New Style? "It is not why therefore we shall wonder
if, as the best historians relate...she by them suddenly to be
about to be cherished had been begun she felt!": some
commentators have heard in these two paragraphs a stylistic
pastiche distinct from the one displayed in the previous
paragraph. But the turgid Latinate prose is similar in many
ways, and the content, while different, feels connected
quasi-logically to the previous argument: because Ireland has
long valued procreation (point one), "therefore" it has a
venerable tradition of practicing medicine and building
hospitals such as the one to which Mrs. Purefoy has come
(point two). Even if Joyce did not intend to create a new
style in these paragraphs, and there is some internal evidence
to suggest that he did, it does seem that he is shifting the
focus from a vaguely ancient prehistory to a specifically
Irish medieval history.
Some phrases in these new paragraphs sound almost
idiomatically modern: "as the best historians relate"; "Not to
speak of hostels, leperyards, sweating chambers,
plaguegraves"; "Certainly in every public work"; "therefore a
plan was by them adopted"; "not merely in being seen but also
even in being related." At other times the language is even
more syntactically contorted than that of the preceding
paragraph. The baffling opening clause is followed by many
others, such as "it is difficult in being said which the
discrepant opinions of subsequent inquirers are not up to the
present congrued to render manifest"; "prosperity at all not
to can be and as they had received eternity gods mortals
generation to befit them her beholding"; "parturient in
vehicle thereward carrying desire immense among all one
another"; "she by them suddenly to be about to be cherished
had been begun she felt."
One has the sense, reading these paragraphs after the
preceding one, of taking an occasional, hesitant step forward,
only to be drawn back even more intractably into linguistic
muck. Perhaps, then, they are best understood as a
continuation of the first style's deliberately baffling
Latinate medium. The English prose continues to sound like an
ineptly literal translation of Latin, and the opaque Latinate
vocabulary persists: "prosperity" is somehow still obscurely
important; mothers are "proliferent" rather than pregnant or
breeding or child-bearing; they come to the hospital
"parturient" rather than in labor; healthcare providers seek
to minimize "all accident possibility" rather than foreseeable
complications; hospitals waive "emolument" rather than
payment.
But several details in the first paragraph create a sense
that we may be moving forward into a recognizably historical
era and a particular geographical place. The "best historians"
are not identified any more than were Sallust and Tacitus in
the preceding paragaph, but now it is said that they wrote
about practices "among the Celts." The "art of
medicine" is mentioned not just as something characteristic of
"a nation" or "the nation," as in the preceding paragraph, but
as practiced by the Irish people's "greatest doctors, the
O'Shiels, the O'Hickeys, the O'Lees," families of
hereditary physicians who served noble families of ancient
Ireland. Records of their practices go back to Irish and
English historical chronicles and medical treatises of the
15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and they began
practicing many centuries earlier still.
Nearly 100 medieval manuscripts contain medical texts in
Irish. The website of the Royal Irish Academy, which holds a
large number of these manuscripts, observes that the medical
texts consist "mainly of translations or adaptations of
continental Latin treatises into early modern Irish. The Irish
practitioners were unusual in translating the texts into the
vernacular rather than working from the Latin as was the norm
elsewhere in Europe. Many of these Latin versions had been
translated from Greek or Arabic by early practitioners in
France and Italy. The compilations were made for practical
purposes—for the use of doctors in the course of their working
lives."
Although it seems doubtful that Joyce would have had the
facility in early modern Irish to delve very deeply into such
texts, it is tempting to suppose that they might have
influenced not only his understanding of medieval Irish
medicine but also the style in which he presented it.
Translations of translations, produced for purely practical
purposes, without pretensions to literary elegance—such
mongrel documents might very well resemble the two horrible
paragraphs that Joyce set down. If scholars eventually
identify and describe some plausible examples, the find would
support, and refine, Gifford's view that these two paragraphs
(unlike the preceding one, inspired, he supposes, by Sallust
and Tacitus) were written "After the style of medieval Latin
prose chronicles, again with the effect of a literal
translation that does not Anglicize word usage and syntax."
Of course, such a discovery would complicate even further
Joyce's stated intention
of imitating the chronological development of English prose.
Latin was the lingua franca of medieval and early
modern Europe, and for centuries some clerical and historical
English writers preferred that medium to the Anglo-Saxon or
Anglo-Norman English spoken in the streets, so creating an
Anglicized equivalent of their Latin might arguably have some
relevance to the project. But using English to imitate the
effect of Celts translating Latin texts into Irish? Such a
digression would be simply bizarre. It would not, however,
necessarily be out of keeping with the methods of Oxen of
the Sun.
