Art and the Joycean Artist

Abstract

At what was to be their last meeting, Stanislaus Joyce attempted to enlist his brother James's support for his own antifascist sentiments-views that were to lead eventually to his internment in Florence as an enemy alien. It was upon that occasion that Joyce relieved himself of opinion quoted above. It may be dubious quality of such assertions that has given rise to a tradition in Joyce criticism that derides what Joyce had to say in his literary works but praises way in which it is said. Malcolm Cowley, for instance, wrote that Joyce's opinions were generally of a fourthor fifth-rate mind,2 while Harry Levin, in his critical study of Joyce, says that the student who demands a philosophy from Joyce will be put off with an inarticulate noise and a skeptical shrug.3 Most students of Joyce would agree that intrinsic intellectual value of what Joyce generally had to say is not on a par with those writers who, like Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or Proust, most frequently populate essays on ideas in literature. Jung's early appraisal of Ulysses, Du sagst nichts und verrtitst nichts, O Ulysses, aber du wirkst,4 would seem final word on matter. But there is danger of overstatement in this tradition. This essay will try to show that some of positions and insights articulated or developed by Joyce in his works are of independent value and interest, especially to readers interested in understanding better development of artistic temperament and nature of its products. There is no subtler treatment of a gifted child's aesthetic development than that to be found in Joyce's early work. In his strongly autobiographical stories and novels (Dubliners, A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man, and Stephen Hero) and in his only play (Exiles) one finds not only a psychologically intriguing profile of