Authors: James Joyce

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His first important book, the collection of short stories titled Dubliners, is a series of meticulously realistic analyses of fictional representatives of the city of Dublin. The stories are designed to give a complete picture of Irish life. They are grouped into studies of childhood, youth, maturity, and public life, and the book ends with the novella titled The Dead, Joyce’s extended depiction of the state of spiritual death he believed to represent the contemporary condition of the Irish. The realistic surface of the studies has been found by later criticism to conceal profound symbolic depth, and the imagery of moral paralysis and decay Joyce worked into his naturalistic treatments of the people of Dublin anticipated the more complex uses of symbolism in his later masterpieces. Dubliners had been completed by 1907. The long delays in its publication—the result of editorial apprehension about his uses of obscene expressions and real people and places in the interest of a greater realism—were to prove an obstacle in the publication histories of his later works. During this period he had also written his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (an early version was published posthumously as Stephen Hero), which came to the attention of Ezra Pound, who immediately agreed to publish it in serial form in the review The Egoist beginning in 1914. The publication of these two works made Joyce’s reputation virtually overnight as the great modernist in fiction, the peer of such modernist poets as Pound and T. S. Eliot.

His next work, Ulysses, is generally considered his masterpiece. This long novel, on which Joyce worked from 1914 until its publication in 1922, succeeds in the apparently paradoxical goal of fusing an extreme realism with complex experimentation with point of view and symbolic and mythological structures. At the level of realistic narrative, the novel presents the events of a single day in Dublin (June 16, 1904) as viewed through the eyes of two characters, Stephen Dedalus, who had been the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Leopold Bloom. The story follows each man throughout the day in such close detail that critics have been able to map their paths virtually step by step, and it comes to its dramatic climax when the two men meet at the end of the day. The novel not only tells the reader exactly what each man sees and hears but also follows their thoughts for the entire day, through Joyce’s elaborate techniques for the representation of interior monologue. His stream-of-consciousness narration was to influence such writers as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. The novel closes with a long interior monologue by Bloom’s wife, Molly, which remains a classic example of the device.

The scrupulously realistic surface of the novel is built around an equally complex pattern of symbol and myth. The chapters of the book have been shown by critics (aided to some extent by Joyce’s own notes and hints) to reflect the structure of Homer’s Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.), with Stephen cast as Telemachus, Bloom as Odysseus, and Molly as Penelope. Each chapter is also organized around a pattern of symbolic references to colors, arts, organs of the body, and other themes and objects. This adaptation of classical myths for the structuring of contemporary works had an influence on the work of other writers, perhaps most notably Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). The novel had begun serial publication in the Little Review in 1918 but was soon banned in England and the United States on the grounds that it was obscene, and the book eventually had to be published in Paris. Ulysses was finally permitted publication in the United States in 1933, following one of the most famous legal battles ever fought over censorship.

Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake, has defied classification and remains the only example of its genre. The book contains a mixture of many different foreign languages as well as nonsense words created by Joyce, among them several one-hundred-letter expressions to denote thunderclaps. The structure of the work is similarly unusual, for the book begins in the middle of a sentence, the beginning of which ends the book. Elements are included from the whole of human history, literature, and mythology in Joyce’s attempt to write a comprehensive summary of all human experience. Clearly, such an experiment can never be entirely successful, and large sections of Finnegans Wake are more or less incomprehensible to anyone but a handful of specialists. Nevertheless, its originality and uniqueness of conception have given it a secure, if not central, place in literary history. It has been said that readers and critics are still trying to become Joyce’s contemporaries. Despite the relatively small volume of his writing, its importance for literary study, as well as for all subsequent writers, is profound. No other writer of the twentieth century broke so much ground technically or succeeded so well in combining interesting characters and stories with his innovations.

Interest in Joyce has grown over the decades. Several volumes of Joyce's literary criticism and correspondence were published following his death. Blooms of Dublin, a musical adaptation of Ulysses, was written in 1971 and finally debuted in 1982 in the United Kingdom. In 2001, The Dead was adapted into a Tony Award–winning musical. Nearly a dozen years later, in 2012, Joyce's children's book The Cats of Copenhagen, a story written for his grandson, was first published, as was a picture book adaptation of “The Ondt & the Gracehoper,” originally published in Finnegans Wake.