James Joyce

James Joyce, illustrated

A few scenes from Joyce's Paris years — drawn illustrations, not photographs.

A Dublin childhood: prosperity turning into poverty

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square in Rathgar, Dublin, the eldest surviving child of John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane “May” Murray Joyce. Ten of their children survived infancy. At the beginning of James's life, the family's circumstances were comfortable enough to support the appearance of gentility. His father came from a Cork family that had owned property, and his mother came from a substantial Dublin family. John Joyce held a position in Dublin's rate-collection office and possessed a powerful singing voice, considerable charm and an equally considerable capacity for drinking, storytelling and financial irresponsibility.[1]

The family's decline was gradual enough for young Joyce to experience both sides of class insecurity. He remembered respectable houses, servants and expensive schooling, then watched the family move repeatedly as property was mortgaged and money disappeared. John Joyce lost his government position and was pensioned while still in his early forties. Addresses became less prestigious, creditors more pressing and domestic disorder more difficult to ignore.

This history matters because Joyce became one of literature's great anatomists of status without writing conventional social-climbing novels. Money in his fiction is everywhere: rent, wages, advertising commissions, drink tabs, funeral expenses, pawned furniture, meals and small humiliations. Leopold Bloom does not drift through an abstract philosophical Dublin in Ulysses; he thinks about what things cost. The extraordinary formal ambition of Joyce's writing is continually anchored in ordinary economic fact.

His father's personality was equally important. John Joyce could be irresponsible and destructive, but his voice, jokes, political memories and endless stories fed his son's imagination. Versions of him appear most clearly in Simon Dedalus, Stephen Dedalus's charming, improvident father. Joyce did not need to invent the tension between affection and exasperation that surrounds Simon; he had lived with it.

Parnell, politics and betrayal

One of the defining political events of Joyce's childhood was the destruction of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, after the revelation of his relationship with the married Katharine O'Shea.

John Joyce passionately supported Parnell. When much of nationalist Ireland and the Catholic hierarchy turned against him, the betrayal became family history as well as national history. Parnell became a nearly mythic figure in Joyce's imagination: a leader destroyed not simply by the British enemy but by his own people and their priests.[2]

Joyce reportedly wrote a childhood poem about the affair, “Et Tu, Healy,” after Parnell's death in 1891, and his father had copies printed. The poem does not survive, but the political idea does. Betrayal recurs throughout Joyce's work — in friendship, marriage, religion, nationalism and art.

The Christmas dinner argument in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which adults quarrel furiously over Parnell and the Church while the child Stephen listens, turns national politics into family trauma. Joyce never became an uncomplicated Irish nationalist. He opposed British domination but distrusted cultural nationalism when it demanded obedience, purity or heroic mythology. His relationship with Ireland remained adversarial, intimate and impossible to escape.

The Jesuits

At six, Joyce entered Clongowes Wood College, the prestigious Jesuit boarding school in County Kildare. His father's worsening finances eventually made the fees impossible, and Joyce left at the end of 1891. After a period of disrupted schooling and a brief time with the Christian Brothers, a chance encounter between John Joyce and the Jesuit Father John Conmee allowed James and his brother Stanislaus to attend Belvedere College without fees.[1]

Joyce ultimately rejected Catholic belief, but few writers who rejected a religion ever remained more saturated in its language. His formal education was overwhelmingly Jesuit, and its habits of classification, argument, confession, examination and rhetoric remained embedded in him. Joyce himself acknowledged that Jesuit training taught him to arrange things so that they could be surveyed and judged.[3]

That helps explain an apparent contradiction in his writing. Ulysses can feel chaotic, but beneath its voices, jokes, advertisements, songs and wandering thoughts lies obsessive organization. Joyce created charts connecting each episode to hours, organs, colors, arts, symbols, techniques and episodes of Homer. The unruliness rests on a nearly scholastic skeleton.

As an adolescent he experienced periods of intense religious fear and devotion and for a time considered a priestly vocation. His sexual awakening and intellectual rebellion pulled him in the opposite direction. By late adolescence, he had effectively rejected Catholic observance. Yet sin, confession, grace, heresy, transubstantiation, priesthood and liturgical language never stopped furnishing his imagination. Joyce did not escape Catholicism by ceasing to write about it. He escaped it by making its language available for art.

University College Dublin

In 1898, Joyce entered University College Dublin, then on St Stephen's Green, where he studied modern languages. He graduated in 1902 with an undistinguished pass degree, but his real intellectual education was much broader than the examination system measured.[1]

He read widely in European literature and became especially devoted to Henrik Ibsen. At eighteen he published an appreciative review of Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken in the influential London Fortnightly Review. Ibsen was informed of the young Irishman's praise and sent his thanks through his translator, which deeply impressed Joyce.

Ibsen offered him an alternative to the literary culture developing around the Irish Revival. Joyce admired Yeats but distrusted any demand that Irish writers produce uplifting national myths. He wanted the freedom to portray embarrassment, sexuality, cowardice, failed ambition, drunkenness, petty cruelty and the ordinary speech of Dublin without first asking whether the result improved Ireland's public image.

In 1901, when a university magazine refused his essay “The Day of the Rabblement,” in part because of a reference to a writer on the Vatican Index, Joyce had it privately printed. It was one of his earliest battles with censorship, and hardly his last.

During these years he also began recording what he called epiphanies: brief fragments of speech, gesture or perception in which an ordinary event suddenly seemed to reveal a person or situation with unusual clarity. The idea would become fundamental to Dubliners and A Portrait.[4]

Joyce the singer

Another side of Joyce is easy to lose behind the image of the difficult novelist: he was highly musical and possessed a strong tenor voice.[5]

Music ran through his family, particularly through his father, and Joyce seriously considered whether singing might provide a profession. In 1904, he entered Dublin's Feis Ceoil and won the bronze medal in the tenor competition. Contrary to a later legend, there is no documentary evidence that the famous tenor John McCormack defeated him there.

His first published book, Chamber Music (1907), was a sequence of thirty-six lyric poems whose title and construction deliberately evoke song. Ezra Pound later praised their musical discipline, and composers continued setting Joyce's poetry to music long after his death.[6]

Music never became a discarded youthful interest. Songs, opera, ballads, advertising jingles, folk tunes and rhythmic patterns run through his prose. Ulysses is full of things characters hear or half remember. In “Sirens,” Joyce goes further and attempts to make the prose itself behave musically through repetition, echo, broken motifs and sounds that return in altered form. His writing was meant not only to be decoded. It was meant to be heard.

