• Written: in Trieste, c. 1911 to 1914, very likely with some later additions from c. 1919 or 1920
• Book publication: New York: Viking, 1968

by Rozerin Asmin Saripinar

^{Youth has an end. In the vague mist of old sounds a faint point of light appears: the speech of the soul is about to be heard. Youth has an end: the end is here. It will never be. You know that well. What then? Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for? (16)}

James Joyce wrote the short, fragmentary prose poem Giacomo Joyce in an interim around the time when he completed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but had not yet begun Ulysses. Though Joyce produced a fair copy of Giacomo Joyce in c. 1914, he refrained from publishing it. (It is very likely that Joyce added some additional passages much later, around 1920, but once again he decided not to publish the text.)

Fortunately, the manuscript was saved by his brother Stanislaus Joyce, and Giacomo Joyce was posthumously published almost half a century after Joyce had added the final portions to the text.

The setting of Giacomo Joyce is uncharacteristic for Joyce. While almost all his other works are set in his hometown Dublin, the enigmatic story told in Giacomo Joyce unfolds against the backdrop of Trieste, where Joyce spent a substantial part of his career as a writer (between 1904 and 1915 and again, briefly, from 1919 to 1920).

The text itself mainly consists of its narrator’s inner monologue: fairly short fragments of prose that are ‘interrupted’ by blank spaces on the page. The story itself is a partly autobiographical exploration of Joyce’s erotic fascination with a much younger adult pupil of his which, toward the end, transforms into a farewell letter to youth itself.

Giacomo Joyce is perhaps best described as a fascinating and problematic modernist experiment that grapples with themes such as the class difference between a teacher and his wealthy pupils, middle-aged men’s objectification of younger women, as well as fantasies – erotic and otherwise – revolving around Jews and Jewishness. It does not make for comfortable reading, but remains strangely compelling.

^{Source: Joyce, James. Giacomo Joyce. Introduction and Notes by Richard Ellmann. Viking Press, New York, 1968.}