Biography James Joyce's life embraced the idea of escape and freedom, whether it was from the Jesuit constraints of the schools and universities he grew up with, or his self-imposed exile from Ireland. Born the oldest son of a middle-class family in 1882 and faced with the possibility of joining the Jesuit order, Joyce, much like the autobiographical figure of Stephen Daedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , declined and chose to follow his artistic muse.
From 1891-1898 Joyce went to several Jesuit boarding schools, and although he had an excellent academic record, his aversion to Catholicism and Irish nationalism began to emerge upon his arrival at the University of Dublin in 1898. It was about this time that he stopped considering himself a Catholic, and when asked why he abandoned the faith, he replied, "That is for the church to say." He refused to learn gaelic and to sign a letter attacking the "heresy" of W.B. Yeats, who had turned a skeptical eye towards Irish Catholicism and nationalism with his play Countess Cathleen . He gained further attention in 1900 with two essays, "Drama and Life" (in which he criticized the provincialism of the Irish theater) and an essay on Ibsen, learning Norwegian in order to correspond with the author. The piece was indicative of his need to embrace European literature and explore literary traditions outside the scope of restrictive Ireland. After he graduated from the University in 1902 he left the country with his future wife Nora Barnacle, never to return. The couple would not marry until 1931 because of Joyce's opposition to the institution of marriage.
Over the next few years Joyce finished Dubliners although it would not be published until 1914 because of censorship problems with the book publishers. He moved to Trieste and became an English language teacher and also received financial help rom his brother Stanislaus. During this time Joyce also worked on Stephen Hero , the first draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. With the publication of Dubliners, a collection of short stories depicting various facets of life in Ireland and its social, political, and religious constrictions Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), his semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman, Joyce's reputation was secured. Both works are a last look back at his Irish upbringing, both containing tragic undertones and moments of self-realization, but Stephen Daedalus's ability to "escape" Ireland through the power of art in the latter novel mirrored Joyce's own desires and ability to achieve freedom.
In the years between 1914 and 1922 in which Joyce wrote his epic Ulysses major events such as the Great War forced him to relocate from Trieste to Zurich. Fortunately at this time he also received patronage from Harriet Weaver, as well as the support of other modernist writers in Paris such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. The first installments of Ulysses were published in the Little Review in 1918, but the scnadalous nature of the text brought heavy censorship down onto the journal. With the publishing of the final book in 1922 by the Shakespeare Company in Paris, Joyce created a major stir, both from countrymen who believed he had ridiculed the nationalist causeUlysses and censors who charged the work as obscene. The text was not published in America until 1932, and even then Random House had to fight a lengthy court struggle before gaiNing permission in 1933 to publish the unexpurgated work.
Joyce's final novel, Finnegans' Wake, is, if anything, more adventurous than Ulysses. The writing of the novel occupied the rest of his life, and shares some of the epic qualities of its predecessor, but with a more opaque storyline, verbal puns and allusions, and a mixing of almost every possible artistic genre. Joyce's remaining years were relatively uneventful, although he had to bear the nervous breakdown and institutionalization of his daughter Lucia. He died in Zurich after an abdominal operation for a perforated ulcer. He was buried at Allmend Fluntern Cemetary near Zurich. His lone unpublished work, the manuscript Stephen Hero, was published by Stanislaus Joyce in 1944.
Sources for this article include The McGraw-Hill Guide to English Literature , Volume II (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1985), Dubliners: a Pluralistic World . Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988, and The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Volume II (Oxford University Press, New York: 1973)
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