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Lånte Joyce fra Pontoppidan?

Abstract

Abstract
Could the world-renowned author James Joyce have borrowed a scene from Henrik Pontoppidan? There is, at any rate, a striking similarity between a situation in Pontoppidan’s short novel Den gamle Adam and a scene in Ulysses. In both cases, a love-stricken man observes a young woman and becomes intensely captivated. Yet when she rises, he is startled. A comparative reading, moreover, reveals a marked stylistic divergence between Pontoppidan—who is at once a romantic and a critic of Romanticism—and Joyce, whose mode is modernist, cynical, and erotically far more explicit. Joyce admired several Danish writers and even spoke Danish himself, which makes the possibility of influence not entirely implausible.