Carthage

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August 21, 2005

James and the giant vocabulary

After years of avoiding him, I'm finally taking James Joyce for a spin. I made the decision once I'd exhausted all my Trollope. After he limped off the floor, I was looking around for a partner and there was James, as usual, sitting shyly against the wall on an uncomfortable folding shelf, watching me eagerly. I sighed.

The thing is, nobody wants to dance with James. He's a nice enough guy, with The Dubliners and so on to recommend him, but who wants to spend the evening staring at the enormous Finnegan's Wake growing out of his face? Still, he keeps hanging around. For a while it seemed like we were going to be rid of him at last--all the professors who had befriended him are getting old, on their last legs--eventually there'll be no one to speak up for him and then, surely, he'll have to go. But then last semester Sean took pity on him, like an idiot, and once Sean is your friend you have both feet solidly planted in the door and you're not going anywhere.

And there he was, watching me hopefully from the sidelines. He tried to make himself as appealingly thin as possible, narrowing into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as if he'd always been that size. I looked around the room desperately. There was Pynchon, but after our last fling I could hardly go back to him without swallowing my pride and a heavy dose of conspiracy theories. Arthur Miller and Nabokov, two longtime companions, were busy smoking cigarettes on the patio. Of course there's always the Grimm Brothers, but they're so juvenile most of the time. Nope, I was stuck with James. So I nodded to him to come over and we started to boogey.

"Say, James," I noted, "you're not such a bad dancer." Once we'd gotten past the initial nervous "moocow coming down the road" nonsense, James actually settled down into a respectable foxtrot. In fact, as the dance wore on, he became downright inspired. Before I knew it, we'd danced the better part of the afternoon and evening away.

I guess I haven't been entirely fair to JJ all these years. In fact, if I can just get him to shut up about hellfire, this might be a love match after all.

Posted by didofoot at August 21, 2005 11:00 AM

Comments

My thoughts:

I read everything else he wrote, but I think the Wake is sort of impossible. I used to hate the moocow stuff, but now I like it, because it makes sense, and it sets up a lot of cow/milk/manure/hell stuff that continues in the next few books. Of course, I wrote a 20-page paper on excrement in Joyce, so I have no perspective at all.

It might be too late to say this, but just skip the hellfire sermon in "Portrait". It's like Sinners in the Hand of a Drunken Irish God.

Posted by: sean at August 21, 2005 08:48 PM

i read 'ulysses' once. it was an experience. mostly, at this point, a blank experience.

(arvin clone! i still can't believe it.)

Posted by: michele at August 22, 2005 03:27 AM

You should go back to "Ulysses", Michele. The "Oxen of the Sun" chapter is primarily an extended allusion to Rambaldi's prophecies.

Posted by: sean at August 22, 2005 09:21 AM

"the drawing of this ox in the margins of ulysses looks JUST LIKE YOU, mr. ox. i'm sure this means you will either be the savior or the destructor of the entire human race! why is that man furrowing his impressivly large forehead at me? are you going to cry? you're so boring!"

Posted by: michele at August 22, 2005 12:14 PM

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