AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

        The great English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote in the 18th century: 'Genius is supposed to be a power of producing excellencies which are out of the reach of the Rules of Art; a power which no precepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire'.

        Judged by this yardstick James Joyce (1882-1941) was a very great genius. All his life he found his own road and carried his own lamp which had the power of lighting its own fire. Just as we talk about the genius of Shakespeare or Dante or Chaucer or Cervantes, we have to refer to the genius of James Joyce.

        In many ways he can be described as a troubled lover of Ireland and a contemptuous hater of the Irish. He derided the Irish as 'the most belated race in Europe'. The major part of his life was spent in self-imposed exile. His tortuous life was one long struggle against poverty, prejudice, failing health and almost total blindness.

        In his youth he rose in revolt against the narrow nationalism of the Irish Renaissance by ridiculing the Celtic Twilight as the Cultic Twalette. He turned against the chief leader of the Movement William Butler Yeats by telling him: 'We have met too late; you are too old to be influenced by me'. Joyce rejected the misty symbolism and provincial myths of the Irish revival. He made a violently new language of symbols and, in a series of intricately connected works, created a broad and often baffling mythology of the modern world.

James Joyce (1882 - 1941)

Joyce's technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history, and literature, and created a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions.         Harold Bloom rightly observes: 'All modern genres and media are almost as Joycean as they are Shakespearean. In the early years of the 21st century I would have difficulty in taking apart the tangle of Shakespeare, Joyce and Freud that manifests endlessly in our media culture'.         Christened James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, he was born on 2 February, 1882 in a suburb of Dublin. His mother was a gifted musician. Her interests and affections were disturbingly divided between her husband and the Church.         His father was a charming, light-hearted and irresponsible fellow. Joyce inherited his fine tenor voice from his father. His father was very fond of James Joyce who was his eldest son and whom he called as 'the most favourite of my 16 or 17 children'.         Joyce studied at University College, Dublin, from the age of 16 to 20. By the age of 20 he could read not only Latin, French and Italian as easily as English but also Norwegian which he mastered in order to study Ibsen in the original. He wrote an essay on Ibsen called 'Ibsen's New Drama' when he was only 18 and it was published in the eminent Fortnightly Review.

        Joyce also sent a letter to Ibsen paying a tribute to him for his dogged devotion to truth and absolute indifference to public canons of art.

        After taking his Bachelor's Degree at 20, Joyce went to Paris. Later he put his resolution in his famous work A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: 'I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my Church'. He said the same thing in a bitter diatribe, part of which ran as follows:

        This lovely land that always sent

        Her writers and artists to banishment

        And in a spirit of Irish fun

        Betrayed her own leaders one by one

        All that Joyce took with him to Paris was a letter of introduction, a couple of pounds, and a few poems. He hoped to study medicine but had to give it up on account of poverty. Unable to write anything marketable, he almost starved. At that time his only food was cocoa most of the time — in his immortal novel in world literature 'Ulysses' cups of cocoa are not only a source of nourishment but a symbol of the sacrament— and he became ill. He was so poor that he could not afford dental treatment in Paris. The later damage to his eyes was on account of neglect of his bad teeth. After six months in Paris he got the news of his mother's serious illness. He rushed back to Dublin where his mother died. In 1904 he married Norah Barnacle and went with her to Switzerland where he failed to get the promised job. Then he went to Trieste where he became a teacher of languages on a salary of 80 pounds a year.

        For the next 25 years, Joyce's life was a story of exile and suffering, of struggle for publication, of Philistine hostility. In 1907 Joyce had published a collection of poems, Chamber Music. In 1914, Joyce's book Dubliners was published in London. It was a conglomeration of unhappy episodes in the city of his birth. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in 1916, a play Exiles in 1918 and Ulysses in 1922.

        He has become immortal in world literature on account of his two great works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

        A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not only a justification of its title but a frank autobiography of Joyce's first 20 years. He originally intended to call it Stephen Hero, and his choice of titles reveals Joyce's pre-occupation with names and their magic associations. His central character remained Stephen, but the last name was discarded in favour of Dedalus, the heroic and fabulous artificer. The choice was particularly meaningful because Dedalus , who invented wings to lift man from the earth, symbolised the poet and his soaring imagination, as well as the basic idea of flight. To quote the words of James Joyce in this context: 'The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself'. This was the magic of words which Joyce described with such gusto and enthusiasm.

        A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a double exposure. It is a nostalgic portrait of the Dublin which Joyce ambivalently loved and loathed, and a portrait of the young and rather precocious writer, pre-occupied with verbal associations and the incantatory power of words. Joyce-Stephen Dedalus is the aroused creator who, with a flourish of trumpets, goes forth to proclaim and declare: 'I want to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.'

        Thus Joyce wanted to achieve a multi-dimensional effect through a multi-dimensional language which for him was an eternal movement and not a stationary condition; a perennial journey and not a fixed harbour.