The Three Irishmen                                                                                                      Italiano

James Joyce

   Joyce is considered not only one of the most important English Modernist, but he also  can be considered one of the most important figure in the European culture because he summarizes a whole cultural tradition but at the same time he destroys it.  Born in Dublin in 1882 he was the best innovator of the literary technicque of the XX^th century.

He was of a middle-class family. His father John Stanislaus Joyce was to be an immense influence on Joyce’ s work. In 1888 the young James was sent away to boarding school at Clongowes Wood College, a Catholic institution run by the Jesuit order. He recieved an education strictly catholic. In his childhood he was influenced by the tragedy of Parnell, an Irish nationalist who was due to leave his campaign for Home Rule because of the revelation of his adoulterous relationship with Kitty O’Shea, the wife of a fellow Irish member of Parlamient. Joyce was a brilliant student. When he was still at school his opposition  to the social and religious conventions was growing to open rebellion. In 1902, having taken his degree,  Joyce left for the first time Ireland and visited Paris. Here he returned a year later but the sudden death of the mather forced him to come back to his land. The death of his mother influenced him deeply and brought him to a state of depression. For this reason he sterted to live a precarious life, drinking too much (often in company of his father), and spending most of his time in dissolute idlness. Fortunately in 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, a simple countrygirl, who had to be his lifelong companion, and with her he left Irland for voulantary exile for the Continent. Joyce settled first in Italy, then in France and finally, during the Secon World War in Zurich, where he died in 1941.

His first work, Chamber Music, contains 36 elaborate love lyrics that show the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite style and of the Elizabethan poets. His second work Dubliners is instead a collection of fifteen short stories dealing with life in Dublin, linked by their common theme of  decay and stagnation of the city’s life.

In 1916 he published, in instalments in the periodical “The Egoist”, “ A portrait of the artist as a Young Man”. It is a splendid autobiographical  work. It tells about the development of Stephen Dedalus and of his shift from the religion to art. Its central figure Stephen Dedalus has himself an emblematic name. Stephen, the Cfirst Christian martyr, stoned to death to preaching the new religion, and Dedalus, the best craftsman of Grecian mythology, who was able to escape the confines of the labyrinth  by creating two wax wings. Stephen Dedalus can be considered the allegory of Joyce. As Stephen he thinks of himself as a victim of incomprehension in his own land, while as Dedalus he leaves Irland with the “wings of his art”.In this novel Joyce used for the first time the technique of the “stream of consciousness” trough the internal monologue. In this period he wrote his only attempt to drama: “The Exiles”.

But the work generally regarded as his masterpiece is  the “Ulysses” a complex work inspired by the Odyssey of Homer.  The novel describes the day of an Irish ebreo  Leopold Bloom, a middle- aged man, marrried with Molly Bloom,who went around Dublin as Ulysses went around the Mediterranean, and the day of  Stephen Dedalus, the Jocean alter-ego,  and their final meeting. The main theme of the novel, which rapresented one of the best expression of Joyce stream of consciounsness technique, are: the simbolic research of Bloom for a son and the   awareness of Dedalus of his literary vocation. Part of the novel was published in instalments on the  American periodical  “Little Review” until 1920, when the publication was stopped because the contenents of the work were considered immoal and porngraphic. The novel was finally published in 1922 in Paris.

The last novel of Joyce, published in 1939, was “Finnegans Wake”. In this work Joyce tried to expose in narrative form the Vico’s teory of the cyclical view of history. In this work Joyce brought to the extreme consequences  the literary experimentation, trough a personal English, born from the blind of many language. In the last period of his life he wrote a collection of poem, “Pomes Penyeach”, and published his earliest attempt at poem, “Stephen Hero”.