Wings Of Art: Joseph Campbell On James Joyce

The late Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth) turns his probing and all-encompassing attention to the works of James Joyce in this 6-hour lecture, filmed in the late 80s, on Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake. We watched the first two tapes in the series. Campbell begins by discussing similarities between Dante and Joyce, and why Dante was Joyce's model. He expounds eloquently (and quite humorously on Joyce's theory of art, which relegated most works to two categories: pornographic art which causes desire (modern TV commercials would fall into this category) and didactic art, which carries a social message. Joyce, of course, wanted to create true art which would cause "aesthetic arrest" in the heart of the reader. Following this introduction, the balance of the first tape and all of the second tape is given over to Campbell's comments on Portrait. Acknowledging that Joyce "gives no help to the reader," Campbell discusses Joyce's break with Irish Catholicism and offers insights into the tortured pathways that Joyce's thinking took in his maturation as an artist. At nearly $500, the series is of questionable worth to public libraries, who may have patrons that have read Portrait, but are likely to have far fewer who have waded through Ulysses, and perhaps none that have tackled Finnegan's Wake. However, this would be a good addition for university libraries with strong literary criticism collections, and for that audience, the series is recommended. (Available from: Brightline, P.O. Box 21155, Oakland, CA 94620.)