Under Construction

Examples of Relationships - James Joyce and Nora Barnacle

Love loves to love love - James Joyce - Ulysses

Index

James Joyce's background

What makes James Joyce such a great example?

James Joyce's background

Nobel-calibre writer James Joyce [though the Prize itself always eluded him] famously wrote Ulysses, one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century. Its early chapters draw directly on one of the defining moments of his own life: in 1903 he was called back from Paris to Dublin to the deathbed of his mother, May, and, having by then rejected Catholicism outright, refused her dying wish that he kneel and pray for her. The guilt of that refusal haunted him for the rest of his life and became one of the central threads of the novel, dramatised through his alter ego Stephen Dedalus. So why was this?

What makes James Joyce such a great example?

James Joyce makes a good example of a single, guilt-laden refusal at a parent's deathbed reshaping an entire body of work: the astrology of that moment, comparing his own chart against his mother's, is a good test of whether a chart can hold both the intensity of the guilt and the fact that he went on to make great art out of it regardless.

The chart shown is the birth of James Joyce, with the birth of his mother as transits.