Two Artists, Two Portraits: Cohen/Joyce – A Study in Affinity

Abstract

Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) was a poet and novelist before becoming world-famous as part of the 1960s and ‘70s counterculture. His two novels, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), are significant contributions to Canadian literature and to postmodern fiction in general. Cohen himself, and more than one contemporary commentator, claimed for them certain affinities with the work of James Joyce, and the present account reflects on this claim. What in the progress of Cohen’s protagonist Lawrence Breavman, of The Favourite Game, echoes the education in consciousness of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus? Religion, politics, and sexuality are emphatic presences in both narratives; art too, clearly. But, is Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) simply a template for later autobiographical Künstlerromane, or is it Joyce’s example as an original master of the form that may be more pertinent here? Where are the main points of convergence and divergence between these two artists and their fictions? An attempt to elucidate some answers may contribute to the construction of an early consensus regarding Cohen’s literary status – and to the question of Joyce’s ongoing importance to later generations and later phases of artistic and cultural production.