James Joyce: Notes (2) - People in Joyce [I]: Literary Figures

Witty Aristotle (1): Joyce translated the French versions of Aristotle’s sentences in De Anima, taking J. Barthélemy-Sainte-Hilaire’s Psychologie d’Aristote, Traite de l’Ame (1847) - otherwise known as De Anima or the Psychology of Aristotle - as his text. Herbert Gorman copied some of these from the “Paris Notebook” in his authorised biography of Joyce, viz.,

‘The soul is the first entelechy of any naturally organic body.’

‘That which acts is superior to that which suffers.’

‘Only when it is separate from all things is the intellect really itself and this intellect separate from all things is immortal and divine.’

‘The principle that hates is not different from the principle that loves.’

‘The intellectual soul is the form of forms.’

‘Speculation is above practice.’

‘Necessity is that by virtue of which it is impossible that a thing should be otherwise.’

‘God is the eternal perfect animal.’

‘Nature, it seems, is not a collection of unconnected episodes like a bad drama.’

See the full list of Joyce’s Aristotelian sentences as given in Fran O’Rourke, Joyce’s Quotations from Aristotle: “Allwisest Stagyrite” (National Library of Ireland 2004) - under Quotations, supra.

Note: Aristotle’s sentences, as above, are also given in W. D. Ross’s translation-edition of The Works of Aristotle - e.g.,: ‘The soul is an actuality of formulable essence of something that possesses the potentiality of being besouled.’ (De Anima, 1.2.414a); and: ‘As the hand is the instrument of instruments, so the mind [nous] is the form of forms, and sensation the form of sensibles.’ (De Anima, 1.3.423c.)

Witty Aristotle (2): Several of the sentences quoted in Gorman found their way into the “Proteus”, chapter of Ulysses, viz.,

Others are woven into the opening scene of “Circe”, where Stephen Dedalus rehashes his aesthetic philosophy for his Lynch: ‘So that gesture, not music, not odours, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm’ - a pronouncement that earns from Lynch the cynical rejoinder, ‘Pornosophical philotheology. Metaphysics in Mecklenburg street!’ (Ulysses, [1922] Bodley Head Edn., 1965, p.564; Corrected Edn., ed. Gabler, 1984, p.623.)

Witty Aristotle (3): Note that the term entelechy is also employed by Thomas Mann in the opening Dr. Faustus to describe Leverkuhn's syphilitic spirochete - rendered as the specific form of his pact with the devil which enables him to live some years as a composer of genius. (See Penguin trans. edn., p.90.)

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Maestro di color che sanno - The Italian phrase quoted by Stephen Dedalus in the opening paragraphy of the “Proteus” episode in Ulysses (Bodley Head. 1965 Edn., p.45) - meaning ‘the master of those who know’ is Dante’s honorific for Aristotle in the “Inferno” (Divine Comedy, Canto IV, ll.131-32.) [See also John Barger's “Advanced Notes” - online; accessed 05.10.2001.]

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Witty Aristotle (3): Joyce calls Aristotle the Stagyrite in Ulysses at two points: ‘Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage, Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don’t forget Nell Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa. [Bodley Head Edn., 1968, p.261] Even the allwisest stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of love.’ [Ibid., 565]. Note that Samuel Taylor Coleridge also uses the formula ‘the wisest Stagyrite’ (Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, OUP 1907, Vol. I. p.71). In Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism the philosopher is similarly cited: “And all the wisdom of the Stagirite. / Enriched and beautified his studious mind.” [On Pope, see Brewer’s Dictionary of Fact and Fable, cited at “From Old Books” [online; 01.01.2009]

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Witty Aristotle (4): Jacques Aubert copied the sentences from Gorman in l’Esthetique de James Joyce (1973), giving the French of Saint-Hilaire also and noting that the Paris Notebook has since been lost (Ibid., p.129). However, the notebook is one of the texts discovered in the Paul Léon cache of Joyce papers acquired by the National Library of Ireland in 2002 [See NLI Papers in Notes, supra.]

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Saint Augustine: ‘It is abundantly clear that neither the future nor the past exist, and therefore it is not strictly accurate to say that there are three times, past, present, and future. It might be correct to say that there are three times, a present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things. Some such different times do exist in the mind, but nowhere else that I can see. The present of past things is the memory; the present of present things is direct perception; and the present of future things is expectation.’ (The Confessions of St. Augustine, Bk XI No. 20; Penguin ed.

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Thomas Aquinas (1): Nihil in intellectu quod no prius in sensibus fuerit [There in nothing in the mind which was not first in the senses.] (Aristotle, De Anima , 432a, 7-8; Aquinas’s Commentary on De Anima cites the line at a.16.) Cf. Contra Gentiles, 1.3: Nihil in intellectu [... &c.] / ‘Those things which do not fall under the senses cannot be apprehended by the human mind except in sofar as knowledge of them can be gathered from the senses.’ Cf. ‘The world, mind [is forever] under the ban of our infrarational senses’, Finnegans Wake [019.35-020.01].

Thomas Aquinas (2): Because the first principle of our knowledge is sense, it is necessary that we reduce to sense in some way all things about which we judge. (De Verititate , 12. 3, ad.2.)

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Thomas Aquinas (3) - his definition of beauty: ‘Nam ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur. Prima quidem integritas, sive perfectio (quae enim diminuta sunt hoc ipso turpia sunt), et debita proportio, sive consonantia; et iterum claritas habent colorem nitidus, pulchra esse dicuntur. (Summa Theologica, Tome 1, q.39, a. 8.) See Hugh Kenner’s remarks: ‘The “three things required for beauty” in St. Thomas Aquinas’s definition of beauty which Stephen Dedalus takes up in Stephen Hero and A Portrait are integritas consonantia claritas. Joyce seems to have met with them not in the “gorebellied tomes” of the original, as Stephen alleges, but in Rickaby’s General Metaphysics, which was required reading for philosophy classes at the Royal University, as Con Curran [points out].’ (Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, Bloomington: Indiana UP 1955, p.144f., cf. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 1968, p.64 [recte 35-36].) Note: COPAC John Rickaby, SJ, General Metaphysics [1st Edn. 1888; Stonyhurst Philosophical Series] (Longmans 1898 [3rd edn.]; other edns. in 1902, 1909, 1912, 1930 - all being reiss. of 3rd edn.), ix, 398pp.

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Thomas Aquinas (4): - Joyce held in Trieste a copy of Michael Maher, S.J., Psychology [Catholic Manuals of Philosophy Ser.] (NY: Benziger [num. edns. in 1890s], in which the Thomistic author writes: ‘[…] essence points to the reality of which the being is constituted’. Joyce has annotated this remark in the margin with the pencilled phrase, ‘acting totality’. (See Sheldon Brivic, Joyce the Creator, Wisconsin UP 1985, p.6; with ref. to Michael Patrick Gillespie, Catalogue of Joyce’s Trieste Library [UMC; forthcoming at date in 2003].)

Thomas Aquinas (5) - Rudolf Steiner remarks on Aquinas’s ‘truly theological theology of the Incarnation’ in The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (1946), p. 24.

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Thomas Aquinas (6) - see C. S. Lewis on Aquinas’s view of sexual intercourse in The Allegory of Love (1936): ‘[...] It will be seen that the medieval theory finds room for innocent sexuality: what it does not find room for is [17] passion, whether romantic or otherwise. It might almost be said that it denies to passion the indulgence which it reluctantly accords to appetite. In its Thomist form the theory acquits the carnal desire and the carnal pleasure, and finds the evil in the ligamentum rationis, the suspension of intellectual activity. This is almost the opposite of the view, implicit in so much romantic love poetry, that it is precisely passion which purifies; and the scholastic picture of unfallen sexuality - a picture of physical pleasure at the maximum and emotional disturbance at the minimum may suggest to us something much less like the purity of Adam in Paradise than the cold sensuality of Tiberius in Capri. It must be stated at once that this is entirely unjust to the scholastics. They are not talking about the same kind of passion as the romantics. The one party means merely an animal intoxication; the other believes, whether rightly or wrongly, in a “passion” which works a chemical change upon appetite and affection and turns them into a thing different from either. About passion in this sense Thomas Aquinas has naturally nothing to say - as he has nothing to say about the steam-engine. He had not heard of it. It was only coming into existence in his time, and finding its first expression in the poetry of courtly love.’ (p.17; for longer extract, see under C. S. Lewis, q.v., and attached.)

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St. John Chrysostom [or Chrysostomos] - the prelate whom Stephen prob. recalls in “Telemachus” - was a fourth-century father of the church and patriarch of Constantinople famed for the remark: ‘For where there is death, there too is sexual coupling; and where there is no death, there is no sexual coupling either.’ (See Marina Warner, First of All Her Sex, p.50 [in another connection] quoted in Susan Purser, UUC MA Diss., 2008.) In Weldon Thornton, Allusions in Ulysses (1961, 1968), the reference to Chrysostomos is conjecturally limited to the application of the literal meaning of his name - “golden-mouthed” (i.e. eloquent) to Malachi Mulligan/Gogarty and the resemblance of there names - viz., St. John Gogarty. (See Thornton, op. cit., Carolina UP 1968, p.12; Ulysses, 3.28.)

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Sir Thomas Browne (Religio medici, 1643): ‘For, as though there were a metempsychosis, and the soul of one man passed into another, opinions do find, after certain revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them. To see ourselves again, we need only look for Plato’s year: every man is not only himself; there have been many Diogeneses, and as many … Timons, though but few of that name; men are lived over again; the world is now as it was in ages past; there was none then, but there hath been some one since, that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self.’ Note: the passage is quoted by Richard Kain in Fabulous Voyager: James Joyce’s Ulysses (Chicago UP 1947), and offered as an expression of the philsophy of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, with the rider that ‘it is probably that Joyce read the following passage’ nothing the thematic importance and the recurrence of some words.’ (Kain, op. cit., p.214; see further under Commentary, Richard M. Kain, supra.)

