Joyce was the son of a father who had been educated at the Queen’s College, Cork (though without graduating), was in receipt of a comfortable inheritance - which he ultimately squandered - and for some years held a virtual sinecure in the Rates Collection Department of the Dublin Corporation and an office in Dublin Castle. The young Joyce was sent to Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit establishment and the “best” Catholic boarding school in Ireland. After his father’s financial collapse he was spared the humiliation of a Christian Brothers education, in which he was briefly immersed, when the Jesuits took him on for free at Belvedere College, a day-school in the city, in recognition of his great ability. From whence he proceeded on a scholarship to the Royal University, Dublin (later UCD/National University of Ireland).

Undoubtedly James Joyce’s adolescent exposure to rapidly-changing circumstances that led the family from a good terrace in the fashionable resort of Bray to the mean-streets of disintegrating inner-city Dublin - a crumbling neighbourhood that once laid claim to Georgian glory but was ravaged by poverty and even prostitution in Joyce’s day - caused him to take an acutely critical view of the society around him. In this he was at odds with his more comfortable student peers and with the ordinary inhabitants of the city who mostly preferred to regarded themselves as pious Catholics, faithful to the religion of their fathers, and therefore the opposite to the cowed, bullying and brutalised beings that he depicted in his fiction.

Joyce’s vision of Ireland was anti-Catholic, anti-nationalist and strongly antagonistic to the both the matriarchal and the patriarchal aspects of Irish family life. His whole pleading was for what he once called ‘individual passion’ as the only source of everything worthwhile in life or art. His characters are chiefly lower-middle and (to a lesser extent) working-class Irish men and women with hardly any glimpses of upper class, still less of the Protestant middle-class who formed the by now depleted rump of Anglo-Irish power in Ireland.

In Joyce’s way of treating this material there is an insistence on everything that debilitates and ‘paralyses’ the human spirit. Indeed, the very term ‘spiritual paralysis’ became for him a motto and a legend to describe what he considered the dominant condition of life in Ireland. More specifically, he began to identify the three-fold powers of family, religion and nationality as those things which enslaved the Irish mind; and all of his Dubliners stories can be regarded more or less as an illustration of this point in cases ranging from an abusive father to a contriving mother, a romantically disillusioned boy to a sexual pervert, a syphilitic priest to a loveless - or, rather, an unloved - suicide.

The landscape in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses is undeniably depressing. For the writer, however, it is intended as a corrective and his own career is correspondingly conceived as a mission to the gentiles: ‘he would bring the word to the masses in travail’, he once wrote of himself in the self-adulatory style that came easy to him as notably self-opinionate young-man. In setting out his purposes as a writer for the publisher Grant Richards Joyce spoke expressly of his intention of writing a ‘chapter in the moral history of [his] country’ and equally assuredly identified ‘paralysis’ as the dominant term of his diagnosis.

The quarrel with Richards turned on the fact that Joyce had employed some words considered indecent at the time, as well as make an uncomplimentary allusion to the Prince of Wales by then the King of England. For Joyce the request to suppress or alter anything he had written was a blasphemy against the principles of art. What is more, he seemed to think his stories might have a civilising influence:

Here it is noticeable that, if he plays a little on the London publisher’s anti-Irish feeling, he also speaks in firmly predicative terms about a formation called ‘the Irish people’: that is to say, there is a national dimension to his art even if it is not conventionally nationalist. So much for the intention; what of the means? Together with the conviction that ‘he is a very bold’ - that is, foolish - ‘man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard’, Joyce equipped himself with a clear idea of the way in which the artist actually apprehends the truth of the world around him and conveys that moral insight to his audience.

The nub of this conception is the term “epiphany” which Joyce formulated at some length in the draft-novel Stephen Hero - and which arguably remains the crucial technical innovation of his career as a literary modernist - even if he desisted from writing individual epiphanies almost as soon as he embarked on extended prose fiction. (In fact he incorporated many of his early epiphanies in the chapters of Ulysses.) On the other hand, the logic of the Joycean epiphany clearly led him onwards towards the subsequent innovations on which his reputation as a revolutionary writer rests, notably the ‘interior monologue’ in Ulysses. [See Joyce's "Epiphany", infra.]

In the liturgical context where he found it, Epiphany means the ‘shewing forth’ or ‘manifestation’ of the infant Jesus in the temple. Joyce used it in a different, properly secular and intensely psychological sense to mean the moments when the ‘being’ of anything or person - whether through ‘word’ or ‘gesture’ or in a ‘memorable phase of the mind itself’ was revealed to the attentive artist. In writing up this idea in Stephen Hero and A Portrait, he treated it as part of a theory regarding the way we see things at all: that is to say, a theory of perception.

