James Joyce: Quotations (1) - Extracts from Works [I]

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Early Writings
“Et Tu, Healy” (1891): ‘His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time / Where the rude din of this [...] century / Can trouble him no more.’ Further, ‘My cot alas that dear old shady home / Where oft in youthful sport I played / Upon thy verdant grassy fields all day / Or lingered for a moment in thy bosom shade.’ (Given by Joyce in letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 22 Nov. 1930, in Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann, 1975, p.355, and quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce [1959] 1966 Edn., p.330 & ftn.; also in Slocum & Cahoon, Bibliography of James Joyce, 1953, p.3.)

“Ecce Homo” (1899) [on Mukacsy’s picture of that title at the RHA]: ‘[...] Perhaps what is striking about the picture under [31] consideration is the sense of life, the realistic illusion. One could well fancy that the men and women were of flesh and blood, struck into silence trance, by the warlock’s hand. Hence the picture is primarily dramatic, not an execution of faultess forms, or a canvas reproduction of psychology. By drama I understand the interplay of passions; drama is strife, evolution, movement, in whatever way unfolded. Drama exists as an independent thing, conditioned but not controlled by its scene. [...] However subdued the tone of passions may be, however ordered the action or commonplace the diction, if a play, or work of music, or a picture concerns itself with the everlasting hopes, desires and hates of humanity, or deals with a symbolic presentment of our widely related nature, albeit a phase of that nature, then it is drama. [....; see note]. But in whatever dwarfed and marionette-like a manner, their passions are human, and so the exposition of them is drama. This is fairly obvious when applied to a stage subject but when the word drama is in an identical way, applied to Munkacsy, it may need a word of explanation.’ (Critical Writings, ed. Mason & Ellmann, [1959] 1966, pp.32.) [Cont.]

[ Note: Joyce here speaks of Maeterlinck’s characters which ‘our civilisation dubs ... uncanny’. ]

“Ecce Homo” (1899) - cont. ‘In the statuary art the first step towards drama was the separation of the feet. Before that sculpture was a copy of the body, actuated by only a nascent impulse, and executed by routine. The infusion of life, or its semblance, at once brought soul into the work of the artist, vivified his forms and elucidated his theme. It follows narually form the fact that the sculptor aims at producing a bronze or stone model of man, that his impulse should lead him to the portrayal of an instantaneous passion. Consequently although he has the advantage of the painter, in at the first glance deceiving the eye, his capability to be a dramatist is less broad than the painter’s. His power of moulding can be equalised by the painter’s backgrounds and skilful disposition of shades, and while in such a manner naturalism is produced on an areal canvas, the colours, which add another life, help his theme to its expression [32] in a very much completer and clearer whole. [...] It is a mistake to limit drama to the stage; a drama can be painted as well as sung or acted, and “Ecce Homo” is a drama.’ [There ensues a detailed examination of the painting, as follows - cont.:]

“Ecce Homo” (1899) - cont.: ‘The expressions conveyed in the varying faces, gestures, hands, and opened mouthes are marvellous [...; 34] It will be cleare from all this that the whole forms a wonderful picture, intensely, silently dramatic, waiting but the touch of the wizard wand to break out into reality, life and conflict. As such too much tribute cannot be paid to it, for it is a frightfully real presentment of all the baser passions of humanity, in both sexes, in every gradation, raised and lashed into a demoniac carnival. [...] To paint such a crowd one must probe humanity with no scrupulous knife. [35; ...] It would have been easier to make Mary a Madonna and John an evangelist but the artist has chosen to make Mary a mother John a man. I believe this treatment to be the finer and the subtler. [...] Van Ruith painted a picture some years ago of Christ and the traders in the temple. His intention was to produce elevated reprimand and divine chastisement, his hand failed him and the result was a weak flogger and a mixture of lovingkindness and repose, wholly incompatible with the incident. Munkacsy on the contrary would never be under the power of his brush, but his view of the event is humanistic. Consequently his work is drama. Had he chosen to paint Christ as the Incarnate Son of God, redeeming his creatures of his own admirable will, through insult and hate, it would not have been drama, it would have been Divine Law, for drama deals with man. As it is from the artist’s conception, it is powerful drama, the drama of the thrice told revolt of humanity against a great teacher.’ (Critical Writings, ed. Mason & Ellmann, [1959] 1966, pp.34-36 - cont.)