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Joachim Abbas of Fiore [Flora]: The volume read by Joyce in Marsh’s Library was Vaticinia sive Prophetiae Abbatis Joachimi, et Anselmi Episcopi Marsicani (Venice 1589), the pseudo-Joachimist Pope Prophecies. He appears not to have read the Liber Concordie or the Exposition in Apocalypsim (both genuine Joachimist works, also held by Marsh’s Library). See Marjorie Reeves & Warwick Gould pp.271-8, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Oxford: Clarendon [1986] rev. edn. 2001). The Pope Prophecies referred to in Ulysses is illustrated on ibid., p.277.

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Dante Alighieri [1]: Matthew Hodgart notes that Dante used an astronomical framework for the whole of the Divine comedy and ends each book with the word stars. Thus Inferno ends ‘Equinidi uscimmo a riveder le stelle [and thence we came out to see the stars again]’ while the Purgatory ends ‘Puro, e disposto a salire alle stelle [purified and prepared to ascend to the stars’; for longer quotation, see infra]. Hodgart infers that the end of “Ithaca” is a reference to both of these devices: ‘like Bloom and Stephen coming out of their dark house’ to urinate by the light of the stars, and afterwards like ‘Bloom [who] having purified his room with incense, is ready to climb up the stairs to bed.’ (James Joyce: a Student’s Guide, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1978, pp.121-22.) as Hodgart points out, in this Dantean schema “Eumaeus” is hell and “Ithaca” is purgatory.

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Dante Alighieri [2]: the full stanza from which ‘Puro [... &c.] is taken reads: ‘Io ritornai da la santissima onda / rifatto sì come piante novelle / rinnovellate di novella fronda, / puro e disposto a salire alle stelle [From that most holy wave I now returned / to Beatrice; remade, as new trees are / renewed when they bring forth new boughs, I was / pure and prepared to climb unto the stars].’ Trans. by Allen Mandelbaum; see Peter Y. Chou, “ Stars Citations in Dante’s Purgatorio”, in Dante pages at WisdomPortal [online; 7.12.2008].

Dante Alighieri [3]: Joyce’s school-boy quotations and notes on La Commedia Divina are taken from Eugenio Camerini’s La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri: con note tratte dai migliori commenti (Milano: Edoardo Sonzogno 1884). See Dirk Van Hulle, ‘Joyce and Beckett Discovering Dante’, in Joyce Studies 2004 , 7, ed. Luca Crispi & Catherine Fahy (Dublin: NLI 2004)

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Nicolas of Cusa: in Spirituality and the Occult: From the Renaissance to the Modern Age (London: Routledge 2001), B. J. Gibbons writes: ‘[...] The doctrine of the coincidence of opposites was given its classic statement in the writings of Nicholas of Cusa. Since God is the ground of being, all predicates must somehow exist in him. Many predicates, however, are mutually exclusive, and thus God becomes ‘the one being to which contradictory predicates can and must be ascribed.’ Further: ‘The search to achieve a coincidence of opposites was a structural principle of all occult thought. For Giordano Bruno, the doctrine of contraries was both a metaphysical and and ethical one. Both contraries are necessary: “the beginning, the middle, and the end, the birth, the growth, and the perfection of all that we see, comes from contraries, through contraries, into contraries, to contraries.”’ (Introduction, p.9.) [Cont.]

Nicolas of Cusa: B. J. Gibbons (Spirituality and the Occult: From the Renaissance to the Modern Age, 2001) - cont.: ‘[...] Romantics like Eckhartshausen and Azaïs also believed in the existence of two opposing forces in nature, the one ‘expansive’, the other ‘compressive’; it was in the harmony of these two forces that nature achieved its perfection. William Blake thought that without contraries ‘there is no progression.’ (p.10.) Further: ‘According to Schelling, there is a “polarity and dualism through all nature”. Matter itself is simply an equilibrium between two opposing forces, and is “brought to life” when the equilibrium is disturbed. Coleridge’s “polar logic” is another Romantic appropriation of the occult doctrine of contraries, and his representation of the dialectical structure of the godhead reads like Behmenism recast in philosophical jargon. [...] It was the occult doctrine of contraries, in its dynamic form, which was to become the Hegelian and Marxist dialect of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.’ (p.11.)

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Giordano Bruno [1]: Joyce’s “The Day of the Rabblement” (1901) derives its haughty intellectual tone from Giordano Bruno’s heroic refusal to recant his unorthodox beliefs, boldly expressed in an ode written shortly before his immolation in 1600 at Campo dei Fiori in Rome. It seems certain that Joyce had already read Isabella Frith’s Life of Giordano Bruno, the Nolan (1887) since he modelled the first sentence of the pamphlet on a quotation given by Frith - as Ellmann and Ellsworth have noted. Where Bruno writes (in Frith’s account): ‘No man truly loves goodness and truth who is not incensed with the multitude’ (Life of Giordano Bruno, rev. by Moriz Carrière [English Foreign & Philosophical Library] London: 1887, p.65), Joyce writes: ‘No man’, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude.’ (The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann & Ellsworth Mason, NY: Viking Press 1966, p.69.) Joyce makes a veiled reference to Frith’s book in the opening of his review of Lewis MacIntyre’s Giordano Bruno for the Daily Express [Dublin] on 20 Oct. 1903: ‘Except for a book in the English and Foreign Philosophical Library [I. Frith, Life of Giordano Bruno, London 1887], a book the interest of which is chiefly biographical, no considerable volume has appeared in English to give an account of the life and philosophy of the heresiarch martyr of Nola.’ [Critical Writings, Viking 1959, &c., p.132]. For the full text of the review, see RICORSO, Library, “Major Authors” > James Joyce, [infra]. (This note by BS.)

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Giordano Bruno [2]: ‘Infinite other worlds, inhabited like our own, spread throughout space; a structure to the universe of suns and clusters of suns circling in grand orbits, but no “centre” except in the ground beneath two human feet; the presence of God not atop an empyrean throne past the threshold of the farthest stars, but inhabiting every atom of matter; an eternal span to matter, which can change its form but never be exhausted in any proportion; and finally a[nd] logic[ally,] infinity demanded of him an innate union of all contraries, by which evil and good, history and the future, localized humanity and an infinite universe inform and express one another.’ (Quoted in Bill Kuhns, ‘Reviewing the Reviews: Giordano Bruno and Marshall McLuhan’, in McLuhan Studies, 1, 2 [q.d.; 1996?] online; accessed 14.10.2008]. (Also cites, inter alia, Bruno’s death by burning [auto-da-fé] on 17 Feb. 1660 at Campo dei Fiere, Rome, and notes a biography by William Boulting.

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Giordano Bruno [3]: ‘[… even in the two extremes of the scale of nature, we contemplate two principles which are one; two beings which are one; two contraries which are harmonious and the same. Therefore height is depth, the abyss is light unvisited, darkness is brilliant, the large is small, the confused is distinct, dispute is friendship, the dividend is united, the atom is immensity …. Here are the signs and proofs whereby we see that contraries do truly concur; they are from a single origin and are in truth and substance one. This, having been seen mathematically is accepted physically … / Here as in a seed are contained and enfolded the manifold conclusions of natural science; here is the mosaic, the disposition and order of the speculative science.’ Also, from De immenso: … I shall place you in the body of the moon; your senses, through proper adaptation, will enable you to use your faculty of reason and see these things … From this side I shall show you the face of the earth shining in the opposite region, in the light of the radiant sun diffused into the surface of the ocean. Do you see how the vast machine seems contracted into a small mass? … Now the moon is not the moon to you, but it seems to be the true earth… Notice how Britain is condensed to a small point and the very narrow Italy is condensed into a thin and short hair.’ (All quoted without refs. in Kuhn, op. cit.] (On extremes, see Shem’s Latin sentence in Finnegans Wake [287.23-28] - as in Notes, 1, infra].

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Giordano Bruno [4] Kuhn remarks that Bruno published three pamphlets in London with a fake Venetian imprint [1584], under the titles The Ash Wednesday Supper, On Cause, Prime Origin, and the One, and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, and ends by quoting Bruno: ‘And while I venture out beyond this tiny globe Into reaches past the bounds of starry night I leave behind what others strain to see afar.’ (Bill Kuhns, op. cit.]

Antoine Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism (NY State UP 2000) - “Exercises of Imagination” - Vis Imaginativa (A Study of some Aspects of the Magical Imagination and its Mythical Foundations [chap.]: ‘[... T]he work of Giordano Bruno, De Imaginum, Signorum et Idearum compositione (1591), propounded a theory of the imagination conceived of as the principal instrument of magical and religious processes. In so doing, Bruno, in the manner of Giulio Camillo (L’idea del Teatro, 1550), transformed the art of memory, which had been merely a rational technique using images (as in Thomas Aquinas), into a religious and magical one. It was a matter of training the imagination to make of it an instrument allowing the acquisition of divine powers. One could attract the spirits through incantations, seals, and {101} markings, but also by the imagination alone, this third method being the principal one.’ (pp.101-02).

