James Joyce and German Theory: The Romantic School and All That (review)

Barbara Laman's volume opens with Donovan's words in the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: the brief reference to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing—"the classical school and the romantic school," the "idealistic, German, ultraprofound" dimension (P 211). The book is the result of much learned research, all well documented and updated in its primary as well as in its secondary sources, by an author who authoritatively masters both Joyce's literary corpus and "German Romantic theories" (20). By this general designation, Laman hints at that exceptionally vast, fruitful season of German literary and philosophical thought that expands from the second half of the eighteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth one. Her thorough text is organized into six main chapters, prefaced by an illuminating "Introduction," which is an essential, anticipated précis of her argument, and followed by a final, clear "Conclusion." The very titles of the chapters show how this comparative study of influences covers the whole sequence of Joyce's works, from the beginning to Finnegans Wake: "German Romantic Theory and Joyce's Early Works"; "From Stephen Hero to Portrait: The Kunstlerroman Revisited"; "Exiles and Romantic Irony"; "Ulysses and the 'Mythic Method'"; "'A Picture of its Age': Hamlet Expositions and Revisions"; and "The 'Romantical' Wake."

Laman's thesis is that most inquiries into the sources of Joyce's aesthetics have focused on Aristotle, Plato, and Thomas Aquinas, leaving little space for his use of the German aesthetic theories, which "contributed centrally to the Europeanizing of Irish literature" (13). Through the operative presence of Goethe and Lessing, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Schiller, Novalis (Friedrich Leopold) and Richard Wagner, in fact, Joyce could overcome Ireland's parochial status—the subordinate condition that he saw as a basic handicap for Irish culture—and actually "fly by those nets" of "nationality, language, religion." (P 203). One is tempted to emphasize what Laman additionally observes: how closely Wagner's presence has already been examined in Timothy Martin's Joyce and Wagner and how later contributions to Joyce Studies in Italy focused on the idea that the juvenile Joycean notion of "drama" is borrowed from Wagner's Prose Works and Gabriele D'Annunzio's Il fuoco.¹ The same could be noted about Lessing: after Fritz Senn, other scholars discovered the presence of Laokoon: Oder Uber die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie in Joyce.² One should also remember Jacques Aubert's words, when speaking of Joyce's first lecture on James Clarence Mangan (CW 73-83) and the influence on Joyce's thinking of "Hegelian, or rather neo-Hegelian" thought: "Joyce in those days was not in a position to read much of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, but, as I have demonstrated long ago, he did indeed read the neo-Hegelian History of Aesthetic, of Bernard Bosanquet, to which, anyway, is appended the closing section of Hegel's 'Introduction' to his Aesthetic."³

It was Senn who, during a lecture, objected to Aubert's thesis, observing ironically that Joyce could have read Hegel in an English translation, which might have made Hegelian thought much more understandable than in its original German version.⁴ Even if this were true, in some cases, Joyce obviously undertook an untranslated reading of "German theory," yet he could also have a wider mediated knowledge of it. In our different predicaments, we, as readers of Joyce, must start our analyses from two established, basic notions. The first relates to Joyce's literary education. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and during the years Joyce spent in elementary and secondary schools and at University College in Dublin, the ordinary cycle of literary education was certainly grounded on several sources but especially on Romantic and Victorian literature. The second notion, which interacts with the first, is that Victorian culture was inflected by a wave of interest in...