ABSTRACT
James Joyce is the author of three books of prose fiction, two books of poems, one play, and a half-finished volume. It is a meagre production in these days of copiousness; but it has a profound influence on contemporary English literature. Ulysses, the story of a day in the lives of two Dubliners, and hence the story of one day in Dublin, and in turn of one day in the history of the world; the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a study of the expanding consciousness of a young artist facing a conflict between religion and art: Dubliners, a book of short stories of Dublin life told with Flaubertian precisionthese are the products of a brain sensitive to the beauty of language and to the individual meanings, the philological values latent in words; and at the same time a brain bearing the imprint of scholasticism, the Jesuit strain which Stephen Dedalus possessesinjected the wrong way, as he is told in Ulysses. ‘To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.’ This is the cry that comes to the artist’s lips in the Portrait in an outburst of profane joy. And this, I think, can be taken to be James Joyce’s credo.
