, a banal event may happen but even if it is simple, it is important for our mind, because it tells our mind to understand and take a decision. Joyce studied at the Jesuit school so he had a catholic education and in A portrait of an artist as a young man, it's said that he mostly spent his early part of life, asking himself if he was destined to be a priest or a writer, this was his crucial point. But then watching the lake, he had the epiphany, he said: "I will not serve, I will accept the call of life to create life out of life". Thanks to the epiphany, he understood that in his future he had to be a writer.