Gauchos and the gauleiters

I read this article the other day in nytimes.

See ** for copyright

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case-of-the-missing-joyce-scholar.html

It talks about a man who spent decades of his life studying Ulysses. One of the greatest novels of our times, A novel version of the tv series Lost*, where Joyce set a requirement for any article about it to include the phrase

"I put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” 

This part I found particularly interesting -

He told me a story, a parable, really. “There are the gauchos and the gauleiters,” he explained. It’s a mixed metaphor, but one that nicely captures his view of the world and of Joyce scholars too. Gauchos, I knew, were Argentine cowboys, but gauleiters (pronounced gow-lieders), I learned, were municipal bureaucrats in the early Nazi government; in other words, menacing apparatchiks. 

Across the great landscape of understanding are the gauchos, at once both rugged and audacious. “They roam the pampas,” he told me, taking care of the vast terrain by knowing its vastness intimately. Meanwhile back at the edge of the pampas, in civilization, are the gauleiters. They are everywhere, they are busy, they are overwhelming. The gauchos are few — iconoclasts like himself, or the occasional Joyce fanatic like Jorn Barger, a polymath who in the earliest days of the internet wrote a lot of brilliant Joyce analysis on his weblog (a word he also coined). But, Kidd said, it doesn’t matter. In the end, the victory always goes to the gauleiters because of their peevish concern for “administrative efficiency.”

* the author manages to simultaneously lose a generation by talking about Ulysses and pisses of a large number of Ulysses fans by comparing it to Lost Island

** By Courret Hermanos Fotogs., Lima, Peru. - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.19409. This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, Link