“Ecce Homo” (1899) - cont.: ‘The face of Christ is a superb study of endurance, passion, I use the word in its proper sense, and dauntless will. [... T]he eyes are of a pale blue colour, if of any, as the face is turned to the light, they are lifted half under the brows, the only true position for intense [36] agony. They are keen, but not large, and seem to pierce the air, half in inspiration, half in suffering. The whole face is of an ascetic, inspired, wholesouled, wonderfully passionate man. It is Christ, the Man of Sorrows, his raiment red as of them that tread in winepress. It is literally Behold the Man. / It is this treatment of the theme that has led me to appraise it a drama. It is grand, noble, tragic but it makes the founder of Christianity, no more than a great social and religious reformer, a personality, of mingled majesty and power, a protagonist of a world-drama. No objections will be lodged against it on that by the public, whose general attitude when they advert to subject at all, is that of the painter, only less grand and less interested. / Munkacsy’s conception is as much greater than theirs, as an average artist is greater than an average greengrocer, but it is of same kind, it is to pervert Wagner, the attitude of the town. Belief in the divinity of Christ is not a salient feature of secular Christendom. But occasional sympathy with the eternal conflict of truth and error, of right and wrong, as exemplified in the drama at Golgotha is not beyond its approval.’ [End] (‘Royal Hibernian Academy “Ecce Homo”, in Ellsworth Mason & Richard Ellmann, eds., Critical Writings of James Joyce, Viking Press 1966, pp.31-37.)

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“James Clarence Mangan” (15 Feb. 1902 [var. 1 Feb.]; published in St. Stephen's [1, 6] May 1902, pp.116-18.) - [on aesthetic theory]: ‘It is many a day since the dispute of the classical and romantic schools began in the quiet city of the arts, so that criticism, which [73] has wrongly decided that the classical temper is the romantic temper grown older, has been driven to recognise these as constant states of mind. [...] The romantic school is often and grievously misinterpreted, not more by others than by its own, for that impatient temper which, as it could see no fit abode here for its ideals, chose to behold them under insensible figures, comes to disregard certain limitations, and, because these figures are blown high and low by the mind that conceived them, comes at times to regard them as feeble shadows moving aimlessly about the light, obscuring it; and the same temper, which assuredly, has not grown more patient, exclaims that the light is changed to worse than shadow, to darkness even, by any method which bends upon these present things and so, works upon them and fashions them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning, which is still unuttered.’ (Critical Writings, 1966, pp.73-74; cf. variant version of same given in Stephen Hero - as infra.)

Compare Stephen Hero [1944]: ‘The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them.’ (p.79; new. edn. p.66; cited in a footnote in Critical Writings, 1959, p.74 n.)

“James Clarence Mangan” (1902) [on aesthetic theory] - cont.: ‘Finally, it must be asked concerning every artist in relation to the highest knowledge and to those laws which do not take holiday because men forget them. This is not to look for a message but to approach the temper which has made the work, an old woman praying, or a young man fastening his shoe, and to see what is there well and how much it signifies.’ (The Critical Writings of James Joyce, NY Viking Press 1959; reps. 1964, 1966, p.75). Also, ‘The critic is he who is able, by means of the signs which the artist affords, to approach the temper which has made there work and to see what is well done therein and what it signifies.’ (1977 Edn. p.74.)[ top ]

“James Clarence Mangan” (1902) [on the poet himself]: ‘Mangan, it must be remembered, wrote with no native literary tradition to guide him and for a public which cared for matters of the day, and for poetry only so far as it might illustrate these.’ [...] ‘Though even in the best of Mangan the presence of alien emotions is sometimes felt the presence of an imaginative personality reflecting the delight of imaginative beauty is more vividly felt. East and West meet in that personality (we know how); images interweave there like soft, luminous scarves and words ring like brilliant mail, and whether the song is of Ireland or of Istambol it has the same refrain, a prayer that peace may come again to her who has lost peace, the moonwhite pearl of his soul, Ameen.’ [78; cont.]

