BOOKS AND ARTS JULY 12, 2012
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James Joyce: A New Biography
By Gordon Bowker
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 608 pp., $35)
THERE ARE CERTAIN artistic geniuses who demand that we should know their lives in detail, since for them the story of their lives is a living component of thewider story of their art. In this new biography of James Joyce—the first major one since Richard Ellmann’s monumental Life, now fifty years old—we encounter again an oft-told tale. Here is the brilliantly gifted youth who makes the Daedelian flight from mother, church, and homeland to a nomadic life of “silence, exile and cunning” in order to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, a superhuman struggle that culminates in the triumphant production of a modernist masterpiece, Ulysses; then follows a seventeen-year monk-like dedication to the writing of what will eventually be Finnegans Wake, a book the likes of which has never been seen before and will not be seen again, a darkling history of the world told in a single night; and at the last, worn down by the demands of his calling, the artist-saint flies by the nets of mere mortality and is assumed into the empyrean of unending fame.
There is another version of the story, which Gordon Bowker slyly draws to our attention while yet observing the common pieties of the Joyce legend. His Joyce is not only Finnegan, the sleeping giant with his head at Howth who cradles the city of Dublin in his belly, but also a drink-sodden sentimentalist, an egoist racked by uncertainties, a tireless self-promoter, a bad parent, a lifelong sponger, a dandy prone to pratfalls who many a night fetches up dead drunk in the gutter. This Joyce is an epic figure tricked out in the costume of Chaplin’s tramp, the Joyce who happily acknowledged that he was more Leopold Bloom than Stephen Dedalus, and who assured anyone who would listen that he was a joker—a great joker, as he said—at the world’s expense.
The Dublin into which he was born, on February 2, 1882, had seen better days. Once the proud second city of the British Empire, it was now a shabby backwater living on its wits, in all senses of the phrase. But Joyce loved his “Dear Dirty Dumpling,” and throughout his life he kept the image of the place inviolate in his imagination. He was immensely proud of his family, despite the Joyces’ unremarkable social origins. His father’s people hailed from Cork, but James Joyce claimed their deeper roots were in the so-called Joyce Country of County Galway in the west of Ireland—the west was very important for Joyce, not least because Nora Barnacle, the love of his life, was a Galway girl—and, even farther back, in the Scandinavia of the sagas and the Norse legends that are woven so closely into the tapestry of Finnegans Wake. But his mother’s family, the Murrays, were Dubliners through and through, although they were never quite as significant for James as the rakish and (initially at least) well-to-do Joyces.
At an early age young James was sent as a boarder to the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College, in County Kildare. His education there is another important strand in the Joyce story, made famous of course in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce and the Jesuits would seem to have been made for each other, and the boy, although he was often unhappy, thrived under their finical care—not for nothing does Buck Mulligan in the opening pages of Ulysses address Stephen mockingly as a “jejune Jesuit.” After Clongowes and, later, Belvedere, another Jesuit school, Joyce went on to the Royal—later the National—University, founded by Cardinal Newman, which in those days was also run by the clergy.
He was a hard-working student, with a dazzling gift for languages—he taught himself Dano-Norwegian in order to read Ibsen in the original—but if he was a budding Dr. Jekyll he was also Mr. Hyde, a precocious hedonist with a taste for voluptuous sin. He was in his middle teens when on his way home from the theater one night he lost his virginity to a prostitute. The play he had been to see was called Sweet Briar, and no doubt he was pleased later on to discover that “sweetbriar” is not only a kind of wild rose but was also, as Bowker points out, a rather lovely Elizabethan term for female pubic hair. All his life Joyce had a charmed way of happening on such happy linguistic coincidences.
