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On the spectral presence of the predecessor in James Joyce – With special reference to William Shakespeare
Author(s) -
Boysen Benjamin
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2005.00832.x
Subject(s) - ambivalence , relation (database) , originality , id, ego and super ego , verisimilitude , rivalry , psychoanalysis , jealousy , philosophy , literature , history , aesthetics , art , psychology , creativity , database , computer science , economics , macroeconomics , social psychology
The work of James Joyce is haunted by the question of the predecessor, who is simultaneously perceived as the generous source or progenitor, the beginning of being, the imago of the present living ego, and as the threatening rival. As the predecessor of Joyce par excellence, Shakespeare, in the works of the Irish author, confirms in a most significant and rich way how the relation to this oddly absent presence is marked by a fundamental ambivalence. The living are nourished by the gift of the no longer existing; they are paradoxically given existence by those who have none, which is why these ghosts are perceived in an ambivalent manner. The predecessor is the heritage of the living poet, and this heritage is always the poet's other , without which he would be deprived of artistic being, but which nevertheless threatens to deprive him of independence, autonomy, originality and being. This conflict with the ghost for being and autonomy, takes place between Joyce and Shakespeare throughout the pages of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake , where the latter continues to awake the jealousy, agony and rivalry of the former. The predecessor's position remains, above all, ambivalent, and nowhere else is this phenomena explored, analyzed, and demonstrated as thorough and as insistently as in the work of Joyce.