James Joyce valued the everyday, but only if it could be grist to the mill of his highly formal art. Yeats endured 'the baptism of the gutter', descending into the profane world only to gather it into the artifice of poetic eternity, and Joyce's aesthetic was similarly redemptive. He would grub among the odds and ends of secular history so as to salvage them for an art which was concerned with nothing but itself. In this, ironically, he could be faithful to the way the world was: the universe itself, he believed, was a set of endless, self-enclosed cycles, which his own art mirrored in its very narcissism.

LRB 22 July 2004 | PDF Download