BOOKS
NARROW VIEWS OF JAMES JOYCE
JAMES JOYCE: Two Decodes of Criticism. Edited
by
Seon Givens.
Vonguord Press. $5.00.
Mr. Givens' collection, which makes nearly as large a volume
as
Finnegans Wake,
includes nineteen essays on Joyce, of which seven–
teen have been published elsewhere in reviews or as parts of books.
Some are important early appreciations, like those of Eliot and Foster
Damon; some, like those of Stuart Gilbert, Frank Budgen and Eugene
Jolas, are based on personal acquaintance with Joyce; some are valu–
able recent reinterpretations by younger critics like Irene Hendry and
Hugh Kenner. The essays are plausibly arranged to cover Joyce's work
in proper sequence, and many of them were good for their time and
place, and stand up well on rereading. Yet they do not make a book,
and cannot be conceived as a book, even a reference book, since there
is no index and most of the material included is discursive rather than
topical in character. It is hard to see who would use this collection or
for what end, except the convenience of not having to look up in
bound periodicals the three or four essays in Mr. Givens' volume which a
student of Joyce might want to know in addition to the material al–
ready available in book form.
Early pieces here like Eliot's "Ulysses, Order and Myth," have
been exhaustively quoted, discussed and assimilated by later critics seiz–
ing desperately on anything that looked like authoritative guidance. The
essays by Gilbert, Jolas and Budgen seem slight beside the books which
two of them have published, and beside Gorman's
Life
and the collection
Our Exagmination.
And a reader who knows Joyce well enough to
judge the close and radical reasoning of Hugh Kenner's "The Portrait in
Perspective" will find little to profit him in six or seven of the more
elementary essays, including some recent ones by Englishmen. Since the
essayists are not collaborating, the result is a tedious deal of overlapping
and repetition, with the same references appearing again and again,
though sometimes with arbitrarily opposite interpretations. Obviously
if
an introduction to Joyce' work is wanted, the guides of Harry Levin,
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