JOYCE, JAMES. — Irish narrator, born in Dublin on 2 February 1882, died in Zurich on 13 January 1941. He was educated in Catholic institutions and, after initially also considering entering the Jesuits, renounced the faith in which he had been raised. From the age of twenty onward he lived continually on the Continent: in Paris, and 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, since he never severed either his memory or his imagination from the years of adolescence. He began with a fine little volume of melodious verse: Chamber music (1907). He took up the introspective technique as early as the stories of Dubliners (1914), developing it in A portrait of the artist as a young man (1916), in which the subtle analysis of a young man’s religious and aesthetic experiences echoes those of J., a Catholic schoolboy, and carrying it to extreme forms in Ulysses, censored in London for immorality and published in Paris in 1922, and to outright paroxysmal forms in his last work: Finnegans Wake (1939), in which the author employs a linguistic amalgam of his own creation, freed from every logical connection and partly indecipherable. In Ulysses, which is considered his masterpiece, he attempts to render, by reflecting them through a polyvalent and necessarily proleptic prismatic language, the fluid perceptions of the characters over the course of twenty-four hours spent in situations and surroundings that are for the most part depressing or sordid. It is an upside-down epic, devoid of ethical justification or resolution, an odyssey of solipsistic adventures in the unexplored seas of the subconscious, whose stages are bizarrely juxtaposed with the episodes of the Homeric poem (hence the novel’s title) and related, following the pattern of a complex symbolism, also the product of an exceptionally personal and heterogeneous erudition, to the various organs of the body and their functions. J. is regarded as the foremost representative of modern European analytical fiction.