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This revised page is missing a few things from the old version.

Subtopics on this page:

• news
• biography
  • Nora
• Ulysses (1914-1922)
  • editions
• Finnegans Wake (1922-1939)
• Dubliners (1904-1907, pub 1914)
  • The Dead
• Portrait (1904-1914, pub 1916)
• other works
• Joyceans

Recent news:

For the very latest headlines, try the JAJportal or the alt.books.james-joyce newsgroup

• Fifty Joycean conjectures [alt.books.james-joyce]
• NY Review of Books posts Gabler-Ulysses debate [ten letters]
• David Hayman posts online research library [page images]
• Ulysses movie website [sketches]
• Danis Rose promises Wake-demo in 2004 [IrishTimes]
• accidental Ulysses-parallels in American Beauty
• New Ulysses movie planned for 2002 [UK Times]
• lost Circe draft sells for $1.5M [IrishTimes] more
• Molly-musical banned [more] [less] ditto
  
• Movie of 'Nora' (see below #)
  
• Musical of 'The Dead' (see below #)
  
• 9 June 1999 Marilyn Monroe as Molly [pic] reading ch18
  
• 4 June 1999 John Kidd resigns from BU
  
• 4 Sept 1998 Clinton on Joyce
• pic on Irish tenner until 2002

Most people coming to this website are undergrads who've been assigned a short story by Joyce, with one of the following titles: The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby, Eveline, After The Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House, A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case, Ivy Day In The Committee Room, A Mother, Grace, or The Dead.

These are all from a book called Dubliners that is briefly discussed below #, or at greater length on this links-page

Things you should know about Joyce's life:

• He was born into a well-off Catholic family in Dublin, Ireland, the oldest of a dozen siblings, but they slid into poverty. [more]
• He attended only Jesuit-run schools, first the (privileged) boarding school Clongowes, then the dayschool Belvedere, and finally the Royal University (aka University College).
• At Belvedere he loved to write essays parodying various literary styles.
• His test scores won him several large awards.
• By the end of his university years he had rejected Catholicism in favor of literature, especially Ibsen. [Joyce's reading]
• He experimented with prostitutes even before university, and with alcohol after.
• After graduation he went to Paris, supposedly to study medicine, but instead squandered lots of money his family couldn't afford.
• He returned from Paris after a few months, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer.
• After she died, he began to drink heavily, and conditions at home grew quite appalling.
• He made a little money reviewing books, teaching school, and singing.
• In Feb 1904 he started writing a long fictionalised autobiography called Stephen Hero (mostly lost). [info]
• In June 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid whose earthy good-humor suited him better than the higher-class, educated girls he'd known. [bio]
• They ran off to Europe together in October 1904, after Joyce had a 'last straw' falling-out with Oliver Gogarty.
• Gogarty became 'Buck Mulligan' in Ulysses, but Joyce has concealed (transformed) the story of their falling out.
• James and Nora ended up in Trieste and Pola, Austria, where they spoke Italian (and were desperately poor).
• James wrote and taught English, and worked briefly in a bank, but his brother Stanislaus ended up paying a lot of their bills.
• 1906-07 was a turningpoint, writing "The Dead", conceiving Ulysses and deciding to rewrite Stephen Hero (as A Portrait).
• In 1909 and 1912, James visited Ireland, first trying to arrange publication of Dubliners, later supervising the construction of Dublin's first movie theater, the Volta.
• During the 1909 trip, Joyce was devastated to hear that Nora had not been a virgin when they eloped. She assured him by mail that this was untrue, and there followed one of the most obscenely passionate correspondences ever made public. [more]
• Between 1914 and 1920, Joyce's fortunes gradually improved as his writing gained attention and he found wealthy patrons.
• Ezra Pound deserves the most credit for recognizing Joyce's talent.
• When circumstances allowed, Joyce was the most disciplined of writers, working long, productive days using an elaborate system of notetaking.
• Thru the 20s and 30s, Joyce's lavish lifestyle in Paris was supported by his patroness Harriet Weaver.
• The banning of Ulysses (published 1922) turned Joyce into a household name.
• Joyce's eyesight grew worse and worse, with occasional reverses thru (painful) surgery. [more]
• He spent 1922 to 1939 writing the incomprehensible Finnegans Wake.
• His daughter Lucia went mad and had to be institutionalised. [more]
• Joyce finally married Nora in 1931.
• He died unexpectedly in 1941.

