| Quotation | Went and lay down dopey for ½ hour, then got up and looked for something new. So Darcy O'Brien on The Conscience of Joyce. Not a marvelous book itself (a bit obvious"”and limited perspectives), but Joyce himself woke me up again and now I am very involved in it. Dedalus's aesthetics. The essentially contemplative vocation of joyce. His revolt is that of the contemplative and creative man called to self-transcendence and "held down" by the prosaic, legalistic, provincial Catholicism of the Irish middle class"”the bourgeois Catholicism of the 19th century"”which continues in another form in the 20th"”liberal, pragmatic, pedestrian, "practical," exalting matter and science, etc. and still putting down contemplation as "gnostic," "unchristian," enemies of the imagination, but not really earthy either. O'Brien tends to give Joyce this same stereotyped business: "rejection of the faith" (the girl standing in the water), "hatred of life." (How can he say such a thing? Surely he'll take that back.) |