céline and joyce

Thinking about Céline and the proletarian revolution in style he effected in Voyage au bout de la nuit, it occurred to me suddenly (in the bathtub) that Joyce may have been up to something similar, as unlikely as that seems.

By using "found" styles, most obviously in the case of "Nausicaa," but arguably even in "Oxen," Joyce moved away from authorial high style towards an "authorless" narrative told by many popular voices. (Andy Warhol just came to mind). If this strikes you as preposterous, consider that the styles Joyce pastiches in "Oxen" are to him just childhood favorites from his schooldays, not the highfalutin' styles they seem to us. And the pastiches are playful, even childish (in the case of Dickens).

Proust: authorial high style.
Céline: authorial proletarian style.
Joyce: no authorial style (to a point) and found popular styles

macguffin / mcguffin

Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with this story:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?" And the other answers, "Oh that's a McGuffin." The first one asks, "What's a McGuffin?" "Well," the other man says, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands." The first man says, "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands," and the other one answers "Well, then that's no McGuffin!" So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.

Apply to Ulysses.

joyce as fox

Check out Isaiah Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox." Hedgehogs have one idea; foxes see things from many angles.