Steve,
I'm trying to imagine Bakshi or Rankin-Bass doing ULYSSES or
FINNEGAN"S WAKE (Or what Glen Yarborough's voice -- maybe Vince
Gill's now -- would lend to any sort of song derivation about Buck
Mulligan) LOL The long delay in response, sad to say is the great
tangle that is my e-mail system -- I'm simply a member of too many
groups.
You raise some excellent points. Clear from Joyce's multilingual
effusions (in Finnegan esp.) he was interested in language. An old
gent who lectured to our Brit Lit seminar back in the 70's at U. of
Illinois (sadly, I don't recall his name) was an acquaintance of
Joyce in Paris. He hesitatingly recounted one excursion with Joyce to
(at least the bar) of a "house of ill repute" where the matron said
something like "Bienvenu sur la maison de l'amore" (my French is very
limited and likely wrong here) to which Joyce replied: "Mais non,
c'est la maison du luxure." Clearly classical language and lit are
the bases for much of Joyce's work (ULYSSES of course, and also the
name of "Daedalus" in SH and PoAaYM -- I did my paper for the course
on how Stephen was both Daedalus and (via surname) the son of
Daedalus or Icarus: there are some nifty connections.) While
Tolkien was, of course, somewhat influenced by Classic lit (mostly, I
think in certain strains of Elvish language), he follows much more
that tradition established by Wm. Morris, the Grimm Bros.
collections, George Webb Dasent, and "the Northern Thing" in general.
Here, I think he and Bob would have hit it off -- I'm beginning to
see more and more evident influence of Chesterton (especially The
Ballad of the White Horse) upon REH, and GKC's Alfred is solidly in
that Northern myth thing, the pagan Nordic stuff blent/clashing with,
of course, Chesterton's cause of Christianity and the echoes of the
Celtic heritage present as well.
Both with tough early lives of course too. Tolkien orphaned young
and, like Lewis, touched deeply by "The Great War."
Both from what Wolfe (may her hyperdescriptive effusions and purple
passages rest in peace, say I -- well at least rest) might call
"underbred" stock (and here I see in both J and T maybe one other
commonality -- the belief that the lives of ordinary people are (or
can be) great adventures, and that there's the latent "hero" in us
all, sometimes actuated).
Regarding that last, I think Bob Howard had a sense of that too, and,
had he been able to become the regionalist of the SW that he might
have become, had he chosen to live long enough to write it, a
developing empathy. I see it, at least in a few of his poems, also
in some of the western pieces.
Frank
>Frank, I didn't quite gather from your post why our August exchange on
>Tolkien and Joyce is resurfacing but here's something I've come across since
>then, from Tom Shippey's AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY:
>
>...something can be learned by putting the two men, and the two works
>[ULYSSES and THE LORD OF THE RINGS] into relation with each other. They were,
>after all, both authors of the same century, close contemporaries, not
>dissimilar in background.
>There are some immediate points of similarity. The two men's careers are more
>like each other's than most other major writers: each with one obvious main
>work, each of these to some extent a development of an earlier and shorter
>one with which it shares some characters (THE HOBBIT, PORTRAIT OF THE
>ARTIST), the two sequences supported only by some short pieces and by
>collections of poems, and extended by posthumous publication of first drafts
>(like Joyce's STEPHEN HERO, and the volumes of the James Joyce Archive). It
>is true that Joyce's magnum opus came out when he was only forty, while
>Tolkien waited til he was sixty-two. Tolkien might have replied that he did
>not have the massive financial support Joyce received for his writing-it has
>been calculated, some GBP 25,000 between 1915 and 1930, certainly more than
>Tolkien earned from being a professor in the same period...But there are less
>accidental connections. Joyce never achieved Tolkien's academic stature nor
>his learning, but he was a philologist of sorts. We know he took a course in
>the subject at University College, Dublin; the "Oxen of the Sun" sequence in
>ULYSSES shows him putting it to use; and the "Proteus" section is assigned
>overtly to Philology in Joyce's own scheme for the book...More subtly, both
>ULYSSES and THE LORD OF THE RINGS are evidently works of the twentieth
>century, neither of them readily describable as novels, which are engaged in
>deep negotiation with the ancient genres of epic and romance...More
>comically, both of them got something of the same treatment from sections of
>the intelligentsia when they eventually appeared. The class reactions to
>Tolkien [have been quoted ad nauseam], but one might compare with them
>Virginia Woolf's nettled dismissal of Joyce's work in her diary as
>"illiterate, underbred."
>
>(Tompkins, not Shippey) Illiterate-and-underbred also resembles, in tone and
>dismissiveness, the remarks on Robert E. Howard in a certain major biography
>of Lovecraft a few years back...It also occurs to me that in some respects
>Joyce enthusiasts have a much easier time of it than Howard or Tolkien
>specialists: no one has cast a series of Germanic bodybuilders as Stephen or
>Bloom, and FINNEGAN'S WAKE remains inviolate and un-animated by either Ralph
>Bakshi or Rankin & Bass.
>
>Steve Tompkins
