Word: joycean
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...Civil War. Freud had that arrogant, Joycean self-confidence that seems to mark many men of destiny before they make their mark. Before a glimmering of psychoanalysis had entered his mind, he told Martha that he was destroying his papers to make things difficult for his biographers: ''Each one of them will be right in his opinion of 'The Development of the Hero,' and I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray...
This phrase keynotes the bright dialogue of this bright new novel. What is a Jumble? The term is a kind of Joycean jive for Johnbull, blurred by soft voices and subtle minds to a new sound. The word is used by London's fast-growing population of West Indian and African Negroes. In their eyes, the whites whose town they have invaded are confused and confusing, square as tea chests, Jumbled in their thoughts about Spades. And Spades, of course, are the Negroes as they describe themselves-hip in their bright night world, realistically calling a spade a spade...
Just as Joyce was obsessed by Dublin and needed to get it out of his system, so Stanislaus was obsessed by James Joyce, and this book was his exorcism. With the true Joycean alchemy, he took truths that were ugly, sordid and violent and composed a memoir that is grave and serene. Yet he did not wholly escape his brother. He died in 1955, on June 16-Bloomsday, i.e., the day in the life of Leopold Bloom chronicled in Ulysses. It was a day Stanislaus himself annually celebrated with a party...
Cozzens has lived by Joycean "silence, exile and cunning" without quitting U.S. shores. But since a writer's secrets cannot be kept from his books and hence his readers, the popular mind has perhaps intuitively felt the "outsider" in its midst. For Cozzens is really alien grain in the American corn. Americans (particularly American writers) are apt to be romantics to the point of being moistly sentimental; Cozzens is classical, dry, cerebral. Americans have a youth complex; Cozzens has an age complex. Americans are optimistic; Cozzens is pessimistic (he would say realistic). Americans like change; Cozzens accepts but deplores...
Since coming to the U.S. in 1940, Nabokov has divided his time among teaching, lepidopterology (he is a professional collector with several unique butterfly specimens to his credit) and a brilliant new literary career in which he has evolved a vivid English style which combines Joycean word play with a Proustian evocation of mood and setting...