JAMES JOYCE AND ULYSSES
James Joyce was born in 1882 in a suburb outside Dublin, Ireland. He studied at University College, focusing mainly on language, mathematics, and philosophy. Joyce began writing in 1900 at the age of eight, creating dramatic vignettes and prose poems. He was an avid reader and even learned to speak Dano-Norwegian in order to read the plays of Henrik Ibsen, of whom he was a great admirer. In 1909, Joyce opened the very first cinema in Ireland, called the Volta. Unfortunately, this business venture failed because Joyce chose to showcase only Italian cinema, rather than the popular films of Hollywood.
Joyce wrote a variety of novels, short stories, and one stage drama throughout his career. Dubliners, a series of short stories about life in Dublin, was published in 1914. The novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in 1916, thanks to the poet Ezra Pound, who published early excerpts of the novel in the literary magazine The Egoist.
Joyce’s most famous novel, Ulysses, was published in 1922. (It is this particular work from Joyce that we encounter in Travesties). Once World War I began in 1914, Joyce and his family took refuge in Zurich (refer to page 13 to learn more about this neutral territory during wartime), and he wrote Ulysses while in Zurich. The novel is known for its hefty length (over 700 pages) and its stream-of-consciousness narrative, which presents the character’s inner thoughts directly on the page. Here is an example of this narrative technique:
A quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office or the alarmlock next door at cockshout clattering the brain out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so that I can get up early.
Joyce co-founded The English Players with actor Claude Sykes, which performed plays in English in Zurich, Switzerland. Their first undertaking was The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (refer to page 14 to learn more about this famous production). After the war in 1920, Joyce left Zurich and moved back to Paris to be with his poet friend, Pound. Joyce had met many people in France who helped propel his
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writing. American expat Sylvia Beach helped publish Ulysses, and another expat, Paul Léon, helped publish his final book, Finnegan’s Wake, in 1939.
After spending 20 years in France, in 1940, he fled the country to avoid the Nazi invasion and returned to Zurich. When Joyce left Paris, Léon went to Joyce’s apartment and put his belongings in safekeeping for the duration of the war. It is because of Léon that we have many of Joyce’s personal possessions and manuscripts today. Joyce ended up dying one year later after having surgery for ulcers in his small intestine and was buried in Zurich.
By the end of his life, Joyce was a master of 17 languages, including Sanskrit, Arabic, and Greek. Known as the father of Modernism, Joyce’s masterful handle on different languages might explain the experimentation with language in his own writing; in other words, “you have to know the rules to break them.” For a writer constantly examining life in Dublin, it is interesting just how little time Joyce spent in his homeland, spending almost 30 years of his life in Paris and Zurich. Still, he is one of the Ireland’s most distinguished writers, responsible for creating some of the most challenging and complex pieces of literature to date.•
James Joyce in Zurich, c. 1918
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