A COMMITMENT TO JOYCE

Looking back over these various attempts during the past fifteen years to register the eeffect, or rather effects, of Joyce on my own thinking and on literary theory and literary culture in the latter part of the twentieth century, I am struck by the unfailing basis on which they all rest: the unquestioned assumption that Joyce's writing is to be enjoyed, admired, and learned from rather than weighed in evaluative scales and pronounced good, bad, or a mixture of the two. This is in part no doubt a matter of personality: a tendency, which I have been aware of in other areas of my experience, to plump for something (a poem, a book, an author, an institution, a country) – often after an extended process of examination and appraisal – in such a way as to give it the benefit of the doubt in further judgements, and to interpret uncertain evidence in its favour at least until negative indications accumulate beyond any denying. (I should make it clear that, one's judgements of people resting on another basis than one's judgements of books, my predilection in favour of Joyce's writing does not extend to his character as we receive in it biographical commentary, a character in which there is clearly much to dislike – though I see little point in spending one's time finding fault with Joyce's behaviour or his attitudes.