Vol. 2 No. 22 · 20 November 1980
pages 3-4 | 3673 words
The Mole on Joyce’s Breast
Sean O’Faolain
- Joyce’s Politics by Dominic Manganiello
Routledge, 260 pp, £12.50, October 1980, ISBN 0 7100 0537 7
Immediately I saw the title on the jacket of this book I remembered with the unfailing affection of an old man for past events of no apparent relevance to anybody else that I was once made a freeman of the city of Memphis in, I think, Tennessee – not Egypt. It happened because the local political boss that year was of Irish descent. He even presented me in public with a key to the city – that is to say, a three-quarter inch replica in painted gold, which I at once passed on to the next pretty young woman I met to hang on her charm bracelet. The relevant correlative? A little ethnic gesture to catch another little ethnic vote. In a word, politics.
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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