“James Clarence Mangan” (1902) [on the poet himself - cont.]: ‘All his poetry remembers wrong and suffering and the aspiration of one who has suffered and who is moved to great cries and gestures when that sorrowful hour rushes upon the heart.’ [80]. [...] ‘No doubt they are only men of letters who insist on the succession of ages, and history or the denial of reality, for they are two names for one thing, may be said to be that which deceives the whole world. In this, as in much else, Mangan is the type of his race. History encloses him so straitly that even his fiery moments do not set him free from it. He, too, cries out, in his life and in his mournful verses, against the injustice of the despoilers, but never laments a deeper loss than the loss of plaids and ornaments. He inherits the latest and worst part of a legend upon which the [81] line has never been drawn out and which divides against itself as much as it moves down the cycles. And because this tradition is so much with him he has accepted it with all its griefs and failures, and has not known how to change it, as the strong spirit knows, and so would bequeath it: the poet who hurls his anger against tyrants would establish upon the future an intimate and far more cruel tyranny. In the final view the figure which he worships is seen to be an abject queen upon whom, because of the bloody crimes that he had done and of those as bloody that were done to her, madness is come and death is coming, but who will not believe that she is near to die and remembers only the rumour of voices challenging her sacred gardens and her fair, tall flowers that have become the food of boars. [...]’

“James Clarence Mangan” (1902) [on the poet himself - cont.]: ‘Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state. The philosophic mind always inclines to an elaborate life [...] taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. With Mangan a narrow and hysterical nationality receives its last justification, for when this feeble-bodied figure departs dusk begins to veil the train of the gods, and he who listens may hear their footsteps leaving the world.’ [82; ...] ‘In those vast courses which enfold us and in that great memory which is greater and more generous than our memory, no life, no moment of exultation is ever lost; and all those who have written nobly have not written in vain, though the desperate and weary have heard the silver laughter of wisdom [...] such as these have part [...] the continual affirmation of the spirit.’ (p.83; end.)

“James Clarence Mangan” (1907 version; Critical Writings, 1966, p.175-86): ‘There are certain poets who, in addition to the virtue of revealing to us some phase of the human conscience unknown until their time, have the more doubtful virtue of summing up in themselves the thousand contrasting tendencies of their era, of being, so to speak, the storage batteries of new forces.’ (p.175.)

Cf., Stephen Hero (1944): ‘Thus the spirit of man makes continual affirmation’ (1977 Edn., p.75), and Ulysses: ‘Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen’s views on the eternal affirmation of man in literature’ (Ulysses, Random Hse Edn., p.650; Bodley Head, pp.777). Note that Joyce has approving things to say about Mangan’s use of the Homeric epithet ‘wine-dark sea’ in an unnamed poem which he compares with William Rooney in a damning review of Rooney’s Poems and Ballads. (Mason & Ellmann, ed., Critical Writings, [1959] 1966, p.86).

“James Clarence Mangan” (1907 version; in Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry [trans. Conor Deane] (Oxford 2001): ‘Poetry takes little account of the many of the idols of the market-place - the succession of the ages, the spirit of the age, the mission of the race’. Further: ‘[T]he essential effort of the poet is to liberate himself from the unpropitious influences of such idols which corrupt him from the inside and out’. (p.135.)