The validity of this idea, outlined so brilliantly in the philosophical discourse the Stephen Dedalus - Joyce’s autobiographical persona - lavishes on his friend Cranly in A Portrait (with a close equivalent in the corresponding episode of Stephen Hero) - need not concern us very much. Philosophers and psychologists universally dispute it, if only on the grounds that the act of perception as defined in Stephen’s theory cannot actually take place successively in time, as he suggests, since recognition is essentially an instantaneoous activity of mind in which structure and meaning are not pursuant on each other.

Literary historians, too, point out that Stephen has distorted the meaning of the Trinitarian definition of beauty which Joyce borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas as a framework for his theory, treating integritas, consonantia and claritas as the ‘phases of apprehensiveness [i.e., perception] itself’. More significantly, perhaps, he implicitly equates the idea of ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ when he argues that an adequate perception of the ‘whatness’ of any thing is all that is required for that thing to be recognised as beautiful. Hence, it is suggested, the most beautiful work of art is presumably the most realistic in asmuch as it captures an image of some entity in such a way that it is revealed to artist or to audienc as ‘the thing that it is’.

The groundwork for this theory was laid by Joyce in notebooks that he kept while reading Aristotle’s De Anima [Psychology] in Paris in 1903. It is characteristically the handiwork of a wilfully independent young thinker with a rooted sense of difference from the empirical tradition of Anglo-American thought - which might seem the natural context for his intellectual development at that period - and an almost fetischistic adherence to the revered figures of the Catholic tradition which even the continental moderns regarded with disdain.

Patently this attempt to found a new theory of realism on a body of ancient Greek and medieval Christian sentences set Joyce enormously at odds with the conventional spirit of contemporary English fiction-writing. Indeed, in writing to his brother on one occasion he baldly declared that he had nothing to learn from the English novelists at all. On the other side, however, knew he had everything to learn from modern French fiction-writers such as - chiefly - Gustave Flaubert, whose stories in Trois Contes he actually knew by heart (a distinction that they share with W. B. Yeats’s mystical story “The Tables of the Law”).

The key to Flaubert’s method is that he used what is called le style moyen indirect [medium-indirect style] - a method of composition that actually excerpts its narrative language from the hearts and minds of it scharacters and presents them on the page without the usual mediation of a genteel narrator which is the usual method of English novelists, tradition of fiction-writing. (The destruction of that complacent moral centre of social understanding which was the English narratorial method is one of the chief revolutionary fact of twentieth literature.)

Joyce had another great model in Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian dramatist who first put put on the European stage the themes of matrimonial unhappiness, women’s rights and especially the right to happiness and divorce in pursuit of it. For Joyce Ibsen was the writer who, in the words of one of his own characters, ‘Let in light’, and Joyce said in Stephen Hero that when he first encountered his works he felt their minds meeting in a moment of ‘radiant simultaneity’. Thus was born the greatest modern Irish realist, the precursor of all the others and - incidentally - the first Irish Catholic prose-writer to attain the status of world-fame and a place in the very first rank of literary revolution.

The relationship between James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, the founder of the Irish Literary Revival, is a complex and intriguing one best summarised, perhaps, in the somewhat apocryphal story that the twenty year-old Joyce accosted the older writer, asked him his age, and then professed: ‘It is as I expected. You are too old for me to help you.’ Turning from the legendary Irish materials of which Yeats was the foremost exponent, he set out consciously to established a new direction for Irish writing consisting in a form of realism about the social and psychological facts of life that turned out to be very much in tune with the intellectual temper of the age. One thinks here of Sigmund Freud’s role in raising sexual experience to the place of highest interest in attempts to explain the contents and behaviour of the human mind.

But Joyce’s revolution did not consist solely in a new attention to the ‘unconscious’, about which he remained quite sceptical, remarking for instance: ‘Why do they always talk about the unconscious mind? What do they know about the conscious mind, that is what I ask’. It also involved a complete rethinking of the way in which prose fiction represents the world as we experience it - in other words, a revolution at the level of literary form. There is an early glimpse of this in the essay - also called “A Portrait of the Artist” - which he submitted to a Dublin magazine edited by young intellectuals like himself and which the editor refused to print on the grounds that he would not publish what he could not understand.

In it Joyce complains about the continual adherence of English novelists to a manner of describing characters which invokes an ‘iron memorial aspect’ of height and beard - a method based on the idea that a given personality has a more-or-less fixed mature form, endowed with specific temperamental and moral traits (or ‘faculties’) whose effects are simply enacted - or perhaps veiled and then revealed - in the course of the novel. Most of traditional fiction is like that; and the evolutionary version of character-portrayal that Joyce was implicitly advocating is a distinctly modern and modernistic innovation.

