Hello Haihao,
It hadn’t occurred to me before, but I think you’re right. (We also have “Bertha Supple” in the vicinity, to add to the resonances.)
Have you come across Nabokov’s essay on Ulysses?
MrP
PS: It was an unexpected pleasure to be reminded of that scene, so thank you!
Hello MrP,
Thank you again for your comment and I am very pleased too to have the opportunity to talk and ask questions with you about Ulysses, the most favorite book of mine. Actually I haven’t had a chance to read Nabokov’s essay but I have the web resources and Derek Attridge’s “The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce”.
In fact I still have had a lot of unsolved questions left on the shelf on Ulysses but I feel now that maybe the mazel has come to me at last to let me consult a professional like you to make a thorough bottleneck removal if I may have the honor.
Haihao
PS: I have found this site quite interesting: joyceimages.com/chapter/1/ Just for your information.
It would be my pleasure to help if I can. When it’s convenient for you, please feel free to post them to this thread or elsewhere – whichever you prefer.
(Though I should say at once that I don’t have knowledge of Ulysses in a professional capacity; only as an amateur dabbler.)
Thank you very much for the link – I’ll be interested to see what they say.
Best wishes,
MrP
Thanks again for your geniality and generosity. I would definitely like to have your help from now on and enjoy the wonderful book once more.
Best regards,
Haihao
Sorry for the hurry but just curious why “Twice nought makes one”? (=zero by zero makes one) in:
Chaps that would go to the dogs if some woman didn’t take them in hand. Then little chits of girls, height of a shilling in coppers, with little hubbies. As God made them He matched them. Sometimes children turn out well enough. Twice nought makes one. Or old rich chap of seventy and blushing bride. Marry in May and repent in December. (XIII)
I would like to know Joyce’s intention here.
That’s an interesting one. I take it to imply that the “chit of a girl” and the “little hubby” in each case are the two zeroes (of no worth), and the child who turns out “well enough” the unexpected “one”; contrary to mathematics, but perhaps in accordance with genetics.
I also wonder whether it’s an allusion to William Carleton’s story of the “hedge school”, in his “Irish peasantry”, where an ignorant schoolboy says that “twice nought is one”: e-copy here.
(I haven’t seen that story before today, though, so it’s only speculation!)
All the best,
MrP
I would like to say, reading your comment is another enjoyment of its relish! You make the Ulysses world more active and expansive to me, MrP. I also like your comment “contrary to mathematics, but perhaps in accordance with genetics” and I have always told myself that literature or language isn’t math. Mathematics has only one correct answer but literature is infinite and eternal, like Declan Kiberd says that Ulysses is "an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies…, it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.’
Sorry for the wander and supererogation and thank you again!
Best wishes,
Haihao
You’re welcome!
That’s a very happy phrase.
All the best,
MrP
Good morning!
Would you mind if I bring along another question to wake you up? 
Sorry to bother you on the Sunday morning but would you see the following sentence could be a paronomasia?
And,
Could I reword it as:
Howth settled for slumber, for it had been tired of long days and of yumyum rhododendrons (it was old), and felt gladly the night breeze rise and ruffle its fell of ferns. Mr Bloom lay but opened a red eye unsleeping, deep and slowly breathing, slumberous but awake. And far on Kish bank the anchored lightship twinkled, winked at Mr Bloom.
Thank you!
Haihao
Hello Haihao, good morning!
Yes, I think that is indeed a pun on “on the shelf”. (There is also a metaphorical “on the rocks” earlier, to match the literal rocks.)
The other reference is more complex – I’ll read around it in my copy, and post back later.
All the best,
MrP
Hi MrP,
Thanks again!
BTW I wonder with what he covered the bowl as in:
Haihao
Hello again Haihao,
I would (tentatively) reword it as:
(But very tentatively – I may have missed an allusion here and there!)
I would have said that Buck covers the bowl of lather with the mirror, since he looks under it. But that does make the “crossed” problematical.
All the best,
MrP
Good morning again MrP,
Your tentative rewording of the part and your paraphrasing for the ‘cover’ activity are both more than satisfying and convincing to me! I am sure I will ponder on them for a while for an enjoyable mastication.
Thank you again.
Haihao
Is it possible there is a pun (enantiosis?) on “He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the smooth skin (around his mouth)”? Maybe just my unnecessary association.
And,
Thank you!
Best wishes,
Haihao
Your observation interests me very much. “Palps” always makes me think of insect mouthparts, in that passage, though I doubt whether that was Joyce’s intention; but did you have some other meaning in mind?
