Vico and Joyce

by Donald Phillip Verene (editor)

Joyce said, "My imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn't when I read Freud or Jung." This volume is the first extended examination of the connections between Vico and Joyce. Joyce employed Vico's New Science as the basis of Finnegans Wake, as he employed Homer's Odyssey as the basis of Ulysses. In what ways are Vico and Joyce similar? To what extent is Vico an influence on Joyce? And in what ways can Vico's philosophy be newly understood when seen in relation to Joyce's use of it? This book suggests ways to see both thinkers anew. Vico and Joyce is divided into three major "Cycles and History," in which Vico's famous conception of the course and recourse of historical events is examined in relation to Joyce's use of this idea in Finnegans Wake; "Joyce and Vico," in which the relationship between the two thinkers is approached more from the side of Joyce than Vico; "Language and Myth," in which the similarities of Vico's and Joyce's grasp of language and imaginative forms of thought are considered. This book opens up a relationship and set of ideas whose time has come. In the last decade there has been an exciting renaissance in the study of Vico that originated in the English-speaking world and spread back to Italy. Joyce has been the one major twentieth-century figure through which most English readers have come to know something of Vico. To consider them together opens up new avenues for our understanding of the imagination, memory, and the cyclic course of human history.

Genres: Philosophy, 20th Century, History

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The editor of this collection of essays was a reader on my dissertation committee at Emory, and I took his seminar on Vico as a graduate student there, which was my introduction to the work of that interesting and curious thinker. I confess that my imagination was not fired by Vico in the way it has been over the years by Joyce, but the former's influence on the latter, especially on Finnegans Wake, is undeniable. The essays in this volume are uneven, but the ones I found most helpful were those by Northrup Frye, Peter Hughes, Baron and Bhattacharya, and the concluding one by Verene. Some of the authors continue to give pride of place in Vico's thought and influence on his cyclic view of history, of corso e ricorso, but I tend to agree with those who find Vico's true originality and deepest influence in the notion of the "imaginative universal", which he sees as the real key to understanding originating myths and which so clearly moved Joyce in his composition of Ulysses and, of course, Finnegans Wake. The most helpful essay on the latter that I have come across thus far though has been Anthony Burgess' "Finnegans Wake: What It's All About," for which one need not have an interest or background in Vico studies.

[Josh Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some interesting pieces and some sort of slapdash over-generalizing. Actually my favorite piece was the Northrop Frye essay about Finnegans Wake. It's pretty rare you read something about FW that's both comprehensible and insightful, but that one is. Some of the philosophical" entries, though, are really less than rigorous.