Thank you! Yes, I believe I heard something of the kind about that river trip. Had it been sunny I suppose the girls might not have needed a story, and Alice would have remained unwritten - so once again we must thank the English climate for its literature. (How much would the Brontës have written but for days when "There was no possibility of taking a walk"?)
Thomas's chiasmus is really there to charm us into childtime, of course, and to chalk a circle about its limits; but I was curious to see how much of confabulation it really had in it. Actually, I was almost as pleased at discovering "rain was general on Boxing Day". Especially since the line from the end of "The Dead", which stuck in my head because it used the same unusual locution, has a prescript: "Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland." Gabriel is of course remembering the earlier words of Mary Jane: "I read this morning in the newspapers that the snow is general all over Ireland." These days the BBC and others would certainly say "widespread" rather than "general", or else "There is snow across the country", but in pre-Corporation days perhaps the newspapers quoted the Met. Office directly, and Joyce was echoing their mildly technical usage.
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Date: 2014-12-27 05:38 pm (UTC)Thomas's chiasmus is really there to charm us into childtime, of course, and to chalk a circle about its limits; but I was curious to see how much of confabulation it really had in it. Actually, I was almost as pleased at discovering "rain was general on Boxing Day". Especially since the line from the end of "The Dead", which stuck in my head because it used the same unusual locution, has a prescript: "Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland." Gabriel is of course remembering the earlier words of Mary Jane: "I read this morning in the newspapers that the snow is general all over Ireland." These days the BBC and others would certainly say "widespread" rather than "general", or else "There is snow across the country", but in pre-Corporation days perhaps the newspapers quoted the Met. Office directly, and Joyce was echoing their mildly technical usage.