Segall, Jeffrey. “Between Marxism and Modernism, or How to Be a Revolutionist and Still Love ‘Ulysses.’”James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 4, 1988, pp. 421–444.
Related Topics:
Politics and Media
Union and Division
Thought and Action
Creation and Making
Link to citation page: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484900
Link to full text: http://www.jstor.org.grinnell.idm.oclc.org/stable/pdf/25484900.pdf
Segall provides an in-depth historical exposition on the modernistic experimentation of Joyce’s writing and how it both aligned with and complicated the political philosophies and literary theories of his Marxist and leftist contemporaries. In a mostly chronological progression, Segall addresses the artistic premises of socialist thinkers like Leon Trotsky, Edmund Wilson, Phillip Rahv, and others, and analyzes their critiques of Joyce’s modernist approach to literature and whether or not it is ideologically opposed to Marxism as high art bourgeois extravagance or if it furthers the socialist cause by offering complex literary devices and intricate characters that scrutinize capitalistic institutions and disrupt standard writing conventions. Segall’s article is particularly insightful in regards to framing the ideological divide between the purely political ideologues of the Stalinist camp and the proponents of Trotsky’s literary theory which suggested that even artwork born out of bourgeoisie culture could enlighten and enrich the proletariat class despite not being explicitly revolutionary in approach, “I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan (U 16. 1099-1101).
According to Trotsky, “One cannot always go to the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to accept or reject a work of art” (qtd in Segall 425). This tolerance of Joyce’s modernism became the western leftist standard of critique as the 20th Century progressed. Segall makes it clear that Joyce’s work, especially Ulysses, does not express outright political criticism, however, it also does not completely ignore issues of class, gender, nationality, and other injustices socialists would have been concerned with. While Ulysses is surely an advanced piece of fiction that is not explicitly leftist, Segall affirms, through explaining the Trotskyist tradition of accepting the educational capacities of meaningful art even from intellegentsia circles, that Joyce’s writings are integral works that can supplement the proletariat class.
Citations and Related Sources:
Max Eastman, Artists in Uniform (New York: Octagon Books, 1934), p. 37. 15 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: RusseU and RusseU, 1957), p. 225
Edmund Wilson, “James Joyce,” in Axel’s Castle (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), p. 207.
Phillip Rahv, “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy,” in Essays on Literature and Politics, pp. 299-300.