Yet though Joyce thought that there was a better way, he was unsure at this stage precisely what it was. The language of his essay is correspondingly tentative. The fact is that it would take him fully ten years between the composition of this sketch in 1904 and the publication of A Portrait of the Artist in 1914 to evolve a satisfactory method. Yet the objection to conventional methods of character-description and the intuition that a better method must be founded on the fact that human personality is formed and operates in time according to an ‘individuating rhythm’ (or a pattern of growth of development) is firmly in place from the outset:

What we witness here is a striving to express the idea that it might be possible to shape prose so that it actually reflects the pattern of growth in a human mind from childhood to maturity and, perhaps also, the different world-views of different characters according as their minds differ from each other. No longer would autobiographical narrative (or, more strictly speaking, auto-diegetic narrative - meaning narrative about the author even if related in the third person) serve as an ‘identificative paper’ - that is, a sort of passport photo. Instead, it would be subtilised so that it traced the woof and warp of changing of selfhood, a developmental graph or simply, as he puts it, ‘the curve of an emotion’.

The history of Joyce’s technical development between the composition of this essay and the accomplishment of the revolutionary idea contained in it is not a straightforward one. In an extended effort to compass an autobiographical celebration of his own ‘soul’ (to which, incidentally, he dedicated his first juvenile play), Joyce wrote a draft novel of perhaps 200,000 words in which no glimmer of a transformative version of fictional technique appears from end to finish - so far as can be judged by the surviving segment published in 1944 as Stephen Hero.

Regrettably this proved to be the most acutely self-regarding, static and opinionated piece of writing from any modern hand otherwise regarded as a writer of genius, and almost unimaginable as the work of James Joyce, author of Ulysses. If we read it - and it is not necessary for any student on this module to do so - we do so to get some sense of the outlook of the young author rather than for any anticipations of his mature craft. To grasp something of that it is to the Dubliners stories that we must turn, with their brilliant art of ‘double writing’ that makes it possible and necessary to read every sentence as a tacit revelation of some state of mind not the authors.

Hence it is that the language of the Dubliners stories is often faulty from the lexical and grammatical standpoints, or else characterised by gaps sometimes even rendered as ellipses - i.e., ... - standing for what the characters know but will not say in a complex network of complicity and silence. In other places it is the inner voice of the characters, no matter how insignificant, that shapes the sentences, as in the opening phrases of “The Dead” which informs us that ‘Lily the caretaker’s daughter was literally run off her feet’ [italics mine]. It is worth paying a little attention to this small example, which was first brought into critical focus by Hugh Kenner in his profoundly stimulating little book Joyce’s Voices (1978).

What does the phrase mean? If literally run off her feet, Lily would be on the flat of her back, supposing that a figure of speech of this description - if it is anything more than a mindless idiom - imports a process of haste with resultant prostration. In reality, however, the sentence is shaped and formed by Lily’s voice as she expressed to herself or to a willing ear that she is overworked at her present task. (Notice that no paraphrase I could give can get the proper accent of her self-awareness in this moment.) It is the measure of Joyce’s innovative method of writing that henceforth all his sentences would reflect the way that a given character thinks or feels about the world around him or her.

From that first sign of a revolution in method of composition a clear line of development through A Portrait leads to the astonishing innovations of Ulysses in which the ‘stream of consciousness’ of Leopold and Molly Bloom, as well as the mentality of less admirable characters are all precisely tabulated in moments of stylistic exactitudes on the printed page. Ultimately Joyce would attempt to gather up this world of phenomenal diversity - an almost anarchic domain of interpersonal difference - in the epic characters of Here Comes Everybody (HCE) and Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), the leading figures in his great experimental novel Finnegans Wake (1939) which - at one point in the text - he aptly describes as ‘the last word in stolentelling’.

That is perhaps the key to the Joycean method of narration: each phrase belongs to someone in a way that prose does not pertain to character in conventional fiction, except of course for dialogue, which is is generally marked by inverted commas- distinguishing it from the narrative supplied by the narrator himself, that all-important personage in conventional fiction. Joyce disparaged those quotations marks, calling them ‘perverted commas’, as if to point out the illusory nature of the authorial perspective from which the world is divided into things observed and things said.

To enter the Joycean world is to enter a domain in which language and reality are co-extensive: there is no difference between ways of saying and ways of seeing; or, in other words, the world is the totality of our perspectives on it.