: Joseph Campbell
: Edmund L. Epstein, David Kudler
: Mythic Worlds, Modern Words Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce
: Joseph Campbell Foundation
: 9781611780314
: 1
: CHF 7.90
:
: Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft
: English
: 368
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

In 1927, as a twenty-three-year-old postgraduate scholar in Paris, Joseph Campbell first encountered James Joyce'sUlysses. Known for being praised and for kicking up controversy (including an obscenity trial in the United States in 1920), the novel left Campbell both intrigued and confused, as it had many others. Because he was in Paris, he was able to visit the Shakespeare& Company bookstore-the outpost of the original publisher ofUlysses, Sylvia Beach. She gave him 'clues' for readingUlysses, and that, Campbell attested, changed his career. For the next sixty years, Campbell moved through the labyrinths of Joyce's creations-writing and lecturing on Joyce using depth psychology, comparative religion, anthropology, and art history as tools of analysis.


Arranged by Joyce scholar Edmund L. Epstein,Mythic Worlds, Modern Wordspresents a wide range of Campbell's writing and lectures on Joyce, which together form an illuminating running commentary on Joyce's masterworks. Campbell's visceral appreciation for all that was new in Joyce will delight the previously uninitiated, and perhaps intimidated, as well as longtime lovers of both Joyce and Campbell. Now available in a trade paperback edition,Mythic Worlds, Modern Words is a masters meet-up between the twentieth century's quintessential mythologist and its most exemplary literary modernist. Forty years of Campbell's lectures, articles and unpublished writings on the novels of James Joyce, drawn together by Joycean scholar Edmund L. Epstein, serve as a lens to examine both the nature of myth in art, and the myriad-minded work of the man whom many have called the greatest literary artist of the modern era.


An appendix includes both question and answer sessions from Campbell's lectures, and a series of articles penned by Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson (co-author with Campbell ofA Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake), unveiling the Wake-like themes that suffused Thorton Wilder's Broadway hit, The Skin of Our Teeth.

editor’s foreword


Classically, it was with an enigma that Joseph Campbell entered the labyrinth of James Joyce.

I had gone over to Paris in 1927 to study medieval philology and Old French and Provençal, and here’s thisUlysses, Ulysses, Ulysses. So I buy the book and take it home, and when I get to chapter three, it starts out:

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read . . .”

It had been published by Sylvia Beach, at Shakespeare& Co., at 12 rue de l’Odéon in Paris, so I went around there—you know, in high academic indignation: “What do you think of this!” And Sylvia Beach—I didn’t know who she was—just took me on and sold me the books that would sell me on Joyce. I took them back to my little room, and that was almost the end of my interest in medieval philology.

So Sylvia Beach gave me the clues about how to readUlysses, and then she sold me this journal calledtransition, published by Eugène Jolas, in which sketches of the early chapters ofFinnegans Wake were appearing under the title “Work in Progress.” That’s what taught me. And there you have it. It’s funny how it changed my career.1

For the next sixty years, until his death in 1987, Campbell moved through the labyrinth of Joyce’s creation; using the methods of depth psychology, comparative religion, anthropology, art history, discovering a great many things as he excavated that would form parts of his work in comparative mythology and religion. In the course of his study, he became one of the great students of Joyce. The book he wrote with Henry Morton Robinson,A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, has been since 1944 one of the basic texts in Joyce criticism of theWake. However, all the time he was evolving a total explanation of the works of Joyce, and all deriving from the passage inUlysses that provided his initial puzzle.

The passage that puzzled Campbell begins the “Proteus” chapter inUlysses. In this chapter, Stephen Dedalus is walking on Sandymount strand, attempting to make his life cohere. Stephen is very much like Hamlet, in his knowledge that the world is out of joint, both the outer world and his own inner world. Stephen feels that his country is ruled by usurpers, just as Hamlet does, and declares to himself that he, as poet, should be the “ruler” of Ireland. However, in the first chapter we have seen that Ireland respects science, in the person of Buck Mulligan, and England, in the person of Haines. Stephen’s inner life is, if anything, more in turmoil than his outer life. His inner life swirls around his constant feeling of guilt for his refusal to pray at his mother’s bedside; in fact, his Pyrrhic victory is threatening to paralyze his poetic gift, making the whole sacrifice useless.

Stephen attempts to give form to his inner and outer life by philosophical meditation, again just as Hamlet does. The “Proteus” monologue is the equivalent in Joyce of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet, and just as in that soliloquy, Stephen’s meditations on the world as presented to the senses covers a growing despair. When Stephen experiments with visual perception by closing his eyes and walking onward, he says, “Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane.” (u31) It is possible to detect a yearning for annihilation, as there is in Hamlet’s soliloquy.

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.” At least that if no more; the desperation is palpable. Stephen is attempting to find in the phenomenal world what has vanished from his moral universe: a center for the soul. However, according to Schopenhauer, a philosopher who plays a central role in Campbell’s analyses, to embrace the phenomenal is to abandon the possibility of moral insight, of a feeling for others. As Campbell explains it:

The notion of separateness is simply a function of the way our senses experience us here in time and space. We’re separate in this room because of space. We’re separate from the group that were here last night because of time. These are the separating factors, what Nietzsche calls thePrincipium Individuationis