Facebook
Twitter
Tumblr
Apparently Joyce became to engaged in Wilde's work that he wrote to his literary executor to ask permission for a translation of "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" into Italian. Evidently, no Italian publisher was as interested in the essay as Joyce was, and his appeal for a translation was rejected.[The Italian newspaper] Piccolo commissioned an article from him on the playwright and he produced an essay which said almost as much about himself as about Wilde. He began by reflecting on the name, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, which implied descent from Fingal, King of the ferocious O'Flahertie clan. "Like that savage tribe, he was to break the lance of his fluent paradoxes against the body of practical conventions, and to hear, as a dishonoured exile, the choir of the just recite his name together with that of the unclean." The sentence rings strangely prophetic of Joyce himself — the exile already regarded as suspicious and morally tainted by many conventional Dubliners. Wilde, he wrote, again sounding strangely self-referential, "grew up in an atmosphere of insecurity and prodigality." He then got in a shot at the rabblement who threw stones at Wilde, quoting his comment in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" that the sins we perceive in Dorian are our own. Finally he lamented a life which ended not only in public disgrace but with Wilde's conversion. He could identify with a genius betrayed; it was the prospect of grovelling recantation that he himself was determined to avoid.
Another recent article on James Joyce here.