JOYCE, JAMES. - Irish narrator, b. in Dublin on 2 February 1882, d. in Zurich on 13 January 1941. He was educated in Catholic institutions and, after having initially even thought of entering the Jesuits, he renounced the faith in which he had been educated. From the age of twenty onward he always lived on the continent: in Paris, in Trieste, where he met and appreciated Italo Svevo; for several years he taught English in Zurich.
But the setting of his stories and his novels is always Dublin, since he never detached his memory or his imagination from the years of his adolescence. He began with a valuable little volume of melodious verse: Chamber music (1907). He tackled the 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 aesthetic and religious experiences of a young boy 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 forms in his last work: Finnegans Wake (1939), where the author makes use of a linguistic mixture of his own creation, freed from every logical connection and in part indecipherable. In Ulysses, which is considered his masterpiece, he attempts to render, reflecting them through a prismatic, polyvalent and necessarily prolix language, the fluid perceptions of the characters over the course of twenty-four hours spent in mostly depressing or sordid situations and environments. It is an epic in reverse, devoid of justification and of ethical resolution, an odyssey of solipsistic adventures in the unexplored seas of the subconscious, whose phases are bizarrely counterposed to the episodes of the Homeric poem (whence the title of the novel) and related, along the lines of a complex symbology, also the fruit of a highly personal and heterogeneous erudition, to the various organs of the body and their functions. J. is considered the foremost representative of the modern European analytic narrative.
Bibliography2 works
Augusto Guidi