Tolstoy and Joyce

Norman O. Brown recognized the importance of James Joyce as a thinker of the first rank. Not simply a teller of tales, Joyce was a philosopher: a fact that our academic specialization and corresponding intellectual compartmentalization obscure.

Joyce himself recognized the world importance of another major literary thinker, Leo Tolstoy. In a letter to his brother Stanislaus, he praised Tolstoy's "How Much Land Does A Man Need?" as the "greatest story that the literature of the world knows" [Joseph A. Kestner, "Tolstoy and Joyce: 'Yes,'"JJQ, vol. 9, no. 4, Summer 1972 (484)]. He also read the novels Resurrection and Anna Karenina. Kestner's brief note in the James Joyce Quarterly [ref. above] makes a persuasive case that Joyce was so affected by Tolstoy's literary genius that he consciously or unconsciously imitates aspects of Resurrection in Ulysses. I won't reproduce Kestner's argument or the evidence he assembles to support it here--anyone who is interested can find his note using the above citation. But Kestner made another shrewd observation that deserves to be noted: he referred to Ulysses as a "history of literature."

And that it is--as is its sequel, Brown's favorite, Finnegan's Wake.