Campbell / Epstein / Kudler Mythic Worlds, Modern Words

Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61178-031-4
Verlag: Joseph Campbell Foundation
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

Reihe: The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell

In 1927, as a twenty-three-year-old postgraduate scholar in Paris, Joseph Campbell first encountered James Joyce's . 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 of , Sylvia Beach. She gave him 'clues' for reading , 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, presents 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, 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 Forty years of Campbell's lectures, articles and unpublished writings on the novels of James Joyce, drawn together by Joycean scholar Edmund L. Epstein, serve as a lens to examine both the nature of myth in art, and the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 of ), unveiling the Wake-like themes that suffused Thorton Wilder's Broadway hit, The Skin of Our Teeth.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Campbell, Joseph

Epstein, Edmund L.

Kudler, David

Leseproben

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 this . 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 read , and then she sold me this journal called , published by Eugène Jolas, in which sketches of the early chapters of 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, , has been since 1944 one of the basic texts in Joyce criticism of the . However, all the time he was evolving a total explanation of the works of Joyce, and all deriving from the passage in that provided his initial puzzle.

The passage that puzzled Campbell begins the “Proteus” chapter in . 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 the , the individuating factors. And Schopenhauer says this is secondary. The notion of you and the other is a secondary one, and every now and then, this other realization comes up. . . . [C]ompassion releas[es] you from the ego orientation.2

Immersion in sense perception, in the phenomenal world, simply emphasizes your own individuality, an individuality indistinguishable from sterile isolation. Feeling for others, compassion (Schopenhauer’s term is ), love, is found only in the noumenal world. A poet must not reject the world of moral sympathy. However, in his attempt to get “thought through my eyes,” this is just what Stephen in his despair and pain is attempting.

It is from this root that Campbell’s description of the major work of Joyce stems. In the same chapter Stephen thinks of a man who had been drowned a few days before in Dublin Bay and whose body is due to be recovered. For Campbell the sea in which the man has drowned is the sea of phenomena. Stephen asks himself if he would save such a man if he could, and answers,

I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water cold soft. When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can’t see. Who’s behind me? Out quickly, quickly! Do you see the tide flowing quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sand quickly, shellcocoacoloured? If I had land under my feet. I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine. (u38)

“I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine.” In this sentence, Stephen affirms the isolation of the individual in the phenomenal world.

, devoted to the reproduction of the isolated souls in the phenomenal world, is the equivalent for Campbell of Dante’s , the realm of hopelessness, where all motion is circular without rising. Hidden within the paralyzed world of , however, Campbell perceives a purgatorial process, in which the isolated Stephen is released from his circular swamp of guilt by compassion for another sufferer. Campbell sees the breakthrough occurring in the “Circe” chapter. The whores in Nighttown somehow sense that Leopold Bloom is a cuckold and begin to mock him (u463). In the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter, when Stephen was frightened by thunder (u323–324), Bloom had attempted to comfort him. Now Stephen, moved by Bloom’s plight, tries to make a diversion and starts babbling about the sexual customs of Paris, which stratagem succeeds in diverting the attention of the whores from Bloom.

If is , where is the rest of the Dante universe? It is here that Campbell achieves an interpretation of all of the major works of Joyce. is the equivalent of the is , and is the journey up the mountain of Purgatory to the Earthly Paradise. The images in , Campbell argues, are perceived by the “waking consciousness” of Buddhist analysis and represent “gross objects”; , by contrast, represents the “dream consciousness” of Buddhism, and its objects are “subtle matter,” luminous with the of complete esthetic apprehension.

is Purgatory because there is no release from the cycle of the book if the reader chooses not to exit on the final page. In Buddhist terms, rebirth as a return to the world of suffering is what is symbolized by the connection between the final “a way a lone a last a love a long the” and the first word of the , “rivverrun.” Where, then, is For Campbell, Joyce’s is the Fourth Book, the book that Joyce did not live to write. In this book, Campbell hypothesizes, Joyce completes the Dantean journey begun in . In the Fourth Book, Joyce would have described the indescribable, the state of or , the state of release from rebirth, which Joyce would have symbolized by the sea.

. . . one of the great Hindu images of the World Dream is of Vi??u dreaming the universe; we are all part of Vi??u’s dream. I’m almost certain that he was going to give us the dream of Vi??u floating on the ocean. In one of the Indian Pura?as—one of the Indian Bibles you might call them—in the Markandeya Pura?a, a sage who didn’t die when the world dissolved sees Vi??u couched on a serpent named Ananta (“unending”), floating on the cosmic ocean out of which all energy comes. So you have the oceanic level, and you have the animal level of the serpent that forms the couch on which Vi??u reclines. Now in the Indian pictures we see the world dream coming from Vi??u in the form of a lotus growing from his navel. This lotus unfolds then in history. Joyce says at one time:

“. . . Now day, slow day, from delicate to divine divases. Padma, brighter and sweetster, this flower that bells, it is our hour or risings. Tickle, tickle. Lotus spray. Till herenext. Adya.” (598.11–14)

[“let us pray”] the history of the unfolding of the lotus. And then at the end of the world, the lotus closes and goes back to Vi??u’s body, and then comes forth again.3

From his first encounter with...