ABSTRACT
Some fragments of another work of genius which Mr. James Joyce is slowly perfecting have been published in London. They show him as a fashioner or creator and transformer of language. He continues on a great scale the method of Lewis Carroll. Not infrequently he employs the metathesis system which the Oxford undergraduates so long and affectionately attributed to Dr. Spooner. But his new strange tongue is not the perfume and suppliance of a moment. It is constant, elaborate, voluminous. The beginner has no trouble with such simplicities as ‘weight a momentum’; but there must be at least 160 seconds in a minute before we can read at sight a passage like this, cited by the Spectator and apparently relating to the operation of describing ‘an aquillitoral dryangle on a given strayed line’. The theme is easy, but some of the language surprises by himself…. [quotes from p. 296]
If we may say so without irreverence, this looks sleazy, broken, interrupted by surrenders to intelligibility. Compare it with the first stanza of ‘Jabberwocky’:
Under so worthy a master, Mr. Joyce’s studies ought to be as fruitful as his terminology is satisfactory. If he could but combine with that
the mystic and mighty thought which Miss Gertrude Stein has manifested in such a classic as ‘Certainly the union of oxygen with ostriches is not that of a taught tracer,’ the ultimate form would be married to the ultimate content. Then nothing but conservatism and decline could be expected of ‘revolutionary’ literature. Mr. Joyce’s purpose is not humor. His is the deep melancholy common to inveterate readers and writers. All words look shabby or sick to him. He hates them. He must have a new lot. To weary word-‘slingers’ the product of his Paris factory may bring encouragement and hope.