First Paris, 1902–1903

Joyce's relationship with Paris began two years before Nora Barnacle.

After completing his degree, he left Dublin for Paris in December 1902, ostensibly to continue medical studies. The plan was poorly organized and did not last. His French was good, his finances were not, and medicine soon lost its attraction. Instead he spent long hours reading in Paris libraries, studying Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Ben Jonson and questions of aesthetics.[1]

This first Paris period is important because it undermines the simple idea that Joyce left Ireland only after meeting Nora. He had already tested exile. Paris gave him anonymity, intellectual freedom and the experience of living beyond the institutions that had formed him. It also reinforced the idea that European culture could be more useful to an Irish writer than loyalty to a narrowly national program.

The experiment ended abruptly in April 1903, when his father sent word that May Joyce was dying. Joyce returned home.[7]

His mother's death

May Joyce died on 13 August 1903 after a long illness.

The emotional consequences appear throughout Joyce's work. During her final illness, family members urged James and Stanislaus to kneel and pray at her bedside. They refused. Joyce had already rejected Catholic belief, but intellectual refusal did not protect him from guilt.

At the opening of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is haunted by precisely such a memory. His dead mother returns in dreams and accusations, and his refusal to perform religious obedience for her remains unresolved.

Joyce frequently transformed autobiography in this manner. He did not simply reproduce events. He allowed a remembered moment to continue working until it had accumulated enough emotional pressure to become fiction.

After his mother's death his Dublin life grew increasingly disorderly. He drank with medical students, continued writing and spent time with Oliver St John Gogarty, the flamboyant medical student and writer who later contributed to Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Joyce stayed briefly with Gogarty at the Martello tower in Sandycove in September 1904, but the arrangement collapsed within days. By then, another relationship had given Joyce an exit.

Nora Barnacle

Nora Barnacle had grown up in Galway and came to Dublin in early 1904 after conflicts within her family. She worked at Finn's Hotel near Nassau Street as a waitress and chambermaid.[8]

She and Joyce first encountered one another around 10 June 1904. Their first significant meeting appears to have taken place on 16 June. Joyce later chose that date for the entirety of Ulysses, transforming an ordinary day of courtship into one of the most famous dates in literary history.[8]

Nora was unlike the intellectual women of Joyce's university circle. She had little formal education, cared little about literary theory and could be openly skeptical about his increasingly difficult books. That difference was one reason the relationship lasted. Joyce found in her an independence from the academic and artistic world in which he was continually trying to prove himself.

Nora also had a strong personality of her own. She was rebellious, direct and resilient. She had already worked for a living, resisted family control and moved alone from Galway to Dublin. Following Joyce into uncertain exile was not simply an act of passive devotion.

By autumn they had decided to leave Ireland together. On 8 October 1904, they departed. They were not married. For the next twenty-seven years, they would live as husband and wife without making it legal.[8]

Leaving Ireland

Joyce initially believed he had secured a position teaching English in Zurich through the Berlitz language-school network. He had not.

After traveling first to Zurich and then Trieste, the couple were sent instead to Pola, now Pula in Croatia, then a naval port of Austria-Hungary. Joyce taught English, particularly to naval officers, while continuing to work on the stories and novel he had brought with him.[9]

In 1905, they moved to Trieste, the multilingual Adriatic port that became Joyce's principal home for the next decade.

His younger brother Stanislaus Joyce soon joined them. Family finances were almost permanently strained. Nora sometimes took in washing and ironing for the households of Joyce's pupils. Their son Giorgio was born in July 1905; their daughter Lucia followed in July 1907. Joyce had escaped Dublin geographically, but artistically he had hardly escaped it at all.

Trieste

Trieste was one of the best possible cities for Joyce's development. Italian, German, Slovenian, Croatian, Greek, Jewish and other communities met within a Habsburg port whose cultural identity was far less homogeneous than Dublin's.

Joyce earned money teaching English at Berlitz and through private pupils. He learned and used Italian fluently, gave lectures on subjects including Shakespeare and Irish literature, wrote criticism and continued developing the books that would eventually make him famous.[9]

He also learned what it meant to be an outsider in several directions simultaneously: Irish in Austria-Hungary, English-speaking in an Italian-speaking environment, culturally Catholic but religiously apostate, poor while teaching wealthy families.

This cosmopolitan experience enlarged the idea of identity that later enters Ulysses. Leopold Bloom, whose Hungarian-Jewish father converted to Christianity and whose social belonging is continually questioned, emerges from a writer who had spent years noticing how language, religion, nationality and ancestry complicate the supposedly simple category of “Irishman.”

Italo Svevo

One of Joyce's most important Trieste friendships began as a language lesson.

In 1907, the businessman Ettore Schmitz, who wrote under the name Italo Svevo, hired Joyce to improve his English. Svevo had already published two novels to almost no response and had largely given up literary ambition. Joyce read them and became an enthusiastic admirer. Svevo and his wife, in turn, read Joyce's unpublished work; when Joyce read “The Dead” aloud to them, Livia Veneziani was reportedly so moved that she brought him a rose from the garden.[10]

Their friendship lasted well beyond Trieste. Joyce later helped draw French literary attention to Svevo, contributing to the rediscovery that made Zeno's Conscience internationally important.[10]

Svevo gave Joyce something equally valuable: a sophisticated older friend outside the English-speaking literary establishment. Their conversations moved among commerce, literature, Jewish identity, marriage and language. Trieste broadened Joyce's art because his life there was not confined to expatriate writers.

Rome

From 1906 to 1907, Joyce briefly left Trieste for Rome, where he worked as a correspondence clerk in a bank.

He hated it. The job was monotonous, money remained tight, and his experience of Rome fed a darker view of urban bureaucracy and commercial life. He soon returned to Trieste.

The interlude nevertheless contributed to Dubliners. Joyce increasingly conceived modern city life as a system capable of trapping people in jobs, habits, institutions and emotional patterns they could recognize but could not escape. That condition became one of his defining words: paralysis.

Dubliners

Joyce began the stories of Dubliners in 1904. By 1907, most of the collection existed, but publication became an ordeal lasting seven more years.[7]

He arranged the stories as a movement through childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The structure turns the city itself into the true protagonist. Different people appear in different neighborhoods and classes, yet forms of frustration repeat: family obligation, religion, failed romance, money, drink, politics, social embarrassment and the inability to act decisively.

