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Ulysses james joyce6/13/2023 ![]() ![]() Despite gaining slightly more power within the British Empire, Ireland remained poor and underdeveloped throughout the 1800s. While Dublin was politically significant, due to Ireland’s situation as a British colony for more than 700 years, its small economy was based largely on agricultural exports and trade. In 1904, when Ulysses is set, Dublin was a fast-growing, diverse, but relatively poor colonial city of about 400,000 people. Ulysses is full of extremely specific references to Irish history, Dublin’s geography, and turn-of-the-century culture, which would have been familiar to readers in Joyce’s time but are likely to be very foreign to 21st-century, non-Irish readers. During World War II, he returned to Zurich, and he died there due to complications from a stomach surgery in 1941. Despite nearly going blind, he dedicated the rest of his life to writing Finnegans Wake. He moved back to Zurich during World War I and then on to Paris after the war, where he published Ulysses in 1922. Joyce occasionally returned to Ireland, helped many of his siblings move to other parts of Europe, and tried (and failed) to start a number of businesses. They first moved to Zurich, and then to Trieste, where Joyce taught English for most of the next decade. He and Nora decided to leave Ireland forever. After this incident, Joyce briefly moved into the Sandycove Martello tower, but quickly departed after his roommate nearly shot him. Hunter brought him home and took care of him. A few months later, after Joyce got into a drunken fight in a Dublin park, a good-humored Jewish man named Alfred H. On June 16, 1904-the day when Ulysses is set-Joyce met the chambermaid Nora Barnacle who would become his wife. The character of Stephen Dedalus is based on these years in Joyce’s life. Over the next two years, he struggled to survive in Dublin and watched his family fall apart. Since he no longer believed in God, he refused to pray at her deathbed. When his mother developed cancer, he had to return suddenly to Ireland. ![]() This plan failed: Joyce quickly gave up on medicine and started spending all his time reading in the library instead. In 1902, he moved to Paris to study medicine, hoping that a career as a doctor would give him the financial stability he needed to become a writer. Still, Joyce managed to attend two different private Jesuit schools, then go on to study English, French, and Italian at University College Dublin. He was the eldest of 12 siblings, and he saw his family gradually fall into poverty after his father declared bankruptcy and lost his job due to his alcoholism. ![]() It’s a Freudian family psychodrama crossed with the fall of man, taking in the history of Ireland, myths, legends, jokes, shame, desire, sin, cycles of time, death, chaos and resurrection.James Joyce grew up in a middle-class, nationalist, Catholic family in Dublin. If you read the final words, “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”, then turn back to page one – “rivverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay …” – you are swept around again. Joyce teased that his “big long wide high deep dense prosework” Finnegans Wake, 17 years in the writing, would “keep the critics busy for 300 years”. As an unfinished novel, it has an unimprovable last line – “He remained behind gazing into the canal near the feet of the body, looking at a fragment of paper on which was …” – but today it’s one for the scholars. Stephen Hero, an earlier, more traditionally realistic treatment of the material that became Portrait of the Artist, was rescued by Joyce’s sister after he threw it on the fire. Now we always have something to talk about. The delicate fragments sparked my interest in the oversized paperback of Ulysses that loomed over the Len Deightons and Le Carrés on his bookshelf. Pomes Penyeach was my own gateway to Joyce, after my dad, never usually a spontaneous present giver, left a copy in my room when I was 12. They provide a fascinating angle on his literary development and showcase his musicality, moving from traditional romantic swoons to a fragile, sincere beauty. “I prefer the poetry” would be a madly contrarian position, but the slim volumes Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach will give you snatches of Joyce in seconds. It is still revolutionary today, as well as being knotty, funny, humane and endlessly rewarding. Each section pushes at least one new style of telling to the limits, as the narration flits from mind to mind. A young man and an older one wander Dublin, their paths repeatedly crossing, and a woman lies in bed thinking, on 16 June 1904. “Apart from everything that you could possibly imagine, nothing much happens in Ulysses,” wrote Anne Enright in her recent celebration of its centenary. ![]()
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