Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas

Joyce, Aristotle and Aquinas examines the pervasive presence of Aristotle and Aquinas in the writings of James Joyce. Joyce was a philosophical writer, with a keen sense of primordial and perennial questions such as diversity and unity, identity, permanence and change, and the reliability of knowledge; in his writings he engaged creatively with these questions. Aristotle and Aquinas were his dominant influences, providing both significant content for his work, as well as important principles of artistic creation. O'Rourke illustrates the decisive and extensive influence of Aristotle and Aquinas by copious reference to Joyce’s writings. The biographical facts of Joyce’s education, and his initiation into the intellectual world of Aristotle and Aquinas, are charted in detail. Aristotle equipped Joyce with fundamental principles regarding reality, knowledge, and the soul, which allowed him to shape his literary characters. Without his study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and On the Soul, he could not have created the intellectual character of Stephen portrayed in the early chapters of Ulysses. The debate in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ between Stephen, Eglinton and Russell would have been impossible. The Aristotelian concepts of act and potency, form and entelechy, are indispensable for Stephen’s reading of the world and his sense of selfhood. Besides relying on Aquinas as an authority for his realist outlook, Joyce appropriated Thomistic concepts to elaborate his own aesthetic theory; he diverged widely, however, from his credited source.