Lamb was a voracious and erudite reader who found much to
imitate in Renaissance essayists like Michel
de Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, and
Richard Burton, but his friendly conversational tone and vivid
descriptions are entirely his own. With folksy warmth and arch
humor he depicts scenes of everyday life––what he called (in
"Elia to His Correspondents") "little sketches." He seems to
have had a particular interest in the ways in which children
learn about adult realities and adults approach the lost world
of their childhood. For "the use of young persons" he and his
sister Mary wrote Tales from Shakespeare (1807), with
the sexuality and violence removed but much of the bard's
language intact. James Joyce first encountered Odysseus in
Lamb's The Adventures of Ulysses (1808),
assigned to him in a class when he was a boy. The book gave
him an admiration for Homer's clever hero that was still with
him when he began his great novel.
In different ways the two essays included in Peacock's
anthology both describe dialogue between present and past,
adulthood and childhood. "Dream Children: A Reverie" begins
with the observation that "Children love to listen to stories
about their elders, when they were children," and Elia
proceeds to narrate an occasion when his children Alice and
John listened to him tell stories about their benevolent
"great-grandmother Field" and her family. Joyce copied five
phrases from this essay into his notebooks but did not use any
of them in his parody. As Robert Janusko observes, though, he
sometimes found patterns to imitate in texts whose language he
did not borrow (72). A highly suggestive pattern (not
recognized until now) can be found at the end of "Reverie,"
when Elia tells Alice and John about his unsuccessful
courtship of a woman named Alice W. Having finished the sad
story, he looks at the girl before him:
the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes
with such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt
which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair
was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually
grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding, till
nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the
uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed
upon me the effects of speech: "We are not of Alice, nor of
thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call
Bertrum father. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams.
We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the
tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have
existence, and a name."
Elia awakes to find that he has been dreaming. He offers no
explanation for the sudden shift in reality, but perhaps he
has fallen asleep after dropping into a vision of his beloved.
The mental journeying between present and past concludes with
a poignant sense that both have been lost. Joyce too writes
about mnemonic travel between present and past: "What is
the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the
chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay
with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her
age changeable as her mood." Just as emotional moods can
suddenly shift, so a person's age can shift in recollection.
Bloom's age changes four times, as his moods take him into
his past, back to the present, to the past again, and once
more to the present. Sitting in the hospital common room, he
suddenly sees himself, "a mirror within a mirror," as "young
Leopold" going off to high school and then returning
from his work as a traveling salesman to rejoin his father
Rudolph. "But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and
the young knighterrant recedes, shrivels, dwindles to a tiny
speck within the mist. Now he is himself paternal and these
about him might be his sons." The past vanishes into the
mist of memory and Bloom returns to present reality, but soon
his thoughts of paternity fire up the vision machine again. He
remembers his first sexual experience with a prostitute named
Bridie Kelly, and rues the fact that he has no son. This
memory of a sterile copulation brings him back to the present:
"In terror the poor girl flees away through the murk. She
is the bride of darkness, a daughter of night. She dare not
bear the sunnygolden babe of day. No, Leopold. Name and
memory solace thee not. That youthful illusion of thy
strength was taken from thee and in vain. No son of thy
loins is by thee. There is none now to be for Leopold, what
Leopold was for Rudolph."
The other essay included in Peacock's anthology, "New Year's
Eve," likewise reflects on reminiscence and the ineluctable
passing of time. Elia writes that although he has suffered
painful misfortunes––seven of his best years spent pining for
Alice, being cheated out of a family legacy by "old Dorrell,"
that "specious old rogue"––"I would no more alter them than
the incidents of some well-contrived novel." He expresses
disappointment in "the man Elia" but cherishes the memory of
"the child Elia––that other me, there, in the background." The
child was honest, courageous, imaginative, hopeful, while the
man is no better than "sophisticated" and looks to the child
"to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the
tone of my moral being!" Lamb remarks that he is fond of
"indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection."
The phrase "retrospective arrangement" is introduced
in Hades and recurs often in Ulysses, but
here, in a paragraph devoted to the practice of reminiscence,
Joyce probably means for it to recall Lamb's use of the word
in "New Year's Eve." Other words from Peacock's two essays are
not much in evidence, and some that can be found in other
essays––"nipping," "traveller," "paternal," "address," "paper"
(Lamb writes frequently about newspapers), "darkness"––could
possibly be coincidental. But some of the words in Joyce's
paragraph are distinctive touchstones in Lamb's essays:
"speck" ("dwindles to a tiny speck"), "reader" ("Nay,
fair reader"), "golden" ("sunnygolden babe"),
"memory" ("Name and memory solace thee not"),
"illusion" ("youthful illusion of thy strength").
Bloom's "chewing the cud of reminiscence" appears to
echo a passage in the essay "That We Should Rise with the
Lark" in which Elia, describing his fondness for lying in bed
and pondering the dreams he has had during the night, writes
that "We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision." It seems
likely that some such words and phrases were floating about in
Joyce's memory as a result of reading Lamb, even if he did not
write them down in his notebooks or make a very determined
effort to imitate Lamb's style.
The most unmistakable such borrowing is also the most
unforgettable. Lamb twice uses the word "oleaginous," or oily.
Shortly after the hilarious opening of his famous
"Dissertation upon Roast Pig," which explains how pigs first
came to be roasted, he writes, "There is no flavour
comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny,
well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is
well called—the very teeth are invited to their share of the
pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle
resistance—with the adhesive oleaginous—O call it not fat—but
an indefinable sweetness growing up to it—the tender
blossoming of fat—fat cropped in the bud—taken in the shoot—in
the first innocence—the cream and quintessence of the
child-pig's yet pure food—the lean, no lean, but a kind of
animal manna—or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so
blended and running into each other, that both together make
but one ambrosian result, or common substance." Lamb here
savors language as much as roast piglet, and Joyce joins him
in the sport, noting that Bloom's success as a door-to-door
salesman can be chalked up to "The scent, the smile, but, more
than these, the dark eyes and oleaginous address."
Joyce's paragraph may not be marked by a particularly strong
fidelity to Lamb's language, but it is also not filled with
vocabulary drawn from other writers and literary periods, as
happens in many of Oxen's stylistic experiments.
Commentators have observed only one such borrowing that could
be called definitive: the phrase "a child of shame"
used to describe the prostitute Bridie Kelly. Defoe's Colonel
Jack mentions a "son of shame" twice on one page, and
Joyce recorded both "Son of shame" and "a child of shame" on
his notesheets.
