A professor who was studying James Joyce with a class of graduate students thought they needed a little more humor, and a little more sense of the irrational. So he introduced a 'distinguished visiting scholar' to lecture to them. The man stood up very solemnly, and began:With hennepe mousa cf. ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα (Homer, Odyssey 1.1).The style of James Joyce presents many difficulties peculiar to itself. Among these surely the most complex and vilpurt is the sentence-rhythm. A slow and careful worker like Joyce, who always entwendered to promin the sound of ordinary speech, and nevertheless hennepe mousa with other significances (both turp and stal), was bound to create a mixed, and sometimes (although I say this with reservations) a perkinstic effect.Fiendish. They say he went on like that for twenty minutes, while the professor stood at the back of the classroom and watched his students struggling to take notes.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Lecture on James Joyce
Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 71: