Stephen and Bloom at Life's Feast: Alimentary Symbolism and the Creative Process in James Joyce's "Ulysses", and: Joyce's Catholic Comedy of Language, and: Children's Lore in "Finnegans Wake" (review)
Joyceans will have to get back to the text again regardless of their many previous readings, because the three studies here reviewed provide new speculations about Joyce's range of reference. "The sacred is at the heart of Joyce's writing experience," asserts Beryl Schlossman in the opening sentence of Joyce's Catholic Comedy of Language. "All of James Joyce's fiction has the creative process as one of its central concerns," Lindsey Tucker begins her study, Stephen and Bloom at Life's Feast. Writing of Children's Lore in "Finnegans Wake," Grace Eckley claims that this lore "holds especial importance and significance," along with "folklore, mythology, or Judeo-Christian backgrounds." Each scholar thus explores a specialized field of Joyceana and shares an interest in wider areas of inquiry, extending their studies from literary and psychological sources to insights provided by cultural anthropology and comparative religion. These approaches provide information, the relevance of which is sometimes questionable. There is the risk of extrapolating casual references into major concerns, of failing to evaluate the conflicting elements of his "jocoserious" manner, or forgetting that the pun was for him a "fatal Cleopatra," as Dr. Johnson said of the Shakespearean "quibble." In a letter to Harriet Weaver Joyce explained one of the key motifs of the Wake, as cited by Schlossman: