What was 'Nighttown' to James Joyce? Was it merely the sordid bordello district of Dublin where women could be purchased for a few shillings, or was it instead a 'scene' - a place of spectral and epiphanic transfiguration? Why does the figure of the Whore assume such enigmatic and archetypal importance in many of the Irish writer's texts? How did syphilis, which Joyce contracted at the age of 21, affect his life and writings? Beginning with a survey of the grim reality of prostitution in Trieste where the Irish writer lived, worked and wrote for the better part of sixteen years, and combining extensive research into local police and Austrian government archives with a series of close textual readings and a variety of theoretical approaches, Zois in Nighttown examines Joyce's life and writings in order to explain why prostitution and syphilis are such pervasive and disruptive discourses in Joyce, and how they are interwoven with many aspects of his personal life and literary works.
Zois in Nighttown reaffirms the fundamental importance of Trieste for Joyce, and sheds new light on the many local factors: religious, social, linguistic, political and artistic which combined to influence the writer's thought and creative processes. The Trieste presented in these pages is neither the Belle Epoque capital of Claudio Magris, nor the picturesque 'la bella Trieste' of standard Joyce biography, but a chaotic and disturbing City of Night which, like its Central European counterparts of Prague and Vienna, provided the essential atmosphere and 'culture' for the revolutionary artistic masterpieces it produced.