Jeffrey Segall, Between Marxism and Modernism, or How to Be a
Revolutionist and Still Love "Ulysses", James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 25,
No. 4 (Summer, 1988), pp. 421-444
The name of James Joyce is truly a collective name for many [Western
writers], and not for the worst bourgeois intellectuals.... Yes, [these
writers] are sick. But this does not mean that they are without worth.
Many diseases are the prelude to health. Naturally, we must be careful
not to infect ourselves. But purely and simply to turn our back on these
writers... under the pretext that in spite of their honest inquiries
they haven't found the path that is ours?, this is defeatism: and this
under mines our confidence in our own power; that we have no right to do.
--Wieland Herzfelde, 1934
When he was told of the harsh attacks directed against him by Karl Radek
and other Soviet critics in the 1930s, Joyce, in conversation with his
friend Eugene Jolas, offered a simple defense. He pointed out that all
his characters, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, belonged to "the lower
middle classes, and even the working class, and they are all quite
poor." Joyce was correct in noting what Radek and other Marxists had
omitted in their hyperbolic indictments of his work. Other critics and
intellectuals would rise to more elaborate defenses of Joyce during the
decades of the twenties and thirties when his work was attacked not only
by those who aligned themselves with Stalin, but by cultural
conservatives as well. In fact, Radek's own fulminations against Joyce,
delivered at the 1934 Writers' Congress in Moscow, were rebutted by
another participant, the German writer Wieland Herzfelde. Herzfelde, an
early champion of Dada, had joined the Communist Party in 1918 and had
left Hitler's Germany for Prague in 1933. In a courageous response to
Radek's attack, Herzfelde defended Joyce's experiments in form and
praised his truthfulness and psychological insight. While he warned that
Joyce ought not to be regarded as a model for revolutionary writers,
Herzfelde insisted that "he is an important writer, one to be taken
seriously. We must learn from him, as from all true artists; very
simply, we must remain conscious of the limits and dangers that are
hidden in his method."
The exchange between Herzfelde and Radek at the First Writers' Congress
was only a skirmish in a battle that raged primarily on American shores
among American writers and critics during the thirties. The apparent
focus of the debate was the evaluation of the work of Joyce and other
modernists, though more generally the controversy concerned the form and
content of all literature in a period of political and social upheaval.
What was truly at issue was the function of culture itself. Writers and
critics with opposed political perspectives argued continually, and
often heatedly, over the proper social and political function of art.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#7809): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7809
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/81904562/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
