On James Joyce

Occasional Histomat commentator Roobin has written a substantial summary of the most important works of James Joyce over at Lenin's Tomb, in the process helping that site to make a 'cultural turn' of sorts. Whether Lenin's Tomb 'needs' a cultural turn or not is of course quite a touchy issue which I am not going to broach.

I have read next to nothing of Joyce personally,* and while Roobin's post does not rise to the heights of Marxist literary criticism, it does give you a flavour of what Joyce is about, and so is highly recommended on that score. I was particularly fascinated by the reference to the influence of Giambattista Vico, author of Scienza Nuova (The New Science, 1725), in the discussion of Finnegan's Wake. Vico of course influenced the early thinking of several great historians like Jules Michelet, and also great Marxists like Antonio Gramsci, while great Marxist historians like EP Thompson would always also pay their respects to Vico - so the fact that Vico influenced Joyce is I think interesting. On Vico, Trotsky's summary is useful:

The theory of the repetition of historic cycles – Vico and his more recent followers – rests upon an observation of the orbits of old pre-capitalist cultures, and in part upon the first experiments of capitalist development. A certain repetition of cultural stages in ever new settlements was in fact bound up with the provincial and episodic character of that whole process. Capitalism means, however, an overcoming of those conditions. It prepares and in a certain sense realises the universality and permanence of man’s development.

*I do intend to at some point, honest.