Extracts from Joyce on Mangan, 1902):

Mangan, it must be remembered, wrote with no native literary tradition to guide him, and for a public which cared for matters of the day, and for poetry only so far as it might illustrate these. He could not often revise what he wrote, and he has often striven with Moore and Walsh on their own ground. But the best of what he has written makes its appeal surely, because it was conceived by the imagination which he called, I think, the mother of things, whose dream are we, who imageth us to herself, and to ourselves, and imageth herself in us - the power before whose breath the mind in creation is (to use Shelley’s image) as a fading coal. Though even in the best of Mangan the presence of alien emotions is sometimes felt the presence of an imaginative personality reflecting the light of imaginative beauty is more vividly felt. East and West meet in that personality (we know how); images interweave there like soft, luminous scarves and words ring like brilliant mail, and whether the song is of Ireland or of Istambol it has the same refrain, a prayer that peace may come again to her who has lost her peace, the moonwhite pearl of his soul, Ameen. Music and odours and lights are spread about her, and he would search the dews and the sands that he might set another glory near her face. [My itals.]

[...]

Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life. As often as human fear and cruelty, that wicked monster begotten by luxury, are in league to make life ignoble and sullen and to speak evil of death the time is come wherein a man of timid courage seizes the keys of hell and death, and flings them far out into the abyss, proclaiming the praise of life, which the abiding splendour of truth may sanctify, and of death, the most beautiful form of life. In those vast courses which enfold us and in that great memory which is greater and more generous than our memory, no life, no moment of exaltation is ever lost; and all those who have written nobly have not written in vain, though the desperate and weary have never heard the silver laughter of wisdom. Nay, shall not such as these have part, because of that high, original purpose which remembering painfully or by way of prophecy they would make clear, in the continual affirmation of the spirit? [End.]

— Given at Rawilsonfans.org > Ulysses - online.; see also full speech on James Clarence Mangan (err. dated 15 Feb.) at Berfrois.com > Mangan - online.

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Autobiographical Writings

“Portrait of the Artist” (aka “1904 Portrait Essay”) [Opening]: ‘The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron memorial aspect. Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only. Our world, again, recognises its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of beard and inches and is, for the most part, estranged from those members who seek through some art, by some process of mind as yet untabulated, to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts. But for such as these a portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion.’ [...] Further: ‘Use of reason is by popular judgement antedated by some seven years and so it is not easy to set down the exact age at whch the natural sensibility of the subject of this portrait awoke to the ideas of eternal damnation, the necessity of penitence and the efficacy of prayer.’ (See “A Portrait of the Artist” [1904], in Poems and Shorter Writings of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz & John Whittier Ferguson, London: Faber & Faber 1991, pp.211-18; p.18; also quoted [in full]in Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, pp.206-12, p.206.)

Giordano Bruno, et al. ‘One night in early spring, standing at the foot of the staircase in the library, he said to his friend “I have left the Church.” And as they walked home through the streets arm-in-arm he told, in words that seemed an echo of their closing, how he had left it through the gates of Assisi. / Extravagance followed. The simple history of the Poverello was soon out of mind and he established himself in the maddest of companies, Joachim Abbas, Bruno the Nolan, Michael Sendivogius, all the hierarchs of initiation cast their spells upon him. He descended among the hells of Swedenborg and abased himself in the gloom of Saint John of the Cross. His heaven was suddenly illuminated by a horde of stars, the signatures of all nature, the soul remembering ancient days. Like an alchemist he bent upon his handiwork, bringing together the mysterious elements, separating the subtle from the gross. For the artist the rhythms of phrase and period, the symbols of word and allusion, were paramount things. And was it any wonder that out of this marvelous life, wherein he had annihilated and rebuilt experience, laboured and despaired, he came forth at last with a single purpose - to reunite the children of the spirit, jealous and long-divided, to reunite them against fraud and principality.’ [Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. Ellmann, et al., 1991, p.214.]

“Portrait of the Artist” (Essay of 1904) [Conclusion]: ‘Already the messages of the citizens were flashed along the wires of the world ... To those multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightning [sic] of your masses in travail; the competitive order is employed against itself, the aristocracies are supplanted; and amid the general paralysis of an insane society, the confederate will issues in action.’ (1904 Portrait, in Cixous, op. cit., p.212; Shorter Writings, Ellmann, et al., eds., OUP 1991, p.211-18). See full text version in RICORSO Library, “Irish Classics > Major Authors > James Joyce” [infra]. See also remarks of Vincent Sherry under James Joyce, Commentary [supra].

