JOYCE, JAMES. - Irish narrator, b. in Dublin on 2 Feb. 1882, d. in Zurich on 13 Jan. 1941. He was educated in Catholic institutions and, after initially even considering entering the Jesuits, renounced the faith in which he had been raised. From the age of twenty onwards he lived always on the Continent: in Paris, in Trieste, where he met and appreciated Italo Svevo; for several years he taught English in Zurich.
Yet the setting of his stories and novels is always Dublin, for he never severed his memory or his imagination from the years of his adolescence. He began with a fine little volume of melodic verse: Chamber Music (1907). He tackled introspective technique already in the stories of Dubliners (1914), developing it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), in which the subtle analysis of the religious aesthetic experiences of a young man echoes those of J. as a Catholic schoolboy, and carrying it to extreme forms in Ulysses, censored in London for immorality and published in Paris in 1922, and indeed to paroxysmal extremes in his final work: Finnegans Wake (1939), in which the author employs a linguistic amalgam of his own creation, freed from every logical connection and in part indecipherable. In Ulysses, which is considered his masterpiece, he attempts to render, by refracting them through a prismatic, multivalent and necessarily prolix language, the fluid perceptions of the characters over the course of twenty-four hours spent in situations mostly depressing or sordid. It is an inverted epic, devoid of ethical justification or resolution, an odyssey of solipsistic adventures in the uncharted seas of the subconscious, whose phases are bizarrely counterposed to the episodes of the Homeric poem (whence the title of the novel) and related, in the manner of a complex symbolism—also the fruit of personal erudition, of heterogeneous essence—to the various organs of the body and their functions. J. is considered the foremost representative of modern European analytical narrative.