The prose is deliberately more restrained than the Joyce of popular reputation. Scholars frequently connect Dubliners with his ideal of “scrupulous meanness”: a disciplined style that refuses ornamental intervention and allows ordinary details to expose the lives being described.[11]

The stories also develop Joyce's epiphany. A revelation need not involve divine truth. It may be a small gesture, a remembered phrase or an embarrassing realization that suddenly clarifies a larger failure.

Publishers found other things clearer than the aesthetic theory. They worried about identifiable Dublin businesses, political references, sexual implications, profanity and potential libel. Grant Richards initially agreed to publish the collection and then withdrew. Irish publisher Maunsel later printed sheets but backed away; the printer ultimately destroyed much of the edition. Joyce responded with the satirical poem “Gas from a Burner.”

Only in 1914 did Grant Richards finally publish the book. By then Joyce had been trying to get it into print for roughly a decade.[7]

“The Dead”

The final story, “The Dead,” was added later than most of the collection and considerably enlarges its emotional range.

At a Dublin holiday gathering, Gabriel Conroy moves through conversation, embarrassment, food, music and self-satisfaction before learning that a song has awakened in his wife Gretta a memory of Michael Furey, a boy who loved her when she was young and died soon afterward.

The story partly draws upon Nora's Galway past. Her youthful relationship with Michael Bodkin contributed to Joyce's imaginative construction of the dead boy, although — as always — the fiction exceeds the biography.[8]

What changes in “The Dead” is Joyce's attitude toward paralysis. Gabriel's self-knowledge is humiliating, but it is also expansive. The dead are not simply obstacles trapping the living. Memory can enlarge the living person's understanding of lives beyond his own.

Joyce had spent years condemning Dublin. “The Dead” shows that exile did not free him from loving it.

From Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

While struggling with Dubliners, Joyce was also writing an enormous autobiographical novel called Stephen Hero.

The surviving portion shows a much more conventional narrative than A Portrait. Joyce eventually abandoned the manuscript and began again, compressing hundreds of pages into a radically different form. The result was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The greatest innovation is visible almost immediately. The language of the novel develops with Stephen Dedalus's consciousness. Its opening resembles the rhythms and vocabulary available to a very small child. As Stephen grows, the syntax, references and intellectual complexity grow with him. By the final pages, narration gives way to fragmented diary entries.[12]

This technique changed autobiographical fiction. Instead of an adult narrator simply telling readers what childhood was like, Joyce tries to make language itself inhabit successive stages of consciousness.

Stephen's life resembles Joyce's: Clongowes, Belvedere, University College, Catholic terror, sexual experience, arguments over Ireland and eventual departure. But Joyce preserves an ironic distance from Stephen. The young artist's declarations can be genuinely moving and faintly ridiculous at the same time. Joyce had learned to transform self-portraiture into something more unstable than confession.

Ezra Pound

Joyce's international career changed abruptly in December 1913.

W. B. Yeats had admired Joyce's poem “I Hear an Army” and recommended it to Ezra Pound, then an energetic promoter of modern writing. Pound wrote Joyce introducing himself on 15 December 1913, asked to include the poem in an Imagist anthology and requested more work.[13]

Joyce sent him Dubliners and the opening of A Portrait. Within roughly a month, Pound had helped arrange serialization of Portrait in the London magazine The Egoist.[13]

Pound became one of Joyce's most important advocates. He wrote about him, introduced him to editors, arranged publication opportunities and eventually pushed him toward Paris. He did not create Joyce's talent. He created routes by which other people could finally encounter it.

Harriet Shaw Weaver

Behind The Egoist stood another figure even more important to Joyce's material survival: Harriet Shaw Weaver.

Weaver became editor of the magazine, fought printers who attempted to censor Joyce's language and eventually financed his work for years. She fired printers who removed expressions they considered improper from A Portrait.[14]

Her financial support later gave Joyce something he had almost never possessed: stretches of time in which writing did not have to compete constantly with language teaching.

Weaver remained one of his principal patrons through the writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, even when the latter work bewildered and disappointed her.

The history of Joyce's supposed solitary genius therefore has an important correction. His books depended upon an extraordinary network of people — many of them women — who typed, financed, serialized, printed, sold and defended work that established institutions refused to touch.

The First World War and Zurich

When Italy entered the First World War against Austria-Hungary in 1915, Joyce's position in Trieste became untenable. With help from friends, he secured permission for himself, Nora and the children to travel to neutral Zurich, arriving in June.

Zurich proved extremely productive.

Joyce completed A Portrait, which appeared as a book in the United States in 1916 through B. W. Huebsch. His play Exiles was published in 1918. Most importantly, he began sustained work on Ulysses.[7]

The idea had existed for years. Joyce had once considered writing a Dubliners-style story called “Ulysses,” and the figure of the wandering Leopold Bloom developed slowly. By Zurich, however, the project had become a novel of extraordinary scale.

Its external plot could hardly be simpler. One day. One city. A handful of people walking around. The complexity would come from everything the novel allowed into that day.

Ulysses begins appearing

In 1918, Ulysses began serialization in the American avant-garde magazine The Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, with Pound serving as foreign editor.[15]

The magazine published twenty-three installments between 1918 and 1920. U.S. postal authorities repeatedly seized issues under obscenity law. The crisis culminated with the “Nausicaa” episode, in which Leopold Bloom masturbates while watching Gerty MacDowell on Sandymount Strand. Anderson and Heap were prosecuted and fined; serialization stopped.[16]

The case made ordinary English-language publication of the complete novel almost impossible. Joyce had written himself into a legal problem. Paris would solve it.

Paris, 1920

After the war Joyce briefly returned to Trieste, but he found the city altered and his prospects uncertain. Pound urged him to try Paris.

The Joyce family arrived on 8 July 1920. Joyce stopped in Paris on his way to London, expecting to stay only briefly. Instead, Paris became his home for almost twenty years. His initial accommodation was at 9 rue de l'Université, followed by 5 rue de l'Assomption in Passy.

Three days after arriving, Joyce attended a gathering at the home of poet André Spire. There he met Sylvia Beach.

The Shakespeare and Company Project dates that meeting to 11 July 1920. The next day Joyce visited Beach's bookshop and took out a lending-library membership. The relationship changed both of their lives.[17]

Sylvia Beach

Beach had opened Shakespeare and Company in 1919 at 8 rue Dupuytren as an English-language bookshop and lending library. In 1921, it moved to 12 rue de l'Odéon, directly across the street from Adrienne Monnier's Maison des Amis des Livres. Beach and Monnier were partners personally as well as professionally, and their two shops created an unusual bilingual literary corridor.[18]

Beach admired Joyce before meeting him. By early 1921, as the obscenity case destroyed his chances of conventional publication, he told her how hopeless the situation looked. Beach offered to publish Ulysses herself.[19]

She was not an established publisher. She owned a bookshop. That was precisely why she could take the risk.