Note: Earlier on, Faivre writes: ‘[...] a {9} knowledge of divine things is gained starting from the concrete world, from the entire universe, whose “signatures” or hieroglyphs it is first a matter of deciphering. The second philosophico-scientific factor was the appearance of mechanism, which favored the emergence of Cartesianism. In contrast to this new form of scientific imagination and to an epistemology that emptied the universe of its “correspondences,” theosophy and pansophy reaffirmed the place of the microcosm in the macrocosm. Certainly, theosophy is not scientific, and pansophy has never gone beyond the project stage. Nevertheless, at this time, both of them appeared to many people as a promise, a hope, a new dawn of thought. Moreover, the poetic aspect of their discourse favored a co-penetration of literature and science and by virtue of this contributed to the development of the popularization of science.’ (pp.9-10.)

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Giordano Bruno [5] - Hélène Cixous writes: ‘[Joyce’s] letters to Stanislaus during 1905-07 show that he was gradually disengaging himself from all idealism, including his youthful admiration for Ibsen or Giordano Bruno; he records, for example, that he had with complete indifference taken part in a procession in honour of the Nolan.’ (Letters, Vol. II, p.217; 1 March 1907; Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, trans. Sally Purcell, London; Calder 1976, p.228.)

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Giordano Bruno [6] - called by Mason & Ellmann ‘a favourite philosopher of Joyce, whose name is mentioned constantly in Finnegans Wake.’ (Critical Writings, Viking Press 1959, &c., p.9.) The editors go on to quote Stanislaus Joyce: ‘Jim had kept the reference to “the Nolan” advisedly, overriding objections from me, his doubting Thomas. He intended that the readers of his article should have at first a false impression that he was quting some little-known Irish writer - the definite article before some old family names being a courtesy title in Ireland - so that when they discovered their error, the name of Giordano Bruno might perhaps awaken some interest in his life and work. Laymen, he repeated, should be encouraged to think.’ (My Brother’s Keeper, p.146; here p.69, n.2.)

Giordano Bruno [7] - Richard Ellmann writes: ‘[...] among philosophers he found an unexpected master in Fiordano Bruno. Bruno had long been considered a clerical villain, but his vindication had begun. In 1889 a statue to him was erected in Rome in the same Campo dei Fiori where he had been burned at the stake in 1600. Ghezzi piously reminded Joyce that Bruno was a terrible heretic, and Joyce dryly rejoined, “Yes, and he was terribly burned.” Bruno’s theory of an ultimate unity and its terrestrial division into contraries attracted Joyce, perpahs, becAuse he saw his art as a reconciler of those opposites within his own mind which he would later personify as Shem and Shaun. In Finnegans Wake he made Bruno of Nola Irish by confusing him with the Dublin booksellers, Browne and Nolan.’ (James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.61.) [Cont.]

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Giordano Bruno [8] - Richard Ellmann [cont.]: ‘The publication of Two Essays [by Skeffington and Joyce] roused a good deal of talk. No one knew who the Nolan was. As Joyce told Herbert Gorman later, “University College was much intrigued by this personage whom it supposed to be an ancient Irish chieftain like the MacDermott or the O’Rahilly.’ [41] Some students thought it was Joyce himself, later identified in the columns of St. Stephen’s as “the dreamy one of Nola”; others thought it was the porter at the St. Cecilia medical school, whose name was Nolan [42] “Said the Nolan” became a catch phrase. Stanislaus had urged him to clarify this reference to Giordano Bruno of Nola, but James replied, “Laymen should be encouraged to think,” and fancied that when the students discovered who the Nolan was, they might go on to read some of his work. “The writer of Michael Kramer” was probably also a baffling phrase to most of his readers, though more easily illuminated. The implications of Joyce’s final sentence about the successor to Ibsen, which he had adapted from the curtain speech in the first act of The Master Builder, were not lost; he was twitted for them at the Sheehys’, where speaking of some Dublin event, Hannah Sheehy said, “0, there are sure to be great crowds.” Skeffington chimed in, “In fact it’ll be, as our friend Jocax would say, the day of the rabblement.” And Maggie Sheehy declaimed, “Even now the rabblement may be standing by the door!” Joyce wrote the dialogue down in an epiphany, perhaps to suggest how in Ireland all things are cheapened. / In St. Stephen’s the essay was handled both lightly and heavily.’ [Cont.]

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Giordano Bruno [9] - Richard Ellmann [cont.]: ‘Arthur Clery, writing as “Chanel”, pretending to quote a State Paper, Aet. Eliz., said that Joyce was “corrupted, as we do verily believe, by the learning of Italie or othere foreign parts, hath no care for Holye Religion, but is fain to mislead our players.” A leading article, perhaps by Kennedy, took issue with Joyce more sharply. The multitude that he so detested was Catholic, it pointed out, and this multitude was willing to forego art if art interfered with the spirit. Only Joyce had refused to join in the protest against The Countess Cathleen, the writer reminded him, and smugly concluded: “If Mr. Joyce thinks that the artist must stand apart from the multitude, and means he must also sever himself from the moral and religious teachings which have, under Divine guidance, moulded its spiritual character, we join issue with him, and we prophesy but ill-success for any school which offers the Irish public art based upon such a principle.” Joyce had succeeded in flouting both the Irish Literary Theatre and the students who disliked its plays for the wrong reasons. He had found his private mountain top. / Although he was profoundly disaffected, Joyce was not like Skeffington a rebel day in and day out. He accepted the enemies he had sought, but did not much bother himself about them. Most of the rabblement liked him better than he desired.’ (p.93-94; see also pp.144, 151, 154, 249.)

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Giordano Bruno [10]: Colin MacCabe gives an introductory account of Joyce’s use of Bruno (‘An Introduction to Finnegans Wake’, 1982): ‘[...] His unorthodox beliefs and his final death at the stake as a heretic in 1600 had interested Joyce from an early age. Bruno’s principle of the “coincidence of contraries” denied the existence of absolute identities in the universe. Bruno argued that oppositions collapsed into unities at their extremes, thus extreme heat and extreme cold were held to be indistinguishable, and all identities were, therefore, provisional. Bruno joined this belief to a belief in an [33] infinite universe composed of an infinity of worlds. [...] But to understand Joyce as simply providing an artistic gloss to the theories of an obscure philosopher is to minimise crucially the importance of the Wake. Bruno is important insofar as he provides a philosophical trellis on which the philosophical and linguistic presuppositions of identity can be unpicked. At one level of consciousness we claim an identity and stability both for ourselves and our objects of perception. But such identities can only be produced by a process of differentiation in which other identities are rejected. [...]’ (See in James Joyce: New Perspectives, ed. MacCabe, Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp.29-40; longer extract in RICORSO Library, “Criticism / Major Authors / Joyce”, infra.].

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Giordano Bruno [10]:

Note on trans. of Metamorphosis: For this translation of Ovid, see Don Gifford, Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [2nd rev. edn.] (California UP 1982), p.130 - and note that Gifford quotes the ensuing phrase: ‘and changes the laws of nature’ (in ibid., p.131).

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Giordano Bruno (11): Bruno’s Bestia Trionfans [Triumphant Beast] is the subject of a reference in Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist”, where he characterises stupidity a ‘the permanent Bestia Trionfans that calls wisdom form its cave’. (See “The Critic as Artist”, in Works of Oscar Wilde, Galley Press 1987, p.860.)

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Giambattista Vico [1]: ‘We shall show clearly and distinctly how the founders of gentile humanity by means of their natural theology (or metaphysics) imagined the gods; how by means of their logic they invented languages; by morals, created heroes, by economics, founded families, and by politics, cities; by their physics, established the beginnings of things as all divine; by their particular physics of man, in a certain sense created themselves; by this cosmography fashioned for themselves a universe entirely of gods; by astronomy, carried planets and constellations from earth to heaven; by chronology, gave a beginning to times; and how by geography the Greeks, for example, described the whole world within their own Greece.’ (The New Science, Bk. II, Chap. 2, ed. Bergin & Fischer, 1961, pp. 72-73; quoted in BS TCD PhD Diss., 1979.)

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Giambattista Vico [2]: ‘The poetic speech which our poetic logic has helped us to understand continued for a long time into the historical period, much as great and rapid rivers continue far into the sea, keeping sweet its waters borne on by the force of their flow.’ (Bergin & and Fisch, trans., 1968 [edn.], para. 412; quoted in Philip Brockbank, Joyce and literary tradition: Language living, dead, and resurrected, from Genesis to Guinnesses’, in James Joyce and Modernism, ed. W. J. McCormack & Alistair Stead, London: Routledge 1984, p.173.) Also: ‘We have seen that the generations of commonwealths began in the age of the gods, in which governments were theocratic; that is, divine. Later they developed into the first human, namely the heroic, governments, even as the might current of a kingly river retains far out to sea the momentum of its flow and the sweetness of its waters, the age off the gods courses on, for there persisted still that religious way of thinking according to which it was the gods who did whatever men themselves were doing.’ (Ibid., para. 629; Brockbank, op. cit., idem.)

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Giambattista Vico [3] - for a discussion of his role in the Wake, see J. Mitchell Morse, ‘“Where Terms Begin” / I.i. [1]’, [chap.] in A Conceptual Guide to Finnegans Wake, ed. Michael H. Begnal & Fritz Senn (Pennsylvania State UP 1974), and extracts under Commentary, supra.] On contraries or meeting of extremes, see also Shem’s Latin sentence in Finnegans Wake [287.23-28] - as in infra [Notes 1].

