In a letter to his friend Frank Budgen on 20 March 1920,
Joyce reported that he was "working hard at Oxen of the
Sun, the idea being the crime committed against
fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition." The chapter, he
wrote, would parallel the stages of human embryonic
development and "the periods of faunal evolution in general"
by presenting an historically arranged sequence of English
prose styles, "introduced by a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude
(the unfertilized ovum)." The paragraph discussed here appears
to constitute the prelude he was talking about, though possibly the succeeding two
paragraphs should be included, since they too are
Latinate and highly obscure.
Sallust (86-ca. 35 BCE) and Tacitus (ca. 56-ca. 120 AD) were
Roman historians. Why Joyce should have looked to these
ancient, non-English writers as he began recapitulating the
historical development of English prose is a mystery, though
Tacitus did write extensively about the Germanic peoples who
later settled in Britain, and some people think he may have
been a Celt. Nor is it at all clear (to this poor Latinist, at
least) how the prose of the two historians could have inspired
Joyce to compose the magnificently involuted gobbledygook of
his first paragraph. Tacitus wrote clearly and sparely. Even
when his sentences are lengthened by subordinate clauses and
parallel verbs, his aim is always to describe a situation as
economically and directly as possible. Sallust was known for
unusual diction (obsolete or rarely used words, innovative
phrasings, nonstandard spellings, strange conjunctions and
verb endings, neologisms), but he too preferred brevity to
Ciceronian ornateness.
Gifford supposes that the paragraph is an "imitation" of
Sallust and Tacitus, which seems hard to fathom, though he
qualifies the claim by affirming Stuart Gilbert's observation
that the prose sounds like a literal translation from Latin,
"without Anglicization of word usage and syntax." That much
seems plausible. The long sentences, with their disjointed
clauses, looping parenthetical phrases, and bafflingly
arranged modifiers, do feel like a poor translator's effort to
adapt the syntax of Latin to an uninflected language. To take
one small example, "the honourable by ancestors transmitted
customs" places words in an order that Latin case declensions
can accommodate but that wreaks havoc with English syntax.
The passage's use of obscure Latinate words where others
would better convey meaning to an English-speaker—acumen,
sapience, proliferent, benefaction, exhortator, and so
on—likewise suggests an effort to approximate the effect of
reading some kind of Latin. Several totally unfamiliar
Latinate words may even suggest neologism and archaism in the
manner of Sallust: "omnipollent" means
"all-powerful" (pollens, from polleo, "I am
strong"), and "lutulent" means "muddy,
turbid, thick" (lutulentus, from lutum, "mud").
Gifford identifies "irrevecund" as a rare
word meaning "immodest."
The paragraph's core assertions, wrapped within webs of
misdirection that Joyce evidently labored hard to weave, seem
to be somewhat as follows: In "no exterior splendour"
(no outward manifestation?) is the "prosperity of a
nation more efficaciously asserted" (economic
wellbeing should result in population increase? improvement in
citizens' lives?) than in its ways of showing "solicitude"
(care) for the condition of pregnancy, which is "omnipollent
nature's incorrupted benefaction." The "evangel"
(good tidings) of God's holy book gives us both "command
and promise" to be
fruitful and multiply, and so the "reiteratedly
procreating function" (making babies not just once,
but repeatedly) is "ever irrevocably enjoined"
upon us. In the past, our "nation excellently
commenced" a tradition of respecting this
imperative (by having large families? by honoring pregnant
women?), and it is to be hoped that these "honourable
by ancestors transmitted customs" (excellent
traditions handed down from our ancestors) will be perpetuated
in the future. But some people today have an "acumen"
(intellectual keenness) that is not very "perceptive."
Lacking in "sapience" (wise understanding) of
what, rightly understood, requires "veneration,"
these "inilluminated" ones do not see that
every good citizen must join in the cultural project, becoming
"the exhortator and admonisher" of his fellow
citizens (urging them to carry on the old wholesome
traditions, and reproving those who do not).
In the immortal words of Monty Python, "Every sperm is
sacred, / Every sperm is great. / When a sperm is wasted, /
God gets quite irate." The theme of divine anger at the taking
of life, prompted by Homer's story of Odysseus' men killing
the cattle of Helios, starts here and continues throughout Oxen
of the Sun. The relevance of this message to the drama
acted out in the maternity hospital—where drunken and
blasphemous young atheists raucously celebrate sex while a
poor woman suffers through an excruciatingly prolonged
labor—is quite clear. The connection to Sallust and Tacitus,
however, feels extremely tenuous. Could Joyce, as he continued
working on Oxen, possibly have found some medieval
Latin text better suited to his purposes than the Roman
historians? Such a text, if one were found, might conceivably
account not only for the ungainly prose but also for the
Christian messaging.
My notes will attempt to comprehensively address the prose
styles in Oxen, while dealing more sparingly with the
notion that they can be identified with stages of pregnancy,
embryonic development, or animal evolution. Joyce wrote in a
letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver that the chapter contained "nine
circles of development," and Robert
Janusko has observed that he worked in nine notebooks
corresponding to the nine months of gestation. But it remains
an open question whether the finished chapter creates such an
effect with anything approaching the dense specificity of its
echoes of English prose writers, and critics who have labored
to associate styles with the stages of pregnancy seldom agree
with one another on the particulars.
Some styles do suggest phases of organic development,
however, and nowhere is this more evident than at the
beginning of the chapter. Joyce's notion that his Sallustian
prelude would correspond to "the unfertilized ovum" seems as
good an explanation as any for its inchoate form. The
sprawling shapelessness was clearly part of his design. The
long final section of Oxen rivals the first one in
inchoate obscurity (though in no other way), and in the letter
to Weaver Joyce called these challenging sections "the
headpiece and tailpiece of opposite chaos." Some critics have
associated the final section with an "afterbirth"—the
placental remains of the developmental process—or with the
inarticulate cries of a newborn baby. The opening style gives
the impression of prose that has the potential to be
intelligible, but has not yet realized its destiny.