Subscriptions financed a private edition, and printer Maurice Darantière in Dijon undertook the extraordinarily difficult typesetting. Joyce continued adding and revising material throughout the proof stage. The novel went through nine rounds of proofs, with revisions simultaneously improving the book and creating new typographical problems.[20]

Beach's estimated printing costs doubled under the pressure of those changes. She functioned not merely as publisher but at different times as secretary, agent, banker, organizer and eye-doctor finder. The relationship is one of the most consequential acts of literary patronage in the twentieth century.

Ulysses, 2 February 1922

The first complete edition of Ulysses appeared on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday.

The edition comprised 1,000 numbered copies: one hundred signed copies on Dutch handmade paper, another 150 on vergé d'Arches and 750 on handmade paper. Its blue wrappers became instantly recognizable.[21]

The book follows events in Dublin on 16 June 1904.

Stephen Dedalus appears first, still wrestling with the intellectual and emotional problems left unresolved in A Portrait. The central figure is Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser who moves through the city while thinking about food, work, sex, memory, his dead son Rudy and his wife Molly's impending affair. Stephen and Bloom eventually meet. After Bloom returns home, Molly lies awake and thinks through a long final monologue ending in affirmation.

Joyce built the novel over the scaffolding of Homer's Odyssey. Bloom becomes an ordinary modern Odysseus, Stephen a Telemachus figure, Molly a Penelope. Yet Joyce did not print Homeric episode titles in the first edition. The parallels function as structural machinery rather than as a requirement that readers solve a puzzle before understanding the people.

His private schemas show just how elaborate that machinery became. Individual episodes were connected to colors, organs, arts, hours, symbols and different narrative techniques. What looks like a chaotic city has been planned with astonishing precision.[22]

Making ordinary life epic

The central wager of Ulysses is almost absurdly ambitious: nothing in an ordinary human day is too trivial for literature.

Bloom eats kidneys, uses the toilet, worries about a funeral, reads advertisements, notices women, thinks about his wife, calculates money, remembers his son, walks into pubs and out again, attends a funeral, works, eats lunch and eventually goes home.

Joyce surrounds these ordinary acts with mythology, Shakespeare, theology, Irish politics, advertisements, scientific ideas, songs and the history of the English language. The contrast does not diminish ordinary life. It makes ordinary life enormous.

This is one of Joyce's deepest artistic convictions: the epic does not require kings and battles. A city dweller surviving one day contains enough.

Why Ulysses was so radical

The novel is sometimes summarized as a triumph of stream of consciousness, but that description captures only part of what Joyce did.

The book continually generates competing narrative systems and different episode-by-episode styles. Joyce's ambition was to create something close to a new style for every chapter.[23]

“Aeolus,” set partly in a newspaper office, becomes invaded by newspaper headlines and rhetorical excess. “Nausicaa” parodies sentimental romance prose. “Circe” is written as a gigantic hallucinatory drama. “Oxen of the Sun” moves through parodies of historical stages of English prose. “Ithaca” adopts an impersonal question-and-answer form resembling a catechism or scientific examination. “Penelope” moves through Molly Bloom's largely unpunctuated interior monologue.

The reader is therefore not merely following several people through Dublin. The reader is repeatedly forced to learn how to read the book again.

Interior monologue

Joyce did not invent interior monologue.

He acknowledged the French writer Édouard Dujardin, whose 1887 novel Les Lauriers sont coupés had experimented with direct presentation of a character's thoughts. What Joyce did was take the possibility much further.

Thought in Ulysses does not appear as polished sentences a person silently “speaks” inside the head. Words are interrupted by sensations, memories, fragments of songs, unfinished grammar, physical desire, advertising slogans and associations triggered by whatever happens to enter the field of attention.

Readers do not simply learn what Bloom thinks. They experience thought moving. That distinction influenced generations of fiction.

The obscenity battle

Publication in Paris did not make Ulysses legal in the English-speaking countries where Joyce most wanted readers.

In the United States, the Little Review prosecution had effectively made the work contraband. Copies were smuggled across borders, and customs authorities seized shipments. Americans who wanted to read one of the most discussed novels in the world often had to obtain a Paris copy illegally.

Beach later remembered Ernest Hemingway carrying copies across the border by ferry concealed under his clothing. Whether every detail acquired in the retelling is exact, Hemingway unquestionably belonged to the circle helping Beach distribute the forbidden book.[24]

In 1933, Random House deliberately arranged for a copy to be seized by U.S. Customs so that the prohibition could be tested in federal court.

Judge John M. Woolsey read the entire novel and ruled on 6 December 1933 that it was not legally obscene. The Second Circuit affirmed the decision in 1934. The case became a landmark in the American legal history of literary expression. A Paris experiment had changed American censorship law.[25][26]

Joyce becomes a Paris literary figure

After Ulysses, Joyce's position changed dramatically.

He was still chronically worried about money and health, but he was no longer obscure. Writers came to Paris hoping to see him. Beach's shop became a place where the Joyce legend could be physically encountered. Records from the Shakespeare and Company lending library show just how central his books were to its readers: A Portrait was its most frequently borrowed title, Dubliners second, with Exiles and Ulysses also among the most borrowed books.

In Paris, Joyce became one of the best-known writers in the literary community around Shakespeare and Company. He attended gatherings connected with Shakespeare and Company and sometimes read his work aloud there. He also spent long evenings at dinners with family, friends and other writers, where he was often the center of conversation.

Joyce himself was an unusual kind of bohemian celebrity. He enjoyed restaurants, wine, songs, family gatherings and late nights, but he could also be formal in manner and sensitive to social slights. His appearance became increasingly distinctive: thin body, moustache, dark glasses or eye patch, walking stick and the strained posture of someone who could not always see where he was going.

During these years, Joyce suffered serious eye problems and underwent numerous operations in an effort to preserve his sight.

His voice remained important. In 1924, Beach arranged for him to make one of only two surviving recordings of his voice, reading from the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses. The author of one of literature's most visually intimidating books was still performing it as sound.[27]

Proust, Picasso and the Hôtel Majestic

Paris also gave Joyce one encounter that almost seems invented by literary history.