IN HIS COLLEGE YEARS he began to lead a life of serious dissipation, drinking heavily and frequenting the stews in Monto, Dublin’s red-light district surrounding Montgomery Street. By day he was deciding to become a doctor—perhaps, one might unkindly think, on the principle that as a physician he would be able to heal himself, for it seems likely that he contracted some kind of venereal complaint on one or more of his forays into Nighttown. Yet he did not care to follow his studies in Dublin, and wrote instead to the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris requesting a place there. In preparation for his first escape attempt he did the rounds of his literary acquaintances in search of support. A letter he wrote to Lady Gregory is a splendid early example of the peculiar mixture of hauteur and whining self-regard in which throughout his life he would couch his begging letters. He was going friendless, he told her, and alone into a strange country, and asked for any help she could give him. “I shall try myself against the powers of the world,” he wrote to her. “All things are inconstant except the faith of the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.”
Lady Gregory, ignoring the grandiloquence, alerted Yeats to the young man’s plight, and also arranged for him to meet J.M. Synge, an old Paris hand, and gave him the names of some others who might help, the majority of whom he would later lampoon in his writings. As Richard Ellmann drily observed, “all were to discover that [Joyce] was not a man to be helped with impunity.” There was plenty of practical advice on offer, but no mention of monetary aid, which was what Joyce was really after.
Undaunted, on the evening of December 1, 1902, he embarked from Kingstown pier—that “disappointed bridge,” as Stephen Dedalus calls it in Ulysses—and, having breakfasted the next morning in London with Yeats, crossed on the ferry to Dieppe and from there took the train to Paris, City of Light, where things went rather darkly for the young man. There were difficulties in registering at the medical faculty—he soon gave up the notion of becoming a doctor; his little room at the Hôtel Corneille was bitterly cold, and his scant resources forced him often to go hungry. Yet he persevered, despite homesickness and occasional failures of nerve. The frugal idyll ended in early April, when a telegram arrived from Dublin: “Mother dying come home father.” The nets he had sought to fly by, young Joyce discovered, had an exceedingly fine mesh. He had ascended the heady heights of freedom, though, and savored the experience.
Back in Dublin for the death-watch, Joyce diverted himself in the company of his old drinking pals, including the egregious Oliver St. John Gogarty, who would be portrayed in Ulysses as the treacherous buffoon Buck Mulligan. The year or so that Joyce spent in Dublin between the death of his mother and his second, permanent departure was a period of loafing and drunkenness, and it might have been the end of him as an artist—many a promising Irish writer has wasted his sweetness upon the desert air of Dublin’s pubs—had he not one day, in June 1904, spotted on Nassau Street a tall, handsome, auburn-haired young woman who worked as a chambermaid in nearby Finn’s Hotel. This was Nora Barnacle—when Joyce’s father heard her name he remarked, “Well, she’ll always stick to him.” Accosted by the young man in the yachting cap, she agreed to a date. As Bowker, who has an intermittent weakness for cliché, remarks, “Unknowingly, Nora Barnacle from Galway had made a date with history.”
At twenty, Nora was two years younger than Joyce, yet for all Joyce’s wide reading and his recent venture into foreign parts he was far less well apprised of the ways of the world than she was: life will withhold few secrets from a chambermaid. It would be hard to exaggerate the momentousness of this encounter, as Joyce acknowledged by setting Ulysses on the day of that first date—June 16, 1904. Before it, Joyce was an overly precocious aesthete with a taste for debauchery, but Nora took him in hand, figuratively and literally, and made of him a man, and an artist.
In the coming years it would be Nora, with her simplicity and shrewdness, her generosity of spirit and, above all, her earthiness, who would show him the direction his art must follow. Without her there would probably have been no Molly Bloom or Anna Livia Plurabelle, and perhaps no Leopold Bloom or Henry Chimpden Earwicker, or even no Stephen Dedalus. “Her disposition, as I see it, is much nobler than my own,” Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus, “her love also is greater than mine for her. I admire her and I love her and I trust her.” Within a few months of their meeting, the pair departed Dublin on October 8 to begin their European life together. It was to be one of the most remarkable marriages in the history of literature. Joyce’s father was right: she stuck to him.
