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James Joyce: A Partial Explanation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert Glynn Kelly
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Extract

Everyone has a different explanation for James Joyce. Thornton Wilder says he is a man divided between a violent love and a violent hate, “a love that cannot integrate its hate” and “a hate that cannot integrate its love”, a love and a hate for the land and the people he left but was unable ever to forget. Harry Levin, insofar as he attempts at all to explain, places great emphasis on Joyce's youthful theory of the development of the arts as a progress from the lyric, through the epic, to the dramatic. Barry Bymo agrees with the importance of this literary theory and suggests that Joyce's problem was the incompatibility between his artistic program and his own capabilities. Gorman, offering us his idol, does not explain Joyce at all except in terms of his high integrity, superb intellect, and remarkable fortitude—an explanation based for the most part on Joyce's own declarations to these effects. And Gogarty, antipathetic, seemingly resentful, attributes Joyce's development to the inherent arrogance which led him to reject his religion but never released him from fears of the consequences of this rejection. Gogarty therefore singles out as the crucial trauma from which Joyce never recovered and toward which he never ceased to react, the sermon on Damnation, Hell, and Eternity which he heard at Belvedere College when he was eleven years old.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 64 , Issue 1: Issue 1 part 1 , March 1949 , pp. 26 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1949

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References

1 Wilder, “James Joyce—1882–1941”, Poetry, lvii (March, 1941), 370–374; Levin, James Joyce (London: Faber & Faber, 1944); Bymo, “Flight from Eire”, Commonweal, xxxiii (April 4, 1941), 597–598; Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, A Definitive Biography (London: Bodley Head, 1941); Oliver St. John Gogarty, “The Joyce I Knew”, Sat. Rev. of Lit., xxiii (Jan. 25, 1941), 3–5.

2 Colum, “The Joyce I Knew” (letter in answer to Gogarty's article), Sat. Rev. of Lit., xxiii (Feb. 22, 1941), 11.

3 This incident is reported by Gogarty and denied by Colum, who says Joyce once denied it to him. But, fact or legend, it represents a genuine characteristic of the young Joyce.

4 For some reason Rebecca West in “The Strange Case of James Joyce”, Bookman, xlviii (Sept. 1928), 9–23, finds these tirades ridiculously and impossibly long. But a knowledge of the character of James Joyce makes them quite believable.

5 Stephen Hero (New York: New Directions, 1944), p. 178; Gorman, p. 112.

6 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Random House, 1928), p. 88.

7 Stephen Hero, p. 56; Levin, p. 98.

8 From “The Day of the Rabblement”, by Joyce, quoted by Gorman, p. 73.

9 Gorman, p. 182.

10 Stephen Hero, p. 106. (Joyce himself later cut this passage from the MS.)

11 Ibid., p. 153.

12 Harry Levin, “James Joyce”, Atlantic Monthly, clxxviii (Dec, 1946), 125–129.

13 Stephen Hero, p. 160.

14 Levin (p. 72) says with slightly different implications, “[Joyce] with his highly developed auditory imagination and his unhappy estrangement from society, came to equate language and experience.”

15 Gorman, pp. 30–31, quoting Father Timothy Corcoran, historian of Clongowes Wood College.

16 Gorman, pp. 126, 116, 142, 145, 148.

17 Stephen Hero, p. 203.

18 Ibid., pp. 124, 39, 38.

19 Levin, “James Joyce”, Atlantic Monthly, clxxviii, 125–129.

20 Levin notes this paradox.

21 Levin, p. 4.

22 Ibid., p. 34.

23 Ibid., p. 62.