Terrance Gordon - Joyce For Beginners

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Copyright 2021 W. Terrence Gordon

Illustrations copyright 2021 by Lynsey Hutchinson

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A For Beginners Documentary Comic Book

Copyright 2021

Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN # 978-1-939994-78-3 Trade

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Beginners and Beginners Documentary Comic Books are published by
For Beginners LLC.

First Edition

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Respectfully dedicated to the memory of
GLENN THOMPSON
Publisher and Visionary
19402001

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MARK TWAIN DEFINED A CLASSIC BOOK AS one that everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read. The few lines from Joyce's Finnegans Wake that you just read (did you?) clinch Twain's point.

Actually, they are not a few lines but the first of ten key words in the Wake. Here is the tenth one:

Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar

The first word (a bit later we'll get to justifying the outrageous claim that this is a word) has 100 letters and the second 101. That part's easyand so is a lot more when we find the keys to turning Joyce's classics into books we want to readfrom spark to phoenish (Joyce's pun).

The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the

last line of Finnegans Wake

BORN IN DUBLIN, ON FEBRUARY 2, 1882, to John Stanislaus Joyce and his wife Mary Jane Murray, James Joyce began his education at age six under Jesuit scholars at Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, continuing at Belvedere College in Dublin from 1893 to 1897. The following year, he entered the University College, Dublin, where he studied philosophy and languages, graduating in 1902. At age eighteen, he broke into print with an essay on Henrik Ibsen's drama When We Dead Awaken, published in the Fortnightly Review in 1900.

Joyce left Ireland for Paris in 1902, planning to attend medical school but spent most of his time writing. On learning that his mother was dying, he returned to Dublin in 1903, but he was not to stay in his native land for long. Soon after Joyce met Nora Barnacle of Galway in 1904, the couple left for the Continent. Their union produced a son and a daughter; Joyce and Nora were eventually married in 1931.

At the beginning of World War I, Joyce and his young family began a series of moves, first to Zrich, where he began to work on Ulysses. By the time the work appeared in print in 1922, Joyce had already published Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, and the play Exiles in 1918. A collection of poems, Chamber Music had appeared in 1907 and a second, Pomes Penyeach, would appear in 1927.

Within a year of the appearance of Ulysses in 1922, the book was plagued by censorship in Great Britain and in the United States, where it remained contraband till 1933. (When US District Judge John M. Woolsey lifted the ban on the notoriously dirty book, he noted wryly that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.) Joyce, then living in Paris, had begun writing Finnegans Wake. He was suffering from glaucoma, and chronic eye trouble dogged him for the rest of his days. The first segment of the Wake appeared in the transatlantic review in April 1924, under the title Work in Progress. The final version of the work was not published until 1939.

Acclaimed a masterpiece by many from the outset, the Wake found just as many readers ready to condemn it. When France fell to the Nazis, Joyce removed his family to Zrich once again. Weakened by illness and discouraged at the public reception of Finnegans Wake, he died there on January 13, 1941.

HE HAD TO CONCEDE THAT THE ENGLISHMAN was pretty good. (Remember that Joyce lived and died before it was first suggested that Shakespeare was a transplanted Italian named Crollalanzaliterally shake spearbut this is another story.) No surprise, given how Joyce the wordsmith worked, that he was particularly fond of The Bard's puns. There are many references to Shakespeare in Ulysses and literally hundreds more in Finnegans Wake (some of them included in the Encyclopedictionary at the end of this book). But as a dramatist, Joyce opined, Shakespeare couldn't hold a candle to Ibsen. The great Norwegian author won Joyce's praise because his plays tackled the problems of modem society head on.

Apart from Ibsen, many writers inspired Joyce. He claimed to have devoured completely the works of Ben Jonson, Daniel Defoe, and Gustav Flaubert.

He said he loved Dante almost as much as the Bible.

To Homer, Joyce gave the credit for using ordinary words and giving them extraordinary meanings. (Who would not say the same of Joyce himself?)