In his unfussy way Bowker gives a sound account of Joyce’s maturation as an artist, one who could weather the many vicissitudes, rejections, and appalling bouts of ill-health with which he had to contend. He was an extraordinarily mercurial mixture, displaying an unremitting dedication to his art and at the same time an almost anarchic disregard for his own person and for the sensitivities of those around him—reading his friend Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses,” he remarked to the author, “I never knew you could write so well. It must be due to your association with me.” He used people without compunction. Stuart Gilbert, the Englishman whom Joyce coerced into writing a book on Ulysses, frequently cast a distinctly cold eye on the master:
He got people . . . to follow him wherever he wanted them to accompany him; boring plays and operas, dull expensive restaurants; to [cancel] their arrangements if he wanted their assistance in some trivial, easily-postponed task; to run errands for him, pull strings for him, undertake delicate and distasteful missions which exposed them to snubs, rebuffs and ridicule at his bidding.
Ezra Pound, who gave Joyce much help in the early days, saw through the “shell of cantankerous Irishman” to the “author of Chamber Music [Joyce’s early, insipid volume of verse], the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems.” This is probably accurate. There was a side of Joyce that was forever the Edwardian poetaster, the lover of sentimental ballads, the flâneur complete with cane and boater strolling on the promenade, appreciatively eyeing those lovely seaside girls and at the same time scheming how to wheedle a florin out of one or other of them. Rebecca West was on to something when, having also read Joyce’s poems (which Pound advised should be put away in the family photograph album along with the ancestral portraits), she claimed to have discovered that Joyce was a “great man who is entirely without taste.” And she was not speaking of his manners in the drawing room.
The flight from Dublin marked the close of the formative and most vigorous part of Joyce’s life. Thereafter there was the usual dullness: hard labor with the pen, the struggle to earn a crust, the wrangles with publishers, the world’s failure of comprehension, the adverse reviews, and, at last, the inevitable triumph. Bowker does his best to keep up the pace, but the interest mainly lies in painful matters: Joyce’s chronic and agonizing eye troubles, his stormy relations with his long-suffering and astonishingly generous benefactor Harriet Weaver, his son Giorgio’s fecklessness and his beloved daughter Lucia’s madness. The difficulty for a biographer is that the life of a writer is just not exciting, since it is so much a life of and in the mind.
A PART OF JOYCE’S greatness lies in the fact that, paradoxical as it may seem, he did not have a fertile literary imagination, as he recognized and frequently acknowledged. He was an Aristotelian to the tips of his writing fingers, and based all his art in actuality. Can there ever have been an author who incorporated so many real, living people into his fiction? He famously told Frank Budgen that he “wanted to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”
Joyce the hard-headed novelist loved the world as it is, not as Joyce the swooning versifier would have wished it to be. The general reader treasures Ulysses not as a modernist experiment, but for the luminous moments of ordinariness that it so vividly and movingly captures, those epiphanies of the actual: the young men at their edgy breakfast in the Martello Tower, Stephen teaching in the classroom, Bloom on his perambulations, above all the loving evocation of Poldy’s and Molly’s morning rituals. Of course Joyce was a master of language; of course he was a great manipulator of forms—“I am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the greatest, in the world”; of course he transformed the modern novel, if indeed he did not kill it stone dead. But surely it is when he is at his simplest and most lucid that we love him best.
Such a suggestion would not have pleased him, despite his frequent protestations of being the quintessential homme moyen sensuel. It delighted him to be the literary lion, an object of veneration and awe. Stuart Gilbert was not the only one to leave acid accounts of his vanity and his need for adoration. Harold Nicolson, who knew a monster of ego when he met one, wrote in 1934 after a visit to Joyce in his Paris flat that “one has the feeling that he is surrounded with a group of worshippers and that he has little contact with reality.” There are frequent accounts from the 1930s of Joyce basking in the midst of fawning bands of sycophants murmuring quotations from his work and sighing over the beauty of his prose. Yet one cannot help but regret that he did not heed the warnings against “bad companions” that no doubt the Jesuits years before had dinned into him. Pound was one such, with his call to “Make it new!” when, as even T.S. Eliot recognized, what is to be primarily valued in art is precisely the maintenance and furtherance of tradition.
