The Consciousness of Joyce

by Richard Ellmann

Book by Ellmann, Richard

Genres: Literary Criticism

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Richard David Ellmann was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition won James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focuses on the major modernist writers of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Ellmann's devotion to studying James Joyce and analysing his works is inspiring and admirable. Ellmann was clearly well read and knowledgable in literary history and traces the literary ancestry of Ulysses with intricate detail and obsession. This energy and enthusiasm is evident and compelling but in this volume of writing, in my opinion —compared with the more accessible prose style in Ellmann's wonderful biography of Joyce— clarity of thought is often inadvertently obscured by over elaboration. Ellmann discusses Joyce's association of himself with Homer and Shakespeare, his oblique, revolutionary subversion of existing institutions and Joyce's belief in the transformative power of art and the artist's role in the world. A fascinating addition to this essay is an appendix of James Joyce's library of 600 volumes and provides an interesting peek into Joyce's purposeful interests during the writing of his books. I was surprised to see Joyce had first editions of the Twilight fan fiction Fifty Shades of Grey…

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are any number of things I disagree with in here, starting Ellmann's prima facie ludicrous belief that Joyce intended everything in Ulysses to lead towards one major philosophical statement:

"To those who lived meaninglessly in a brutal and consuming present, Joyce offered a world of accountability and did not shrink from calling it spiritual. To those who, nursed by locally distorted Catholic doctrines, spoke of spiritual realities as if they alone existed, he pointed to the realities of the body's life," (89).

If that's what Joyce was doing, then I'm fully behind it: he'd be doing negative dialectics decades before Adorno. But Ellmann's argument doesn't stop there. He connects the two terms here (materialism and spiritualism) with two other kind-of-sort-of relevant terms (objectivity and subjectivism), and two philosophers who are relevant, but not in the way that Ellmann seems to think (Aristotle and Hume) to make a grandiose metaphysical statement about how puns represent reality because reality is inevitably doubling and folding in on itself or something. He then claims that this is not mystical.

There's a lot going on there, but there are some pretty obvious points to make. First, Aristotle is not a materialist. In fact, Aristotle holds the very position that Ellmann sometimes attributes to Joyce, of 'form' interacting with matter. Aristotle believes in forms, he just doesn't believe that they can function if they transcend matter. Now, true, this puts him in opposition to Hume, but it also puts him in opposition to actual materialists.

Second, Ellmann goes through all of this without mentioning Kant--you know, the guy who made the problems of materialism vs idealism and scepticism vs dogmatism central to European philosophy. Now, Joyce may not have known Kant. But his not knowing Kant is a pretty good indication that he wasn't making the argument Ellmann attributes to him. Joyce was a knowledgeable guy. If he was making a Kantian argument, he would have known he was doing it.

Third, metaphysics of this kind is always mystical.

More important for most readers of Ulysses, however, is the way Ellmann traces Odyssean and Shakespearean tropes and themes through the book. He makes a number of excellent arguments about small moments (particularly interesting is his take on Bloom/Stephen looking into the mirror and seeing Shakespeare), and you don't have to buy the "Joyce solved all the world's intellectual problems" thing to get a lot out of the book.

So, he hasn't convinced me that Joyce had even one remotely coherent political thought (he might have read some anarchism, but was clearly enamored of the movement's destructive aspects--no institutions! no groups!--rather than its positive, communitarian aspects); nor has he convinced me that Ulysses' is a structural masterpiece. But he makes a strong, reasonable case, one that was worth making, and is well worth reading.

[Noel Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

The three main sections of the book each have a lot of interesting insights on Joyce’s works but I thought the first section was by far the strongest. I really enjoyed learning about the source materials on Homer which were used to write Ulysses. The section on Shakespeare was less revelatory but there were still a handful of very helpful and new-to-me observations. The last section on Joyce and his politics flew past me. I can’t say I found anything terribly illuminating there.

Overall though I would say my next reading of Ulysses will be enhanced by this book quite a bit.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Acquired 1993
The Word, Montreal, Quebec