Alphabet Authors ~ J is for Joyce

I found this idea on Simon's blog @ Stuck in a Book. He picks an author for each letter of the alphabet, sharing which of their books he's read, which I ones he owns, how he came across them etc.

Sometimes, you read hundreds of books by one author, other times only a few but you still know he or she is one of the greatest authors ever. James Joyce is such an author. He has written some extraordinary works.

- "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" - 1916  
- "Dubliners" - 1905 (short stories)
- "Ulysses" - 1922

Facts about James Joyce:
Born    February 2, 1882 in Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland
Died    January 13, 1941 in Zürich, Switzerland, aged 58
Married Nora Barnacle 1931

They had two children together, Girgio born 1905, and Lucia born 1907.
They moved around a lot from Zürich to Pula in Croatia, then Trieste, Rome, Dublin again, Zürich, Trieste, Paris, London and again to Zürich. They got married in London, so his son would get an inheritance when he died.

* * *

This is part of an ongoing series where I will write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

#ThrowbackThursday. Dubliners

 

Joyce, James "Dubliners" - 1905

Fifteen stories offer vivid, tightly focused observations of the lives of Dublin's poorer classes. The description of the characters was very good, they came alive, the plots were interesting, I did enjoy the stories. I just would have wished them to be longer.

Read my original review here.

Lopez-Schroder, Maite "Romping through Ulysses"

Lopez-Schroder, Maite "Romping through Ulysses" - 2013

While we visited Dublin recently (as described in this blogpost), we stayed in this wonderful guest house that was just like our own home. It was filled with books. What a treasure!

There was one that I really had to read as it gave me the opportunity to look at our host city through the eyes of James Joyce, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus or, easy, Ulysses.

A lovely little book that tells us how the two protagonists made their way through the city on 16 June 1904, better known as Bloomsday.

And the best part of it, there are more "Romping through …" books. You can romp through Dublin or any other Irish books as well as through other literature or even mathematics. What a cute idea for a booklet.

From the back cover:

"Read all about the strange affair of the garter and the bowler hat. This is a 64-page illustrated improper guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses. It's pocket-size with a retro vibe. There are maps to help you create your own romp through Dublin.

Dip into it as an introduction to Joyce's big book. You will find out what's happening in the story, get ideas of what to do and places to visit. Arm yourself with a quote or two and pick up some insider titbits."

Dublin

Dia dhuit

("Hello" in Gaelic)

Last month, our family took a trip to Ireland. We visited Belfast where my son did an exchange semester but mainly, we spent our time in Dublin (or Baile Átha Cliath, as it is called in the native Gaelic), capital of the Republic, largest city of the Emerald Isle. Its original name means Blackpool in English. With a little over 1 million inhabitants (1,173,000 to be a little more precise), Dublin is a lovely city with lots of cultural and touristy sites but not too large to get lost in it.

My husband and my sons loved the opportunity to try all sorts of different Irish beers, visit the Guinness brewery and the Jameson distillery, but for me the most important part was its approach to literature.  Slàinte! ("Cheers" in Gaelic)

First, there is the old library in Trinity College which dates back to the times of Queen Elizabeth, the first, not the current one. It was really full, so you couldn't take any nice pictures like the ones you always see online (after all the tourists are out, I suspect) but I still managed to capture a few.
Then there were all the locations I remember from "Ulysses", "Dubliners" or other Irish novels like the ones by Edward Rutherfurd, "Dublin. Foundation" and "Awakening".

But one of the best parts here was seeing the Statue of James Joyce. I know he is not the easiest writer and maybe not the best liked one, but I love his books and was happy standing face to face with him. He lived from 1882 to 1941 and even though he spent quite a large part of his later life on the continent in Trieste, Paris and then Zurich, Dublin plays a major role in all of his novels. I can imagine how you can never forget this city, especially if you've grown up here.

My only regret was that I wasn't well enough to join the Literary Pub Crawl because I wasn't well enough to walk a lot. Maybe next time.

So, I hope you enjoy these pictures at least a little.

