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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

James Joyce [2]

James Joyce [2]

Sir: I had hoped to avoid an elaborate controversy with your correspondent ‘Zosimos’ about the principles of critical reviewing. But since he has reopened discussion, I will make two necessary points.

I do not consider it only a matter of interpretation that Harry Levin’s book on James Joyce has been published seventeen years. On the other hand, this fact, of which I was unaware, has practically no bearing on the content of my review. There is a principle of accuracy involved. I think that a reviewer is bound to be accurate within the limits of his knowledge; but I do not think that a reviewer must necessarily have a full, scholarly, bibliographical knowledge of the background of the book he reviews. It depends, of course, on what periodical he is reviewing for. A review, let us say, of an anthropological work by Sir Peter Buck, for the Polynesian Journal, would have to be exhaustive and scholarly; a review of the same book for the Listener might be scholarly, but would not have to be. My own qualifications for reviewing Levin’s book were a full knowledge of Joyce’s writings, not scholarly but literary. I think that ‘Zosimos’ is expecting scholarly qualifications.

When I write of Joyce’s ‘hieroglyphics’ I am employing it as a metaphor. The exact term for Joyce’s coinages (another metaphor, I fear) would be ‘neologisms’. Apparently ‘Zosimos’ holds that a reviewer may not use metaphor. This is certainly a point where we differ radically on a point of taste; and I think that ‘Zosimos’ would find that an overwhelming weight of literary opinion would fall on my own side of the scales (another metaphor, I regret to say).

1961 (241)