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6 Rhetoric—Modern and Classical “After the Race” is a broad satire on the subject and a parody of the style of the stories read by British gentlemen during the reign of the King Edward VII. As ironically implied by Villona’s term of address on which it ends, it satirizes the expectations aroused by an account of the Gordon Bennett Cup Race among the presumed readers of a glossy monthly such as the Blackwood’s Magazine, the Strand, or the Gentleman’s Magazine. Blackwood’s (1820–1980), known as “The Maga,” was the standard-bearer of British Victorian values. The stereotypical pabulum of British colonial life, it claimed to offer its readers at home and abroad sound criticism and Tory political commentary. Each issue carried articles on the management of the empire (“British Interests in Siam,” “Russia and Japan: Navies,” “Army Shooting and Its Improvement,” “Foreign Undesirables”); sports (“Cricket Reform,” “Sport and Politics”); and adventures in exotic climes. And (for the ladies): “My House in the West Indies,” “Bridge,” and “Dogs I Have Known and Loved.” A score of magazines competed for the middle to lowbrow readership. They took sports and big-game hunting more seriously than they deserve; but operating on the assumption that the world was the young Briton’s playground, they recounted humorous and romantic tales of speed, risk, wonder, and adventure. Told in breathless style, such tales were lubricated with exclamatory phrases like “intoxicating, exhilarating, and perfectly charming!” As described in chapter 2, motoring stories appeared frequently, either celebrating the new satisfactions of high-speed motion or expatiating on “the infirmities of motor-cars and the foibles of those who drive them” (James Walter Smith, “Automobilism,” Strand, September 1901: 318). As the joke had it, “l’automoblesse n’oblige pas” (324). The narrator of “After the Race” enters these lists by invoking some of the clichés from stories of such derring-do in the popular press; thus the Rhetoric—Modern and Classical · 179 somewhat reserved and skeptical emphasis, in his opening paragraphs, on the high or excellent spirits, hilarity, good humor, high stakes, and “careering” automobilists and the awe in which he represents their regard by the anonymous bystanders. Also, in his characterization of the motion of the automobiles as “scudding” (D 42.2) and “bounding” (D 45.12), the narrator is rendering a graphically accurate image of the dangers and discomforts endured by motorists bouncing over roads designed for horse-drawn carriages that did not exceed 10 mph. And again, when he makes the sententious pronouncement, “Rapid motion through space elates one,” and follows it immediately with the deflationary qualifiers “so does notoriety; so does the possession of money” (D 44.14–15), he is inditing a trope long honored in the Irish literary tradition, the undercutting triad.1 The narrative exhibits many examples of clumsy or imprecise writing , such as “well above the level of successful Gallicism” (D 42.17–18), the pleonasm “an optimist by nature” (D 43.11), lazy euphemisms like “did not study very earnestly” (D 43.24), unintentional puns such as “fortunate enough” (D 43.19),2 thoughtless metaphors like the mercantile “cargo” (D 44.3), the idolatrous “pay homage to the snorting motor” (D 45.17), and the irony in Jimmy’s trite phrases, “to see a little life” (D 43.27) and “seen so much of the world” (D 43.32). These are the more explicit signs of a parodist at work on the approximate rhetoric of the recreational journalism of the time designed for the gentleman consumer. It is not hard to imagine Joyce endowing his narrator with a sense of superiority over sentimental vulgarians earned in a school that—like Clongowes and Belvedere—trained its students in classical rhetoric. The elementary classical studies to which the young Joyce was exposed required a lot of memorization—first of vocabulary and grammar, and then of long passages from Virgil, Ovid, and Horace. Beginning students in Jesuit schools used an edition of Emmanuel Alvares’s Prosodia and as they advanced (P 179.21–24), they were required to produce exact translations of assigned passages in each class, and then, occasionally to render that literal translation into elegant English. They were required to master Latin prosody, grammar, and rhetoric; and were therefore examined on their ability to scan poetic texts, “parse” individual elements in the language (write precise syntactic notes), and to tag figures of speech with their classical names.3 To develop proficiency in these skills, students...

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