New Style. "Universally that person's
acumen . . . ever irrevocably enjoined?": In this
paragraph of two long and nearly impenetrable sentences
Gifford hears "An imitation of the Latin prose styles of the
Roman historians Sallust (86-34 B.C.) and Tacitus (c. 55-120
A.D.). The manner of this passage suggests a literal
translation, without Anglicization of word usage and syntax."
Despite its unreadability, the paragraph adds more layers to
the associations of divinity and fertility laid down in the
first three paragraphs.
After the strange but rousing incantation that frames the
entry to Oxen of the Sun, these two mind-choking
sentences clog the entrance, threatening to bar the reader's
progress beyond the first page. Their thought, though, does
not seem highly complex. Impatient readers can pluck some
kernels of meaning from the whirling linguistic chaff and move
on, while those with more interest in how words are strung
together to make syntactic structures can derive some
pleasure, or at least mental exercise, from trying to piece
together the architecture of disjointed clauses, long
parenthetical phrases, and bafflingly arranged modifiers,
perhaps even admiring the perverse ingenuity by which Joyce
has twisted English into a semblance of a highly inflected
language.
The narrator's core assertions, wrapped within dense webs of
misdirection, seem to be somewhat as follows: In "no
exterior splendour" (i.e., in no other
manifestation of economic wellbeing?) is the "prosperity
of a nation more efficaciously asserted" than in
its ways of showing "solicitude" for the
condition of pregnancy, which is nature's great blessing. The
"evangel" of God's holy book gives us both "command
and promise" to be fruitful and multiply, and so
the "reiteratedly procreating function" is "ever
irrevocably enjoined" upon us. In the past, our "nation
excellently commenced" a tradition of respecting
this imperative (by making lots of babies? by honoring
pregnant women? by founding
maternity hospitals?), and it is to be hoped that these
excellent customs transmitted by our ancestors ("the
honourable by ancestors transmitted customs") will
be perpetuated in the future. But some people today seem to
have an "acumen" that is not very "perceptive."
Lacking in "sapience," "ignorant of
that which," rightly understood, requires "veneration,"
these "unilluminated" 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.
God wants us to make babies, then, and he doesn't look kindly
on those who make light of this sacred responsibility. The
relevance of this message to the drama being acted out in the
maternity hospital —where a drunken crew of blasphemous young
atheists is raucously celebrating sex, while a poor woman
suffering through an excruciatingly prolonged labor lies
within earshot —is quite evident. The tone of prophetically
inspired chastisement that this narrator comically directs at
his characters will be revisited in several later stylistic
sections of the episode.
Latin or Latin-derived vocabulary compounds the difficulty of
reading this paragraph. Gifford glosses several totally
unfamiliar words: "omnipollent" = powerful,
from Latin pollens; "lutulent" =
muddy, turbid, thick; "irrevecund" =
immodest.
