THE W JAMES JOYCE His Ulysses baffled readers and challenged aspiring Frosty writers; it also revolutionized 20th century fiction By PAUL GRAY ‘ames Joyce oncetolla ature would be his vocation complex account of Stephen friend, “One of the and his bid for immortality. Dedalus, i.e. James Joyce, from things I could never get He fied Ireland into self- his birth to his decision to leave accustomed toinmy imposed exile late in 1904, tak- Dublin in pursuit of his art, youth was the differ- ing with him Nora Barnacle, a Portrait did not sell well Zhce tfound between young woman from Galway enough to relieve Joyce's. life and literature.” AI ‘who was working as a hotel chronic financial worries, bu + serious young readers notice § this difference, Joyce dedicat- i ed his career to erasing it and 7 in the process revolutionized j 20th century fiction. } ___The life he would put into § his literature was chielly his } own. Born near Dublin in 1882, § James Augustine Aloysius was ¥ the eldest ofthe 10 surviving } children of John and Mary Jane ® Joyce. His father was irascible, witty, hard drinking and rain~ ously improvident; his mother, $ adevout Roman Catholic, § helplessly watched her hus- 4} band and family side into near poverty and hoped fora happi- j erlife in the hereafter, James’ § entire education came atthe 7 hands of the Jesuits, who did a £ better job with him than § they may have intend- and all his + obligations to i family, home- land and the D argcceume WE Horse orisvorce SF EhiLOmeN sro & Shiten sur chambermaid in Dublin when Joyce met her earlier that year (On hearing that his son had ‘tun off with a girl named Bar- nacle, John Joyee remarked, playing on her lst name, “She'll never leave him.” And, proving puns can be pro- Dhotic, she never did.) ‘Joyce departed Dublin with nearly all the narratives: he would ever write already: stored in his memory. What remained for him to do was transform this cache into an art that could measure up to his own expectations. Ashe and Nora and then their two children moved among and around European cities—Pols, Trieste, Zurich, Rome, Paris—Joyce found clerical and teaching jobs that provided subsis- tence to his family ‘and his writing, ‘His first pub- lished book of fiction, Dublin- ers (1914), con- tained 15 sto- ies short on conventional plots but long on evocative at- and age. A Por- trait of the Artist as 1 Young Man (1916) provided a remarkably objective and linguistically his work by then had at- tracted the attention of a ‘number of influential ub theenpeu ate American poet ey Pes tc} aon Pee eng eesti ed Erie Pcie paren oe) Ulysses published or eee Perper Ezra Pound, who believed a new century demanded new art, poetry, fiction, musie— everything, Such supporters rallied to promote Joyce and his experimental writings, and he did not disappoint them. He began Ulysses in 1914; portions of it in progress ap- peared in the Egoist in En- gland and the Little Review in the US, until the Post Office, ‘on grounds of alleged obsceni- ty, confiscated three issues ‘containing Joyce's excerpts and fined the editors $100. The censorship fap only height- ened curiosity about Joyce's forthcoming book. Even be- fore Ulysses was published, critics were comparing Joyce's brealthroughs to those of Ein- stein and Freud. received the fist copy of Ulyases, with its blue binding and white lettering, on is 40th birthday, in 1922. Itwas his most exhaustive attempt yet to the distinction between literature and life. First ofall, Joyce tossed cout most ofthe narrative tech- niques found in 19th century fiction. Ulysses has no discem- ‘ble plot, no series of obstacles that a hero or heroine must surmount on the way toa hap- py ending, The book offers no all-knowing narrator, ala Dickens or Tolstay, to guide the reader—deseribe the char- acters and settings, provide background information, sum- rmarize events and explain,JOYCE IN THE 20S WITH SYLVIA BEACH, WHOSE PARIS BOOKSTORE, 'SHARESPEARE & CO, WAS THE FIRST PUBLISHER OF ULYSSES from time to time the story's tempted in Ulysses to render as ‘moral significance. exhaustively, as precisely and ‘With so many traditional as directly as its possible in ‘methods of narrative aban- words todo, what our partici- oned, what was|eft?Pethaps pation in lifes like or rather, the clearest and most concise what t seems to us like as from description of Joyce's tech- moment to moment we live” nique came from thecriic Ed- A first reading of Ulysses tmund Wion:“Joycotas at can thus bea baling expen meant, and that’s the only way missible subjects in fiction, fol- of ensuring one’s immortality.” lowing Bloom not only into his Joyce later relented, and so secret erotic fantasies but his the world learned that Ulysses outdoor privy as well. ‘was, among many other things, ts multiple narrative voices a modern retelling of Homer's and extravagant wordplay Odyssey, with Bloom as the made Ulysses a virtual the- wandering hero, Stephen as _saurusof styles for writers Telemachus and Molly as 2 wrestling with the problem of Penelope decidedly less fsith- rendering contemporary life. ful than the original. T'S. Eliot Aspects of Joyce's accomplish- who recognized the novel's un- ment in Ulysses can be seen in derpinnings, wrote that Joyce's the works of William Faulkner, use ofclasscal mythasamethod Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, of ordering modern experience Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia had “the importance of a scien- Mrquez and Toni Morrison, tifie discovery.” allof whom, unlike Joyce, won the Nobel Prize for Literature lusses made joyce But the only author who famous, although no: _tred to surpass the encyclopedic atwaysina manner scope of Ulysses was Joyce tohis liking, When # himself He spent 17 years feaapproached him working on Finnegans Wake, a scdasked,"Moyl book intended to portray Dub- ‘ss the hand that lin’ sleeping life as thoroughly wrote Uys Joyce std, as Ulyses had explored the “No, it did es of other things _wide-awake city. This task, ice decided, required the -ention ofa new language that suukd mime the experience of ‘reaming, AS excerpts from the Article from Time Magazine. Ulysses ... I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like this ... I feel like a eunuch. GEORGE ORWELL. in» letter to Brenda Sohald 134 ‘ence, although no book more liners as they walk the streets, generously rewards patience meet and talk, then talk some ‘and fortitude. Stephen Deda- more in restaurants and pubs. lus reappears, stilstuckin Allthis activity soems random, a Dublin, dreaming of escape. ° record of urban happenstance. ‘Then we meet Leopold Bloom, But nothing in Ulysses is or rather we meet his thoughts truly random. Beneath the ‘as he prepares breakfast for his surface realism of the novel, its wife Mell. (Weesperience "apparently artless transcrip: her thoughts as she drifts off to tion of life's flow, lurks a com- sleep at the end ofthe book) _plicated plan. Friends who Ulysses is the account of one were in on the secret of day in Dublin—June 16,1904, Ulysses urged Joyce to share it, Joyce's private tribute to Nora, to make things easier for his since that was thedateon which readers He recited a fst they first went out together, The “I've put in so many enigmas book follows the movements and puzzles that it will keep of not only Stephen and Bloom the professors busy for cen- ‘but also hundreds of other Dub- _ turies arguing over what I AFTER 27 YEARS TOGETHER, NORA BARNACLE AND JOYCE, CENTER, WENT OFF TO BE LEGALLY MARRIED, IN LONDON. ON JULY 4, 1931, new work, crammed with multi- in print, even Joyce's champions expressed doubts, To Pound's complaint about obscurity, Joyce replied, “The action of my new work takes place at nigh. I's natural things should not be s0 clear at night, isn’t it now?” Today, only dedicated Joyceans regularly attend the Wake. A century from now, his readers mayeatchup with him. TIME senior writer Paul Gray wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on James Joyce's short fiction