On the night of 18 May 1922, British patrons Sydney and Violet Schiff hosted a supper at the Hôtel Majestic after a performance of Stravinsky's Renard. Guests included Marcel Proust, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev and James Joyce.[28]

The hosts particularly hoped Joyce and Proust might recognize one another as kindred innovators of memory and consciousness. No great friendship followed.

Accounts of the conversation conflict, and the evening has accumulated so much mythology that individual lines are difficult to trust. What seems secure is that the exchange was brief and awkward. Proust and Joyce — the two writers posterity most wanted to imagine discussing time, memory and the modern novel — did not produce the conversation posterity wanted.

The anticlimax is appropriate. Joyce's Paris life repeatedly places literary history beside ordinary human awkwardness.

James Joyce and the Lost Generation

Joyce is frequently grouped casually with the Lost Generation, but the label needs qualification.

Strictly speaking, he was not one of its typical members. The term generally refers to the generation — especially American writers and artists — shaped by the First World War and drawn to expatriate Paris during the 1920s. Joyce was Irish, born in 1882, had left Ireland a decade before the war and had already produced most of Dubliners before Hemingway was out of school.

He was closer to a senior modernist presence within the Lost Generation's Paris. The distinction makes his role more interesting.

The younger expatriates arrived in a city where Joyce had already spent years creating the kind of literature they wanted permission to write. Shakespeare and Company became a major meeting point for precisely this international community.

Joyce's relation to that generation was therefore partly social and partly gravitational. He did not need to be one of them to affect the atmosphere in which they worked.

When Ulysses appeared in 1922, it demonstrated that a novel could break conventions of narration, sexuality, vocabulary and structure and still command serious international attention. Younger writers did not necessarily imitate his sentences. They inherited a larger sense of what a novel was allowed to attempt.

James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway belongs among the clearest examples.

Hemingway arrived in Paris in late 1921 as a young journalist who had not yet published the fiction that would make him famous. Joyce, by contrast, was approaching the completion of Ulysses and already carried considerable avant-garde prestige.

Hemingway admired him intensely as a craftsman. Decades later he wrote that Joyce was one of the writers from whom he had learned technically, and his correspondence records him saying that he liked Joyce personally and believed few people could write better.[29]

Their styles appear almost comically opposed. Joyce's mature prose expands, parodies, accumulates references and allows language to call attention to itself. Hemingway's mature prose became famous for short declarative sentences, omission and controlled surfaces.

Yet Hemingway was not learning from Joyce by trying to sound like him. He was learning what formal seriousness could mean.

They also shared Sylvia Beach. Hemingway borrowed through Shakespeare and Company and assisted with the distribution of Ulysses. Beach's memoir remembers him transporting copies that could not legally enter English-speaking markets.

Hemingway later included Joyce in A Moveable Feast, the posthumously published memoir of his Paris years. Unlike his often savage portrait of Fitzgerald, his memories of Joyce retain substantial admiration. The two men drank and ate together on occasion, and Hemingway's later correspondence still remembered Paris restaurants partly through their connection to Joyce.[30]

The relationship therefore connects two seemingly opposite roads out of nineteenth-century prose. Joyce asked how much a sentence could contain. Hemingway asked how much it could leave out. Both helped redefine modern fiction.

Joyce and Nora Barnacle

No person was more important to Joyce's life than Nora.

Their relationship lasted from 1904 until his death in 1941. They lived through poverty in Trieste, wartime displacement in Zurich, literary celebrity in Paris, their children's difficulties, Joyce's physical deterioration and repeated financial instability. They legally married only on 4 July 1931 in London, partly to regularize inheritance arrangements for their children.

Nora never became Joyce's literary disciple. That is one of the most useful things to understand about her.

She reportedly never read Ulysses in full and could be openly dismissive of the enormous amount of time her husband spent on increasingly incomprehensible books. She had little interest in pretending otherwise. Yet friends recognized her as exceptionally capable of handling the human realities around Joyce's genius: moves, children, guests, his drinking, his jealousies and years of uncertain income.

Their surviving correspondence also reveals an intensely sexual relationship. Joyce's famous erotic letters to Nora, particularly from 1909, are among the most explicit private documents associated with a canonical modern author. They matter less for scandal than for what they demonstrate about his refusal to separate sexuality, bodily functions and intimate language from serious experience. That refusal later enters Ulysses.

Nora's influence is also artistic. Scholars and friends connected aspects of Gretta Conroy, Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle to her. This does not mean any of those characters is simply Nora on paper. It means her speech rhythms, memories, body, Galway background, sexuality and independence became part of Joyce's imaginative vocabulary.

The ending of Ulysses ultimately belongs not to Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's obvious alter ego, nor even to Leopold Bloom. It belongs to a woman's voice. That was not an accidental choice.

Giorgio and Lucia

James and Nora had two children.

Giorgio Joyce, born in Trieste in 1905, possessed a strong singing voice and pursued music. Joyce took considerable pride in his son's ability, though Giorgio never established an artistic career comparable to his father's.

Lucia Joyce, born in 1907, became far more entangled with Joyce's later creative life. In 1920s Paris she trained seriously in modern dance and performed publicly. Photographs show a striking young woman moving through the same avant-garde Paris in which her father had become famous.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, however, her behavior became increasingly unstable. She experienced severe recurring mental illness and underwent numerous treatments and hospitalizations. Different doctors offered different diagnoses, with schizophrenia becoming the most persistent historical label. Modern discussions correctly treat those retrospective classifications with caution.

Joyce found Lucia's illness extraordinarily difficult to accept. He frequently interpreted what doctors considered symptoms as evidence of unusual artistic intelligence and believed her private language might be creative rather than pathological. In 1934 he brought her to Zurich to consult Carl Jung. The crisis dominated much of his final decade emotionally and financially.

Samuel Beckett

Lucia's story intersects with another major writer.

The young Samuel Beckett came to Paris in the late 1920s and entered Joyce's circle. He visited the family, occasionally assisted Joyce — whose eyesight was increasingly poor — with research and Work in Progress, and contributed the essay “Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” to the 1929 collection defending Joyce's new book.[31]

Lucia became romantically interested in Beckett. He did not reciprocate. The situation caused a temporary rupture between Beckett and the Joyce family.

Beckett nevertheless remained deeply marked by Joyce. He later described Joyce's achievement as heroic while recognizing that he could not follow the same path. Joyce had expanded language almost without limit; Beckett's mature work increasingly moved toward reduction, silence and failure.