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Giambattista Vico [4]: Stephen Heath (‘Ambiviolences: Notes for reading Joyce’, in Attridge & Ferrer, eds., Post-structuralist Joyce, Cambridge UP 1984), refers to Scienza Nuova as a ‘key reference for Joyce’s writing’, and notes that Vico argues in the third section (‘Della discoverta de vero Omero’) against the assumption that Homer was an individual genius: ‘Homer is to be seen rather as a poetical “character” open to the totality of forms of his culture; which find supreme articulation in “his” poems. Writer of the modern Odyssey, Joyce is likewise a “character” in this sense, a disposition of forms.’ (Heath; op. cit., p.62, n.10.)

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Giambattista Vico [5] - on thunder, in The New Science [377:] ‘Of such natures must have been the first founders of gentile humanity when ... at last the sky fearfully rolled thunder and flashed with lightning, as could not but follow from the bursting upon the air for the first time of an immersion so violent. Thereupon a few giants, who must have been the most robust, and who were dispearsed thorugh the forests on the mountain heights where the strongest beasts have their dens, were frightedned and astonished by the great effect whose [75] cause they did not known, and raised their eeyes and became aware of the sky. And because in such cases the nature of the human mind leads it to attribute its own nature to the effect, and because in that state their nature was that of men all robust bodily strength who expressed their very violent passions by shouting and grumbling, they pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body, which in that aspect they called Jove, the first god of the so-called greater gentes, who meant to tell them something by the hiss of his bolts and the clap of his thunder. And thus they began to exercise that natural curiosity which is the daughter of ignorance and the mother of knowledge and which, opening the mind of man, gives birth to wonder ...’ (See The New Science of Giambattista Vico , trans. from Third Edition [1744] by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, NY: Doubleday 1961, pp.75-76.)

Giambattista Vico (6): Richard Ellmann quotes a conversation with one Tom Kristensen who met Joyce in Copenhagen and asked him for help on “Work in Progress”, and Joyce referred him to Vico. “But do you believe in the Scienza Nuova?” asked Kristensen. “I don’t believe in any science”, Joyce answered, “but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn’t when I read Freud or Jung.” (James Joyce, 1965,p.706.)

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: in Ulysses Stephen quotes Goethe’s saying, ‘Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life.’ (U, 9.451; quoted in Weldon Thornton, The Antimodernism of Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” , Syracuse UP 1994, p.1.)

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Samuel Johnson: Boswell writes of Johnson’s refutation of George Berkeley: ‘After we came out of the church [at Harwich], we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I nevery shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute him thus”. This was a strout exemlification of the first truths of Père Buffier, or the original principles of Reid and Beattie; without admitting which, we can no more argue in metaphysicks, than we can argue in mathematicks without axioms. To me it is inconceivable how Berkeley can be answered by pure reasoning.’ (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, and rev. by L. F. Powell, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1935), Vol. I, p.471; quoted in Douglas Lane Patey, ‘Johnson’s Refutation of Berkeley: Kicking the Stone Again’, in Journal of the History of Ideas, 47, 1 [Pennsylvania UP] (Jan.-March 1986), pp.139-46; JSTOR online; accessed 12.11.2008.]

Boswell: The allusion is also given in Weldon Thornton, Allusions in Ulysses (N. Carolina UP 1961, 1968) , citing Boswell’s Life, 6 Aug., 1763. Thorton adds that R. M. Adams (Surface and Symbol, p.134) says that Stephen has Aristotle repeat with his head Dr. Johnson’s famous experiment with his foot. to refute Berkeley. (Thornton, op. cit, p.42.)

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Thomas Moore (History of Ireland, 1846), writing of Sir Henry Sydney: ‘on entering the ship appointed to bear him from that land [Ireland], it is said that he repeated, in allusion to Moses, when departing from Egypt, the words of the 114th Psalm, “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob [departed] from a people of strange language.”’ (p.87.) Cf. John F. Shawe-Taylor in Aoelus on the language of the outlaw.

Thomas Moore: ‘’Tis gone, and for ever, the light we saw breaking, / Like Heaven’s first dawn o’er the sleep of the dead / When Man, from the slumber of ages awaking, / Look’d upward, and bless’d the pure ray, ere it fled. [...; see further under Moore, Quotations, infra - and cf. Finnegans Wake (Ricorso): ‘’Tis gone infarover. So fore now, dayleash. Pour deday. To trancefixureashone. Feist of Taborneccles, scenopegia, come! Shamwork, be in our scheining! And let every crisscouple be so crosscomplimentary, little eggons, youlk and meelk, in a farbiger pancosmos. With a hottyhammyum all round. Gudstruce!’ (FW 613.12)

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Caesar Otway, A Tour of Connaught: Comprising Sketches of Clonmacnoise, Joyce Country, and Achill (Dublin: W. Curry Jun. 1839): The conjunction of a story about a hen and the tale of the ‘heir of Howth [...] carried when stolen by the O’Malleys’ suggests a possible source of motifs in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Can he have read Otway on the Joyce Country? And, if so, when, and in what form did he record or otherwise remember it? (For extract from this text, see under Caesar Otway, q.v., or view attached.)

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1): See Bill Kuhns, ‘Reviewing the Reviews: Giordano Bruno and Marshall McLuhan’, in McLuhan Studies, 1, 2 [q.d.; 1996?], remarking that Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposed a biography on Bruno in Biographia Litteraria where he was burnt under pretence of atheism, at Rome, in the year 1600 and of his works: ‘In the last volume of this work […] I propose to give an account of the life of Giordano Bruno … the scarcest books ever printed […] The most industrious historians of speculative philosophy have not been able to procure more than a few of his works […] out of eleven, the titles of which are preserved to us I have had an opportunity of perusing six.’ (Kuhns, op. cit.: online; accessed 14.10.2008).

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S. T. Coleridge (2): Joyce may have also met with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s tributes to Bruno both in Biographia Literaria (1817) and Literary Remains (1836). Coleridge admired Bruno enough to plan a further volume of the Biographia devoted to the life of this humanist ‘whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an atheist in year [94]’. (See Biographia Literaria, ed. John Shawcross, OUP 1907, p.94.) In a letter of 16 July 1916, Coleridge wrote: ‘I had in the Friend announced my intention of writing the life of G. Bruno with a critique on his system’, and blamed the unwillingness of an associate called Hare to lend him the necessary books for his failure to do so. (See Collected Letters, IV, p.626, quoted in a foot note to The Friend, Vol. I, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, Collected Works, London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul 1969, p.118.)

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S. T. Coleridge (3): In The Friend (Essay XII), Samuel Taylor Coleridge supplies the version of Bruno’s theory of coinciding contraries which Joyce quotes in “The Day of the Rabblement”: ‘There is, strictly speaking, no proper opposition but between two polar forces of one and the same polar power.’ (See The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, Vol. I, p.94; in Collected Works, 1969.) This sentence is followed by the one that Joyce quotes with more or less accuracy: ‘Every power in nature or in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole condition and means of its manifestation; and every opposite is, therefore, a tendency to reunion.’ [CW135]. Coleridge goes on to explain: ‘This is the universal law of Polarity or essential Dualism, first pronounced by Heraclitus, 2000 years afterwards republished, and made the foundation both of Logic, of Physics, and of Metaphysics by Giordano Bruno.’ (Op. cit., 1969, p.94.) In a letter to Miss Weaver of 27 Jan. 1925, Joyce wrote by way of explanation: ‘Bruno Nolano (of Nola) another great Southern Italian was quoted in my first pamphlet The Day of the Rabblement. His philosophy is a kind of dualism - every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realise itself and opposition brings reunion &c. &c.’ (Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, London: Faber 1977, pp.305-06.) Note that the essay in question in The Friend is erroneously given as Essay XIII in Mason and Ellmann, ed., Critical Writings (1966), p.134 n.)

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S. T. Coleridge (4): For Coleridge’s printing of Bruno’s final ode in the Literary Remains (1836) under the heading “Magnanimity” - a possible source for Joyce’s adoption of the name Daedalus/Dedalus in Stephen Hero [1944] and A Portrait (1916), see RICORSO Library, International Critics, infra.

S. T. Coleridge (5) - E. K. Chambers writes: ‘He [Coleridge] reverted, with Giordano Bruno, to his earlier studies in Neoplatonism and now, for the first time, he seems to have become familiar with the writings of Kant. He is conerned with the “relations of thought to things”.’ (Chambers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Biographical Study, 1958, p.139.)

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Percy Bysshe Shelley, Essay on Poetry (1821; pub. 1840): ‘the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconsistent wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.’ [Cont.]

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Percy Bysshe Shelley (Essay on Poetry, 1821 ) - cont.: ‘Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appear, were called, in the earlier epochs of our world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but be beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of the latest time […] A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one, as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and numbers are not.’ [Cont.]

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Percy Bysshe Shelley (Essay on Poetry) - cont.: ‘Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. [...] It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: it’s secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world... it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know.’

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Thomas de Quincey, “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain” [on memories]: ‘Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain soft as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before, and yet in reality not one has been extinguished.’ (in David Masson, ed., Thomas De Quincey: The Collected Writings, Vol. XIII p.346.) ‘Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy which have been inscribed upon the palimpsest of your brain.’ (Ibid., p.348.) ‘[L]ike the annual leaves of Aboriginal forests, or the undissolving snows of the Himalayas, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness. But by the hour of death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these can revive in strength. They are not dead, but sleeping.’ (Idem.)

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Thomas de Quincey, “Suspiria de Profundis”: ‘[O]ften I have been struck with the important truth that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, that ever reach us directly, and in their abstract shapes.’ Masson, op. cit., Vol. I, p.39.) See also Confessions, ed., Edmund Baxter): ‘[…] I am convinced […] that the dread book of account which the scriptures speak of is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. Of this at least I feel assured: that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind.’ (p.235.)

