Patrick Colm Hogan - Joyce, Milton, and the Theory of Influence (Florida James Joyce)

The purpose of this book is twofold: to set out and illustrate a theory of influence and to explore the ill-understood relationship between James Joyce and John Milton, not merely as an exercise in literary history and the psychology of creation but as a way of understanding Joyce's literary works, especially his most difficult and rewarding works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I undertook the former task as previous theories of influence appeared to me lacking in one of two ways. Some have sought deep explanations of influence, but have failed to make clear arguments, or even very clear generalizations; others have limited themselves to description, which has made their analyses clearer but often has rendered them superficial. In addition, writers on this topic have tended to focus on social aspects of influence to the exclusion of psychological aspects, or vice versa. In the opening chapter, I undertake to present a clear descriptive and explanatory account of influence, including both social and psychological factors. Moreover, in connection with the latter, I seek to articulate an understanding of influence that is coherent with recent developments in cognitive science as well as psychoanalysis.

Following some general remarks on Joyce's relation to precursors, the second chapter takes up Joyce's troubled relation to Milton, isolating some of the important political, psychological, and literary factors that entered into this complex influence, and emphasizing the ways in which the influence of one precursor is bound up with the influences of other precursors, events in the author's life, and so on. The third chapter concerns the less

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Miltonic of Joyce's major works: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Exiles. The fourth and fifth chapters are devoted to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, respectively, two works that are, I argue, deeply Miltonic in structure. These chapters also reinterpret aspects of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake--for example, the nature of Stephen's mourning and the thematic function of wakean cycles--that are important to our understanding of those works independent of their relation to Miltonic precedents. (The appendix gives a brief description of the editions of Milton that Joyce is known to have owned and used.)

Influence is like a thread woven through the affections and cognitions of an author; it both enters and redefines patterns of transference and understanding at once literary, social, and biographical. It is the product of an author's relation not only to a precursor's works but also to that precursor him- or herself, to the works and judgments and values of yet other authors through or against which the precursor and his or her works may be understood, to the larger social and political histories in which these occur, and so on. Moreover, any elements drawn from a precursor are necessarily warped by the pressures of the work at hand, its structures and sentiments, even its literary aims and market.