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Stephen Hero (composed 1904-07; first iss. 1944; rev. 1977)

Stephen Hero (1944; rev. edn. 1977) - I [on aesthetics]: ‘The romantic temper [...] is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this [73] choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them. The classical temper, on the other hand, ever mindful of its limitations, chooses rather to bend upon those present things and so work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered. In this method the sane and joyful spirit issues forth and achieves an imperishible perfection, nature assisting with her goodwill and thanks. For so long as this place in nature is given us, it is right that art should do no violence to the gift.’ [74; Jonathan Cape Edn., 1956, 1969, p.83.]

[Cf., Stephen to UCD President:] ‘My entire esteem is for the classical temper in art .. By “classical” I mean the slow elaborate patience of the art of satisfaction. The heroic, the fabulous, I call romantic [...’; 1977 rev edn., 89].

‘The poet is the intense centre of the life of his age to which he stands in a relation than which none can be more vital. He alone is capable of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him and of flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. It is time for the critics to verify their calculations in accordance with [this phenomenon]. to acknowledge that here the imagination has contemplated intensely the truth of the being of the visible world and that beauty, the splendour of truth, has been born.’ [Ibid., 75].

Stephen Hero (1944; rev. edn. 1977) - II [on the Catholic Church]: ‘These wanderings filled him with a deep-seated anger and whenever he encountered a burly black-vested priest taking a stroll of pleasant inspection through these warrens [150] full of swarming and cringing believers he cursed the farce of Irish Catholicism: an island [whereof] the inhabitants of which entrusted their wills and mind to other that they might ensure for themselves a life of spiritual paralysis, an island in which all the power and riches are in the keeping of those whose kingdom is not of this world, an island in which Caesar [professes] confesses Christ and Christ confesses Caesar that together they may wax fat upon a starveling rabblement which is bidden ironically to take to itself this consolation in hardship “The Kingdom of God is within you”.’ (Cape Edn. 150-51.)

The passage continues: This mood of indignation which was not guiltless of a certain superficiality was undoubtedly due ot the excitement of release and it was hardly countenanced by him before he realised the dangers of being a demagogue. The attitude which was constitutional with him was a silent self-occupied, contemptuous manner and his intelligence, moreover, persuaded him that the tomahawk, as an effective instrument of warfare, has become obsolete. He acknowledged to himself in honest egoism that he could not take to heart the distress of a nation, the soul of which was antipathetic to his own, so bitterly as the indignity of a bad line of verse: but at the same time he was nothing in the world so little as an amateur artist. He wished to express his nature freely and fully for the benefit of a society which he would enrich and also for his own benefit, seeing that it was part of his life to do so. It was not part of his life to undertake an extensive alteration of society but he felt the need to express himself such an urgent need, such a real need, that he ws determined no conventions of society, however plausibly mingling pity with its tyranny, should be allowed to stand in his way, and though a taste for elegance and detail unfitted him for the part of demagogue, from his general attitude he might have been supposed not unjustly an ally of the collectivist politicians, who are often very seriously upbraided by opponents who believe in Jehovahs, and [Cape 151] decalogues and judgements with sacrificing the reality to an abstraction.
 That kind of Christianity called Catholicism seemed to stand in his way and forthwith he removed it. He had been brought up in the belief of the Roman supremacy and to cease to be a Catholic for him meant to cease to be a Christian. The idea that the power of an empire is weakest at its borders requires some modification ... in many cases the government of an empire is strongest at its borders and is invariably so when its power at the centre is on the wane ... it will perhaps be a considerable time before Ireland will be able to understand that the Papacy is no longer going through a period of anabolism [...] Though it is evident on the one had that this persistence of Catholic power in Ireland must intensify very greatly the loneliness of the Irish Catholic who voluntarily outlaws himself out of so strong and intricate a tyranny may often be sufficient to place him beyond the region of reattraction. It was, in fact, the very fervour of Stephen's former religious life which sharpened for him now the pains of his solitary position and at the same time hardened into a less pliable, a less [Cape 152] appeasable enmity molten rages and glowing transports on which the emotions of helplessness and loneliness and despair had firat acted as chilling influences. [Cape edn. 151-53; Triad Grafton Edn., 1977, 123-34 - in Chap. XXII.]

