fanuzzir wrote:
both Joyce and Melville were amazing polymaths
Friery, could you please tell me more?
Bob
Joyce had an astonishing range of knowledge. He taught himself Norwegian so he could read Ibsen in the original. In Ulysses, he showed intricate knowledge of subects as esoteric as women's fashions and dressmaking. Finnegans Wake has puns taken from dozens of foreign languages. (Example: "In his broadginger hat and his civic chollar and his allabuff hemmed and his bullbraggin soxangloves and his ladbroke breeks and his cattegut bandolair and his furframed panuncular cumbottes like a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation, to the whole longth of the strongth of his bowman’s bill." )
Melville, unlike Joyce, left school as a child and was self-taught. One biographer says Melville devoured Shakespeare, as well as historical, anthropological, and technical works. Another said he read Renaissance playwrights in preparation for writing Moby Dick. Melville's self-taught erudition shows itself in Moby Dick, with its detailed information about whaling, the natural history of the whale, and the whale in folklore, history, legend, and art. It also shows itself in his writing style. As one commentator says, "Melville creates spaciousness by a successive layering of literary forms, styles, tones, references, allusions, and particularly the manipulation of language. The "romance of adventure" is formally a combination of personal narrative, drama, and epic including, among other genres, elements of the short story, tall tale, sermons both serious and burlesque, lawyer's briefs, and librarian's catalogue; and its tonalities extend from the grandeur of Elizabethan blank verse soliloquy to the crudities of vaudeville dialect."
