OxBlog

Thursday, June 17, 2004

# Posted 6:15 AM by Patrick Belton  

BLOOM: LAST CALL... Sheila O'Malley, lovely girl that she is*, has been posting loads on Bloomsday. Also, OxFriend Phil C. poses a question to our readers:
I was trying to explain to a colleague—over beers @ Mackey’s Pub on L St—last night why Joyce is worth reading (she was forced to read “Portrait” for a lit class in college, couldn’t figure out what was going on, and has disliked JJ ever since).

Eventually I got on to the topic of 1922 as the annus mirabilis of 20th-century literature and began to gas on a bit about how JJ’s technique of bringing the sound and soul of the modern city into his writing very closely resembles TS Eliot’s method of “bricolage” (think of all the snatches of conversation, pop music, etc. from the London scene in The Waste Land—kind of TSE’s nightmare version of JJ’s Dublin, w/ its pompous schoolmasters, blowhard editors, mellifluous Italian music teachers, crippled coquettes on beaches, sirenical barmaids, debating literary intellectuals etc replaced by the typist and her small house-agent’s clerk, the tense married couple, the ladies in the pub, one-eyed Smyrna merchants, and so on).

But for the life of me I couldn’t explain who influenced whom, or if indeed there are filiations of influence from one to another of these giants. I know that Waste Land came out in ’22, and that JJ mailed portions of Ulysses to TSE, Ezra Pound, et al. while JJ was working on it (which must have been before ’22—chunks of U were indeed written during WWI, if I recall correctly). Yet on the other hand, TSE had published works such as “Prufrock,” which use some of this “found-objects-or-experiences-transmuted-into-art” method as early as 1914.

So are JJ & TSE just parallel—like Newton & Leibniz, geniuses who had similar brilliant insights independently but almost simultaneously—or did one affect the other more than vice versa?
Any thoughts?

_____
* In fact, sufficiently avid readers of OxBlog will recall that Sheila is - along with my lovely wife, Sasha Castel, and the NHS's cross-dressing crouton doctor - one of a very exclusive number of female blogosphere friends to have attained the highly coveted status of 'OxBlog OxBabes of the Week'.
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