Between Nov 2000 and Mar 2001, I did a deep exploration of biographical riddles, with a running commentary via about 200 posts to alt.books.james-joyce.

Hyperlinked mega-timeline

Close-up of 1898-1904

Community gossip: 1881-?, 1898-1904

Hints and rumors about what he was working on at the time of his death:

• "I think I'll write something very simple and very short." [e731, 14 April 1940]
• "The Awakening" (to follow the day of Ulysses and the night of FW) [rjj30, c1939?]
• "something simple about the sea"
• The Reawakening [wp203]
• "I saw that Joyce had a notebook and I asked, 'Are you going to work on something?' ...He said, 'Yes the Greek revolution.' That time against the Italians, you know, had made a great impression on him, and he said, 'I would like to write a drama on the revolution of the modern Greeks.'" [wp279]
• Buffalo notebook VIII.C.2

NYTimes 1941 obit; bio sketch by John Banville

His literary tastes

Tidbits and trivia about: Joyce's appearance and personality; his preferences; his mastery of languages and opinions on art

Memories of JAJ from: his sister (a nun); Jim Tully

Joyce's houses map

directory of images

the biographical fallacy

Things you should know about biographies of Joyce:

• Richard Ellmann's (double-ell, double-enn!) long biography is brilliant and indispensable. [analytic index] [Amazon]
• (Ellmann's working title was "The Hawklike Man")
  
• It's been criticised, though, for accepting dubious anecdotes from Joyce's acquaintances, and especially from brother Stanislaus, and for treating Joyce's writings as if they were strictly factual (rather than fictionalised).
• Stanislaus was unreliable and jealous, and his own 'Dublin diary' is a forgery, rewriting the lost original at a much later date (identifying his distortions is an important research project: qv).
• Ellmann never got around to digesting the facts he'd assembled, and he promotes a condescending view of Joyce as clownishly deluded about his own strengths. [quotes]
• Peter Costello's biography includes many useful corrections to Ellmann, but is often sloppy. [Bibliofind] [ABE]
• Joyce's own letters are the best source of biographical evidence, but remain mostly unpublished.
• Dozens of Joyce's acquaintances have published memoirs. Most reliable include: Budgen, Curran, Power.

Ellmann researches, critique, bio/timeline

Ireland

Community gossip: 1881-?, 1898-1904, Yeats, Maud Gonne, AE, The Household, Theosophy, 100 fave poems

Irish education system

Joyce Street in Nighttown

17 Jan 00 'Drama and Life' centennial

Nora

It is commonly claimed that Nora gave James a handjob on their first date, but this is a canard! (It was more than two months later.)

Joyce's long-suffering common-law wife, Nora Barnacle, was the subject of a feminist biography by Brenda Maddox. Young Obi-wan himself, Ewan McGregor, jumped at the chance to play Joyce in the movie version, which has yet to find a US distributor. [Nora page]

Movie links: Internet Movie Database entry; official website; RealVid G2 trailer; soundtrack; Early: production, fan report

Reactions: Brenda Maddox; Joyce-kin protest swearing; UK premiere; Express, Irish Herald, Ain't It Cool, TimeOut, UK Times 1, 2, 3; Irish Times 1, 2, 3, 4

Actors: Ewan channels JAJ, writes on role, profile, fansite; Susan Lynch profile; pix

The movie portrays Joyce swearing, which he never did in later life, but Joseph Holloway (in his diaries), CP Curran (in the NY Times) and Padraic Colum (in a memoir) acknowledge that the Joyce of 1904 swore freely.

Lucia

links, timeline, pix

Joyce's daughter Lucia became increasingly schizophrenic in the late 1920s, and was finally institutionalised. Her birthday-- July 26-- has been designated Lucia Day to promote schizophrenia-awareness. Year 2000 observance.

