Volume 20, Number 16 · October 18, 1973
Joyce and Vico: The Middle Way
By Stuart Hampshire
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
The Exile of James Joyce
by Hélène Cixous, translated by Sally A.J. Purcell
David Lewis, 765 pp., $15.00
Ulysses on the Liffey
by Richard Ellmann
Oxford University Press, 228 pp., $2.50 (paper)
Closing Time
by Norman O. Brown
Random House, 109 pp., $5.95
Vico's Scienza Nuova and Autobiography are related to the familiar classics of Western philosophy rather as a dream is related to the waking workaday state. They are disturbing, confusing, and they have a multiple significance. They are apt to be remembered in fragments and they mean different things to different persons: and it seems, or has seemed, that they cannot easily be put to work for any practical necessary purpose, either as guides to action in politics, or as keys to the future, or as moral exhortation, or even as advice to historians on methods of history. In this respect they are utterly unlike the works of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Condorcet, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, Durkheim. Not only are they not part of this continuous order of thought and ambition: they are opposed to it, and they would, if they could, undermine it finally. Vico's science genuinely was new, both in his theory and in his practice; and the novelty remains even now, because he has only been partially understood, and understood usually in a tame, domesticated sense, which disguises his subversive meanings.
Review, 6018 words
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