Familiar Materials: Joyce among the Europeans

Abstract

In his life and work, James Joyce is often regarded as the paradigmatic exile. His legendary obsession with accurate detail in the account of a day in the life of an imaginary Dubliner in Ulysses, and the importance he always accorded to the minutiae of memory, tend to be seen as evidence of the nostalgic thrust of his writing. Yet, as this essay suggests, the cities in which nearly four decades of self-imposed dislocation were spent (Pola, Trieste, Rome, Zurich, Paris) provided more than a conveniently alien backdrop for Joyce's transposition of remembered Irish material. In those cities, Joyce practised the cosmopolitanism (linguistic and other) that he preached, and surrounded himself with fellow cross-nationals. Usually featuring only in anecdotal asides, or brief editorial footnotes, many of these figures can claim a significant influence on Joyce's work. This essay records the circumstances of some of these friendships, and discusses their emergence within Joyce's "familiar material".