Stephen James Joyce

Joyce's only living descendant is his grandson Stephen, subject of the poem "Ecce Puer" [etext]. In recent years he's become the Scourge of the Joyce Industry, denying permissions to everyone from Kate Bush [more] on down. [background]

Most recent target: a musical about Molly Bloom: 1, 2, 3 4

Things you should know about Ulysses:

• It takes place in a single day, 16 June 1904 (Bloomsday).
• The main characters-- Leopold and Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus-- correspond to Homer's Odysseus (aka Ulysses), Penelope, and Telemachus.
• Joyce first thought of the idea in 1906 as a story for Dubliners
• He quickly realised it should be the sequel to his autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero (which he rewrote with this in mind, as A Portrait)
• Each of the 18 chapters corresponds to one of Odysseus's (or Telemachus's) adventures.
• Each chapter is written in a different style, with symbolism appropriate to the corresponding adventure. These patterns were hinted by Joyce in privately-circulated schemata.
• Joyce included hundreds of puzzles that can only be understood by very careful reconstruction of exactly what each character is thinking and doing. [more]
• Because the book was so complex, no one has ever managed to create an authoritative 'corrected' edition.
• The most useful companion-volume is Gifford's Ulysses Annotated [Amazon]
• Harold Nicolson claimed that Joyce pronounced it 'oolissays' [e230, but this may have been only when he was speaking Italian or French?]

The Internet Ulysses

I've spent most of this year (2000) trying to create the best possible Internet resource for studying Ulysses. [Meta: design lessons]

Along with a completely new edition of the text, there's a main page that offers short summaries of each chapter, plus links to all known Internet resources about each chapter.

The advanced notes go line by line, offering thousands of links to maps and music samples and many etexts, etc.

Specialised pages: Bloom bio, clocktime, 1904 prices, Shakespeare, Gold Cup race, Tower imagemap, Bloomsday VR tour, Gogarty resources, AE resources, Eglinton resources, Irish lit resources, Eolus tropes, leitmotif finder

Homeric parallels: Odyssey resources, Homeric correspondences

Bloomsday

What you should know about Bloomsday:

• It's celebrated every year on 16 June, the day Ulysses takes place.
• The date was chosen by Joyce as a tribute to Nora, but it wasn't the day they met-- probably it was the date of their first real date.
• Many people claim Joyce and Nora had a sexual exchange on that first date, but this is mistaken. (It wasn't until 27 August.)
• Joyceans in Dublin like to spend the day retracing the characters' paths.
• Some cities host public readings of the full book (or parts).

Bloomsday resources

riddles

What you should know about Ulysses riddles:

• No one has figured out who the Man in the Macintosh is.
• A very plausible theory has been advanced as to who 'Martha Clifford' really is.
• No one knows what Bloom was going to write in the sand.
• No one is sure what the postcard with "U P up" means.
• No one knows Bloom's birthday.

I have a basic riddles-page plus specialised pages about: Bloom's condom, Gerty's age, esthetic symmetry, the Glencree dinner, masturbation, Henry Flower, clocktime, and Bloom's Waterloo.

excellent analysis of various cruxnuts: Bloomers on the Liffey by Paul van Caspel [Bibliofind] [ABE]

editions

Things you should know about Ulysses editions:

• The 1922 edition had many typos, especially in the later chapters.
• No one but Joyce was qualified to proofread it, and he was too busy finishing it (plus his eyes were often very bad).
• Editions after 1922 introduced more typos.
• Hans Walter Gabler published a 'corrected' edition in 1986, but John Kidd has been arguing Gabler introduced more errors than he fixed.
• These arguments have produced far more heat than light.
• The NY Review of Books has finally put their extensive coverage of the debate online [ten letters]
• Kidd's own edition has been delayed indefinitely.
• I spent several months in mid-2000 comparing the 1986 to the 1922, and almost always found the 1922 version more plausible.
• I've posted my revised edition, along with notes itemising every change I made to Gabler.
• In effect, Gabler stripped off many layers of Joyce's 'French polish', going back to the readings in Joyce's preliminary manuscript.
• Because this method leaves you with genuine-but-slightly-raw Joyce, and because Gabler's system of line-numbering is so convenient, I recommend Gabler's edition if you're only buying one. [Amazon]
• If you get Gabler hardbound, the UK edition has a much stronger binding than the US [can't find at Amazon???]
• An eccentric Joycean named Danis Rose published a new edition in 1998 that was universally reviled for 'cleaning up' the text. [Kidd's review]

What you should know about Ulysses editors:

