“Send us bright one”: James Joyce and his Modernist Masterpiece
The Irish modernist author and poet was on the cusp of his greatest masterpiece while living in 1917 Zürich, as featured in TRAVESTIES
Featured in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties — onstage at Lantern Theater Company September 8 through October 9, 2022 — Irish modernist author and poet James Joyce was on the cusp of his greatest masterpiece while living in 1917 Zürich alongside Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Lenin, and — most fatefully for them both — British consular officer Henry Carr. Joyce chooses that moment to produce an amateur production of The Importance of Being Earnest, one of the great works of Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde, all the while working on his own very different entry to the canon, contributing to the revolutionary spirit of the times.
James Joyce was born in February 1882 in a suburb of Dublin, Ireland, and was the eldest of 10 children. Even has a child, he displayed extraordinary intellect; he would eventually learn 17 languages, including Norwegian (so he could read Ibsen in the original), Sanskrit, Italian, and Arabic. But intellect alone could not pay the bills; Joyce’s childhood was poor, and up until the success of his novel Ulysses, he worked as a teacher and banker to support his partner, Nora Barnacle, and their children. Though he is heavily associated with Ireland, Joyce was a wanderer and only lived in his birth country for brief stints in his adulthood. Instead, he and his family lived in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and, fatefully, Zürich. Throughout his life, Joyce was plagued by eye trouble; at times he wrote in red crayon in order to see his work more clearly.
Joyce began as a poet and short story writer. His first story was published in Irish Homestead; his first published volume was 1907’s Chamber Music, a collection of 36 lyric love poems that brought him attention from modernist poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound — but not fame or fortune. Despite being best known for his longer-form narratives, Joyce continued writing poetry until the early 1930s and would publish two more volumes before his death. But his most enduring work is in narrative: the vivid short stories of Dubliners, the autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the revolutionary and controversial Ulysses, and his final novel Finnegan’s Wake.
When World War I broke out, Joyce and Barnacle moved from Trieste to Zürich in neutral Switzerland. While there, Joyce first supported his family by teaching English, but then survived on a series of grants from a sympathetic magazine publisher who was a fan of his work. With financial pressures somewhat relieved, Joyce could begin work on what would come to be his crowning achievement as a writer: Ulysses, the modernist masterpiece still considered one of the English language’s most exceptional novels. Though the family would move to Paris before it was completed and published, its birthplace was Zürich.
Dubliners was largely realistic, even naturalistic — its power deriving from finely observed detail about both life in the Irish metropolis and the humanity of each story’s protagonist. Patterned largely on Joyce’s own early life, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was a coming-of-age tale that utilized elements of modernism — the umbrella term for the movement in art and literature of the early 20th century that responded to war, technological advances, and societal upheaval by seeking to create new forms of art and reject the purely representational.
But it was with Ulysses that Joyce came into his full modernist power. The novel focuses on a single day in the life of Stephen Dedalus (also the protagonist of A Portrait of an Artist at a Young Man), Leopold Bloom, and his wife Molly Bloom (based on Nora). The novel is written largely in stream of consciousness, tracing the half-thoughts, digressions, interruptions, and anxieties of its three primary characters. Other styles abound in the work: expressionist drama, sentimental literature, journalistic headlines, and in the Oxen of the Sun section (which we see Joyce working out in Travesties), Joyce traces the development of the English language. While exuberantly employing so many styles, Joyce also imbues his major characters with warmth and humanity — all while loosely retelling the Homeric tales of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope.
Ulysses is one of the most celebrated — and most challenging — novels in the English language, and it brought Joyce near-immediate notoriety. Published in Paris in 1922, Ulysses was banned in the United States and the UK until 1932 and 1936, respectively, due to explicit sexual content. But the controversy only added to the literary praise, and both Americans and Brits sourced bootleg copies of the novel well before it was officially deemed to be not pornographic by an American judge, allowing its publication and sale on these shores. It has been a beloved fixture in the literary canon ever since, with annual Bloomsday celebrations hosted around the world on June 16th — the day the novel is set, and also the day Joyce and Barnacle’s first date. An original manuscript is also a major highlight of The Rosenbach, right here in Philadelphia.
Joyce followed Ulysses with Finnegan’s Wake, a dizzyingly difficult novel full of puns, made-up words, stream of consciousness, and more. Shortly after its publication, Joyce’s family moved back to Zürich, where he died in 1941. Set in Joyce’s final resting place, Travesties delights in playing with the styles its famous (and less famous) characters believed in and adhered to in their time. From Wildean epigrams to Dada-esque nonsense to Joyce’s own stream of consciousness, the play is a high-spirited concoction of styles that would make a modernist like Joyce proud.
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Travesties by Tom Stoppard is onstage September 8 through October 9, 2022, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
