Inspiration comes to me from many random places. Here's the latest.In How to Read Novels like a Professor (not your average coffee table reading, I suppose, but I currently am...did I mention I'm a bit of a geek?), Thomas Foster says:
"...despite a 20-year gap, [James] Joyce copies [someone else's] style exactly for many of Leopold Bloom's monologues in Ulysses. Joyce finds and capitalizes on a style of narrative by Edouard Dujardin in a novel which he says "lapsed into neglect and was largely forgotten." (Too bad for Dujardin!)
The point is not that what eventually became James Joyce's trademark style was first attempted by someone else. The point is rather that when Jim discovered a gem, he acted in response.
