Complete Works of James Joyce

by Unknown

  Pending such final judgment we can at least assign him a place among the great literary creators. The number and length of his novels prove incontestably that the writer is possessed by a kind of creative fury. As to the nature of the work so created we shall be safe if we say that Dickens is a great caricaturist and a great sentimentalist (using those terms in their strict sense and without any malice) — great caricaturist in the sense that Hogarth is a great caricaturist, a sentimentalist in the sense which Goldsmith would have given to that word. It is enough to point to a row of his personages to see that he has few (if any) equals in the art of presenting a character, fundamentally natural and probable with just one strange, wilful, wayward moral or physical deformity which upsets the equipoise and bears off the character from the world of tiresome reality and as far as the borderland of the fantastic. I should say perhaps the human fantastic, for what figures in literature are more human and warm-blooded than Micawber, Pumblechook, Simon Tappertit, Peggoty [sic], Sam Weller (to say nothing of his father), Sara Gamp, Joe Gargery? We do not think of these, and of a host of others in the well-crowded Dickensian gallery, as tragic or comic figures or even as national or local types as we think, for instance, of the characters of Shakespeare. We do not even see them through the eyes of their creator with that quaint spirit of nice and delicate observation with which we see the pilgrims at the Tabard Inn, noting (smiling and indulgent) the finest and most elusive points in dress or speech or gait. No, we see every character of Dickens in the light of one strongly marked or even exaggerated moral or physical quality — sleepiness, whimsical self-assertiveness, monstrous obesity, disorderly recklessness, reptile-like servility, intense round-eyed stupidity, tearful and absurd melancholy. And yet there are some simple people who complain that, though they like Dickens very much and have cried over the fate of Little Nell and over the death of Poor Joe [sic], the crossing-sweeper, and laughed over the adventurous caprices of Pickwick and his fellow-musketeers and hated (as all good people should) Uriah Heep and Fagin the Jew, yet he is after all a little exaggerated. To say this of him is really to give him what I think they call in that land of strange phrases, America, a billet for immortality. It is precisely this little exaggeration which rivets his work firmly to popular taste, which fixes his characters firmly in popular memory. It is precisely by this little exaggeration that Dickens has influenced the spoken language of the inhabitants of the British Empire as no other writer since Shakespeare’s time has influenced it and has won for himself a place deep down in the hearts of his fellow-countrymen, a honour which has been withheld from his great rival Thackeray. And yet is not Thackeray at his finest greater than Dickens? The question is an idle one. English taste has decreed to Dickens a sovereign position and Turk-like will have no brother near his throne.

  James Joyce B. A.

  The Universal Literary Influence of the Renaissance

  The doctrine of evolution in the light of which our civilization basks teaches us that when we were small, we were not yet grown up. Accordingly, if we take the European Renaissance as a point of division, we must conclude that, until that age, humanity only had the soul and body of a child and it was only after this age that it developed physically and morally to the point of deserving the name of adulthood. It is a very drastic and somewhat unconvincing conclusion. In fact (were I not afraid of seeming to be a laudator temporis acti), I should like to oppose this conclusion with all my might. The much trumpeted progress of this century consists for the most part of a tangle of machines whose aim is simply to gather fast and furiously the scattered elements of profit and knowledge and to redistribute them to each member of the community who can afford a small fee. I agree that this social system can boast of great mechanical conquests, of great and beneficial discoveries. To be convinced of this, it is enough just to draw up a brief list of what we see on the street of a large modern city: the electric tram, telegraph wires, the humble and necessary postman, newspaper boys, large companies etc. But in the midst of this complex and many-sided civilization the human mind, almost terrorized by material greatness, becomes lost, denies itself and grows weaker. Should we then conclude that present-day materialism, which descends in a direct line from the Renaissance, atrophies the spiritual faculties of man, impedes his development, blunts his keenness? Let us see.

  In the age of the Renaissance the human spirit struggled against scholastic absolutism, against that immense (and in many ways admirable) system of philosophy that has its fundamental origins in Aristotelian thought, cold, clear and imperturbable, while its summit stretched upwards towards the vague and mysterious light of Christian ideology. But if the human spirit struggled against this system, it was not because the system in itself was alien to him. The yoke was sweet and light: but it was a yoke. So when the great rebels of the Renaissance proclaimed the Good News to the peoples of Europe, that there was no more tyranny, that human sadness and suffering had dissolved like mist at sunrise, that man was no longer a prisoner, perhaps the human spirit felt the fascination of the unknown, heard the voice of the visual world tangible, inconstant, where one lives and dies, sins and repents, and, abandoning the cloistered peace in which it had been languishing, embraced the new gospel. It abandoned its peace, its true abode because it had tired of it, just as God, tired (if you will permit a rather irreverent term) of his perfections, called forth the creation out of nothing, just as woman, tired of the peace and quiet that were wasting away her heart, turned her gaze towards the life of temptation. Giordano Bruno himself says that all power, whether in nature or the spirit, must create an opposing power without which man cannot fulfil himself, and he adds that in every such separation there is a tendency towards a reunion. The dualism of the great Nolan faithfully reflects the phenomenon of the Renaissance. And if it seems a little arbitrary to quote a witness against himself and to quote the very words of an innovator so as to condemn (or at least to judge) the work of which he was the author, I respond that I am doing no more than following the example of Bruno himself who, in the course of his long, persistent and quibbling self-defence, turned the weapons of the prosecution against his accuser.

