The World—Gritty, Particular

James Joyce, Letters, Vols. II and III, edited by Richard Ellmann. Viking, $25.00

On the Joyce shelf, what he didn’t write for publication now considerably exceeds in bulk what he did: the Stephen Hero manuscript, the Scribbledehobble notebook, the Critical Writings, the 1957 Letters, and now two more volumes which bring the published correspondence alone to a wordage exceeding that of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake combined. Add Mr. Ellmann’s megatherium biography; add the dozens upon dozens of volumes of commentary, exegesis, introduction, orientation; stand back for a synoptic view; and the mere half-million-plus words on which Joyce chose to be judged dwindle to the thickness of a cutting edge backed up by an astonishing bulk of brute metal. And Joyce brought the whole phenomenon into existence, cutting edge, axe-head and all. Flaubert, by contrast, merely ground a new edge on something we may call “the novel.” But the Joyce phenomenon has oddly little to do with the novel, with fiction, with literature. Joyce wrote in the knowledge that there would be commentaries; he virtually invented his own commentators; in the Twenties and Thirties we see him equipping the first-generation Joyceans with credentials and with themes. Over a period of seventeen years he not only wrote Finnegans Wake but brought it bit by bit and draft by draft into print with such skilful marshalling of elucidative essays that what might have plopped into public gaze a stillborn elephant was moderately well understood before it was even published.

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Hugh Kenner

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James Joyce, Letters, Vols. II and III, edited by Richard Ellmann. Viking, $25.00

On the Joyce shelf, what he didn’t write for publication now considerably exceeds in bulk what he did: the Stephen Hero manuscript, the Scribbledehobble notebook, the Critical Writings, the 1957 Letters, and now two more volumes which bring the published correspondence alone to a wordage exceeding that of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake combined. Add Mr. Ellmann’s megatherium biography; add the dozens upon dozens of volumes of commentary, exegesis, introduction, orientation; stand back for a synoptic view; and the mere half-million-plus words on which Joyce chose to be judged dwindle to the thickness of a cutting edge backed up by an astonishing bulk of brute metal. And Joyce brought the whole phenomenon into existence, cutting edge, axe-head and all. Flaubert, by contrast, merely ground a new edge on something we may call “the novel.” But the Joyce phenomenon has oddly little to do with the novel, with fiction, with literature. Joyce wrote in the knowledge that there would be commentaries; he virtually invented his own commentators; in the Twenties and Thirties we see him equipping the first-generation Joyceans with credentials and with themes. Over a period of seventeen years he not only wrote Finnegans Wake but brought it bit by bit and draft by draft into print with such skilful marshalling of elucidative essays that what might have plopped into public gaze a stillborn elephant was moderately well understood before it was even published.