Manipulating word classes
Nouny styles: Our Analysis of Ulysses
First of all, it is important to notice that the context surrounding
sentence 2 is absurd. To have a quarrel at a public execution about the
date of birth of a saint is itself very odd, and given that the saint
lived a long time ago, his exact date of birth is unlikely to be known.
However, if the two sides are arguing over the date (the 8th or 9th of
March) we will assume that the contending parties each have some evidence
in favour of each of the dates. But then the solution proposed which ends
the argument is an entirely different date in March (the 17th) which is
the arithmetical sum of the first two, and the acceptance of this entirely
different date appears to have nothing to do with evidence, or logic,
at all.
About 35% of the words in the passage are nouns (compared with the Ellegard
norm of 27%). The nouns in sentence 2 are comprised almost entirely of
a long list of items said to have been used in the argument. These items
suggest not a debate but an enormous and very vicious physical brawl This
brawl, in turn, seems to disappear magically when Constable MacFadden
suggests the 17th as St Patrick's date of birth.
16 of the 29 words in sentence 2 are nouns and 13 of these 16 are involved
in the long list of fighting implements. They are also all plural nouns.
These two facts help us to infer that the fight involved a very large
number of people indeed. Assuming only two implements for each plural
and one implement per person, the absolute minimum involved in the fight
would appear to be 26 people!
The fact that the list of nouns is so long leads us to look at the nouns
in the list a bit more carefully. The list is very variable in its composition.
Some items (e.g. knuckledusters) are things which we can imagine being
involved in a street brawl. Others (e.g. cannonballs, blunderbusses) seem
more appropriate to warfare. Umbrellas are not prototypically weapons,
but we can imagine how they might be used as such if nothing better was
to hand. Stinkpots, however, normally occur in the context of school pranks.
Some of the items (scimitars, boomerangs) appear to be associated with
particular national/racial delegations who might be in attendance at the
execution. All of this adds to the bizarre sense of disorder and confusion
which James Joyce clearly sets out to create.
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