JAMES JOYCE

This massive, meticulously researched biography by the late Irish historian Callanan reveals the political and social worlds of the novelist James Joyce (1882-1941). Valued today as one of the founders of Modernist prose style, as an author of allusive difficulty, and as a great reader of the classics, Joyce emerges here as a man deeply engaged with lived politics. At the heart of the book is the life, work, and death of Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891), one of the founders of Irish nationalism. Callanan sees Parnell’s rise and fall as the “primal scene” that shaped young Joyce’s view of Irish culture. Joyce’s writings, in this sense, are not political in a straightforwardly polemical way. Rather, they engage with the central themes of late-19th-century Irish awareness: What does it mean to live in a colonized country; how does the Irish language intersect with English; what is the place of the individual in an oppressed society; how does the history of famine, poverty, the Catholic Church, and the deep class fissures of Irish social life enable the creation of literary protagonists struggling to find their voices, dealing with sexual longing, and looking for a place in the landscapes of inequality? Joyce’s brilliant creations—Stephen Daedalus and Leopold and Molly Bloom—come alive as people living on the axes of class and erotic desire. And, with Joyce living away from Ireland, in the cosmopolitan Italian city of Trieste, Callanan raises questions about how Italian political unification and the relations between church and state influenced his understanding of his homeland. Finally, Callanan offers this lucid interpretation of the famously cryptic last novel, Finnegan’s Wake: “Men and women, in the cycle of the year and of the generations, find themselves existentially compelled—doomed—to hope.”