Rosemary Tonks and James Joyce

There was another gentle prod towards linking together Rosemary Tonks and James Joyce while having another look at
The Halt During the Chase. Sophie says of Guy,

'...And the books he reads ! I wanted to understand him, so I went to the library and got hold of one of them, Ulysses by James Joyce. And I took the trouble to read it through, right down to the glug-glug-glug gog-gog-gog bits.'

So Joyce, for Rosemary, represents something - the sort of writer her protagonist's would-be boyfriend would read, something a bit out of the ordinary- and something she can reduce to absurdity in her ironic way.

Sophie, like Min in Way Out of Berkeley Square, is 30-ish and in a similar way behindhand in establishing herself, trapped to some degree at home, most tellingly,

I was really terrified of the women in Philip's set...Name any subject, and they had a brand-new set of opinions on it. Another thing: I hadn't had a miscarriage or an abortion, and that marked me down straight away...No left wing and no miscarriage? You cannot hope to become a fertility tyrant of the middle classes, and earn the right to exclude, snub and humble others, without a story about babies...

 

There is a huge difference between Rosemary's head-on satire and Joyce as a comic writer. I'm not sure how much my enjoyment, and admiration, of Joyce depends on him making me laugh but Rosemary's novels do so on a regular basis.

Neither am I convinced that there's enough to link them together to make for a proper 'compare and contrast' or where such an essay would find an audience. How tangential can a premise be and still mean anything of significance. On the other hand, if the main benefit of writing is that one enjoys doing it, nothing else matters. So we will see. It might be like the essay a friend of mine did for Prof. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene's official biographer, who told me, I could have given it 0 or I could have given it 80, so I gave it 80. I don't know if universities still work like that any more.