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5. James Joyce (1882-1941)
Life
Joyce, or James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, was born into a declining middle
class family in
Dublin, Ireland. He went to Jesuit schools in his early
youth. He was educated at University College in 1898 and took his B.A.
degree in modern languages in 1902. He was acquainted
with the well-known figures of the
Irish literary Renaissance, but he
refused to take part in the Irish literary movement. His distaste for the
country’s fierce nationalism and his renouncement of Irish
Catholicism had
soon compelled him to leave Dublin. He went to Paris and worked as a teacher
of English. He came back to Dublin for his mother’s death and left Ireland
again in 1904. He first went to Italy and then moved to Switzerland. He
settled in Paris for twenty years from 1920 to 1940. When the German invaded
France in 1940, Joyce took the family to Zurich, where he died on January
13, 1941.
Although Joyce spent most of his life living in Europe with
his wife and two children, his fiction always centered on his native country
Dublin. All his life, Joyce lived in a state of poverty. He supported the
family with meager salaries earned by teaching and doing clerical work. One
of the pioneering figures of modernism, Joyce started his full time writing
career from 1920, first as a poet. His first major work was Dubliners
(1914), a collection of fifteen short stories. Those stories, in Joyce’s
words, represented the moral history of his country, where Dublin was the
centre of Paralysis. Joyce’s other famous works included A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and his last
revolutionary work Finnegans Wake (1939). His major contribution to
literary world is “stream of consciousness”, which was culminated in his
epic novel Ulysses. He was also the author of two collections of poem,
Poems Penyeach (1927) and Collected Poems (1936).
Dubliners
Dubliners is a collection of stories about every day seemingly minor
events written in the traditional style. All characters in the stories were
dealing with inner or spiritual struggle with oppressive morality and
personal frustrations. Some of the stories are poignant tales of desperate
human search for illusory ideals to escape from numbness of Dublin. With the
stories going on, the characters would develop self-awareness, or a sudden
realization of the meaning of their existence.
“Araby” is the third of the fifteen stories and one of
the most popular short stories of Joyce. The young boy narrator is raised by
his aunt and uncle. The boy develops a crush on his friend Mangan's sister.
Mangan and his sister live in a building across the street. He watches her
stealthily, waiting for her to leave in the mornings so that he can follow
her on part of his way to school. One day, the girl finally speaks to him,
asking if he will go to Araby, a bazaar selling Arabian stuff. The boy says
that he will go and find some kind of gift for her. All the time he thinks
about the girl, the bazaar and the gift. The day finally arrives, but his
uncle has forgotten about the bazaar and comes back late. The boy cannot go
without the money for going to the Bazaar and buying the gift. Although it
is quite late then, the boy still heads off with the small sum of money. He
arrives at the bazaar just as it is closing. The lights are being shut off,
leaving the boy in despair. In "Araby", a boy deals with the limits imposed
on him by his situation. The boy’s romantic dream about the girl is
gradually broken in the anxious waiting and the closing of the bazaar. For a
time, the boy fears he may not be able to go at all. When he finally does
arrive, the bazaar is more or less over. His fantasies about the bazaar and
buying a great gift for the girl are revealed as ridiculous at that moment.
He overhears the conversation of some of the vendors, who are ordinary
English women. The much cherished hope turns out to be illusion and
disappointment. It reminds the reader that there is no escape of frustration
in a colonized city as Dublin. The following excerpt is taken from the end
of the story when the boy comes to the almost closing bazaar. A woman asks
him what he wants to buy, but the boy goes with disappointment and
depression.
“Observing me the
young lady came over and asked me did I wish to by anything. The tone of her
voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of
duty. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at
either side of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured:
‘No, thank you’
The young lady changed the position of one of the
vases and went back to the two young men. They began to talk of the same
subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder.
I lingered before her stall, though I knew my
stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Then
I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the
two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call
from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the
hall was now completely dark.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a
creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and
anger.”
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