Stephen Hero (1944; rev. edn. 1977) - III [on artists]: ‘There are certain poets who, in addition to the virtue of revealing to us some phase of the human conscience unknown until their time, have the more doubtful virtue of summing up in themselves the thousand contrasting tendencies of their era, of being, so to speak, the storage batteries of new forces.’ [175].

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Stephen Hero (1944; rev. edn. 1977) - VI [egotism]: ‘He was egoistically determined that nothing material, no favour or reverse of fortune, no bond of association or impulse or tradition should hinder him from working out the enigma of his position in his own way. He avoided his father sedulously because he now regarded his father’s presumptions as the most deadly part of a tyranny, internal and external, which he determined to combat with his might and main.’ (Slocum & Cahoon eds. [5th edn.], NY: New Directions 1963, p.209; quoted in James Wurtz, ‘A Very Strange Agony: Modernism, Memory and Irish Gothic Fiction” , Ph.D. Diss., Notre Dame U., 2005 - available as PDF online; accessed 10.06.2012.)

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Notebooks

“Paris Notebook” (1903): ‘Desire is the feeling which urges us to go to something and loathing is the feeling which urges us to go from something: and that art is improper which aims at exciting these feelings in us whether by comedy or by tragedy. Of comedy later. But tragedy aims at exciting in us feelings of pity and terror. Now terror is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us with its secret cause and pity is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us with the human sufferer. Now loathing, which in an improper art aims at exciting in the way of tragedy, differs, it will be seen, from the feelings which are proper to tragic art, namely terror and pity. For loathing urges us from rest because it urges us to go from something, but terror and pity hold us in rest, as it were, by fascination. When tragic art makes my body to shrink terror is not my feeling because I am urged from rest, and moreover this art does not show me what is grave, I mean what is constant and [143] irremediable in human fortunes nor does it unite me with any secret cause for it shows me only what is unusual and remediable, and it unites me with a cause only too manifest. Nor is an art properly tragic which would move me to prevent human suffering any more than an art is properly tragic which would move me in anger against some manifest cause of human suffering. Terror and pity, finally, are aspects of sorrow comprehended in sorrow - the feeling which the privation of some good excites in us.’

“Paris Notebook” (1903): ‘e tekhne mimeitai ten physin - This phrase is falsely rendered as “Art is an imitation of Nature”. Aristotle does not here define art; he says only, “Art imitates Nature” and means that the artistic process is like the natural process ... It is false to say that sculpture, for instance, is an art of repose if by that be meant that sculpture is unassociated with movement. Sculpture is associated with movement in as much as it is rhythmic; for a work of sculptural art must be surveyed according to its rhythm and this surveying is an imaginary movement in space. It is not false to say that sculpture is an art of repose in that a work of sculptural art cannot be presented as itself moving in space and remain a work of sculptural art.’ ([Signed,] ‘James A. Joyce, 27 March, 1903, Paris’; Mason & Ellmann, ed., Critical Writings, NY 1959, p.145.

“Paris Notebook” (1903): ‘Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.’ ([Signed,] ‘James A. Joyce, 28 March, 1903, Paris’; in Mason & Ellmann, ed., Critical Writings, NY 1959, p.145; ref. Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, NY: Farrar & Rhinehart 1939, pp.96-99.) [See also “Witty Aristotle”, in Notes, infra.]

“Paris Notebook” (1903) [1]: ‘The soul is the first entelechy of a naturally organic thing.’ (De Anima, 1.2); ‘The intellectual soul is the form of forms.’ (De Anima, 3.8; Joyce’s translation from J. Barthelemy Sainte-Hilaire’s Psychologie d’Aristote: Traité de l’Ame, Paris: Ladrange 1840) - being the first French translation; quoted from the lost Paris Notebook in Jacques Aubert, l’Esthetique de James Joyce (Paris 1973), p.129 - as given in Herbert Gorman’s James Joyce (1939) [pp.95-96].