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Thomas de Quincey: John Barrell identifies ‘involutes’ as a scientific term used for conch-shells ( The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, Yale 1991, p.32.) Note: For Althea Hayther, De Quincey’s ‘whole lifetime of experiences which, under the agency of opium dreams, folded inwards round each other and became a single involute of feeling.’ (Opium and the Romantic Imagination, Faber 1971, p.126.) [All the foregoing quoted in The following quotations copied from Roisin McCluskey, PhD transfer submission, UUC 2008; see further in RICORSO Library, “Critics” > International, infra.]

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W. M. Thackeray (1): ‘[…] you pass from some of the stately fine streets straight into the country. After No. 46 Eccles Street, for instance, potatoes begin at once. You are on a wide green plain, diversified by occasional cabbage-plots, by drying grounds white with chemises, in the midst of which the chartered wind is revelling; and though in the map some fanciful engineer has laid down streets and squares, they exist but on paper; nor, indeed, can there be any need of them at present, in a quarter where houses are not wanted so much as people to dwell in the same.’ (Irish Sketchbook, 1883 Edn. p.555; quoted also in Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce’s World, 1957, pp. 52-53 & 72.) Note that ‘on paper’ is possible echoed as ‘on papel or off of it’ in Finnegans Wake.

W. M. Thackeray (2): Staying at Eccles Hotel, Glengarriff, Thackeray witnesses an altercation involving some Cockneys one of whom avers the importance of their station by saying, ‘I pay my way.’ Thackeray reflects: ‘I have met more gentlemen here than in any place I ever say, gentlemen of high and low ranks ... “I am a gentleman, and pay my way ...” I have not heard a sentence near so vulgar from any man in Ireland.’ (Sketch Book; quoted in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.191.) Note that Joyce gives the line to Mr. Deasy in Ulysses; and see also his reflections on the “two truths” to be encountered in the country which have been quoted by critics and historians as a defining account of the condition of nineteenth-century Ireland [under Thackeray, infra.]

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John Mitchel: Mitchel’s epithet toploftical - which finds a place in Finnegans Wake - is also quoted in Guiney in her introduction to Poems by James Clarence Mangan, with biographical introduction by John Mitchel (NY: D. & J. Sadlier 1866) - ‘James Clarence Mangan, His Life, Poetry, and Death’ (pp.7-31) - viz., ‘Selber’s toploftical disdain of human applause is the only great thing about him, except his cloak.’ (Op. cit., 1897, p.56.)

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Gustave Flaubert [1a] wrote to Mme de Chantepie: ‘Madame Bovary is a totally fictitious story. The illusion of truth - if there is one - comes from the book’s impersonality. It is a one of my principles that a writer should not be his own theme. An artist must be in his work like God in creation - invisible and all-powerful: he must be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen’. (18 March, 1857; Selected Letters, ed. Francis Steegmuller, London: Hamish Hamilton 1954, p.186.) Cf. Stephen on A Portrait, Chapter 5, speaking of the ‘godlike impersonality’ of the artist, who remains ‘in or behind his handiwork, paring his fingernails in indifference’; and note also that Joyce’s novel is very much on the theme of the writer himself, an intense contradiction at the heart of the novel. See also quoted in Stephen Heath, Flaubert: Madame Bovary [Landmarks of World Literature; q.d.], quoting Flaubert: ‘ Art, like God in space, must remain suspended in the infinite, complete in itself, independent of its provider.’ (Letter of 27 March 1852; accessed in Google Books; 30.10.2008 [online].)

Gustave Flaubert [1b] - Letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie (18 March 1857): ‘Avec une lectrice telle que vous, Madame, at aussi sympathique, la franchise est un devoir. Je vais done répondre à vos questions: Madame Bovary n’a rien de vrai. C’est une histoire totalement inventée; je n’y ai rien mis ni de mes sentiments ni de mom existence. L’illusion (s’il y en a une) vient au contraire de l’impersonnalité de l’oeuvre. C’est un de mes principes: qu’il ne faut pas s’écrire. L’artiste doit être dans son oeuvre comme Dieu dans la Création, invisible et tout-puissant, qu’on le sente partout, mail qu’on ne le voie pas. / Et puis l’art doit s’élever au-dessus des affections personnelles et des susceptibilités nerveuses! Il est temps de lui dormer, par une méthode impitoyable, la prevision des sciences physiques! La difficulté capitale, pour moi, n’en reste pas moins le style; la forme, la beau indiffinissable résultant de la conception même et qui est la splendour du vrai, comme disait Platon.’ (Quoted in Critical Writings of James Joyce , ed. Ellsworth Mason & Richard Ellmann, NY: Viking Press, 1959, 1966. p.141n; and see also briefer footnote reference on p.65.)

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Gustave Flaubert [1c]: See alternative translation: ‘Madame Bovary has nothing “true” in it. It is a totally invented story; into it I put none of my own feelings and nothing from my own life. The illusion (if there is one) comes, on the contrary, from the impersonality of the work. It is a principle of mine that a writer must not be his own theme. The artist in his work must be like God in his creation - invisible and all-powerful : he must be everywhere felt, but never seen’. (Quoted in as given in Tim Dean, ‘Paring His Fingernails: Homosexuality and Joyce’s Impersonalist Aesthetic, in Quare Joyce, ed. Joseph Valente, Michigan UP 2000, p.248; Google Books - accessed 31.10. 2008 [online].

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Gustave Flaubert [2]: Gregory Castle quotes Roy Pascal on Flaubert’s style and compares it positively with Joyce’s: ‘Flaubert’s realism did not imply the sort of objectivity that belongs to natural science, an objectivity founded on communicable skill and authoritative control over the (imaginary) object; on the contrary, it meant an imaginative self-submergence in the object, participation in the imagined character’s experience, and communication of this intuitive experience.’ (Pascal, The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in the Nineteenth-century European Novel, Manchester UP 1977, p.98; Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Cambridge UP 2001, p.183.) See also Pound’s comparisons between Joyce and Flaubert.

Gustave Flaubert [3] - Joyce on Flaubert: ‘GF treats language as an expression of his despair. JJ au contraire.’ (Wake Notebook VI.B.8, in James Joyce Archive, gen. ed. Michael Groden, NY: Garland Pub. 1978, Vol. 30, p.315.) [Note: Supplied by Geert Lernout. (The reading of ‘treats’ is conjectural.)]

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Benedetto Croce: Richard Ellmann finds a source for the phraseology and ideas in Stephen’s speech “Circe” [as follows] in Benedetto Croce’s Estetica (chap. on Giambattista Vico): ‘Stephen: (Abruptly.) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself, becomes that self, .. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!’ (Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn., 1967, [p.606].) Croce wrote: ‘man creates the human world, creates it by transforming himself into the facts of society: by thinking it he re-creates his own creations, traverses over gain the paths he has already traversed, recontstructs the wholly ideally, and thus knows it with full and true knowledge’. (See Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.351 ftn.) Ellmann adds that Joyce borrowed the book from Dario de Tuoni as the latter told him in 1953.

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John Henry Newman: ‘And he remembered that Newman had heard this note also in the broken lines of Virgil, giving utterance, like the voice of Nature herself to that pain and weariness yet hope of better things which has been the experience of her children in every time." (A Portrait, Corrected Edition, ed. Scholes, p.168). J. S. Atherton remarks in a note to his edition of A Portrait (London: Heinemann 1964) that ‘Joyce makes Stephen quote from various works of Newman to enhance the impression that Stephen reads very widely’, but adds: ‘It does not follow that Joyce himself had this wide reading, although he did, of course, read a great deal; but all the passages which Stephen quotes from Newman’s works in A Portrait are given in a one-volume anthology, Characteristics from the writings of John Henry Newman, William S. Lilly, London 1875.’ He goes on: ‘It is interesting that Stephen quotes from writers such as Newman who would be aproved of by his Catholic teachers; James Jyce at the age Stephen is here was reading, and quoting, Ibsen who was thought obscene and Bruno who was a famous heretic.’ (Atherton, op. cit., 1964, Notes, p.249 [n.152].) This passage in Atherton’s edition is the object of a reference in Don Gifford’s Joyce Annotated [rev. edn.] (California UP 1982, Intro., p.11, with the comment: ‘Atherton argues that Joyce is trying to given the impression that Stephen is widely read. But Stephen treats his bit if Newman [...] as parts of a collection of phrases notable for their sounds and rhythms, not notable for their [...] reflection of the attitudes of the writer from whom they are taken. This would again suggest the tendency to regard learning as as a grasp of contexts but as an acquisition of quotable moments’. (Gifford, op. cit., idem.) Note also that Stephen shortly quotes ‘a proud cadence from Newman: “Whose feet are as the feet of harts and underneath the everlasting arms”’ (A Portrait, Corr. Edn., p.168), and speaks ealier of the ‘cloistral silverveined prose of Newman’ (idem., p.175.) Newman was the first rector [president] of the Catholic University of Ireland, later the Royal University of Ireland and ultimately the National University of Ireland.

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Henrik Ibsen: ‘Everything that I have written is most minutely connected with what I have lived through, if not personally experienced; every new work has had for me the object of serving the process of spiritual liberation and catharsis; for every man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs.’ (Quoted in Michael Meyer, Ibsen, Penguin 1974, p.291; cited in Lynee Hamill, Henrik Ibsen, UG Diss., UUC 2002.) Note that Stephen Dedalus’s encounter with Ibsen’s plays is described in Stephen Hero as ‘a moment of radiant simultaneity’. Note further, In his first play, Cataline, Ibsen gives these lines to his eponymous hero: ‘I dreamed that, winged like Icarus of old./I flew aloft beneath the vault of heaven.’ (See Critical Writings, ed. Mason & Ellmann, [1959] 1965, p.98.)