As with Hemingway, influence did not require imitation. Joyce created a problem younger writers had to solve.

The eyes

Joyce's public image often includes dark glasses, an eye patch or the stiff upward tilt of a man trying to see through damaged vision. These were not affectations.

His eye problems became severe during the Paris years. Surviving records indicate eleven operations, along with periods in which he was nearly blind.[32]

He suffered recurrent pain and difficulty reading ordinary print. Assistants, family members and friends increasingly helped him with texts and proofs. During severe periods he wrote in very large handwriting, sometimes using colored crayons so he could see the marks more easily.

The irony is extraordinary: the book that demanded the most intense visual attention of any work Joyce wrote — Finnegans Wake — was composed while the author's own ability to read the page deteriorated. The difficulty made his reliance on other people even greater.

Beginning Work in Progress

After the exhausting publication of Ulysses, Joyce initially struggled to begin again.

In March 1923, he told Harriet Weaver that he had written two pages — the first new pages since finishing the final “Yes” of Ulysses. He copied them in enlarged handwriting so he could read them. Those pages became the beginning of the work eventually titled Finnegans Wake.

Joyce concealed the title for almost the entire sixteen-year composition period. Publicly, the book was simply Work in Progress.

The first published extract appeared in April 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's transatlantic review. From 1927, Eugene and Maria Jolas became essential supporters through transition, which serialized substantial portions over the following years.[7]

Even people who had defended Ulysses struggled with the new writing. Pound disliked its direction. Harriet Weaver expressed serious doubts. Stanislaus Joyce was skeptical. Readers who had finally learned how to approach Ulysses discovered that Joyce had moved the goalposts again.

Our Exagmination

In 1929, twelve writers published Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a collection defending and interpreting Joyce's experimental project. The youngest contributor was Samuel Beckett.

The very existence of the volume illustrates the unusual situation Joyce had created. A book not yet finished required an explanatory book to persuade readers that its apparent nonsense was deliberate.

Joyce encouraged this interpretive industry. He supplied information, allusions and structures while simultaneously designing a text in which no single explanation could exhaust a passage. Finnegans Wake was becoming less like a novel one decoded and more like a language environment one entered.

What Finnegans Wake is doing

The finished book centers loosely on a Dublin publican usually known as Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or HCE, his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, their sons Shem and Shaun and their daughter Issy. But even saying that gives the characters more stability than the book does.

Identities merge, names mutate, historical people flow into fictional ones and places become other places. A Dublin family becomes simultaneously mythic families, political conflicts, biblical stories and cycles of civilization. The dominant logic is dream.

Joyce's most conspicuous innovation is a layered dream-language built from multilingual puns. A single word may contain English, French, Italian, Latin, German, Irish or several other languages at once. Portmanteau words produce several meanings simultaneously rather than selecting one. Language seems to speak in several tongues at the same moment.[33][34]

Joyce spent approximately sixteen years building this effect. More than 25,000 pages of notes and drafts connected with the composition survive. Whatever else Finnegans Wake is, it was not casually improvised nonsense.

Publication of Finnegans Wake

The completed Finnegans Wake was published on 4 May 1939, with Faber and Faber issuing the British edition and Viking the American edition. Joyce had been working on it since 1923.[7]

The reception was divided even among serious admirers. Some saw a culmination of Joyce's lifelong experimentation. Others believed he had crossed the line between difficult communication and private language. That argument has never ended.

What is undeniable is that the book takes several Joycean techniques — the pun, interior language, multilingualism, cyclic structure, sound play, literary allusion — and pushes them until they nearly consume conventional narrative altogether.

Dubliners had tried to make prose almost invisible. Finnegans Wake makes language impossible not to notice. The two extremes belong to the same writer.

Joyce and Sylvia Beach after Ulysses

The relationship between Joyce and Sylvia Beach changed as his international position strengthened.

Beach continued publishing editions of Ulysses through the 1920s, but the arrangement placed increasingly heavy financial and administrative burdens on her. She published multiple editions and sold roughly 28,000 copies before the relationship shifted.

As Joyce pursued broader commercial publication and American copyright protection, Beach eventually surrendered her publication rights. Their friendship cooled.[18]

This does not diminish her role. Without Beach's decision in 1921, Ulysses might have remained an unfinished scandal circulating in fragments. Her bookstore had done what established publishers would not.

Paul Léon

In Joyce's final decade, Paul Léon, a Russian-Jewish émigré scholar living in Paris, became his closest practical collaborator.

The two met around 1928. Léon gradually became adviser, business manager, proofreader and confidant. As Joyce's sight deteriorated, the two sat together correcting the extraordinarily difficult proofs of Finnegans Wake. Their correspondence documents Joyce's finances, health, family problems and publication affairs from 1930 to 1940.

Léon's greatest service came after Joyce had already fled Paris. In 1940, with the city under German occupation, Léon returned to Joyce's apartment and rescued manuscripts, notes and other possessions, placing them in safekeeping.[35]

Léon himself did not survive the war. As a Jew in occupied France, he was arrested and ultimately murdered. The survival of important Joyce papers is partly owed to a man who did not survive to see them preserved.[36]

Joyce and Paris

Joyce arrived in Paris expecting a temporary stay and became one of the city's best-known modern writers.

His Paris was not one address. The family moved repeatedly. Among the most significant early residences were 5 rue de l'Assomption, 5 boulevard Raspail and the apartment at 71 rue du Cardinal Lemoine, where he worked during the final stages of Ulysses. Later, Square Robiac became one of the family's longer-term homes.

But Joyce's Paris is better understood through relationships than real estate.

Ezra Pound brought him there. Sylvia Beach published him. Adrienne Monnier helped integrate his work into French literary culture. Valéry Larbaud became an influential French advocate and reader. Hemingway admired him. Beckett assisted and learned from him. Eugene and Maria Jolas provided the pages of transition for Work in Progress. Paul Léon managed the increasingly complicated final decade.

Paris offered precisely what Joyce had sought when leaving Dublin: an international audience that did not require him to stop writing about Dublin. He became cosmopolitan by becoming more obsessively local.

The Second World War

When Germany invaded France in 1940, the Joyce family's position became increasingly dangerous and unstable.

They moved to Saint-Gérand-le-Puy in central France while trying to secure permission to enter neutral Switzerland. Lucia could not simply travel with them because she remained institutionalized in France, a source of profound anxiety to Joyce.

