This paper reads Joyce’s fiction as an artistic and philosophical apprenticeship in love. From A Portrait of the Artist to Finnegans Wake, love is examined as a key aesthetic and ethical virtue against two related emotions: pity and...
moreThis paper reads Joyce’s fiction as an artistic and philosophical apprenticeship in love. From A Portrait of the Artist to Finnegans Wake, love is examined as a key aesthetic and ethical virtue against two related emotions: pity and desire. Whereas in the earlier Joyce ‘pity’ is valued above ‘desire’ as the more philosophically valid emotion, in the later works (after Giacomo Joyce) Joyce’s understanding of the Love-Pity-Desire triad becomes rather more complex. Not only are the emotions seen to be inextricably bound up; but pity is suspected as the most equivocal of the three.
In tracing the evolution of this idea within Joyce’s work Dante must be recognized as an important source. Joyce becomes increasingly aware of the philosophical bankruptcy of the concept of love in modernity. At first blush he suspects Dante’s theory because he finds he is unable to ground the experience of love in a theological framework (a framework that was available to Dante but not to Joyce himself). However, even at his most ironic, he continues to yearn for some sort of theological/philosophical revalidation of the concept. To this end, his writing tests two distinct strategies: rhetorically, it takes on an elegiac tone, mourning (and ultimately acknowledging) the loss of ‘love’ as a theologically valid emotion; allegorically, it seeks to replicate Dante’s apprenticeship within a secular context, placing erotic experience in a series of trials and moral set-pieces. My analysis of these strategies will draw on several Joycean works but will focus mainly on Giacomo Joyce and Finnegans Wake II.4.
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