In Ulysses we discern the ghost of a great realist novel, the pinnacle and culmination of the nineteenth-century form—the book that might have been, had Joyce closed his ears to much of the modernist claptrap buzzing round him and reined in his innovative urges. Are we really as impressed as we pretend to be by the gestatory bravura of the “Oxen of the Sun” episode, or by the codscientific interrogations of “Ithaca,” or by the gigantism of “Cyclops”? Ulysses is a masterly work, protean, funny, occasionally moving, yet who but the most dedicated Joycean could disagree with Roddy Doyle’s daring assertion that it would have benefitted from the attentions of a good editor?
Such notions will seem heresy to many, while others will say they are simply the same old reactionary objections that outdated curmudgeons such as Shaw and H.G. Wells mounted when the book first appeared—and perhaps they are. But one puts them forward more in sorrow than anything else. The stylistic experiments of Ulysses led straight on to Finnegans Wake, that magnificent disaster, Joyce’s final gift to the professors and the hobbyists, from which so many of the rest of us turn away, empty-handed, in bafflement and melancholy regret. As Parnell was to Joyce, so Joyce himself is to us disappointed ones: the lost leader. Reading of his final years of triumph and renown, one recalls Braque answering a critic’s request for an opinion of his old friend Picasso: “Pablo? Oh, Pablo used to be a good painter—now he’s just a genius.”
Gordon Bowker has written a solidly readable life of one of the great figures of the twentieth century. Although in his preface he claims that he will draw on recent products of the Joyce industry and, rather mysteriously, “more recently discovered material,” in an attempt “to go beyond the mere facts,” the fact is he has not much to add to Ellmann’s halfcentury-old biography. Yet if it succeeds in bringing new and younger readers to these marvelous fictions, his book is to be warmly welcomed.
John Banville is the author, most recently, of The Infinities (Knopf). This article appeared in the August 2, 2012 issue of the magazine.
15 comments
Good essay on Joyce. From what I have been reading people would be better off reading the earlier bio of James Joyce by Richard Ellmann which was published in 1959. Newer doesn't mean better.
- arnon1
July 16, 2012 at 6:53pm
So there are contending biographical Joyces. For those interested in literary biography that's well and good and let them soldier on, dueling swords gleaming and bloodied in the hot sun of their own scholarly febrility. I dispute the premise of this otherwise engaging and knowing review: ...THERE ARE CERTAIN artistic geniuses who demand that we should know their lives in detail, since for them the story of their lives is a living component of the wider story of their art... This is another iteration of the biographical fallacy. A good critic with some rudimentary understanding of Joyce's life, his Ireland and a few highlights of his life, will write better literary criticism than a poorer critic armed to the teeth with biographical information and interpretation. So for as much as I may be interested in Joyce's life, such understanding is decidedly not a living component of the wider story of his art insofar as his the wider story of his art consists of a profound understanding of his texts. We need to distinguish sharply between literary scholarship, one commendable thing, and literary criticism, something categorically and commendably else.
- basman
July 21, 2012 at 5:17pm
Basman “So there are contending biographical Joyces. For those interested in literary biography that's well and good and let them soldier on, dueling swords gleaming and bloodied in the hot sun of their own scholarly febrility.” There are no contending biographies. The Richard Ellmann biography is the only biography worth reading for those interested in a scholarly close reading of his texts. People write biographies for all sorts of reasons, scholarly ones, commercial ones, for the sake of gossip, etc. Joyce has attracted fewer non scholarly biographers than writers such as Shakespeare, or George Eliot. The reason for reading a biography, if the life of an author is available to scholars, is to be able to look into a fictional text more closely. Anyone can read a novel such as Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s Middlemarch but only those who know that Joyce had a lifelong interest in Shakespeare will be able to make sense of his uses of the playwright in his fiction. This is even truer for Middlemarch since the novel is more accessible to the average reader and leaves a false impression that one need not learn anything about the author’s intellectual background to understand it. And yes, one can comprehend the plot of the novel without knowing that the author was involved with August Comte’s positive philosophy but knowing that offers a dimension of understanding that is absent from such knowledge. With Ulysses trying to understand why he made one of his main protagonist Jewish and an outsider in Dublin society requires an acquaintance with Joyce life in and outside Dublin. Close readings are only as close as the knowledge one brings to the text. Looking at structure, form, themes, use of metaphoric language is part of the process of understanding a novel. However, knowing about the life of the author, the history and politics of the period enriches our understanding of form and themes one gets from close readings.
