"Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize"
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Joyce is needling the tidy fantasy that art can be certified the way plumbing can. “Irresponsibility” here isn’t childish carelessness; it’s the deliberate suspension of ordinary duties: to be clear, to be useful, to be morally improving, to “make sense” on schedule. The pleasure of art, he implies, comes from its right to misbehave. It can waste time, follow an obsession into a cul-de-sac, linger on a smell or a rhythm, betray the plot for a sentence that sings. That’s not a bug in Joyce’s worldview; it’s the engine.
The jab at “the schools” carries subtext about institutions that survive by grading, standardizing, and justifying themselves. Schools can recognize craft and technique, even originality in the abstract, but they can’t comfortably endorse the risky, non-teleological impulses that often produce the most alive work: ambiguity, digression, private jokes, erotic charge, linguistic excess. You can rubric a metaphor; you can’t rubric the moment a book decides it doesn’t owe you an explanation.
Context matters: Joyce wrote against the moral and cultural gatekeeping of early 20th-century Ireland, and against a broader Anglophone respectability that policed sexuality, religion, and “proper” prose. His own career is basically a case study in institutional discomfort: Ulysses tried, censored, smuggled, then canonized. The irony is sharp: once schools finally “recognize” a revolution, they often sand down the very irresponsibility that made it revolutionary, teaching transgression as a unit with learning objectives. Joyce’s line protects art’s right to stay unhousebroken.
The jab at “the schools” carries subtext about institutions that survive by grading, standardizing, and justifying themselves. Schools can recognize craft and technique, even originality in the abstract, but they can’t comfortably endorse the risky, non-teleological impulses that often produce the most alive work: ambiguity, digression, private jokes, erotic charge, linguistic excess. You can rubric a metaphor; you can’t rubric the moment a book decides it doesn’t owe you an explanation.
Context matters: Joyce wrote against the moral and cultural gatekeeping of early 20th-century Ireland, and against a broader Anglophone respectability that policed sexuality, religion, and “proper” prose. His own career is basically a case study in institutional discomfort: Ulysses tried, censored, smuggled, then canonized. The irony is sharp: once schools finally “recognize” a revolution, they often sand down the very irresponsibility that made it revolutionary, teaching transgression as a unit with learning objectives. Joyce’s line protects art’s right to stay unhousebroken.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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