Organic and unworked communities in James Joyce's "the dead"

Pilar Villar-Argáiz

pp. 48-66

in: Paula Martín Salván, Gerardo Rodríguez Salas, Julian Jiménez Heffernan (eds), Community in twentieth-century fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

James Joyce believed that insular notions of Irish identity threatened the writer's freedom. He feared an artist could lose his integrity "while being involved with a community's enterprise" (Deane 35). The artist's loneliness and apartness was, therefore, a prerequisite for creativity. Joyce's preference for exile and cosmopolitanism—both in his life and in his works—responds to his desire to safeguard artistic independence. As Edna O"Brien explains in her biography of Joyce, he left Ireland 'so he said, for fear he might succumb to the national disease which was provincialness, wind-and-piss philosophising, crookedness, vacuity and a verbal spouting that reserved sentiment for God and for the dead" (17). This explains Joyce's scathing critique in his work of all forms of saturated communities and his attempt to visualize alternative, non-essentialist communitarian forms.

Cited authors

Joyce James