The Mole on Joyce’s Breast

Letters

Vol. 3 No. 1 · 22 January 1981

From Gianfranco Corsini

SIR: I would have thought that James Joyce deserved, at last, more than being depicted as someone ‘who never joined anything larger than a dinner party in a first-class Parisian restaurant’ (LRB, Vol. 2, No 22). If Mr Sean O’Faolain really believes that art is only ‘magic’ and Joyce never had anything to do with politics, he should have given us more than a couple of ‘trivia’ to prove his point. Besides, it would have been only fair to the reader, and to the author of the book reviewed, to give us at least some information about the content of Joyce’s Politics. We have no way of knowing whether Mr Manganiello has proved his point, but we certainly know that the early reviewers of Dubliners and the Portrait read them as political statements. One of their contemporary critics went as far as to call their author a ‘literary bolshevist’. This might be a trivial example, but it might illustrate – just as Mr Faolain’s grumpy trivia – the danger of dismissing the facts too lightly in the name of magic.

The author of this letter is the editor, with Giorgio Melchiori, of Joyce’s Scritti Italiani (Milan, 1980). Most of the material assembled in this collection is about Irish politics.

Gianfranco Corsini
Rome