James Joyce: Commentary - Index

An index of authors quoted in this compilation of commentaries on Joyce follows - as infra.
See also some miscellaneous extracts these and other authors on this page - infra.

Commentaries: Index of Critics

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Miscellaneous extracts

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Bruce Stewart, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 93, 370 (Summer 2004) - notice by Sadbh [Caroline Walsh, Lit. Ed.] in The Irish Times (q.d.): ‘A fascinating episode in the long story of Ireland’s reaction to James Joyce is analysed in the current issue of Studies. In an essay by Bruce Stewart called Another Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce and the Envoy, the focus is on a volume called A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish (1970), edited by man of letters and publican John Ryan, and including articles by Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and others which they had contributed to a James Joyce special issue of Envoy, which Ryan had published in 1951. / Stewart says that apart from isolated enthusiasms in that issue of Envoy and its sequel, the pieces represented a moment when the expropriation of Joyce’s Dublin triggered apoplectic irritation on the part of its living literary denizens. They simply carped, he adds, giving a flavour of what was said at the time. “It remains a pity that they did seek in Joyce’s works an explanation for their own confusions at the same time as they berated transatlantic Joyceans for their inevitable failings,” Stewart concludes.

Ulick O’Connor, ‘Joyce should join Yeats in the Irish soil’, in Irish Independent, [Sunday] 30 Jan. 2011: ‘[...] As Yeats is widely recognised as the finest poet of the 20th Century and Joyce as its outstanding prose writer, it would be appropriate if both their graves were in the country of their birth. / There is no doubt that Joyce's feelings for his own country were extreme. “I am attracted to it daily and nightly like an umbilical cord’ is how he put it to Sean Lester, the Irish Secretary of the League of Nations, only a fortnight before he died in Zurich in 1941. Lester learned from Joyce that he listened to Radio Eireann every day. / During their meeting, Joyce was quite excited as he had just heard a Radio Eireann broadcast of Question Time in which one of his books had been mentioned by an Irish labourer as his favourite one. He told Lester that he was so moved he got up and bowed to the radio. During the conversations that they had, Joyce was ravenously hungry for news of Dublin.’ (Available online).

Stephen Greenblatt [citing Stephen’s thoughts on Shakespeare in “Scylla & Charybdis” chapter of Ulysses], ‘Wooing, Marrying, and Repenting’ [Ch. 4], in Will of the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) - on Shakespeare’s relations with his wife Ann Hathaway: ‘In his rented rooms in London, he contrived to have a private life - that too, perhaps, is the meaning of Aubrey’s report that he was not a “company keeper”, that he refused invitations to be “debauched”. Not the regular denizen of taverns, not the familiar companion of his cronies, he found intimacy and lust and love with people whose names he managed to keep to himself. “Women he won to him”, says Stephen Daedalus, James Joyce’s alter ego in Ulysses, in one of the greatest meditations on Shakespeare’s marriage, “tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully tapsters’ wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.”
 Sometime around 1610, Shakespeare, a wealthy man with many investments, retired from London and returned to Stratford [...]’ (Greenblatt, q.p.; Kindle edition - loc. 2130; copied 25.04.2017.).

Note that Greenblatt has already underscored the biographical connection between life and works earlier in the same chapter, where he is engaged on measuring the effect of Shakespeare’s seemingly broken marriage with Anne Hathaway: ‘[T]he whole impulse to explore Shakespeare’s life arises from the powerful conviction that his plays and poems spring not only from other plays and poems but from things he knew firsthand, in his body and soul. [Kindle, loc. 1728.]’