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.ary age that they and their work helped to define.The sensitive and attentive reader comes awayfrom Conrad s Heart of Darkness in the same way Hogarth Press See WOOLF, VIRGINIA.as he or she comes away from Eliot s The HollowMen, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge s phrase, a sad- Holy Grail See FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE. JJoyce, James (Augustine Aloysius) (1882 1941) exile from his native Ireland.Ireland s religious,Among those modernists writing in English at the intellectual, and political turmoil under the bane oftime that Eliot was himself first making his mark, a centuries-long British colonial occupation appar-none was perhaps more celebrated in literary cir- ently had caused him nothing but exasperationcles than the Irish novelist and short-story writer and pain throughout most of his youth, and, withJames Joyce.the exception of a brief visit during the summer ofBorn in Dublin on February 2, 1882, Joyce, the 1912, he would never again return there.eldest of 10 children in a Roman Catholic family, Partly through the good graces of his brotherexhibited a literary precociousness from a very early Stanislaus, he never lost touch with his Irish roots,age.When he was nine, he wrote and his proud however, both as the locale and inspiration for hisfather had published a poem, Et Tu Healy, literary compositions and as the outlet for his work.dealing with the scandal that ruined the political A series of short stories, providing realistic glimpsescareer of the Irish home-rule advocate Charles into urban Irish life at the turn of the century, wasStewart Parnell and that apparently led to his early published in book form under the collective titledeath.Although young Joyce s middle-class family s Dubliners in 1914.Most noteworthy among thesegradual decline into poverty impeded the quality of baldly unsentimental tales are Araby, detailinghis formal education somewhat, he was neverthe- a young boy s frustrating encounter with roman-less trained from his childhood by Jesuits, a rigorous tic high hopes and dashed expectations, and Theorder of Catholic priests, first at Clongowes Wood Dead, a novella that exposes the unconsciousCollege and later at Belvedere College.Joyce him- hypocrisies underlying much of an ethnic Irish soci-self entertained a vocation for the priesthood until ety split between its buried native impulses andhe was 16 and also flirted for a time with a career as a shallow devotion to contemporary fashions inan operatic tenor.thought and behavior.Learning and literature ultimately won out as An early (1904) essay on aesthetics, meanwhile,his two primary interests.In 1898, Joyce enrolled A Portrait of the Artist, eventually became thein University College Dublin, where he studied abortive autobiographical novel Stephen Hero.Itmodern languages, including English, French, and finally emerged, after a virtual rewriting, as his firstItalian.By 1904, he was able to travel to the conti- major novel and modernist masterpiece, A Portraitnent with his wife Nora to take up a post teaching of the Artist as a Young Man.This work details theEnglish with Berlitz Language Schools, first in Zur- developmental years of its overly sensitive protago-ich, Switzerland; later in Trieste, Italy; and finally nist, and Joycean alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, as hein Rome.Thus began Joyce s famous self-imposed struggles with the normal problems of growing up,534 Joyce, James 535problems that are compounded in a culture where enough just to have made it through the day withindividual sensibilities are devoured by the cease- all its grind and misgivings.less conflicts of confused allegiances to church, With its complex mixture of narrative styles,state, and nation.Like Joyce himself, his young including stream-of-consciousness techniques,hero discovers that, in order to survive and create and of Joyce s own extensive learning in both lit- the uncreated conscience of [his] race, he must erature and history, Ulysses stands as one of theleave Ireland altogether.greatest literary achievements, in any language, ofThis would be achieved, by Joyce himself, in the the 20th century.Beyond a doubt, it rivals Eliot stransformation that another early project took
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