— the key is “huge”, when it first appears, some pages earlier: Buck wants it to hold down his shirt (“chemise”), etc., while he goes swimming.
— yes, the distant BM! But perhaps with an Odyssean reference to a sea deity: Proteus or more probably Phorcys, as the latter tends to be associated with seals and other marine mammals.
“Toothless Kinch” I’m not sure about (a kinch is a knife, as you probably know). I think somewhere Stephen’s poor dental hygiene is mentioned (either in Ulysses or Portrait), but I can’t find the passage. Maybe I’ll have better luck tomorrow!
I am now so satisfied with a broader and deeper understanding of Telemachus thanks to your precious help.
I would like to move on to Nestor now wishing a similar favour could be granted with all my thankful heart.
Does this refer to BM with a background of King John?
I love this “sentimental” para very much. I suppose I could understand it but still want to say something which I can’t. Among which one thing is why a fox shows up here only because it was in the riddle?
Those are dense passages, so this is very much a tentative offering!
For Haines’s chapbook. ] S. means his bon mot about the pier (“a disappointed bridge”) would be suitable for the collection of S’s aphorisms Haines wishes to make (“chapbooks” are cheap booklets).
No-one here to hear. ] No one here to record my bon mot.
Tonight deftly amid wild drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind.] Haines appeared urbane and unperturbed during their earlier conversation; as an Englishman (and representative of “the imperial British state”), his mind is therefore like “polished [chain-]mail”. But later, after the “sacred pint”, S. promises himself, he will “pierce” Haines’s mind; presumably with his brilliant exegesis of Hamlet, etc.
What then? A jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement master’s praise. ] But then S. realises the slight indignity of this desire to impress Haines: he will be in the position of a court jester, patronised by the Englishman. (“Clement master” might be a suitable form of address for a British monarch; there is probably also a reference here to Yorick, the jester whose skull appears in Hamlet.)
Why had they chosen all that part? ] Why had Anglo-Irish writers, etc. (e.g. Wilde?) accepted the role of jester to their English masters? (Cf. earlier: “Irish art is the cracked lookingglass of a servant”.)
Not wholly for the smooth caress. ] Not entirely to win indulgent caresses (i.e. plaudits) from their masters. (This and the last sentence are in iambics, and therefore suggest verse; it may be that there’s a quotation from a poet hidden away here; but I don’t recognise it.)
For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop. ] Perhaps a reference to Macbeth (cf. S’s earlier “Yet here’s a spot”):
For Irish writers, Irish history was simply another kind of fiction: like the folk tales collected by Yeats, perhaps.
I can’t see any allusions, in this reflection on maternal love; except perhaps to the Stephen D. of Portrait of an Artist. Sargent’s case seems to be Stephen’s own; it isn’t quite clear at which point S. begins to think of his own mother, rather than Sargent’s.
Here S. breaks into verse again. St Columbanus (an Irish missionary from the late 6th century) might be seen by S. as the antithesis of the Irish intellectuals he considered earlier: exporting religion into Europe, rather than entertainment into England.
This returns to S’s earlier vision of his mother. (I particularly like that last phrase.)
This fox is troublesome. On the one hand, we have St C. and S’s mother; on the other, contrastingly, the fox and S. himself. The fox has buried its grandmother, in the non-riddle; in the usual phrase, S. has “buried his mother”. (Earlier, too, S. was “poor dogsbody”; and a real dog’s body will appear later.)
I wonder myself whether these fox references look forward, rather than elsewhere: perhaps to the “tallyho” scene in Nighttown. Except that there may be an allusion to Tennyson’s In Memoriam, in the “red reek of rapine”:
It is a very pregnant passage: moving from the ugly and “futile” boy to the bright-eyed fox.
I wonder if it suggests he repeatedly knocked the box with his thumbnail like filliping out his thumb onto (against) the box.
Does it imply he went to the desk, sat in his chair and then pulled it in twice?
And sorry for another trifle from Oxen of the Sun:
#1 I have no idea what ‘avis’ is. #2 Is ‘repreved’ = reproved? #3 No idea about ‘do her mandement ne’. Kind of ‘refuse her amendment’? #4 contrarious to his list = against his will?
It’s an odd gesture. The savingsbox in question is a pocket coin dispenser of some kind. If it holds sovereigns, it can’t be a small or light object; and so I would expect Mr Deasy to knock his thumb against the box, as you suggest. Yet Joyce presents it the other way round: Mr Deasy knocks the box against his thumbnail.
(When I try this myself with a small object, it does not feel entirely natural. But then, to carry a pocket coin dispenser is not an entirely natural habit.)
Yes, I agree – his chair is presumably not quite in the right position, after the first “pull”.
I think this is part of Joyce’s pastiche of Sir Thomas Malory, who translated a collection of French stories about King Arthur into robust 15th century English.
“Avis” is the French word for “opinion”; “repreved” is “reproved”, in Malory; and “nor do her mandement ne have him in aught contrarious to his list” means “nor do what she commanded nor act in any way contrary to his own will”.
I am pleased to see you again and here is my another trifle.
#1 I guess “backing king’s colours” is somewhere around "holding king’s marks’’ but why ‘back’? #2 Does ‘shouted’ suggest SD shouted (in his heart)?
It puzzles me: He turned about and got ack to his speech again, or, He turned about and came back again, or, He looked about and looked back again, or…?
Tentatively: S., surrounded by pictures of well-known horses, imagines himself in the crowd of spectators at the races. The “elfin (small-built) riders” wait for the signal to start the race; S. assesses their different speeds; puts a bet on (“backs”) a horse owned by the king (it is in “king’s colours”); and in his imagination cheers on his chosen horse with the rest of the crowd.
(Edward VII was king in 1904; he was well known for his love of horse-racing, as Wikipedia attests: “In 1896, his horse Persimmon won both the Derby Stakes and the St. Leger Stakes. In 1900, Persimmon’s brother, Diamond Jubilee, won five races (Derby, St Leger, 2,000 Guineas Stakes, Newmarket Stakes and Eclipse Stakes) and another of Edward’s horses, Ambush II, won the Grand National”.)
Yes, it puzzles me too. It seems to mean “he turned to face SD and then turned away again”. But I find some of the the movements in this interview quite difficult to imagine!
I think the sunbeam is to be envisaged as between Mr D. and Stephen. So he is “across” the sunbeam, in the sense that someone might be “across the road”, i.e. “on the other side of the sunbeam”.
Thank you, MrP. Just a word again for the last one. I imagined so as “across the road” but was still a little puzzled by “in which he halted”. I wonder if it could imply a movement: stared across, went into, and then halted.
BTW, I love tea as well as Guinness. 