Slán! (which simply means "safe" in Irish but also "Good-bye")

Joyce, James "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"

Joyce, James "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" - 1916

The story of a young man trying to find himself, a story about James Joyce himself, his character Stephen Dedalus is partly autobiographical. Stephen comes from a poor Irish family who goes to a religious boarding school which he has to leave for financial reasons. He then enters another religious school where they try to convince him to become a priest. This question is very important to the author and he tries to imagine himself as a priest. But he decides that life as it is is far more interesting for him and that he wants to live it in freedom. Between all this, he goes from all sorts of religious and social questions to the meaning of life and his first attempts of becoming a writer.

The book itself is highly philosophical and one could write a whole new book about Stephen Dedalus ... well, James Joyce did. "Ulysses" was first intended to be just a short story for the collection "Dubliners" but then was written as a sequel to "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".

From the back cover:

"Published in 1916, James Joyce's semiautobiographical tale of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is a coming-of-age story like no other. A bold, innovative experiment with both language and structure, the work has exerted a lasting influence on the contemporary novel.

'Joyce dissolved mechanism in literature as effectively as Einstein destroyed it in physics,' wrote Alfred Kazin. 'He showed that the material of fiction could rest upon as tense a distribution and as delicate a balance of its parts as any poem. Joyce's passion for form, in fact, is the secret of his progress as a novelist. He sought to bring the largest possible quantity of human life under the discipline of the observing mind, and the mark of his success is that he gave an epic form to what remains invisible to most novelists.... Joyce means many things to different people; for me his importance has always been primarily a moral one. He was, perhaps, the last man in Europe who wrote as if art were worth a human life.... By living for his art he may yet have given others a belief in art worth living for."

Joyce, James "Ulysses"

Joyce, James "Ulysses" - 1922 

I loved the writing but the story was quite overwhelming despite reading "The Odyssey" first which everyone recommends and I would, too. Having a lot of explanations helped but if you generally don't like classics very much, I wouldn't start with this one.

Still, this is the most difficult book I have ever read. It is hard to follow the stream of consciousness, actually it is hard to follow the stream at all. A lot of books are easier once you get into them, not this one. I had the feeling with every chapter it got more confusing.

As in "Odyssey" we have three parts: The Telemachiad, The Odyssey and The Nostos (Coming Home). In the Telemachiad, you can still follow the teacher Stephen Dedalus in his classroom and understand what he is trying to teach. Then all, of a sudden, the story changes and you encounter the protagonist of the story, Leopold Bloom. We are supposed to follow him around for the day. And follow we do but we don't always have an idea where this is guiding us. Starting at the breakfast table, we attend a funeral, go to a restaurant and end up in the middle of a play.

The best example why we need punctuation is the last paragraph where Bloom's wife Molly tells us her thoughts about her life in general and her marriage to Leopold in particular. Over forty pages and no punctuation. At all. No comma. No full stop. No paragraph.  You can't even take a break.

However, the longer I distance myself from this novel, the more it makes sense and the bigger an impact does it have on me. I am glad I read it.

If you still are in doubt, consider this quote by William Faulkner:
"You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.
 
From the back cover:

"For Joyce, literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written between 1914 and 1921, Ulysses has survived bowdlerization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishing wide-ranging allusions confirms its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction that Ulysses is 'an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.'"

Joyce, James "Dubliners"

Joyce, James "Dubliners" - 1905

Fifteen stories offer vivid, tightly focused observations of the lives of Dublin's poorer classes.

True. There are a lot of different people James Joyce describes in his stories. As a true lover of novels, I would have liked him to write a novel about every single one of them. Short stories always finish as soon as you get used to the characters. That's my personal opinion, I know a lot of people love short stories. I don't really.

However, the description of the characters was very good, they came alive, the plots were interesting, I did enjoy the stories. I just would have wished them to be longer.

It is recommended to read "Dubliners" (and "Odyssey") if you want to attempt "Ulysses". I heartily agree.

From the back cover:

"Joyce's first major work, written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience."

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.