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Henrik Ibsen: Richard Ellmann (in James Joyce [1959], 1965 Edn.) notes that Joyce read Ibsen, in W. B. Yeats’s phrase, ‘through William Archer’s hygenic bottle’ (p.55), and makes ftn. reference to A Vision, NY: 1938, p.35. The passage in question is a speech by Daniel O’Leary in “Stories of Michael Robartes” which reads: ‘[…] You at any rate cannot sympathise with a horrible generation that in childhood sucked Ibsen from Archer’s hygienic bottle. You can understand even better than Robartes why that protest must always seem the great event of my life.’ (London: Macmillan 1937; 1978 reprint, p.35.)

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Henrik Ibsen: The grave-cloths that Stephen’s soul casts off at the end of Chapter Four of A Portrait of the Artist, together with the encounter with the wading girl that occasions it, are modeled on the episode in Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken where Rubek throws off the cerements of his soul and is drawn by a young woman wading in the sea to seek life and freedom. (See prefatory note to "Ibsen’s New Drama" in James Joyce: Critical Writings, ed. Mason & Ellmann, [1959 1966, p.48.)

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Sigmund Freud (1): Joyce’s “paternity is a legal fiction’ [in “Scylla and Charybdis” - Ulysses, longer extracts, infra] seems to echo the same precept as Freud’s observations on the relation of the growing child to the father in "Family Romances" - viz., “When presently the child comes to know the difference in the parts played by fathers and mothers in their sexual relations, and realizes that “pater semper incertus est”, while the mother is “certissima”, [Ftn.: an old legal tag, "paternity is always uncertain, maternity is most certain."] the family romance undergoes a curious curtailment: it contents itself with exalting the child’s father, but no longer casts any doubts on his maternal origin, which is regarded as something unalterable.’ Compare this, more specifically, to the sentences in Ulysses: “It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood.’ [Idem.; my itals.].

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Sigmund Freud (2): Joyce does not, however, follow Freud in the next stage of the argument: “This second (sexual) stage of the family romance is actuated by another motive as well, which is absent in the first (asexual) stage. The child, having learnt about sexual processes, tends to picture to himself erotic situations and relations, the motive force behind this being his desire to bring his mother (who is the subject of the most intense sexual curiosity) into situations of secret infidelity and into secret love-affairs. In this way the child’s phantasies, which started by being, as it were, asexual, are brought up to the level of his later knowledge.’ [224]. Arguably, however, Joyce exemplifies with Finnegans Wake the final stage of Freudian argument: ‘Indeed the whole effort at replacing the real father by a superior one is only an expression of the [225] child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women. He is turning away from the father whom he knows today to the father in whom he believed in the earlier years of his childhood; and his phantasy is no more than the expression of a regret that those happy days have gone. Thus in these phantasies the overvaluation that characterizes a child’s earliest years comes into its own again. An interesting contribution to this subject is afforded by the study of dreams. We learn from their interpretation that even in later years, if the Emperor and Empress appear in dreams, those exalted personages stand for the dreamer’s father and mother’s. So that the child’s overvaluation of his parents survives as well in the dreams of normal adults.’ (See Sigmund Freud, The Penguin Freud Library, ed. Angela Richards, et al., Vol. 7: On Sexuality - Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, 1977, pp.217-56; pp.224-26 & 257. For full text, see RICORSO Library > “Criticism > International Critics”> Sigmund Freud (4), via index, or direct]. Note also the resemblance in title between Joyce’s “Tales Told by Shem and Shaun” and Freud’s “Two Lies Told by Children” [1913] (The Penguin Freud Library - On Sexuality [Vol. VII], 1977, p.285-92).

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Edgar Quinet (1803-75), author of ‘a beautiful sentence’ of which Joyce spoke (Letters, I, p.295) and which he incorporated in several versions in Finnegans Wake (e.g., 117.11). Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, OUP 1965) remarks that Joyce once astounding John O’Sullivan by quoting it in the original as they walked by the cemetary on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, while Joyce later asked Paul Léon to find the passage in notebooks left behind in Paris in 1933 (Ellmann, 1965, p.676), quoting the original: ‘Aujourd’hui, comme aux temps de Pline et de Columelle la jacinthe se plait dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguérite sur les ruines de Numance et pendant qu’autour d’elles les villes ont changé de maitres et de noms, que plusieurs sont entréers dans le néant, que les civilisations se sont choquées et brisées, leurs paisible generations ont traversé les ages et sont arrivés jusqua’a nous, fraiches et riantes commes aux jours des batailles. [Today as in the time of Pliny and Columbella the hyacinth desports in Wales, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia and while around them cities have changes masters and names, while some have ceased to exist, while the civilisations have colleded with each other and smashed, their peaceful generations have passed through the ages and have come up to us, fresh and laughing as on the days of battles.]’ Ellmann also quotes the ‘Irish’ version in Finnegans Wake: ‘Since the bouts of Hebear and hairman the cornflowers have been staying at Ballymun, the duskrose has choosed out Goatstown hedges, twolips have pressed togatherem by sweet Rush, townland of twinedlights, the whitethorn and the redthorn have fairygeyed the mayvalleys of Knockmaroon, and, though for rings round them, during a chiliad of perihelygangs, the Formoreans have brittled the tooath of the Danes and the Oxman hs been pestered by the Firebugs and the Joynts have thrown up jerrybuilding to the Kevanses and Little on the Green is childsfather to the City (Year! Year! And laughtears!), thes paxsealing buttonholes have quadrilled across the centuries and whiff now whafft to us, fresh and made-of-all-smiles, as, on the eve of Killallwho.’ (FR, pp.14-15; Ellmann, [op. cit.,] idem; n.) See also detailed exposition in Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (London: Faber 1962); Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake, California UP 1977, p.242, and Richard Kain, ‘“Nothing Odd Will Do Long”: Some Thoughts on Finnegans Wake Twenty-five Years Later’, Jack P. Dalton & Clive Hart, eds., Twelve and a Tilly: Essays on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of Finnegans Wake, London: Faber & Faber 1966, p.95.)

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Walter Pater, The Renaissance (1873; 1893 Edn.), Preface: ‘Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them […] “To see the object as in itself it really is,” has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in æsthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The objects with which æsthetic criticism deals - music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life - are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? […] “The ages are all equal,” says William Blake, “but genius is always above its age.” Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the commoner elements with which it may be found in combination. Few artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all débris, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has wholly fused and transformed. Take, for instance, the writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his genius, entering into the substance of his work, has crystallised a part, but only a part, of it; and in that great mass of verse there is much which might well be forgotten. […]’ [For full text, see RICORSO Library, International Critics, infra.]

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Walter Pater, The Renaissance (1873; 1893 Edn.), Conclusion [Epilogue]: ‘Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them - the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the brain under every ray of light and sound - processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them - a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways. / Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye, the gradual fading of colour from the wall - movements of the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest - but the race of the midstream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions - colour, odour, texture - in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. […] To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off - that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves.’ (Quoted [in small part] in Vicki Mahaffey, Reauthorizing Joyce, Cambridge UP 1988, p.145, comparing the passage with Stephen’s speech in the Library scene of Ulysses: “we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies … from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro.” - U 9.376-77.) [For full text, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > International Critics”, infra.)

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Walter Pater: In “The Decay of Lying”, Wilde writes: ‘[...] Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new aesthetics; and it is this, more than that vital connection between form and substance, on which Mr. Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the arts.’ (The Works of Oscar Wilde, London: Galley Press 1987, p.926.) Might it be to this passage and idea that Stephen Dedalus tacitly alludes refers at the opening of the “Circe” episode of Ulysses when he asserts: ‘So that gesture, not music, not odours, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm’. (Bodley Head Edn., 1965, p.564.)

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Walter Pater: Wilde writes of Pater’s Renaissance: ‘[...] Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Mona Lisa something that Lionardo [Leonardo] never dreamed of? The painter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange figure “set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea“, I murmur to myself, “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her: and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands”. And I say to my friend, “The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire”; and he answers me, “Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little weary’. / And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing ”’ (See Works of Oscar Wilde, Galley Press 1987, p.860.)

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Ernest Renan: Joyce reads and does not like Renan’s Souvenirs and guesses that ‘his life of Jesus must be very maudlin stuff.’ (Letter of 3 Dec. 1904; Selected Letters, 1975, p.45); asks Stanislaus for translation of Strauss’s Life of Jesus and tells him that he is ordering Renan’s Vie de Jesu [1863] (Letter of 16 Jan. 1906, Selected Letters, p.50.)

Ernest Renan (2): On 28 February 1905 he reported on Vie de Jesu: ‘I have read Renan’s Life of Jesus (I asked you to send Strauss): it is a model of good writing in many ways: the temper is delightful. The narrative of the death I may perhaps translate for our. He calls John the Baptist the absinthe of the divine feast.’ (Selected Letters, 1975, p.55.)

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Edouard Dujardin -of Les lauriers sont coupés (1887): Harry Levin writes, ‘Dujardin was not utterly unknown to the Dublin of Ulysses, since Dana: A Magazine of Independent Thought carried his defence of the excommunicated Catholic historian, Alfred Loisy, a month before Stephen tried to persuade the editor, John Eglinton, to accept an article on Shakespeare. The elderly innovator survived to promulgate a rambling definition of the style which he had invented and Joyce had perfected: “The internal monologue, in its nature on the order of poetry, is that unheard and unspoken speech by which a character expresses his inmost thoughts (those lying nearest the unconscious) without regard to logical organizations - that is, in their original state - by means of direct sentences reduced to the syntactic minimum, and in such a way as to give the impression of reproducing the thoughts just as they come into the mind.” […] The little book [Les lauriers sont coupées] did not escape the sharp eye of Remy de Gourmont, who reviewed it as “a novel which seems in literature a transposed anticipation of the cinema”. (James Joyce: A Critical Introduction [1944], Faber & Faber 1960, p.83.) (For full text, see RICORSO Library, International Critics, infra.)

