The aesthetic of James Joyce

Abstract

"Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last." Samuel Johnson said this in 1776, sixteen years after the publication of Laurence Sterne's unconventional novel. For once Dr. Johnson has been proved wrong by the passage of time. Tristram Shandy is certainly odd and yet it has lasted for over two centuries now. A Cambridge don said of the same novel, soon after it was published, that in the course of twenty years should anyone want to refer to the book in question, he will be obliged to go to an antiquary for it. It is ironical that the dictum of this don is to be found in the critical introduction of the paperback edition of Tristram Shandy published two hundred years after its first appearance. There could not be a more eloquent warning to those ready to dismiss the writings of James Joyce as little more than obscene crossword puzzles, the work of a mad Irishman. And yet there were many who decided not to heed such a warning. A compatriot of Joyce, George Moore, for example, looked down upon Joyce's more conventional novel, A Portrait of the Artist us a Young Man, as "a book entirely without style and distinction; why I did the same thing, but much better, in The Confessions of a Young Mall. Why attempt the same thing unless you can turn out a better book?" Few readers today would doubt which is the better book. Indeed, very few have ever come across, much less read, George Moore' s 'Bildungsroman'. George Moore also had the arrogance to add that "Ulysses is hopeless" and that it is not art, it's like trying to copy the London Directory.