Eventually Joyce, Nora and Giorgio received permission to enter Switzerland and reached Zurich in December 1940. It was the city that had sheltered them during the previous war. Joyce had only weeks left.[32]

Death of James Joyce

In January 1941, Joyce became seriously ill with abdominal pain.

Doctors diagnosed a perforated duodenal ulcer. He underwent surgery but developed peritonitis. He fell into a coma and died early on 13 January 1941, aged fifty-eight. Nora and Giorgio were in Zurich.[32]

Joyce was buried at Fluntern Cemetery. Nora, who died in 1951, was eventually buried there as well. A later statue by American sculptor Milton Hebald marks Joyce's grave.

He had left Ireland permanently at twenty-two and never returned after 1912. Yet almost everything for which he is remembered takes place there. That paradox is the center of James Joyce.

Writing style

Joyce did not have one writing style. He had a career-long habit of inventing a style appropriate to the problem of each work, then abandoning it when the next book required something else. That is why the controlled realism of Dubliners, the developmental narration of A Portrait, the stylistic explosion of Ulysses and the multilingual dream language of Finnegans Wake can all be recognizably Joycean without resembling one another on the surface.

The continuity lies underneath: close attention to ordinary life, rhythm, exact physical detail, shifting consciousness, wordplay, structural obsession and the belief that form should not merely carry meaning but participate in creating it.

Epiphany

Joyce's early idea of epiphany is one of the foundations.

An epiphany occurs when some apparently trivial thing — a sentence overheard in the street, a gesture, an object or a sudden recognition — seems to reveal more than its surface importance suggests. The term originally belongs to Christian revelation. Joyce secularized it.

In Dubliners, the revelation is often uncomfortable rather than uplifting. A character suddenly sees a failed life, a compromised desire or an inability to act. Yet not every story functions as a simple machine leading toward one decipherable revelation. Joyce often leaves the moment ambiguous. The reader is made to experience recognition without receiving an official interpretation.

“Scrupulous meanness”

The early stories also demonstrate Joyce's ideal of scrupulous meanness. The prose avoids obvious authorial sentiment. Details are selected carefully, dialogue is allowed to expose characters and the narrator resists announcing moral conclusions.

The restraint was important because Joyce's subject was politically sensitive. He believed Dublin suffered forms of paralysis. If the prose became a sermon, readers could dismiss the diagnosis as an author's rant. Instead Joyce lets rooms, conversations, missed opportunities and habits make the argument.

Style developing with consciousness

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man introduced another major technique: the prose changes as Stephen changes.

The narrator never maintains one stable adult vocabulary while describing childhood. The opening language is close to nursery perception. Syntax and ideas become more elaborate with Stephen's education, theology, sexuality and artistic ambition. By the end, the narrative fragments into his diary.

This allows Joyce to represent consciousness historically. A person's mind is not merely a container full of thoughts. The available language itself changes with age. Later novelists would use similar strategies to make form develop alongside a character's mental life.

Free indirect discourse

Joyce frequently moves between external narration and a character's internal language without announcing the transition.

This technique, generally called free indirect discourse, allows third-person narration to absorb vocabulary, judgments and rhythms belonging to a character. The boundary becomes uncertain. Is the narrator saying this? Is Stephen? Is Bloom? The answer can be both.

This was especially useful to Joyce because he distrusted authoritative narrators. A stable all-knowing voice would have imposed precisely the kind of hierarchy his later fiction increasingly resisted.

Interior monologue and thought before grammar

In Ulysses, Joyce pushes closer to direct thought through interior monologue.

Thought does not wait to become grammatically complete. A smell interrupts it. A song arrives. A sexual image replaces a financial calculation. A memory is triggered by a word. The result feels radically intimate because consciousness is represented before it has been cleaned up for conversation.

Joyce acknowledged Édouard Dujardin as an important predecessor. His originality lies less in inventing the device than in expanding its range and combining it with many other methods.

Molly Bloom's final monologue is the most famous instance, but Bloom's wandering mind throughout the novel is equally important because it demonstrates how an ordinary consciousness continuously joins body, memory, language and environment.

A new style for every episode

Ulysses refuses stylistic stability on a larger scale. The novel is effectively an encyclopedia of styles, reflecting Joyce's ambition to devise something close to a new formal method for each episode.

This has an important consequence. The style itself becomes part of the plot.

A newspaper office makes language behave like journalism. A maternity hospital produces a parody history of English prose developing from archaic forms toward modern slang. A hallucinatory night district becomes drama. A return home becomes catechism.

The world does not exist independently and then get described in one neutral English. Each social environment generates its own language.

Mythic method

Joyce places the movements of Bloom and Stephen over the pattern of Homer's Odyssey. The technique is sometimes called the mythic method: ancient structure is used to organize modern fragmentation.

Yet the point is not simply that Bloom “equals” Odysseus. The gap between them matters. Odysseus survives monsters and war. Bloom buys soap, attends a funeral and goes home to an unfaithful wife.

By placing both journeys on the same structure, Joyce asks what makes a life heroic. The answer appears to be something close to humane persistence. Bloom's heroism is not conquest. It is his ability to remain curious, compassionate and alive inside an ordinary day.

The city as archive

Joyce's realism is unusually obsessive. Street names, tram routes, advertisements, pubs, shops, newspaper offices, churches and civic monuments are reproduced with extraordinary specificity. Joyce famously claimed that Dublin could be reconstructed from his work if the city disappeared.

But this is not merely antiquarian accuracy. Dublin supplies the network through which consciousness moves. People encounter one another accidentally because streets cross. Advertisements reappear because several characters see the same public language. A funeral procession passes through neighborhoods that awaken memories. The novel becomes almost a model of a city's simultaneous mental life.

Joyce therefore combines two kinds of realism usually thought incompatible: extreme factual geography and extreme interior subjectivity. The city is objective. Every person experiences a different version of it.

The everyday body

Joyce also altered literary realism by taking the body seriously. His characters urinate, defecate, menstruate, masturbate, become aroused, smell, digest, fart, sweat, eat, drink and think about physical discomfort.

This contributed directly to the censorship of Ulysses. But the bodily detail is not there simply to shock. Joyce rejects the division in which “serious” literature concerns the mind while the body remains embarrassing machinery beneath it.

Bloom can think about death and digestion within minutes because human beings actually do. The body is not an interruption of consciousness. It is one of the conditions producing consciousness.

Music and rhythm

Joyce's musical training appears everywhere in his prose. Rhythm often organizes passages before argument does. Words are selected for sound as well as meaning. Repeated phrases behave like motifs. Songs surface inside memory without warning.

