ABSTRACT

James Joyce is said to have cherished precedents and cultivated analogies, in his life as well as in his work. If tradition be defined as a living relationship with the dead, no writer has been more traditional. It is worth remembering in this connection, though not without a qualm of self-conscious irony, that one of Joyce's contemplated careers was a professorship of Romance languages at his college in Dublin, now the National University. Hereupon the invader sets foot upon shore, and out of the confusion of tongues emerges the perception that Joyce's many conflicts start from the basic incongruity between his Celtic race and his Norman name. Nothing linguistic was completely alien to him, but he had a special flair for French and Italian, and these were subjects in which he specialized at the university. His classmate, Con-stantine Curran, tells us that Joyce's French compositions were the pride of Pere Cadic, their Breton instructor.