''Giacomo Joyce'' is a posthumously-published work by Irish writer
James Joyce. It was published by
Faber and Faber
Faber and Faber Limited, usually abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot (an early Faber editor and director), W. H. Auden, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel B ...
from sixteen handwritten pages by Joyce. The text is a free-form love poem that tracks the waxing and waning of Joyce's infatuation with one of his students in
Trieste.
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''. 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". The manuscript was left with his brother Stanislaus when Joyce moved to Zurich in 1915. 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.
''Giacomo Joyce'' contains several passages that appear in Joyce’s subsequent works including ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'', ''
Ulysses
Ulysses is one form of the Roman name for Odysseus, a hero in ancient Greek literature.
Ulysses may also refer to:
People
* Ulysses (given name), including a list of people with this name
Places in the United States
* Ulysses, Kansas
* Ulysse ...
'', and ''
Exiles
Exile is primarily penal expulsion from one's native country, and secondarily expatriation or prolonged absence from one's homeland under either the compulsion of circumstance or the rigors of some high purpose. Usually persons and peoples suf ...
''. Some passages were borrowed verbatim while others were reworked. According to
Ellmann Ellmann is a surname. Notable people with the name include:
*Lucy Ellmann (born 1956), Anglo-American novelist
* Marvin Ellmann (born 1987), German footballer
* Mary Ellmann (1921–1989), American writer and literary critic
*Richard Ellmann
...
, this reflects a decision on Joyce’s part to "pillage rather than publish" ''Giacomo''. 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".
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
Nora. Additionally, "Giacomo" is the Italian form of the author's forename,
James. According to
Helen Barolini
Helen Barolini (born November 18, 1925) is an American writer, editor, and translator. As a second-generation Italian American, Barolini often writes on issues of Italian-American identity.How to count American immigrant generations is a subject ...
, the use of the name is an ironic allusion to the "name of another (but more successful) lover,
Giacomo Casanova." The "dark lady" at the center of ''Giacomo'' is identified by Ellmann as Amalia Popper. The daughter of Leopoldo Popper, a Jewish businessman who ran a shipping company in Trieste, Amalia was tutored by Joyce between 1908 and 1909. Citing various biographic discrepancies, other scholars dispute that the heroine of ''Giacomo'' is Amalia Popper, rather they say she is most likely an amalgam of several of Joyce's students in Trieste.
John McCourt describes ''Giacomo Joyce'' as "a mixture of several genres — part biography, part personal journal, part lyrical poetry... part prose narrative". It represents the liminal period when Joyce was transitioning from the poetry of
''Chamber Music'' to the prose of ''Ulysses''. Several of the shorter fragments in the text closely resemble
Ezra Pound's "
In a Station of the Metro
"In a Station of the Metro" is an Imagist poem by Ezra Pound published in April 1913 in the literary magazine ''Poetry''. In the poem, Pound describes a moment in the underground metro station in Paris in 1912; he suggested that the faces of the in ...
" which leads Delville to connect it to
Imagist poetry, a movement which was well underway at the time of Joyce's writing.
Related works
In 1976, German artist
Paul Wunderlich produced ten multicolored heliographs illustrating ''Giacomo Joyce''. Wunderlich's illustrations are a
post-war
In Western usage, the phrase post-war era (or postwar era) usually refers to the time since the end of World War II. More broadly, a post-war period (or postwar period) is the interval immediately following the end of a war. A post-war period c ...
interpretation of a pre-war text "which he reads as deeply disturbing intimations of the Holocaust".
References
Works Cited
*
*
*
External links
Poems and ''Exiles'' at themodernword.com
{{authority control
1968 books
Books published posthumously
Poetry by James Joyce
1914 books