Upon arrival into Zurich Hauptbahnhof, tram 6 will bring you to Fluntern Cemetery, where the Irish writer James Joyce (1882–1941) is interred. As an adopted Romanschriftsteller of the city, Joyce recurrently made his home in Zürich, eventually passing away here in 1941. While deterring less dedicated readers, his modernist canon has bestowed an extensive cultural lineage, inspiring intellectuals, imitators and public-house signs worldwide.

Notwithstanding endless debates about titular apostrophes, Joyce’s work Finnegans Wake (1939) holds a particular psychiatric resonance because of the purported influence of his beloved daughter Lucia (1907–1982) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Family portrait photograph of the Joyce family; Clockwise from top left: James Joyce, Giorgio Joyce, Nora Barnacle, Lucia Joyce. 1924. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

A celebrated dancer during the années folles in Paris, Lucia increasingly began to exhibit erratic behaviours and episodes of agitation. Temporary hospitalisations followed in France and Switzerland, including in Oscar Forel’s (1891–1982) clinic in Prangins, and Lucia received several different diagnoses, most notably for schizophrenia.

Subsequently, in 1934, Joyce brought Lucia to Zürich to consult with Carl Jung (1875–1961), an authority on psychosis, at the Burghölzli hospital (now the Psychiatric University Hospital Zürich). Jung had previously published an essay on Ulysses (1922), linking the text to potentially disordered states. Ironically, Joyce’s writing seemed to test the psychiatrist’s own mental faculties; in a letter to Joyce, Jung conceded that Ulysses engendered ‘too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter’, leaving him ‘astray in the labyrinth’ (many readers can no doubt sympathise).

Allegedly, the writer and Jung shared a famous exchange about Lucia, though the exact wording has varied in retellings. Joyce is said to have remarked that he and his daughter ’swim in the same waters’, to which Jung affirmed, ‘where you swim, she drowns’. In spite of this, and the reality that Lucia would spend much of her adult life as a psychiatric in-patient, her father struggled to deal with her illness. Instead, Joyce accentuated Lucia’s artistic capabilities, depicting her as an ‘innovator’ and claiming that she had her own ‘private language’ (one that he, at least, could comprehend).

Critics have hypothesised that Lucia’s mental health and idiosyncratic speech may have contributed to the style of the Wake, parts of which Joyce was still composing at the time of her diagnoses and early psychiatric treatment. Specifically, the character of Issy (Isobel/Isolde) could be interpreted as a reflection of Lucia, surrounded by disrupted and fragmentary discourse. More broadly, pages from the book are replete with fractured syntax, multilingual puns and neologisms, possibly evoking a sense of incoherent speech. Equally, Joyce’s narratorial technique plunges us directly into dreamlike streams of consciousness, perhaps, at times, attempting to grant an intimate perspective into the phenomenology of mental illness.

It should be noted that Jung himself did not consider Ulysses a pathological text, and this may also be true for Joyce’s other works, like the Wake, which rank among the most demanding reads in 20th-century literature. Further, the wider connections between mental illness and creative expression have long been disputed. Either way, Joyce once wondered: ‘[p]eople talk of my influence on my daughter, but what about her influence on me?’. The Wake’s enduring complexity helps keeps this question alive.