• Hans Walter Gabler = pompous German with horrible prose style and tin ear, usually makes wrong editorial choice
• John Kidd = ambitious American with excellent prose style, paralysed by fear of criticism
• Danis Rose = delusional Irishman with echt-Nabokovian prose style who's done some excellent work with Joyce's notebooks, but whose interpretations are wildly (wildly!) wrong [bio]
• Jack Dalton = brilliant-but-very-difficult American (deceased) who re-edited Ulysses in the 1960s, never published
• Stuart Gilbert = grouchy American (deceased) close to Joyce, oversaw corrections to the 1932 Odyssey Press edition favored by Ellmann pre-Gabler

Resources: online Ulysses editions inventory. Critique of Gabler. Joyce's lapses, typists; deletions, commas, capitals, compounds, other punctuation. Dan Klyn's links

genetics

Joyceans use the term 'genetic studies' to describe the analysis of Joyce's manuscripts, drafts, and notebooks. The 63-volume 'bible' of Joycean genetics is the (rare-- only 250 copies) James Joyce Archive (JJA) which includes facsimiles of almost all Joyce's notes and drafts (not letters). The big exception is the main Ulysses manuscript, published in facsimile by the Rosenbach Foundation. [history] [info]

Joycean genetics basics

My expression 'IQ Infinity' refers to a heuristic that guides my own genetic researches: you can never assume that Joyce hasn't thought things out more carefully than you!

Ulysses notes

[Amazon]

Things you should know about Finnegans Wake:

• Joyce thought it was his most important work.
• There's no apostrophe in the title (unless you're talking about the song "Finnegan's Wake")
• The book ends in the middle of a sentence [p628] that continues with the opening words: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's..." [p3]
• It's written in a language of puns that takes years of study to understand (many call it madness) [random page] (requires Javascript)
• The most useful companion-volume is McHugh's Annotations to FW [Amazon]
• Joyce called it a "universal history" and spent 16 years writing it
• He died unexpectedly just 20 months after it was published, before he'd had a chance to start explaining it
• In 1929 he'd explained it in detail to James Stephens, but Stephens left few if any hints [quote]
• The best place to start is the recording Joyce made of a short section known as 'A.L.P.' [audio]
• He also translated this 'ALP' section into French [compare] and Italian [compare]
• There are ten 100-letter thunderwords in the book [more]
• The main characters are:
  • Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE, the everyman)
  • Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP, his wife)
  • Shem and Shaun (their twin sons, an artist and a conformist)
  • Issy-Isobel-Iseult (the daughter)
• Danis Rose claimed the earliest drafts were 'really' a collection of short stories titled Finn's Hotel. [read 'em]
• Fifty notebooks that Joyce used in writing FW have survived, but are almost entirely unstudied.

Almost-full MP3 and RealAudio of Joyce's FW (ALP) reading plus notes

overview; annotated shorter Finnegans Wake, Joyce-research console

NYT on the Wake; Chapelizod article; Rory O'Connor revisionism; 5 Mar 1999 HCE's tavern gutted

genetics

Joyce-studies commonly treat the interval between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a perfect discontinuity, with no shared motives or techniques between the two books. This can't be true-- it was less than a year!-- so we need to search for hidden simplicities in the origins of FW, and hidden complexities in the final form of Ulysses.

This site offers many megabytes of analysis of the early notes and drafts for Finnegans Wake, available nowhere else, under the rubric New Game. Along with many transcripts, I offer step-by-step 'genetic closereadings' that look at drafts layer-by-layer, trying to trace all possible notes used in each layer. (The Joyce Industry as a whole has welcomed this research with a big... nothing. I've sort of lost respect for them as a whole, in consequence.)

Most students never encounter any Joyce except a story or two from Dubliners, written when Joyce was in his early twenties.