  It would be easy to fill these pages with the names of the great writers whom the wave of the Renaissance lifted to the clouds (or thereabouts), easy to praise the greatness of their works which, in any case, no one is calling into doubt, and to end with a ritual prayer: and it might be an act of cowardice since reciting a litany is not philosophical inquiry. The crux of the question lies elsewhere. It must be seen what is really meant by the Renaissance as far as literature is concerned, and towards what end, happy or tragic, it leads us. The Renaissance, to put it briefly, has placed the journalist in the monk’s chair: in other words, it has deposed a sharp, limited and formal mind in order to hand the sceptre over to a mentality that is facile and wide-ranging (as the saying goes in theatre journals), a mentality that is restless and somewhat amorphous. Shakespeare and Lope de Vega are to a certain extent responsible for modern cinematography. Untiring creative power, heated, strong passion, the intense desire to see and feel, unfettered and prolix curiosity have, after three centuries, degenerated into frenetic sensationalism. Indeed, one might say of modern man that he has an epidermis rather than a soul. The sensory power of his organism has developed enormously, but it has developed to the detriment of his spiritual faculty. We lack moral sense and perhaps also strength of imagination. The most characteristic literary works that we possess are simply amoral: The Crisis by Marco Praga, Pelléas et Mélisande by Maeterlinck, Crainquebille by Anatole France, and Smoke by Turgenev. Perhaps I have taken these somewhat at random. No matter: they will do to document the thesis which I uphold. A great modern artist who wishes to set the sentiment of love to music will reproduce, as far as his art allows him to, every pulsation, every tremor, the lightest shiver, the lightest sigh; the chords interweave and wage a secret war among themselves: one loves while acting cruelly, one suffers when and as much as one rejoices, anger and doubt f
lash in the eyes of lovers whose bodies are the one flesh. Put Tristan and Isolde beside the Inferno and you will realize how the poet’s hate follows its path from abyss to abyss in the wake of an increasingly intense idea, and the more intensely that the poet is consumed in the fire of the idea of hate, the fiercer becomes the art by which the artist communicates his passion to us. One is the art of circumstance, the other is ideational. In the high Middle Ages, the compiler of an atlas would not lose his composure when he found himself at a loss. He would write over the unknown area the words: Hic sunt leones. The idea of solitude, the terror of strange beasts, the unknown were enough for him. Our culture has an entirely different goal: we are avid for details. For this reason our literary jargon speaks of nothing else than local colour, atmosphere, atavism: whence the restless search for what is new and strange, the accumulation of details that have been observed or read, the parading of common culture.

  In strict terms the Renaissance should mean a rebirth after a death, an unexpected fecundity like that of Sarah after a long period of sterility. In fact, the Renaissance came about when art was dying of formal perfection, and thought was losing itself in vain subtleties. A poem would be reduced to an algebraic problem, put forth and resolved into human symbols in accordance with the rules. A philosopher was a learned sophist who, for all that he preached the word of Jesus to the crowd, would, like Bellarmine or Giovanni Mariana, strive to construct a moral defence of tyrannicide The Renaissance arrived like a hurricane in the midst of all this stagnation, and throughout Europe a tumult of voices arose, and, although the singers no longer exist, their works may be heard just as the shells of the sea in which, if we put them up to our ear, we can hear the voice of the sea reverberating.

  Listening to it, it sounds like a lament: or at least, so our spirit interprets it. Strange indeed! All modern conquest, of the air, the land, the sea, disease, ignorance, melts, so to speak, in the crucible of the mind and is transformed into a little drop of water, into a tear. If the Renaissance did nothing else, it did much in creating within ourselves and our art a sense of pity for every being that lives and hopes and dies and deludes itself. In this at least we excel the ancients: in this the popular journalist is greater than the theologian.

  James Joyce

  On the Moral Right of Authors

  A particular point in the history of the publication of Ulysses in the United States seems to me both interesting and noteworthy: it makes explicit one aspect of an author’s right over his work which has not been brought to light until now. The importation of Ulysses had been forbidden since 1922, and this ban was not lifted until 1934. In such circumstances it had been impossible to secure copyright for the United States. In 1925 an unscrupulous American publisher circulated a truncated edition of Ulysses over which the author, unable to secure copyright, had no control. An international protest signed by 167 writers was published and legal proceedings were begun. The result of these proceedings was the judgement delivered at a sitting of the Supreme Court of New York on 27 December 1928, a judgement which forbade the defendants (the publishers) ‘from using the name of the plaintiff (Joyce), first, in any journal, periodical or other publication published by them; second, in relation to any book, piece of writing, manuscript, understood to be the work entitled Ulysses’ (Joyce against Two Worlds Monthly and Samuel Roth, II Dep. Supreme Court New York, 27 December 1928).

  It is, I believe, possible to reach a judicial conclusion from this judgement to the effect that, while unprotected by the written law of copyright and even if it is banned, a work belongs to its author by virtue of a natural right and that thus the law can protect an author against the mutilation and the publication of his work just as he is protected against the misuse that can be made of his name.

  Joyce’s grave, Fluntern Cemetery - Zurich, Switzerland

  The famous writer Ezra Pound visiting Joyce’s grave