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Oscar Wilde (1): An Ideal Husband by Wilde includes the lines: ‘A woman’s life revolves in curves of emotions’ - the phrase that inspired Joyce’s account of the proper method of biography (and autobiography) in his “Portrait” Essay (1904). More extensively, the passage reads: [Lord Goring to Lady Chiltern:] ‘Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew himself? A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A woman’s life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man’s life progresses. Don’t make any terrible mistake, Lady Chiltern. A woman who can keep a man’s love, and love him in return, has done all the world wants of women, or should want of them.’ (Act IV; The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, London: Dawsons 1969, p.228; also in The Works of Oscar Wilde, London: Galley Press 1987, p.533; see also under Oscar Wilde > Notes > James Joyce, infra.)

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Oscar Wilde (1): In An Ideal Husband, Lord Goring uses the phrase: ‘he stands in immediate relation to modern life, makes it indeed, and so masters it’ (Act III). Similarly, in Stephen Hero, Joyce says of the poet that stands ‘in a relation to life than which none can be more immediate’ [my italics]. Similarly, the phrase ‘[t]hose big words that make us so unhappy’, to be found in Joyce’s review of William Rooney’s poems, seems to echo the line in which Mrs Cheveley’s remarks on her business with Sir Robert Chiltern when she tells Lord Goring:‘Oh, don’t use big words. They mean so little. It is a commercial transaction that is all’ (idem.).

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Oscar Wilde (3): in De Profundis Wilde attaches the phrase ‘our great mother’ to the Earth which Buck Mulligan afterwards applies to the sea: ‘I hope to be at least a month with my friends, and to gain peace and balance, and a less troubled heart, and a sweeter mood. I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon. The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy that he might keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped over the young shoots, and for the artist and the athlete, the two types that Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the leaves of the bitter laurel and of the wild parsley, which else had been of no service to men. / We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our art is of the moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the sun and deals directly with things. I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.’ (itals. mine; Complete Works; quoted in part in Danial Albright, ed., W. B. Yeats: The Poems, London: Everyman 1992, p.xxx; see whole text in Library / “Irish Classics”, infra.)

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Oscar Wilde (4) - In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde introduces Giordano Bruno in a context that Joyce may well have met with. The reference falls in the course of Sir Henry Wotton’s reflections on the psycho-physical complex: ‘Soul and body, body and soul - how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began? How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also. /  He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy. /  It was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions.’ Note that Joyce attributes roughly corresponding ideas to Stephen Dedalus in different places, and the Joyce’s critique of Wilde is based on the premise that sin is central to his system. (Consider also the idea of modern ideas as ‘bric-a-brac’ (p.24) and Joyce’s later assertion that the reader would know that the contents of Stephen’s mind was bric-a-brac by the Proteus episode. (Refs. here to Evelyn Nash Edn., n.d.; for full text, see RICORSO Library, “Irish Classics” > The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chap. 4, infra ).

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Oscar Wilde (5) Stephen’s motto, ‘silence, exile and cunning’ [AP312] derives from Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisane (1847) in which Lucien de Rubempré says: ‘J’ai mis en pratique un axiome avec lequel on est sûr de vivre tranquille: Fuge ... Late ... Tace’, while Oscar Wilde remarks of the same: ‘One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.’ (See under Textual Notes, supra.)

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Oscar Wilde (6): Joyce’s remarks at the opening of the “1904 Portrait” seem to echo the preoccupation with time and personal evolution to me met with in Wilde’s The Critic as Artist when Gilbert says: ‘The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.’ (See Works of Oscar Wilde, Galley Press 1987, p.860.)

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Oscar Wilde (7): Stephen Dedalus’s remark in Ulysses about the Catholic Church’s being ‘founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void’ (Bodley Head Edn., 1960, p.267) echoes Wilde’s remark about Homer’s songs being ‘built out of music, “And so not built at all, / And therefore built forever”.’ (See “The Critic as Artist”, in Works of Oscar Wilde, Galley Press 1987, p.960.)

Oscar Wilde (8): Joyce’s epistolary remark that ‘I am sure however that the whole structure of heroism is, and always was, a damned lie and that there cannot be any substitute for the individual passion as the motive power of everything - art and philosophy included.’ (Selected Letters, 1976, p.54), seems to have its roots in Wilde’s observation, The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age.’ (“The Critic as Artist”, in Works of Oscar Wilde, Galley Press 1987, p.960; for full text, go to RICORSO Library, “Irish Classics”, via index, or direct.) [See also note on Bruno’s Bestia Trionfans, supra.]

Oscar Wilde (9): Arguably, Joyce’s hebephilia and exaltation of youth is generally of a kind with Wilde’s. Compare Dorian Gray (1891): ‘Ah! In what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendour of his youth!’ - with A Portrait: ‘We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.’ (Youth is a recurrent term in Joyce’s novel, which seems to rate it at a very high intrinsic value, in the tradition of the symbolists and decadents.)

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W. B. Yeats (1): The famous remark of Joyce’s to Yeats, ‘We have met too late; you are too old to be influence by me’ was recorded by Padraic Colum in ‘With James Joyce in Ireland’, New York Times (11 June 1922), and is quoted in Herbert Gorman, James Joyce: The First Forty Years (London: Geoffrey Bles [1924]), p.5; see Commentary, supra.)

‘And turn no more aside and brood ...’: the lines from Yeats’s “Who Goes with Fergus?”, in The Countess Cathleen, the premiere of which Joyce attended on 8 May 1899 [Ellmann, JJ], when he he was especially moved by the lyric, sung by Florence Farr: "it’s feverish discontent and promise of carefree exile were to enter his own thought, and not long afterwards he set the poem to music and praised it as the best lyric in the world" (JJ, 1959, p.69.) See Thornton Weldon, Allusions in Ulysses (1968, 1982), p.16.

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W. B. Yeats (2): In Stephen Hero, Joyce quotes a sentence from Yeats’s “The Tables of the Law”: ‘Why do you fly from our torches which were made out of the wood of the trees under which Christ wept in the gardens of Gethsemene. Why do you fly from our torches which were made from the sweet wood after it had vanished from the world and come to us who made it of old tunes with our breath?’ [SH161; See W. B. Yeats, Short Fiction, ed. & intro., G. J. Watson, London: Penguin 1995, p.211.) Joyce’s familiarity with the text - ‘whole pages of which [he] knew by heart’ is remarked in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn, p.85, quoting Stephen Hero [as supra] and Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections of James Joyce, trans. Ellsworth Mason, NY: 1950, p.9 - but see also the account given by Padraic Colum of Joyce’s reciting the story while walking together. [q.opus.]

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W. B. Yeats (3): Joyce took the term ‘imperishable’ as he found it in Yeats’s story “Rosa Alchemica” and applied it to Stephen’s aesthetic ideals in A Portrait of the Artist, Chap. IV. Yeats wrote: ‘I had discovered […] that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals […] as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some divine and imperishable substance, and this enabled me to make my little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into art, and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly of essences.’ [italics mine] (See “"RA”, in George J. Watson, ed., W. B. Yeats: Short Fiction, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1995, p.180.) Cf., A Portrait of the Artist: ‘a prophecy of the end he had been born […], a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being’. (Jonathan Cape Edn., 1968, p.127), and also: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.’ (pp.172-73; my italics, BS.)

Note: It is conspicuous here that, just as Joyce is separating himself from the Irish literary revival tradition by means of his bold distinction between classical and romantic tempers, he retains a good deal of the vocabulary and the reflexes of a fin de siècle aesthete whose gaze is fixed on the artifice of eternity and the corresponding idea of pure essences. The fact is that Joyce took time to replace the pharmacopia of the symbolists with his own literary language. I think of this as the ‘stickiness’ of style. [BS: lecture at International Yeats Summer School (Sligo), 2002.]

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W. B. Yeats (4): As Richard Ellmann remarks, Joyce echoed the following Yeats’s lines from The Countess Cathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics: ‘And of the embattled flaming multitudes / Who rise, wing above wing, flame above flame, / And, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name ... ’ in his own verses from Shine and Dark (unpub.), ‘O Name, / Ineffable, proud name to whom the cries ascend / From lost angelical orders, seraph flame to flame / For this end have I hated him - for this poor end?’ (See Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., pp.84-85.) Ellmann also remarks that Joyce’s poem beginning ‘I intone the high anthem, / Partaking of their festival [...]’ describes a witches’ sabbath suggesting the orgiastic dance in Yeats’s story The Tables of the Law. (Ibid., p.85.) The source of poems from that collection quoted in Ellmann’s life of Joyce (on pp.84-86) is the verso of pages of Stanislaus Joyce’s diary, this being written on the verso of discarded pages of Joyce’s compositions [now held in the Cornell Univ. Library James Joyce Collection].

