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The Aesthetics of James Joyce PDF

189 Pages·1992·7.16 MB·English
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THE AESTHETICS OF JAMES JOYCE THE AESTHETICS OF Jamesjoyce by JACQUES AUBERT THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS Baltimore & London FOR VONETTE AND LAURENT with love Originally published as Introduction a UEsthetique de James Joyce © Librairie Marcel Didier, Paris, 1973 This revised English-language edition © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The Johns Hopkins University Press 701 West 40th Street Baltimore, Maryland 21211-2190 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aubert, Jacques. [Introduction a I'esthetique de James Joyce. English] The aesthetics of James Joyce / Jacques Aubert. p. cm. Translation of: Introduction a resthetique de James Joyce. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8018-4349-9 1. Joyce, James, 1882-1941—Aesthetics. 2. Aesthetics, Modern—20th century. I. Tide. PR6019.O9Z5256513 1992 823'.912—dc20 91-45690 CONTENTS PREFACE Vll LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ix Prolegomena 1 ONE Explorations 11 TWO The Dramatic Idea and Beyond 24 THREE Ibsen: Hail and Farewell 46 FOUR "James Clarence Mangan" 62 FIVE The Paris Notebook 83 six The Pola Notebook and Aquinas 100 Conclusion 112 V CONTENTS APPENDIX A Aristotle: The Paris Sources 127 APPENDIX B Quotations from Aristotle in Joyce's 1903-1904 Notebooks 131 APPENDIX C The Pola Notebook 138 NOTES 141 BIBLIOGRAPHY 161 INDEX 173 VI PREFACE JAMES JOYCE produced a body of creative masterpieces which changed the course of literary history and, by the same token, the relationship of both writer and reader to literary texts. Remarkably enough, the general reader most often does not know, and the pedagogue makes haste to forget, that Joyce had been at pains to create a critical concept of the epiphany Not that this fact did not have the widest circulation, but it has re­ mained isolated and has never been brought to bear on—or become part of—more general critical systems or historical re­ views, partly because it has proved practically useless in assess­ ing Joyce's originality and achievement. Another reason may be the uneasy conscience of critics, who feel guilty about looking over Joyce's shoulder: for Joyce's only mention and definition of the epiphany, by now well publicized, occurs in Stephen Hero, the early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Joyce energetically refused to publish and which saw the light of day only after his death. The paradox, then, is that Joyce's only contribution to criti­ cal theory lies in a submerged part of his production and that this disappearance is not accidental. His attitude suggests de­ liberate rejection, the final gesture perhaps in an individual adventure. In other words, what requires attention is the epiphany as manifestation of an absence in a theoretical inves­ tigation. The aim of this book, accordingly, is to take seriously the available early material, with a view to discerning, among the tangle of juvenile enthusiasms and tentative constructions, the secret line of research which was specifically Joyce's own. vu PREFACE The task is a difficult one. We suffer from an overabundance of possible sources. For we may safely assume, from internal as well as external evidence, that Joyce had read all that a brilliant young student at the end of the nineteenth century was likely to read of current critical literature, whether romantic (e.g., Coleridge and Shelley) or postromantic (e.g., Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde). No doubt one must be wary of words such as crit ical or criticism, which suggest topical—if not contingent— journalistic activity, or a very specific philosophical position that Joyce scarcely mentioned, a fortiori held. This does not mean that we must follow him blindfolded when he poses as an Aristotelian or a Thomist, or both. And yet the word aes thetic, which he did use, raises the problem of his relation, as a turn-of-the-century author, to Aestheticism and the so-called Aesthetic school. Although the movement had already run its course when he began to write, its impact and part of its legacy certainly oudasted its demise—and that of Oscar Wilde. In short, I try to steer between the rocks of literary tradition and history and the fascinating maelstrom of philosophical speculation, the aim ultimately being to discover the rationale of what was for Joyce, at the outset of his career, a deeply en­ grossing line of personal investigation. Vlll xM&z ABBREVIATIONS cw The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Edited by Ells­ worth Mason and Richard Ellmann. New ^fork: Viking Press, 1959. Letters Joyce, James. Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Stuart Gilbert (vol. 1, 1957) and Richard Ell­ mann (vols. 2 and 3, 1966). 3 vols. New York: Viking Press, 1966. PA Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The Definitive Text, Corrected from the Dub lin Holograph. By Chester G. Anderson and edited by Richard Ellmann. New "fork: Viking Press, 1964. SH Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. Edited by John Slo- cum and Herbert Cahoon. New Ifork: New Di­ rections, 1944; rev. ed., 1963. U Joyce, James. Ulysses. New "fork: Random House, 1934; reset and corrected, 1961. Workshop The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for (A Portrait of the Artist as a Toung Man." Collected and edited by Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965. MBK Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother's Keeper. Edited, with an Introduction, by Richard Ellmann, and with a Preface by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1958. IX ABBREVIATIONS Bosanquet Bosanquet, Bernard. A History of Aesthetic. 1892. Reprint. London: Macmillan, 1904. Butcher Butcher, S. H. AristotWs Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. London: Macmillan, 1895, 1897; rev. ed., 1902. Oeuvres Joyce, James. Oeuvres. Edited by Jacques Aubert. Vol. 1. P&ris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1982. x

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"Readers who missed the 1973 French edition of this book will be surprised and delighted with the author's review of source-figures behind Joyce's aesthetics. Some of this material, though familiar in general, is now traced with unprecedented depth and sophistication; some of it is new; and the impl
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