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(he's just prolixizing the opening of a gate here, folks.)



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--prolixizing--

Yes. And going beyond detail to redundancy, as in D. Thomas's "avuncular uncle."

And, as says faldo, he probably liked the sound.




Prolixizing: Absolutely.

Things you need to know about Ulysses to make sense of arruginated :

Ulysses takes place in a single day, 16 June 1904 (Bloomsday).

The main characters-- Leopold and Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus-- correspond to Homer's Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope, and Telemachus.

Each of the 18 chapters corresponds to one of Odysseus's (or Telemachus's) adventures and each chapter is written in a different style, with symbolism appropriate to the corresponding adventure. These patterns were hinted by Joyce in privately-circulated schemata.

Therefore, the symbolic method of Ithaca (the episode whence arruginated originated) needs to be understood for the use of arruginated to be understood.

Jeri Johnson explains why arruginated is the mote juste for Ithaca:

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In a language which is at once impersonal, nominative, 'arid' and self-generating, the text [of Ithaca] propels itself forward, apparently driven by an accelerating impulse to name and describe with increasingly irrelevant phenomenon.

So, Bloom unlocks and opens the door "By inserting the barrel of an arruginated male key in the hole of an unstable female lock, obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and turning its wards from right to left, withdrawing a bolt from its staple, pulling inward spasmodically an obsolescent unhinged door and revealing an aperture for free egress and free ingress."

Action so precisely delineated, broken down into such minute constituent movements, applied to such exactly named physical phenomena, virtually ceases to be action. Narrative nearly disappears beneath the weight of such nominative proliferation. Not to mention the actual triviality of the action itself. Other narratives would more usually content themselves with statements in the order of "Bloom unlocked the door to let Stephen out.'

No action beyond the stochastic can be detected behind the selection of facts to be related. The text appears both voracious and distracted; hungry to name everything, so frantic to do so that it turns its attention now here, now there, with no apparent rhyme or reason. [...]

Such a drive to name, to propogate facts, corresponds, at least superficially, to the hard rocks, the solidity and permanence of Ithaca. The compulsive urge to know the 'whats' in precise, unmistakable detail correlates with the anxiety of Odysseus in his initial failure to recognize his homeland.




Joyce confirms this interpretation :

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"[Ulysses] is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life)…. It is also a kind of encyclopaedia. My intention is not only to render the myth [of Ulysses] sub specie temporis nostri [in the mode of our time] but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to condition and even to create its own technique. Each adventure is so to speak one person -- as Aquinas relates of the heavenly hosts."



Hugh Kenner coined this technique the “Uncle Charles Principle” :

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Kenner observes that Joyce uses language that is relevant to the characters. This tailoring of language to the individual in the text gives an added flair of characterization. Not only are individuals described, but the text itself reveals subtler aspects of their character, allowing the reader to glean even more out of the writing. [...]

Perhaps the most precise example of the “Uncle Charles Principle” is seen with Uncle Charles himself [a character from an earlier novel by Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man].

Cliché and moderately base diction is used when describing Stephen’s pedestrian uncle. Charles is an avid smoker and is said to have “…smoked such black twist that as last his nephew suggested to him to enjoy his morning smoke in a little outhouse…” (Joyce 50). Uncle Charles is then said to “repair” to the outhouse. Joyce was heavily criticized for this trope. Windham Lewis even used this incident to prove that Joyce used a “slop shed” style and wasn’t worthy of serious literature.

It later became apparent that this was a conscious choice as Uncle Charles himself was given to hackneyed or affected speech. Jeri Johnson writes, “He ‘repairs to the outhouse’ because ‘repairing to outhouses’ is what characters like Uncle Charles do”



The same goes for arruginated in the Mythic method of Ulysses.

The Mythic method, by the way, is the superimposition of fin-de-siècle Dublin on ancient Greece--and of Mr Bloom on Odysseus; Stephen Dedalus on Telemachus; Molly on Penelope; the Citizen on Polyphemeus and so on--where thematic correspondences are brought into relief and should be interpreted as archetypes of the human struggle :

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As Homer sent his Ulysses wandering through the inferno of Greek mythology and Virgil his Aeneas through one of Roman mythology so Dante himself voyaged through the inferno of the mediaeval Christian imagination and so Mr. Joyce sent his hero through the inferno of modern subjectivity.

—Thomas McGreevy.



Last edited by Homo Loquens; 12/01/05 02:44 PM.