Greek Tragedy: ‘I think that we will learn again how to describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands, his return home at last, his slow-gathering vengeance, a flitting shape of a goddess, and a flight of arrows, and yet to make all of these so different things “take light from mutual reflection, like an actual trail of fire over precious stones”, and become “an entire word”, the signature or symbol of a mood of the divine imagination as imponderable as “the horror of the forest or the silent thunder in the leaves”’. (1898 essay, “The Autumn of the Body”, in Selected Criticism, Pan Macmillan 1976, p.42; quoted in Munira Mutran, ‘Different Appropriations of Greek Tragedy in Contemporary Drama: Irish and Otherwise’, in Ilha do Desterro Florianópolis, No. 58 (Jan./June 2010, pp.413-38; p.414 - available as pdf. online; accessed 15.10.2011). Mutran remarks: ‘Although referring to poetry, Yeats was, in a way, foretelling that James Joyce, and many of the modernist writers, would go back to myth in order to define their world.’ (Idem.)

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W. B. Yeats (5) - see Richard Ellmann: ‘The principle source of uncertainty as he [Joyce] acknowledged candidly to Stanislaus and to himself, was that he could rival his countryman Yeats, whose volume of lyrics, The Wind Among the Reeds had awakened his intense admiration when it appeared in 1899. About his prose, however, he had no such modesty and was already beginning to feel he might outdo George Moore, Hardy, and Turgenev, if not Tolstoy.’ (James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.87.)

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Alice Stopford Green refers to Uisneach [or Usnech] and the four-fold division of ancient Ireland in Irish Nationality (1912) - a survey of early Irish ‘nationhood’ which bears the dedication ‘To the Irish Dead.’ Cf. Hill of Uisneach as the scene of Jaun’s lying-place in FW, 1.iv. (See further under Green, Notes, supra.)

John Todhunter: In Todhunter’s story “How Thomas Connolly met the Banshee”, anthologised in Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), a comical allusion is made to the painting “Ecce Homo” in the pro-Cathedral (Marlborough St., Dublin), where it supplies a point of visual comparison for the face of the banshee under this somewhat mutilated form: “God forgive me for sayin’ it, but ’ twas more like the face of the “Axy Homo” beyand in Marlboro Sthreet Chapel nor like any face I could mintion - as pale as a corpse, an’ a most o’ freckles on it, like the freckles on a turkey’s egg.’ (Chapel denotes the standard - and implicitly diminutive - term for a Catholic church in Ireland for long after rescinding of the Penal Laws.) Now, this "Ecce Homo" might possibly be the work of that name by Michael Munkacsy (1844-1900) which was shown at the RHA in 1899 , and which Joyce enthusiastically described in an essay preserved in as a 14pp. holograph in Cornell UL - and formerly the property of Stanislaus Joyce. See The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason & Richard Ellmann (NY Viking Press 1959; rep. 1966), pp.31-37; and see further under Todhunter, infra.

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William James, “Stream of Consciousness” [Chap. XI], Psychology (Cleveland & NY: World): ‘[…] But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sensationalists are wrong. If there be such things as feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerum naturâ [sic], so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known. There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades.’ (Rep. on internet at Classics in the History of Psychology by Christopher D. Green [online]; see also “James Selection” by George Boeree of Shippensberg Univ. (Neth.) [online].)

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Valery Larbaud: Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier arranged a meeting between Joyce and Larbaud, an influential amateur who had converted to Catholicism in 1910. Joyce lent Larbaud numbers of the Little Review, and then the typescript of “Oxen of the Sun”. After two months Larbaud wrote to Beach, ‘I am raving mad over Ulysses’, which he said was ‘as great and comprehensive and human as Rabelais’, adding that Mr Bloom was ‘as immortal as Falstaff’. (See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., p.514.) The letter to Beach was quoted by her in ‘Ulysses à Paris’, in Mercure de France, CCCIX, May 1950, p.19; the remark on Rabelais and Falstaff quoted in a letter by Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1 March 1921, while Joyce also reported the remark on Falstaff it to Frank Budgen in a letter of 28? Feb. 1921 [Letters, I, p.159], adding ‘except that that he has some few more years to live’. (Ellmann, Notes, p.796, and ftn., p.514.) Note that the remark ‘I am raving [..., &c.]’, is also quoted in Geert Lernout, The French Joyce (Michigan UP 1990), p.29-30, being quoted from John L. Brown, ‘Uysses into French’, in Library Chronicle, 20-21 (1982), pp.29-60, p.32.

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Carl G. Jung (1): Jung called Ulysses ‘die Kunst de Rückenseite, oder die Rückenseite der Kunst [the art of the backside or the backside of art]’, in ‘Ulysses: A Monologue’, in Wirklichkeit der Seele (Zurich: Rascher 1934), p.148; quoted in Stephen Heath, ‘Ambiviolences: Notes for reading Joyce’, in Post-structuralist Joyce, ed., Attridge & Ferrer ( Cambridge UP 1984, p.34.) Note: Jean Kimball, in Joyce and the Early Freudians: A Synchronic Dialogue of Texts (Florida UP 2003), demonstrates that Joyce knew key texts of psychoanalysis.

Carl G. Jung (2): Jung called the “Penelope” episode in Ulysses ‘a veritable string of psychological peaches’ (letter to Joyce, Aug. 1932, in Letters of James Joyce, London: Faber 1966, Vol. 3 [ed. Richard Ellmann], p.253).

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Wyndham Lewis (1): Lewis wrote a hostile chapter on Ulysses as ‘Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce’, soon afterwards rep. in Time and Western Man (Sept. 1927), pp.91-130, calling it Joyce’s ‘sardonic catafalque of the victorian world’ (p.109); further: ‘what stimulates [Joyce] is ways of doing things […] and not things to be done (p.106-07). He also comments at length on Joyce’s use of cliché - or, rather, his propensity toward cliché (p.112-16). See Derek Attridge & Daniel Ferrer, Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French (Cambridge UP 1984, p.5.)

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Wyndham Lewis (2): Lewis criticised Ulysses as ‘a suffocating, noetic expanse of objects, all of them lifeless’ - to be echoed by Joyce in the phrases, ‘a jetsam litterage of convolvuli of times lost or strayed, of lands derelict and of tongues laggin too’ [FW292], but more extensively in “The Ondt and the Gracehoper” (pp.414-19 - in “First Watch of Shaun”, being III.i of FW). Note: Joyce’s epithets belong to Bloom’s encyclopaedic listing, in “Ithaca” of numerous if implausible sources of possible wealth such as ‘wireless telegraph’ scams at the horse-track or ‘unexpected discovery of object of great monetary value’-in this case, ‘in the sea (amid flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict’). Ulysses [1922] (London: Bodley Head 1967), p.845.

Arnold Schoenberg: ‘In response to [Otto] Luening’s inability to approximate an answer, Joyce stated the following, denouncing all composers, except two: “For me there are only two composers. One is Palestrina and the other is Schoenberg.”’ (See Jim Samson, Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expression and Atonality 1900-1920, London : J. M. Dent & Sons 1977, p.194; quoted in Jonathan McCreedy, MA Diss., UUC 2008.)

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Takaoki Katta (1886-1976), a Japanese academic and grad. of Imperial University of Tokyo, interviewed Joyce in Paris in July 1926. The text of his interview, transcribed by Yasuo Kumagai from notebooks in the possession of his daughter, is published in Genetic Joyce Studies, 2 (Spring 2002), under the heading: ‘“Takaoki Katta” (Buffalo Notebook, VI.B.12: 113)’. The interview is transcribed from the Katta’s notebook entitled “Drama VI [in Abroad II]” - as follows [inter alia]: I. Words & phrases should sound like the meaning they express. a.) To attain this the writer may well invent new wds within the extent that the reader can understand the meaning of those new words[.] b.) The writers should go over grammar and dictionary. Grammar & Dictionary sh d follow writers. It is a great anachronism & absurdness that writers sh d follow grammar & dictionary. Writers sh d always be younger than grammar & dictionary. II. Words must be spelt as they are pronounced. a.) The object of spelling is to let the reader know the pronunciation of the words. How fool-hardy is it to spell “[ ]” which shd be pron. “[ ]”. There’s no reason whatever to keep this silly spelling but the so-called custom & conservativeness. [Note: the blanks are Katta’s own.] III. We want to feel literature. We want to see the spirit of life. Various accidents external are merely the voices & shadows of our internal spirit. / Realistic treatment of things external is indirect & round-about way of treating. / We should try to express our spirit flowing from the inmost recesses of our heart without being controlled by external things. External things will follow./ Literature should be a living picture of the living spirit.’ [Cont.]

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Takaoki Katta (interview with Joyce, 15 July 1926): ’. ‘[...] He said that he is writing a voluminous book very metaphisical [ sic ], & said that it would take him 10 years. He said Ulyses [ sic ] took him 8 yrs, A P. of the Art. - 5 years. He said that he is putting many Jap. wds in his new book & asked me who was the first woman in Japan. I gave him “[Jap. chars.]” together with the pronunciation. / “I’ll answer you your question in my book [i.e., Katta’s marginalia in Portrait]. Ask now.” and I asked some which he answered on the spot. His kindness went further & said: “If you have any question in my “Portr. of the Art” when you want to translate it into Japanese, you can make a list of those questions to send it to me c/o Miss Beach, Shakespeare & Coy.” / How sweet of him! / I will do so. / He is so kind. He must be honest too. / It is very difficult to say what is good & what is bad in the strict sense of the words, but this much is certain that kindness & honesty are, despite of the difference of time & place, always & everywhere good. / He is a good man. 15 juillet, 1926. P.S. He said he thinks very highly of slang & dialect (pidgin-English even). / Slang & dialect, tho first detested, are very apt to become the standard language not in so long a time.’ (See Yasuo Kumagai ‘“Takaoki Katta” (Buffalo Notebook, VI.B.12: 113)’, in Genetic Joyce Studies , Spring 2002 - online, with thumbnails attached.