Giacomo Joyce
 First edition | |
| Author | James Joyce |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Faber & Faber |
Publication date | 1968 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 16 pages |
| Preceded by | Stephen Hero (1944) |
Giacomo Joyce is a posthumously-published work by Irish writer
Writing and publication
Giacomo Joyce was written in Trieste between 1911 and 1914 shortly before the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.[1] The original manuscript contains fifty fragments transcribed onto eight large sheets of sketching paper held within a blue school notebook. It was written in Joyce's "best calligraphic hand".[2] The manuscript was left with his brother Stanislaus when Joyce moved to Zurich in 1915.[1] The text of Giacomo Joyce is quoted at length in Richard Ellmann's 1959 biography, James Joyce, but it wasn't until 1968 that it was published in its entirety.[1]
Giacomo Joyce contains several passages that appear in Joyce’s subsequent works including A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Exiles. Some passages were borrowed verbatim while others were reworked. According to Ellmann, this reflects a decision on Joyce’s part to "pillage rather than publish" Giacomo.[3] Writer and critic, Michel Delville, asserts that the "explicitly autobiographical character of the poem and the scabrousness of the subject eventually prevented Joyce from publishing"; adding that Joyce may have found it "aesthetically embarrassing as well as biographically compromising".[1]
Analysis and interpretation
The hero of Giacomo Joyce is undoubtedly Joyce himself, and within the text Giacomo is referred to as "Jamesy" and "Jim". There is also a reference to Joyce's wife
John McCourt describes Giacomo Joyce as "a mixture of several genres — part biography, part personal journal, part lyrical poetry... part prose narrative".[10] It represents the liminal period when Joyce was transitioning from the poetry of Chamber Music to the prose of Ulysses.[11] Several of the shorter fragments in the text closely resemble Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" which leads Delville to connect it to Imagist poetry, a movement which was well underway at the time of Joyce's writing.[12]
Related works
In 1976, German artist Paul Wunderlich produced ten multicolored heliographs illustrating Giacomo Joyce. Wunderlich's illustrations are a post-war interpretation of a pre-war text "which he reads as deeply disturbing intimations of the Holocaust".[13]
References
- ^ a b c d e Delville 1998, p. 24.
- ^ Ellmann 1968, p. xi.
- ^ Ellmann 1968, p. xvi.
- ^ Ellmann 1968, p. xii.
- ^ Barolini 2003, p. 249.
- ^ Ellmann 1968, pp. xi–xii.
- JSTOR 25473659. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
- ^ Barolini 2003, pp. 251–252.
- ^ Barolini 2003, pp. 260–261.
- JSTOR 3831646. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
- ^ Delville 1998, p. 30.
- ^ Delville 1998, p. 26.
- S2CID 153959516. Retrieved 12 November 2021.
Works cited
- Ellmann, Richard (1968). Introduction. Giacomo Joyce. By Joyce, James. London: Faber and Faber.
- Delville, Michel (1998). The American Prose Poem : Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. ISBN 9780813021447.
- Barolini, Helen (2003). "The End of My Giacomo Joyce Affair". Southwest Review. 88 (2/3). Southern Methodist University: 248–261. JSTOR 43472628. Retrieved 15 November 2021.