- arnon1
July 21, 2012 at 6:34pm
Any good biography is also a biography of the work the artist/writer produces. It differs from mere "close readings" in that it opens the work to the world as opposed to closing it upon itself.
- arnon1
July 21, 2012 at 7:36pm
....Anyone can read a novel such as Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s Middlemarch but only those who know that Joyce had a lifelong interest in Shakespeare will be able to make sense of his uses of the playwright in his fiction. This is even truer for Middlemarch since the novel is more accessible to the average reader and leaves a false impression that one need not learn anything about the author’s intellectual background to understand it.... I'll make a few brief points in response. I'll plead a little guilty (like being a little pregnant) to being in one specific sense a tad too binary in opposing scholarship and criticism and can agree that the more background one brings to one's reading, the richer can be that reading. (I'd also agree that for some writers like Blake whose poetry is so much the elaboration of his particuliar and idiosyncratc system of thought that knowing it is essential to understanding Blake.) Copping to that though, and leaving aside the noted exception, doesn't, I'd argue, dislodge my point that such knowledge is not necessary for superb literary criticism and can even be a distraction. To repeat myself, knowing Joyce's use of Shakespeare or Eliot's intellectual background or Shakespeare's use of the revenger tragedies for Hamlet will not perforce make for comparatively better criticism in a weaker reader than a stronger, more penetrating reader less knowing of those matters. Also let's not confuse a good critic's criticism being enhanced by what he knows with the idea that knowing of those matters is indispensable to his criticism. What is indispensable is his coherent and penetrating reading of the text, of getting textually down to the very essence of the text's meaning, penetrating its world. Without getting there, scholarship, for illuminating meaning, is unanchored talk. ...Close readings are only as close as the knowledge one brings to the text. Looking at structure, form, themes, use of metaphoric language is part of the process of understanding a novel. However, knowing about the life of the author, the history and politics of the period enriches our understanding of form and themes one gets from close readings... And I'd say about this, again differentiating between enhanced good criticism and what is necessary for good criticism, that looking, as you put it, "at structure, form, themes, use of metaphoric language" as proxy for attending generally but closely to the text itself and putting it all interpretively together precedes the other stuff that may take, unless one is careful, criticism beyond its own boundary and into history and biography and so on, rich in themselves but ultimately something different. Finally, I can see a scholar immersed in a particular author or even a critic committed to a certain system or doctrine of what comprises literature unable to read a text in relation to its own emotional and intellectual power--too many presuppositions and preconceptions possibly occluding that.
- basman
July 21, 2012 at 10:27pm
"I'd argue, dislodge my point that such knowledge is not necessary for superb literary criticism and can even be a distraction." This begs the question: what is great literary criticism. Do you know any "great literary criticism" of Joyce's Ulysses that doesn't show a thorough knowledge of both the text as well as the socio-historical background and know of Joyce's literary intent to create parallels between Bloom/Odysseus on the one hand and Daedalus/Telemachus on the other hand; or Molly Bloom/Penelope? This knowledge isn't "a distraction" it is essential to knowing what Joyce was trying to do in his novel. The close reading which leaves out a work's background was invented by Professor's in order to make literature interesting and accessible to students without the necessary time or desire to devote themselves to reading as a way of life.
