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Skeat andJoyce: A Garner of Words Gregory M. Downing "The fact is, man is an etymologizing animal." A. Smythe Palmer Folk-Etymology 1882 Readers and critics have always recognized James Joyce's intense focus on the possibilities of language. It is evident everywhere: from the careful play with rhythm, sound, and connotation ofthe lyrics that eventually became Chamber Music, on through Anna's predawn monologue at the end ofFinnegans Wake over a third of a century later. Every phrase manifests a deep concern for words as tools consciously employed in the creation or capture, and conveyance, of every kind of meaning — old and new, ordinary and abstruse, plain and mannerist. Probably the preeminent distinguishing feature ofJoyce's work is the degree to which, more than other literary figures, he appears to exhibit a rational rather than an instinctual sense of English as a whole array of strategies for description and expression. Joyce chose this mode early. As reactions ofhighly sophisticated readers to his earliest lyrics make clear, Joyce had already honed his linguistic facility to a noticeable extent before he was twenty.1 Included 1 Not long after their first meeting in August 1902, George Russell remarked on the verse of the twenty-year-oldJoyce: "He . . . writes verses perfect in their technique and sometimes beautiful in quality" (quoted in Ellmann 1982, 100). In fact, Russell exhortedJoyce to strive for less technical sophistication, linguistic skill, and prosodie meticulousness, and instead focus more on individuality and even chaos (99). Yeats, a couple of months later that year, stated: 'Your technique in verse is much better than the technique of any young Dublin man I have met during my time" (104). (By this pointJoyce had already produced the never-published Shine and Dark collection [80-83] , as well as some of the pieces diat eventuated in Chamber Music in 1907.) See also Russell's further 34Gregory M. Downing in the largely autobiographical Stephen Hero (SH) manuscript, in fact, is an account of Stephen's linguistic activities as an undergraduate. To the extent that Stephen's dates matchJoyce's, this would be during the period from late 1898 through early 1902, when Joyce was at the (Catholic) University College in Dublin, from age sixteen-and-a-half until just after turning twenty. Near the outset of the extant portion, Stephen and his brother Maurice discuss poetry as a verbal construct resulting from the closest attention to sound, scansion, rhythm, and stress (SH 25-26), and: Soon Stephen began to explore the language for himself and to choose, and thereby rescue once for all, the words and phrases most amenable to his theory. He became a poet with malice aforethought. He was at once captivated by the seeming eccentricities of the prose of Freeman and William Morris. He read them as one would read a thesaurus and made a garner of words. He read Skeat's Etymological Dictionary by the hour and his mind, which had from the first been only too submissive to the infant sense of wonder, was often hypnotised by the most commonplace conversation. People seemed to him strangely ignorant of the value of the words they used so glibly .... Words are simply receptacles for human thought [as Stephen argues to the rather literary dean of the college, Father Butt] : in the literary tradition they receive more valuable thoughts than they receive in the market-place .... As he walked thus through the ways of the city he had his ears and eyes ever prompt to receive impressions. It was not only in Skeat that he found words for his treasure house, he found them also at haphazard in the shops, on advertisements , in the mouths of the plodding public.2 comments on the topic during the summer of 1903 and his statement that, at age 20/21, Joyce was more prosodically proficient than either Russell or Yeats (134 and 134n). As Joyce said of lyric prosody to the young Padraic Colum at their first meeting in 1903: "A lyric is a simple liberation of a rhythm" (135). From another angle, the opening of the extant SH ms. portrays the undergraduate Stephen in this way, at the very beginning of chapter 16: " ... he...

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