James Joyce.

FOR OVER 50 YEARS, June 16 has marked a curious mix of celebrations. Revelers pack into Dublin for a breakfast of kidneys and Guinness stout. Tour groups course through the streets, looking for buildings that no longer exist. Perhaps most significantly, ordinary people gather in pubs and on street corners to read from James Joyce's infamously difficult, highly experimental, and stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses (1922). More familiarly known as Bloomsday, June 16 marks the day in 1904 that James Joyce--one of the most influential writers of the 20th century--set his fictional protagonist Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser and a contemporary Odysseus, on a daylong walkabout of Dublin. Equal parts challenging and rewarding, Ulysses is generally regarded as the seminal work of literary modernism, which reached its height between 1900 and 1940.

Joyce, along with Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, and others, pioneered the modernist novel of the post-World War I era. Melding his Irish experiences with his wanderlust, Joyce rejected realist sensibilities and broke with the ordered Victorian worldview. He heralded a modern, experimental technique that included interior monologue, the disruption of linear narrative flow, a moral relativism, and the use of symbolic parallels with other periods in history, as well as with literature and mythology. In Dubliners (1914), he delved into human consciousness with characters who experienced epiphanies and thereby achieved a deeper understanding of their lives. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) used interior monologue to depict a character's personal reality. Ulysses, which appeared the same year as T. S. Eliot's modernist poem, The Waste Land, explored Dublin life through stream of consciousness and presented each chapter in a different literary style. Finnegans Wake (1939) forsook all plot for literary allusion, free association, extravagant wordplay, and a dreamlike logic. Not easy reading, Joyce's stories and novels are worth pondering for their fractured sense of modern life.

Although most authors would be delighted by such a lasting legacy of merrymaking in their hometown each year, Joyce had a healthy distaste for Dublin. Like so much in his work, there was ever a battle between opposites. His fiction is charged with finely filigreed sensory details of Dublin; yet throughout his life he lobbed insults--"old sow that eats her farrow," "center of paralysis," and "afterthought of Europe"--to express his aversion to Dublin and Ireland. One might assume his loathing of his mother country had its genesis in a horrific childhood. In fact, but for the profligacy of his father and some strict Jesuit priests, Joyce's upbringing was unexceptional.

Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the eldest of ten siblings. Educated in the Catholic tradition at Clongowes Wood and, later, Belvedere College (the source for much of 1916's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man), he was an excellent student, particularly in the literary arts. His first poem, "Et Tu Healy," which celebrated the life of Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, was published when Joyce was just nine. He continued to excel in school, prompting hope in his mother and the Jesuit priests that taught him that he might find his calling as a man of the cloth. Instead, as his father suffered the first of many severe financial reversals, Joyce renounced Catholicism at the age of 16 and found a deeper devotion in literature.

Joyce's "Nicely Polished Looking-Glass"

Though many early 20th-century authors took to expatriate life, none did so with as much conviction as Joyce. Nor did any author remain so steadfastly fascinated with the homeland he had left behind. With hopes of studying medicine and continuing his writing, Joyce moved to Paris in 1902 after completing his studies at University College, Dublin. He quickly abandoned medical school, preferring the Parisian bohemian life. For the next decade, he returned to Dublin occasionally, drawn back by familial, financial, and literary obligations. In 1904 he visited his ailing mother's bedside, and, true to his staunch anti-Catholicism, he refused her request that he pray for her before she died. He made subsequent visits to argue over the publication of his short story collection Dubliners, which had been accepted by publisher Grant Richards but almost immediately became the subject of controversy for its realism and "indecency." Joyce marked his haughty obsession with his birthplace in this letter to Richards:

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"It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass."

Spending the bulk of his early life abroad, Joyce supported himself with odd jobs as an English tutor and a book reviewer for Dublin's Daily Express. Promised a job in Trieste with the Berlitz Language School, Joyce arrived in the Adriatic port city in 1905 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid he had met in Dublin. (Lifelong companions, the two would not marry until 1931 because of Joyce's strong opposition to the sacraments of the Church). Soon after, their first son Giorgio was born and Joyce's brother Stanislaus came to live with the family. In Trieste Joyce crossed paths with the Italian writer Ettore Schmitz, better known by his pseudonym, Italo Svevo. Aside from their friendship, Schmitz would also become important in Joyce's life as one of the models for Leopold Bloom.

Adept at languages, Joyce followed a nomadic path through Europe. Forced to move by the onset of World War I, he left Trieste (then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) for Zurich, where he struggled in relative poverty while working on Ulysses, a book about another wandering Irishman and one that would cement his reputation.

Joyce's Many Patrons

By the 1920s Joyce had settled into quiet domesticity with Nora, Giorgio, and his daughter Lucia. His work never made the family much money, but it drew the attention of many notable contemporaries, each of whom was eager to help Joyce continue his writing. A long correspondence with W. B. Yeats led to an introduction to American poet Ezra Pound. Impressed by Joyce's work, Pound arranged to have stories from Dubliners printed in England and America and facilitated the serialization of Portrait of an Artist in The Egoist, a literary magazine edited by Harriet Weaver. (Weaver would later become Joyce's main patron.)

Following World War I, Joyce and his family moved to Paris, where Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the famed bookshop Shakespeare & Co, published 1,000 copies of Ulysses in 1922. As described by his biographer Brenda Maddox, the bookstore became Joyce's "bank, post office, coffee shop, library, and home away from home."

He began work on Finnegans Wake the following year, but his eyesight, a long-standing problem (he had undergone 10 operations on his eyes by 1925), continued to deteriorate. As he struggled with near blindness and the complexities of composing Finnegans Wake, Joyce dealt with a raft of personal problems: his daughter Lucia had been diagnosed as schizophrenic; his relationship with his brother Stanislaus was crumbling; and his literary allies held serious reservations about his work on Finnegans Wake (then called Work in Progress). Even the steadfast Harriet Weaver scolded him in a letter: "I am made in such a way that I do not care much for the output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darkness and intelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language system. It seems to me you are wasting your genius."

Faber & Faber published Finnegans Wake in 1939, 16 years after Joyce had started it. Joyce passed away two years later in Zurich.

MAJOR WORKS

Dubliners (1914)

Though the battle to publish Ulysses is well known, publication struggles plagued Joyce throughout his career. His first book, Dubliners, was no exception. These 15 short stories, written mostly in Trieste around 1905, didn't see book form until almost a decade later--and only after one set of page proofs was deliberately destroyed before publication. Though the material hardly seems racy by today's standards, the book's insistent naturalism scared off many publishers. Some of the characters introduced in Dubliners are walk-ons in Ulysses.

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THE STORY: In Dubliners Joyce introduced a key literary technique--the epiphany--while exploring the limits of naturalism, a literary philosophy which embraced the idea that fate and environment govern human life and death. Organized around the stages of life (childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life), the stories feature ordinary people from the Irish middle classes: the young man in "Araby" racing to a carnival to fulfill a pledge, only to find it closed; Jimmy incurring heavy gambling losses to his wealthy European peers in "After the Race," and the socially awkward Gabriel Conroy of "The Dead," one of Joyce's masterpieces, who becomes painfully aware of his limitations.

"Frankly, we think it a pity (perhaps we betray a narrow Puritanism in so thinking) that a man who can write like this should insist as constantly as Mr. Joyce insists upon aspects of life which are ordinarily not mentioned. To do him justice, we do not think it is a pose with him: he simply includes the 'unmentionable' in his persistent regard." GERALD GOULD, NEW STATESMAN, 6/27/1914