James Joyce

He was born in 1882 in Dublin. At first he was deeply religious. He studied at Jesuit University College in Dublin. But he broke from the Church and at the age of 22 he left Ireland for good. He didn’t like the Church, the Irish nationalism and the narrowness. He was gifted (talented); he spoke many languages. He lived all his life on the Continent, especially in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. He left Ireland with his partner Nora Barnacle. Later they had two children. They got married in the 1930s.

He suffered from very bad eyesight and towards the end of his life he was almost blind. He died in 1941.

James Joyce ranks among the representatives of the so-called experimental literature between the wars. He is especially famous together with Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley for his methods of writing – the stream-of-consciousness. He thought that the only thing, which exists, is what’s going on in our mind. He captured the innermost feelings and he used inner monologs. He simply put on the paper things, which were going through his mind. He ignored grammar, grammatical structures, and punctuation… These books are extremely difficult to read and therefore there exist “skeleton-keys” and they help to explain the book, the symbols.

He wrote “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man”. This is his very beginning. Then he wrote a collection of short stories: “Dubliners”. All of them are set in Dublin. He captures the important periods of a person’s life that is adolescence, marriage, death, … The stories are very sad and dull, because Ireland was poor and people drank a lot, …“Ulysses” – he was working on this novel for seven years. This novel is completely written in the stream-of-consciousness. Later he wrote “Finnegan’s Wake”. It’s written in a language of a dreamer.

“Eveline”

This short story ranks among the stories from adolescence. The main heroine is Eveline, a 19-years old girl, who lives in Dublin in a poor district. Her mother is dead and her brothers are gone. She lives with her violent father and is very unhappy. She isn’t pleased in her job either. She feels like changing her life because she doesn’t want to live a similar life to her mothers, full of drudgery. Her hope comes with Frank, a sailor, who wants to take her with him, as his wife possibly, to Argentina. But when the time of her departure draws near, she doesn’t know what to do and she recalls better moments from her childhood. The turn in her thinking comes suddenly when she hears a street organ. She is baffled because it is playing the same tune (air) she heard on the day when her mother was dying. At that time she promised her mother to hold the family together as long as she could. In the end Eveline decides to stay at home because the sense of duty is stronger than her desire to leave.

“An Encounter”

The main characters are three boys who want to play truant for one day. They skip the lessons and go to the quay in Dublin. They are approached by one very strange man who sounds suspiciously. He seems to be quite liberal in his opinions about little boys and their sweethearts. After a while the narrator is left alone with this old man who starts speaking about boys being whipped. He stresses that the boys shouldn’t have any girlfriends and if they do or if they lie about it, they should be whipped very hard. After some time the boys who are afraid of the ma leave. We can feel that it is probably an encounter of young boys with a homosexual or some twisted (deviated) person.