- arnon1
July 22, 2012 at 12:11am
I want to say that what I said begs no question in either sense of that often misused phrase. I'll repeat what I said In begging no question by quoting a wise man who once wrote, ....engaged literary criticsm takes a position and argues for it. It argues for what it thinks, and says so clearly and accessibly, forming what it thinks into a coherent whole. Engaged literary criticism defends its position. Seeing form as world, form as meaning, all resonating in theme, literary criticism is most engaged, meaningful and resonant when it grapples with form as world. For that brings the critic to the very heart of literary meaning, in which form and content are one, which is to say, literary texts' very nature and essence... That done greatly is great literary criticism. Other stuff, I may say later.
- basman
July 22, 2012 at 1:10am
basman @ 07/22/2012 - 1:10am EDT What you said is besides the point. I ask you again: Do you know any "great literary criticism" of Joyce's Ulysses that doesn't show a thorough knowledge of both the text as well as its literary background?
- arnon1
July 22, 2012 at 8:46am
Well, you asked me what great criticism is and I tried to answer you. Disagree with my answer, but it's hardly "beside the point." It's your point. The answer to your other question is no. But what turns on that? I'm saying a better critic, a stronger reader, will do better criticism than someone more scholarly who's a weaker reader. Do you dispute the sheer logic of this? And if you do not, then what are we talking about? For it follows from that that scholarly expertise isn't necessary in a great critic. Literary scholars reconstruct the historical milieu out of which texts emerge and follow the history of texts once produced. They're not primarily concerned with is the value or meaning or interpretation of the text. The further we go back in literary historical time, the more necessarily this is the case and the stronger the distinction between critic and scholar stands out. Literary criticism concerns itself with meaning and value, rather than with historical origin. It explores the text itself in order to illuminate its meaning. It explores possible ways of reading and evaluating. It requires thenability to read intelligently. That can be independent of any special training and so good literary criticism can come from almost any quarter. So, to say again, specialized education as a literary scholar will not necessarily make one a better critic than one who comes to a particular text for the first time. And I say, again, in some instances, someone without literary training can be a better critic than a qualified scholar (whose scholarship can conceivably, again, get in the way of criticism.) As long as it's meaningful to distinguish between literary criticism and literary scholarship, superior Joycean criticism doesn't "demand," as Banville lightly suggests it does, that we should know (Joyce's life) in detail.
- basman
July 22, 2012 at 10:13am
You said Basman above: "We need to distinguish sharply between literary scholarship, one commendable thing, and literary criticism, something categorically and commendably else." Then you repeat the claim: "Literary criticism concerns itself with meaning and value, rather than with historical origin. It explores the text itself in order to illuminate its meaning. It explores possible ways of reading and evaluating. It requires thenability to read intelligently. That can be independent of any special training and so good literary criticism can come from almost any quarter." You oppose literary criticism to literary scholarship. I disagree that these two endeavors are "categorically different." Hence my question which you answered in the negative: Do you know any "great literary criticism" of Joyce's Ulysses that doesn't show a thorough knowledge of both the text as well as its literary background? Even the criticism of the most coherent of textualists Paul de Man or or Cleanth Brooks is informed by a thorough knowledge of literary history as well as the history of criticism. There is no such thing as "pure literary criticism" sans, literary history, sans knowledge of semantic history, sans biography, sans rhetoric, sans period history, sans anything external.
