Stay Where You Are

Tying together the uses of art and Joyce, I present Joyce on “pity and fear” and his defense of “static” art. Eat your heart out Aristotle. I have a feeling George will like this better than Gardner. This is written when Joyce was 21 and had just escaped Dublin for Paris:

Desire is the feeling which urges us to go to something and loathing is the feeling which urges us to go from something: and that art is improper which aims at exciting these feelings in us whether by comedy or by tragedy. Of comedy later. But tragedy aims at exciting in us feelings of pity and terror. Now terror is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us with its secret cause and pity is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us with the human sufferer.