Things you should know about Dubliners:

• There are fifteen stories arranged by age, from youngest-central-character to oldest.
• The 'narrator' usually uses the same style/voice as the character being described.
• The first few were commissioned by George 'Æ' Russell [bio] for a pound apiece, when Joyce was 22.

links-page

RealAudio and MP3 of 'The Sisters'

The Dead

The musical:

2 Oct 99 Early 'Dead' pan [more reviews]
- 28 Aug 99 Broadway musical of The Dead [fanpage]

detailed review of LA Dead;

Things you should know about Portrait:

• The book is mostly autobiographical, with Joyce called 'Stephen Dedalus'.
• It covers his life up to age 20.
• Joyce distilled it down from a 1000-page version called Stephen Hero (mostly lost) [info]
• This earlier version would have featured WB Yeats and George 'AE' Russell in major roles (but it lacked the whole 'pandying' episode!).
• The rewrite was done with the idea of having Ulysses for a sequel.
• He focused this distillation-process on a set of motifs that recur over and over, including the five senses, words and poems and performances, rose and bird and train and wave.
• This process of distillation can also be seen in the late Dubliners stories (the early ones more closely resemble Stephen Hero).
• The central chapter (3rd of 5) [etext] is a harrowing sermon about Hell, that 1) inspired Thomas Merton to convert to Catholicism; 2) has been reprinted in an anthology of Irish horror stories; and 3) was effectively plagiarised by Joyce from a 1688 Jesuit tract [compare]
• In 1912, Joyce threw chapters 1-3 (not 'Stephen Hero') into the fire, frustrated about the delays in publishing 'Dubliners'

Portrait links

annotations to chapter one.

Analysis of autobiographical dimension

These links include full etexts and extensive notes:

One play: Exiles (1915) (an earlier play in 1900 called "A Brilliant Career" has not survived: info)

Two books of poems: Chamber Music (1907) and Pomes Penyeach (1927)

Assorted verse and some epiphanies

Fritz Senn's history

Patrick Kavanagh's anti-Industry poem Who Killed James Joyce?

For me, the two most visible recent trends in the 'Joyce Industry' have been the irrational favoritism toward Gabler over Kidd, and the consistently immature ego-wars on the j-joyce mailing list.

Because Joyce is so obscure, it's easy for anyone who's intellectually ambitious to become the local Joyce expert by reading Ellmann and a few other sources. When these local experts come together in groups, there's a tendency to battle for prominence, using Ellmann et al as the standard of measure.

Original research is mostly discouraged by this process, though, so you're left with a lot of belligerence defending the status quo against new ideas.

j-joyce mailinglist

London symposium report

Best of the new generation of Joyceans: RW Dent of "Colloquial Language in Ulysses" (not for beginners, though) [Amazon]

collectibles market

death of Don Gifford [NY Times obit]

Ulysses:
chapters: summary : anchors : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12a 12b 13 14a 14b 15a 15b 15c 15d 16a 16b 17a 17b 18a 18b
notes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
reference: Bloom : clocktime : prices : schemata : Tower : riddles : errors : Homeric parallels : [B-L Odyssey] : Eolus tropes : parable : Oxen : Circe : 1904 : Thom's : Gold Cup : Seaside Girls : M'appari : acatalectic : search
riddles: overview : Rudy : condom : Gerty : Hades : Strand : murder : Eccles
maps: Ulysses : WRocks : Strand : VR tour : aerial tour : Dublin : Leinster : Ireland : Europe
editing: etexts : lapses : Gabler : capitals : commas : compounds : deletes : punct : typists
drafts: prequel : Proteus : Cyclops : Circe
closereadings: notes : Oxen : Circe

Finnegans Wake:
txt: [I.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 II.1 2 3 4 III.1 2 3 4 IV] : [HTML]
shorter: main : I.1-4 : 5-8 : II.1-2 : 3-4 : III.1-2 : 3 : 4 : IV
reference: thunder : Quinet : waves : [MP3 ALP] : FrALP : ItalALP : ch4 digest : Finn's Hotel : JAJquotes : search
drafts: NewGame : ROC : Kev : B&P : T&I : HCE : Mmlj : Cad : Rev : Pacata
closereadings: notes : ROC : T&S : Kev : B&P : T&I : HCE : Mmlj : Cad
theory: AI : archetypes : WakeOS : notes : origin : Scribble

Portrait:
ref: main : ch1 : ch1 notes : ch2 : 3 : 4 : 5a : 5b : Pinamonti : [notes] : [Cave] : [Gabler]

SHero: outline : quotes : PoA04

Dubliners:
etexts: Sis : Sis04 : Sis05 : Enc : Araby : Evel : After : 2Gall : Board : LitCl : Cntr : Clay : Pain : Ivy : Moth : Grace : Dead
guides: main : [Cave] : [Peng]

Other:
Exiles: Ex1 : 2 : 3

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