Note: Aubert (op. cit.) takes Ellmann and Ellsworth Mason to task for not reprinting the contents of the Paris notebooks in The Critical Writings (1957) - all the harder to understand since Ellmann quotes Joyce on sexual reproduction as a form of immortality from Gorman’s life [Gorman, 1939, pp.96-99, as infra; see further from Gorman under Commentary, supra].

“Paris Notebook” (1903) [2] - quoting Aristotle: ‘The most natural act for living beings which are complete is to produce other beings like themselves and thereby to participate as far as they may in the eternal and divine.’ (Given in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959, 1965 Edn., p.212n. [quoting Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, 1939, p.94 - though without acknowledgement). Also copied from Gorman in Jacques Aubert, l’Esthetique de James Joyce (Paris: Didier 1973); and Fran O’Rourke, Joyce’s Quotations from Aristotle: “Allwisest Stagyrite” [Joyce Studies, 21] (National Library of Ireland 2004), p.9.

Note: the original is in Aristotle’s De Anima, 415b. For further Aristotelian sentences in Joyce, see infra. For an account of the “Paris Notebook” and “Pola Notebook” - which, in reality, are the same notebook, now held in the National Library of Ireland, see under Notes, infra.

Paris Notebook (1903): ‘[D]esire urges us from rest that we may possess something but joy holds us in rest so long as we possess something, Desire, therefore, can only be excited in us by a comedy (a work of comic art) which is not sufficient in itself inasmuch as it urges us to seek something beyond itself; but a comedy (a work of comic art) which does not urge us to seek anything beyond itself excites in us the feeling of joy. All art which excites in us the feeling of joy is so far comic and according as this feeling of joy is excited by whatever is substantial or accidental in human fortunes the art is to be judged more or less excellent: and even tragic art may be said to participate in the nature of comic art so far as the possession of a work of tragic art (a tragedy) excites in us the feeling of joy. From this it may be seen that tragedy is the imperfect manner and comedy the perfect manner in art. All art, again, is static for the feelings of terror and pity on the one hand and of joy on the other hand are feelings which arrest us. It will be seen afterwards how this rest is necessary for the apprehension of the beautiful - the end of all art, tragic or comic - for this rest is the only condition under which the images, which are to [144] excite in us terror or pity or joy, can be properly presented to us and properly seen by us. For beauty is a quality of something seen but teror and pity and joy are states of mind.’ (Dated ‘13 Feb. 1903’; “Paris Notebook”, in Mason & Ellmann, ed., Critical Writings, NY 1959, p.143-46; pp.144-45.)

Paris Notebook (1903) - on genres: ‘There are three conditions of art: the lyrical, the epical and the dramatic. That art is lyrical whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to himself; that art is epical whereby the artist sets forth the image in mediate relation to himself and to others; that art is dramatic whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to others.’ (Signed: ‘James A. Joyce, 6 March 1903, Paris’, in Mason & Ellmann, ed., Critical Writings, NY 1959, p.143-46; p.145.)

Paris Notebook (1903): ‘Rhythm seems to be the first or formal relation of part to part in any whole or of a whole to its part or parts, or of any part to the whole of which it is a part ... Parts constitute a whole as far as they have a common end.’ (Signed ‘James A. Joyce, 25 March 1903, Paris’, in Mason & Ellmann, ed., Critical Writings, NY 1959, p.143-46; p.145.) [Rhythm seems to be the first or formal relation of part to part in any whole or of a whole to its part or parts, or of any part to the whole of which it is a part. [...] Parts constitute a whole so far as they have a common end. (NLI 36,639/2/a, f.[12v]; Gorman, 98; OCPW, 103.)

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[ See further contents of the so-called Pola Notebook in a separate file - attached. ]