- arnon1
July 22, 2012 at 10:56am
I agree that there is no pure literary criticism. But it's nonetheless a definable mode of endeavor distinguishable from scholarship, biography, literary theory and other modes of reckoning with literature. It respectfully doesn't follow from lack of "purity" that literary criticism doesn't have a discernible and coherent purpose and methodology. Analogously, there's an approach to interpreting your country's and states' statutes and Consitutions called textualism. It claims to be an specifically definable mode of interpretation. It's not a "pure" approach devoid of necessarty overlapping with, say, purposiveness or consequentialism, but the overlapping does not vitiate the distinctiveness of the approach. (I'm reading Reading Law now so textualism is on my mind. Nevertheless the arguments for textualism are illuminative of the specific nature of literary criticism and the arguments for it as a specific disiplne.) That lack of "purity" doesn't vitiate that specificity. That's the bane of your argument. Not for nothing is, literary criticism called, or at least it used to be in my day, practical criticism. And what exactly were the New Critics reacting against if not literary scholarship which saw the work as something to be mined historically about its times akin to a kind of archeology and biographically about the author and not as an autonomous work of art with its own specific properties? That conception until post modernism drove literary criticism. As I noted the distinction is stronger the further back we go in literary history where we need schoalrship to recover texts and make them accessible. But unless something has changed that I don't know about the distinction between criticsm and schoalrship still holds. And, I'd repeat, a better reader but weaker scholar will be a better critic than a better scholar but weaker reader or for that matter than a better theorist but weaker reader, The unique enterprise of literary criticism calls on skills specifically geared to the demands of its discipline. (And I have tried briefly to sketch from my perspective what that discipline does at it's best.)
- basman
July 22, 2012 at 3:26pm
" It respectfully doesn't follow from lack of "purity" that literary criticism doesn't have a discernible and coherent purpose and methodology." Since I never argued that literary criticism "doesn't have a discernible and coherent purpose and methodology." I don't know why you imply that I did. The purpose of literary criticism is to understand textual meaning or rather meanings. There have been a number of methodologies proposed which range from approaching the text thorough its rhetorical strategies seen in the effect is has on its readers (audience oriented theories---often referred to as "pragmatic approaches.") to seeing the text as the representation of an outward reality (the mimetic theories) to reading a work as the expression of the life of an author real or imagined such as Homer or Shakespeare writers we know very little about (these theories are referred to as the "expressive theories. Ultimately, biographical method has its place in the many roads open to us for understanding literary texts. Of course many if not most biographies these days sensationalize its subject and are of very limited utility for the critic which is what the latest biography by Gordon Bowker does. This is why I said that Ellmann's biography is still the best and most scholarly life we have. The new biography may be fun to read but I doubt it supplant the earlier one. The purpose of a biography is to help us understand the texts a writer produces and will always be of secondary importance for the scholarly critic of literature.
- arnon1
July 22, 2012 at 3:52pm
Fair enough. I think we've both said on this what we wanted to. I'll leave it there to save repeating myself. Thanks for the exchange. It's always thought provoking.
- basman
July 22, 2012 at 8:33pm
Too bad you have such a lawyerly view of discussions (this isn't a criticism since you are a lawyer) about literature and other non-legal matters. We might have explored some of subtleties of the topic. For that to take place one can’t have an absolute point of view about a given subject. However, as you said we each had our say.
- arnon1
July 22, 2012 at 11:45pm
Moving on: I am fascinated by the titles editors choose for the articles they publish. I doubt that John Banville came up with the title of his article with its solecisms: “The Brilliant, Pathetic Life of James Joyce” posted on the front page of the magazine. Joyce was a brilliant writer but his life (is any writer’s?) was neither brilliant nor pathetic. Why assume that a gifted author should be blessed with an exultant existence. Was Shakespeare’s or George Eliot’s? The title given on the page in which the article was posted: “The Lost Leader” alludes to one of the final paragraphs in the text that compares Joyce to Parnell. I wonder to how many people John Banville’s sentence refers. Who is the “to us” in the sentence a reference to? “The stylistic experiments of Ulysses led straight on to Finnegans Wake, that magnificent disaster, Joyce’s final gift to the professors and the hobbyists, from which so many of the rest of us turn away, empty-handed, in bafflement and melancholy regret. As Parnell was to Joyce, so Joyce himself is to us disappointed ones: the lost leader.” Joyce’s writing was magnificent and had he written only Dubliners or only ‘The Portrait of the Artist” he still would have been considered a great writer. But to this American reader he was no “lost leader.”
- arnon1
July 23, 2012 at 12:20am