ჯოისი და გოეთე: “Un noioso funzionario”?
Joyce and Goethe: “Un noioso funzionario”?

Summary/Abstract: James Joyce regarded Goethe as being in the great writers’ “Holy Trinity” along with Dante and Shakespeare. However, his attitude towards the great German author seems to be ambivalent. He once noted that Ulysses (than in the planning stages) would depict an “Irish Faust”. Later, in 1915, Joyce’s attitude seems to have changed – he refers to Goethe as “un noioso funzionario” – as a figure of bourgeois conformity. He told Frank Budgen that Faust was an inadequate model for his new hero: “Far from being a complete man, he isn’t a man at all. Is he an old man or a young man? Where are his home and family? We don’t know. And he can’t be complete because he is never alone. Mephistopheles is always hanging round him at his side or heels”. Compared to other great literary figures like Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe appears to play a relatively small role in Joyce’s work. Some critics point out that while there are passing references to Goethe in Joyce’s fiction and private correspondence, none of Goethe’s specific works seem to have served as important models or inspirations for any of Joyce’s, and little of Joyce’s technique as a writer seems especially similar to Goethe’s. However, I would argue, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses provide enough material for a more systematic comparative study. Richard Ellmann argues that Joyce’s “connections with Goethe in Ulysses are less overt than the connections with Homer. They are, however, deeply ingrained.” Ellmann was by no means the first to highlight the potential in this particular line of critical inquiry. In the very year in which Ulysses was published John Middleton Murry described “Circe”-Nighttown episode as a kind of ‘Walpurgisnacht’ of Joyce’s protagonists. This astute observation seemingly found approval with the author himself, as Stuart Gilbert, whom Joyce assisted in writing the first full-length study of Ulysses, attempts to illustrate Murry’s parallel there in some detail.

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