I wonder myself whether the sweeping of the mirror is another allusion to the celebration of the Mass (perhaps to the lifting of the paten). “The tidings” recalls “the Gospel” (= “the good news”).
In the second underlined part, I would say “both interpretations” – the showing of the white teeth is part of the laughing. (In those last two sentences, there may well be a Homeric reference; though I can’t place it!)
All the best,
MrP
If it were for Mr Bloom I would think of some other meaning from “stroking palps of fingers felt the smooth skin” but seems to me not likely for Buck…
This is great! It didn’t occur to me until now but I am sure now I have ‘three in one’.
This explains everything crystalclear. As you said, Homeric reference is always behind the scene; I have no idea about it either but feel like it must be beneficial to take a glance at Odyssey someday!
Best regards,
Haihao
PS. There is another website about Joyce, covering almost all the texts of his works. Also useful and convenient for searching sentences. Just for your reference.
I am sorry for all these trivia all the time. 
But I like trifles.
I would think ‘cleft by a crooked crack’ a jeu de mots but I have no idea why followed by ‘Hair on end’? Is that only Stephen’s appearance or angry?
What does ‘dogsboy’ imply? Or no implication at all? Is it reasonable to think ‘vermin’ refers to Haines?
So far, Buck kept using ‘the aunt’. Does it suggest both of them knew who ‘the aunt’ was very well and who was Buck’s aunt?
A Philistine like me would use ‘last wish in life’ but it’s Joycean relish to use ‘in death’ to depict the state of dying. It also reminds of ‘in deathbed’. Or is it just a normal usage?
Thank you!
Haihao
“The tidings” recalls “the Gospel” (= “the good news”).
But the word “tidings” isn’t particulary tied to religion, is it?
As for allusion (“I wonder myself whether the sweeping of the mirror is another allusion to the celebration of the Mass (perhaps to the lifting of the paten)”:
[color=brown]STATELY, PLUMP Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
That mirror will be used shortly for heliography, when Mulligan will have “swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea.” This is idle signal-sending, with no clear sense of a recipient. Up close, Buck has just hurt Stephen’s feelings on the subject of his mother, and is about to hurt them again. In other words, between the two men, communication is poor. The signals don’t get through.
allfreeessays.net/student/Cy … ysses.html
And:
[color=brown]Mulligan perpetually chides Stephen for aesthetic “mumming” and for his failure to use art as a vehicle of Zolaesque naturalism. He wants Kinch to recognize the bloody knife and razor perched on the mirror of art, to think in excretory images, and to regard death in terms of “beastly” medical cadavers.
Throughout “Telemachus,” Mulligan is described in nonhuman imagery: his face is “equine”; his “untonsured” hair resembles “pale oak.” “He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering
teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk” (p. 6).
And they’re Joycean trifles; which makes a difference.
I take “hair on end” as a literal description of S’s appearance, first thing in the morning; but it’s also appropriate, after S’s “funk” about Haines and the dream of his dead mother.
“Cleft by a crooked crack” is mysterious; Joyce likes “cracks” of various kinds; the phrase suggests Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse; but there might also be an allusion to Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott (“The mirror cracked from side to side”), in which the mirror shows the real world outside the Lady’s window, just as this mirror shows S’s face “as others see me”.
The “cracked mirror” also prepares for the “cracked lookingglass” (an allusion to Wilde’s “I can quite understand your objection to art being treated as a mirror. You think it would reduce genius to the position of a cracked looking glass”).
Buck calls S. “poor dogsbody” on the previous page, and the phrase recurs later; it has a Jacobean sound (which is in accord with the allusions to Hamlet); but if it is an allusion, I don’t know the original! So perhaps it means no more than “wretched drudge”.
In “This dogsbody to rid of vermin”, I think S. picks up Buck’s phrase and applies it to himself; he is not enthusiastic about his own corporeal aspects; he reduces his own raison d’être to ridding himself of vermin. (Elsewhere – if I remember correctly – we discover that S. has vermin.)
But again, I’m not sure whether Joyce has hidden an allusion here.
Yes, I think that’s right: “the aunt” is a familiar, nonchalant phrase. (In a Shakespearean context, an “aunt” is a prostitute; but I’m not sure that’s relevant here.)
I think it’s a variant on “dying wish”, which is the usual phrase. But perhaps the latter has too sentimental a sound, for Buck: “last wish in death” is plain and un-euphemistic.
All the best,
MrP
Same again: