James Joyce's Exile

In a way that is wholly unlike most artists, an understanding of the development of Joyce as an individual and as an artist is essential to understanding his work. He set out, as he sets his literary double Stephen, to "forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race", fully intending to use his own development as an individual and his maturation as an artist as a model for the creation of a new Irish "conscience" to replace the "paralytic", stagnant one dominated by the Irish Catholic Church, British colonialism, and the pretenses of the Irish Literary Revival. Thus, the key to understanding the intention behind works like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake lies in no small part in the study of Joyce, the man.

For Joyce, there are two major periods of development: his youth and adolescence in Dublin, and the many years he spent in exile on the European continent. He dealt explicitly with his experiences as a youth in his early work, Stephen Hero and Portrait , but his exile is never covered in great detail by his literary work. The information we do have is drawn from his letters and the personal recollections of those who were in contact with him in these years.

Despite what he may have wanted us to believe, Joyce's exile was hardly a unified experience. His attempts to leave Ireland were many, and once abroad, his habitation remained fluid, responding to economic necessity and threats of war. This page is an attempt to briefly outline his exile in terms of where it took him, when, and what influence can be attributed to specific places and instances of particular resonance.

Joyce's first departure began with the pretense of attending medical school in Paris. This quickly disagreed with him, in no small part due to his limited French, which did not include the highly technical vocabulary necessary for medical study.  He dropped out after only a handful of classes, pursuing instead the Bohemian life which he at that time found alluring.  He wrote home often for money, citing constant hunger.

Joyce returned home at the request of his father, who had alerted him in a brief telegram that his mother was dying of illness. In order to make the journey back on his extremely limited funds, Joyce had to pretend he could not speak English to avoid tipping one of the Channel porters. When he arrived in Dublin, his days were spent on long walks with his friends, and frequent drinking bouts, which were only encouraged by his mother's death on August 13, 1903. Indeed, this is where he began drinking heavily on a regular basis, setting the groundwork for his infamous drinking problem later in life. He had been accused by friend Oliver Gogarty of wearing her down by expressing his incendiary opinions about Dublin life, church and state, and this must have affected Joyce deeply, for he continued to dramatize the event in both Portrait and Ulysses, though in much harsher terms.

He was known about Dublin for wearing his Latin Quarter hat atop his long hair and small beard, as was the trend with Parisian students. As his stay dragged on longer than he had hoped, with little prospect of returning to the continent, he became discouraged with his prospects at a literary career. He confessed to his aunt that he would like to be famous within his lifetime, and even considered writing his characteristic anticlerical works for the benefit of the uneducated rural Catholic population who he detested so greatly, and who represented an insultingly great stepping down from the literary greatness he felt he deserved.  However, he worked harder than ever in this time, to combat the crippling "paralysis" of Dublin, and a first draft of Stephen Hero, the precursor to Portrait, was completed by January 7, 1904.  After meeting Nora Barnacle, his future wife, on the famous date June 16, 1904, he decided to give the continent another shot. A variety of elements had aligned with the coming of Nora into his life: for one, he desired to live with her, but could not do so in Dublin; a second is noted by Helene Cixous in her study of Joyce's exile, that with Nora now at his side, he no longer feared cutting the ties that he must to leave Dublin forever, as he so desired.

He grew bored with Trieste in 1906 and moved with his family to Rome, where he worked as a bank clerk until leaving again in March 1907 for Trieste. His nine months in Rome were generally unhappy ones. He found the proximity of the Vatican disconcerting, and his work at the bank was miserable. It was in Rome, however, that he became attracted to the Jewish population of Europe, and began connecting his fate with what he perceived theirs to be: an essentially ambiguous relation to the whole continent of established nations. The concept of a Jewish man wandering Dublin became loged in his head in this time, first as a story, never written, for Dubliners. This was also where he began to develop his most famous story, The Dead. Nevertheless, he consistently blamed the city for stifling his ability to write.

When he returned to Trieste, he took up his old job with Berlitz again. His Italian was good enough that he was able to give a short series of lectures at the school. The first, "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages", is his only critical assessment of the history of Ireland. He wrote it in direct opposition to the history championed by the Irish Literary Revivalists, who underplayed the role of the early Church, and who believed that there was a continuing strain of pure Gaelic culture that had survived through ages of invasion.

Joyce visited Dublin for the month of August 1909, during which time he signed the first, ill-fated, contract to publish Dubliners with Grant Richards' Maunsel & Co. He returned again in late October to establish a movie theatre, the Cinematograph Volta, which opened on December 20th. Finding the business aspect of the theatre too demanding, he gave up management quickly and returned to Trieste in January.

His final trip to Ireland lasted from July until September 1912, during which time the contract with Maunsel & Co. fell apart. In the face of this disappointment, for which he jealously blamed the Revivalists' success and seeming monopoly over the market, he determined that this would be his last visit to Ireland, Indeed, he never returned, even under the threat of the two World Wars yet to come.

After the outbreak of the First World War, Joyce received permission from the Austrian government to relocate to Zurich.  Here he came into financial recognition for his artistry, receiving, at the request of Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats among others, a gift from the British Royal Literary Fund, and a grant from the British Treasury Fund.  In 1917 his long patronage by Harriet Shaw Weaver began.  During this time he continued to work on the text of Ulysses , and organized a theatre group, the English Players.

Joyce returned with his family, teaching English at a school, while stille working diligently on Ulysses.  He did not stay long, moving, at the request of Ezra Pound to Paris in June 1920.

Joyce lived in Paris while completing Ulysses and throughout the publishing process.  Following this, Joyce and family travelled frequently around Europe, staying at various places for sometimes several months at a time, but always ultimately returning to Paris.  It seemed that Joyce had finally found a hub to which he could calibrate his movements in the long term.  There was a brief time in 1931 when he definitively moved out of his Paris accommodations  with his family, making for London, where he intended to settle for a time.  While they were there, Joyce and Nora were finally wedded officially.  Following 1932, and daughter Lucia's mental breakdown, Joyce spent time between Paris and Zurich, visiting the hospital to which she had been committed.

In 1940, as the war approached Paris, Joyce made arrangements for his family to relocate once more to neutral Zurich.  They left Paris on December 14th, 1940.  Joyce died in Zurich of a perforated ulcer on January 1941.

Cixous, Helene. The Exile of James Joyce

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce.

Gilbert, Stuart. "A Chronology of Joyce's Life". The Letters of James Joyce. ed. Stuart Gilbert.