“Sirens” in Ulysses is the most overt musical experiment, but Finnegans Wake pushes sound even further. A reader who silently struggles with an apparently impossible Wake sentence can often hear jokes and linguistic overlaps once the sentence is spoken aloud.

This is why recordings of Joyce reading matter. The prose is not simply visual typography. It has a mouth.

Comedy

Joyce's difficulty sometimes makes readers assume solemnity. He is frequently extremely funny.

There is slapstick, drunkenness, bad poetry, bodily humor, parody, ridiculous intellectual vanity and elaborate linguistic jokes throughout his work. Contemporaries remembered Joyce himself for uproarious laughter, something easy to forget beneath the grave photographs and scholarly reputation.

Even Finnegans Wake is saturated with jokes. Many are difficult jokes. They are still jokes.

Joyce's modernism is therefore not a project of making fiction respectable enough for academics. It repeatedly drags respectable systems — religion, nationalism, newspapers, literary criticism, medicine, advertising and scholarship — into comedy.

Polyphony

Another major Joycean technique is polyphony, the coexistence of many social and linguistic voices.

In Ulysses, no single form of English is granted permanent authority. Newspapers, Catholic liturgy, pub conversation, legal phrases, advertising slogans, romantic fiction, nationalist rhetoric, Shakespearean quotation and private thought all compete.

Finnegans Wake expands the principle internationally. English itself becomes porous. Other languages enter words, sometimes several at once. The layered multilingual pun becomes one of the defining operations of the book.

Language stops behaving like a transparent window. It becomes the main event.

Portmanteau and wordmaking

Joyce increasingly combined fragments of words into new formations. A Wake word may compress several languages, names, sounds and associations. The technique is usually called portmanteau, borrowing Lewis Carroll's term.

The reader therefore cannot always “translate” a sentence into one plain meaning. Several meanings may be active simultaneously. That is crucial.

If every strange word had one correct ordinary equivalent, Finnegans Wake would simply be a code. Joyce wanted something more unstable: language behaving like a dream, where one image can be two people, several memories and a joke at the same time.

Parody and pastiche

Joyce possessed an enormous ear for other people's prose. He could imitate sermons, cheap romance novels, journalism, patriotic speeches, scientific exposition, legal language and historical literary styles.

The purpose was rarely simple mockery. Parody reveals how a style shapes what can be thought.

A romance magazine makes Gerty MacDowell understand herself through clichés of femininity. Newspaper rhetoric makes events sound more important than they are. Nationalist language turns messy political history into heroic story. Joyce exposes ideology by reproducing its voice almost too well.

Revision and accumulation

Joyce revised obsessively. The first Ulysses edition passed through nine rounds of proofs, and he continued adding material while the book was already being typeset.

His mature method often involved accumulation rather than compression. A passage generated associations. Those associations produced notes. The notes entered later drafts. New allusions created opportunities for still more allusions.

By Finnegans Wake, this procedure had produced tens of thousands of pages of surviving preparatory material.

This helps explain the opposite trajectories of Joyce and Hemingway. Hemingway revised toward omission. Joyce often revised toward density.

Joyce and Ireland

Joyce spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, but he did not become an international writer by abandoning his native country. He internationalized Dublin.

Almost all his major prose is rooted there. The city of Dubliners becomes Stephen's city in A Portrait, then the almost exhaustively mapped setting of Ulysses. Even Finnegans Wake, which stretches across world history and many languages, repeatedly returns to Dublin geography, especially the River Liffey.

His attitude toward Irish nationalism was deliberately difficult to categorize. He opposed British colonial domination but distrusted heroic nationalist mythology, sectarian purity and the influence of the Catholic Church.

Exile gave Joyce a productive contradiction. He needed distance from Ireland. He needed Ireland as his subject.

Joyce and Catholicism

The same pattern governs religion. Joyce rejected Catholic practice, but he never ceased thinking through Catholic forms.

Dubliners contains priests everywhere. A Portrait contains some of the most terrifying prose ever written about hell because Joyce knew exactly how Jesuit preaching worked. Ulysses continually parodies and transforms liturgical structures. Finnegans Wake folds theology into multilingual comedy.

His artistic method therefore cannot simply be described as secular emancipation from religion. Jesuit training helped shape the habits of analysis, structure and examination through which he later attacked Jesuit authority.

Joyce became, in one contemporary phrase, something like an inverted Jesuit. The Church lost the believer. The writer kept the machinery.

James Joyce's influence

The scale of Joyce's influence makes it difficult to isolate.

Later modernists and postwar writers inherited different parts of him. Samuel Beckett confronted the problem of how to write after Joyce's maximal linguistic achievement and moved toward reduction. William Faulkner developed his own forms of shifting consciousness and temporal fragmentation. Later experimental novelists inherited Joyce's willingness to change styles inside a single book. Writers far removed from experimental modernism absorbed freer access to interior thought.

Even fiction that does not look remotely Joycean often assumes liberties his books helped normalize.

The legal history matters too. The American Ulysses decision helped move obscenity law away from judging isolated offensive passages and toward consideration of a work as a whole.

And then there is Bloomsday. Every 16 June, readers around the world commemorate the fictional day of Ulysses, often retracing Bloom's Dublin route, reading sections aloud, eating the foods named in the book and dressing in period clothing.

A date Joyce chose because of an outing with Nora became a secular literary holiday. Few writers have succeeded in making readers celebrate the calendar of an invented day.

Why James Joyce still matters

Joyce's reputation sometimes creates the wrong impression of his work. He is described as difficult, experimental and canonical — all true — but those words make him sound like a writer interested principally in literary technique.

His deepest subject is much more ordinary.

What is it like to inhabit one human consciousness while surrounded by millions of other consciousnesses you can never fully enter? How much of a person exists in memory? How does a city enter language? What happens when public slogans invade private thought? Can a man buying lunch possess an epic life? Can a marriage contain love, betrayal, boredom, sex, grief and tenderness simultaneously? Can language capture thought without making thought falsely orderly? And if ordinary English no longer seems sufficient, can language itself be broken apart and rebuilt?

Joyce kept changing his technique because each book made the previous solution insufficient.

Dubliners strips prose down. A Portrait makes style grow with a mind. Ulysses gives almost every social system its own voice. Finnegans Wake destabilizes the language in which those voices exist.

The books become more difficult, but the ambition remains surprisingly consistent. Joyce wanted literature to contain more of life. Not just the admirable parts. All of it.