84 (U6.139) —Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard!

Cast 84: page 6, line 139.

　—Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard!

　Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.

　—I pinched it out of the skivvy’s room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.

This is from Episode 1, the opening scene of the novel. It is eight in the morning. Stephen, the protagonist, is living in the Martello tower with his friend Malachi Mulligan. Mulligan has just held out to Stephen the mirror he was using to shave.

“cleft by a crooked crack” has that striking alliteration of c’s.

A little later in the same episode, ”cracked lookingglass of a servant” appears again. Stephen tells Mulligan that “cracked lookingglass of a servant” is a symbol of Irish art. Ireland, as a servant to England, is a damaged mirror and cannot reflect reality truly.

—Cracked lookingglass of a servant! Tell that to the oxy chap downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He’s stinking with money and thinks you’re not a gentleman.

（U6.154）

　—It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.

Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them.

（U14.484）

Because this is a mirror, it also made me think of the passage I wrote about in Cast 59: the “mocking mirror” held up by Averroes and Maimonides. (Only now did I notice the play on looking glass.) I wondered there whether it might be some kind of curved mirror. A flat mirror shows only a fragment of the world, but a cracked mirror or a warped mirror can reflect a wider and stranger one. Joyce may be trying to capture the world by means of a broken mirror. At a deeper level, “the cracked lookingglass of a servant” may describe his own novel.

“dogsbody” means a drudge, someone stuck with the dirty work nobody else wants to do.

A little earlier, Mulligan has called Stephen exactly that, so the word rises again in Stephen’s mind here.

　Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.

　—Ah, poor dogsbody! he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?

（U5.112）

Dogs become important again in Episode 3. On Sandymount Strand, Stephen sees the carcass of a dog. The word “dogsbody” comes back there too.

The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody! Here lies poor dogsbody’s body.

（U39.351）

“rid of vermin” means getting rid of pests or vermin.

“Lead him not into temptation” is, of course, a parody of Matthew 6:13.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil:

And Ursula, the servant’s name, is presumably a reference to Saint Ursula, the legendary British Christian virgin and martyr, famed for beauty, purity, and noble birth. Mulligan is clearly making fun of the lofty name.

The painting below is Hans Memling’s Saint Ursula, in the Memling Museum in Bruges.

File:Saint Ursula of Cologne, by Hans Memling.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

For the method behind this blog, see⇒ Here..

83 (U548.148) What did Stephen see on raising his gaze

Cast 83. Page 548, line 148.

　What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from the fire towards the opposite wall?

　Under a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope, stretched between two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs folded unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of ladies’ grey hose with Lisle suspender tops and feet in their habitual position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer extremities and the third at their point of junction.

This is from Episode 17. The whole of Episode 17 is written in the form of questions and answers. It is after two o’clock in the morning. Bloom has brought Stephen back to his house, and in the basement kitchen he is trying to boil water on the stove so he can offer him some cocoa.

This is the point where Stephen notices the laundry hanging above the stove.

“Housebells” are the bells by which people on the upper floors could summon servants in the basement. They were connected to the rooms by cords, so that when someone pulled the cord upstairs, a spring-loaded bell downstairs would ring. Since there are five bells, that would suggest that there are five rooms in Bloom’s house from which a servant could be called.

File:Staff Call Bells (7964118810).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

The Bloom family is imagined as living at No. 7 Eccles Street. The houses on Eccles Street were of the late eighteenth-century Georgian type. A good sense of what such buildings looked like can be seen on the website of the Georgian House Museum, The Number Twenty Nine house on Dublin’s Lower Fitzwilliam Street. Bloom’s house would not have been as grand as that one, of course.

I am not entirely sure about “the chimney pier.” Pier usually means a quay or jetty, but it can also mean a square supporting pillar, so I take it here to mean the boxed-in vertical structure that encloses the chimney rising up from the stove.

It seems that a line has been strung from the recessed space between the side of that structure and the wall, across toward the opposite wall, and that the washing is hanging there.

The four handkerchiefs, since they are described as rectangles, were probably folded in half and hung horizontally over the line.

“Hose” can mean stockings or socks. It has no ordinary plural in this sense, so one pair of hose means one pair. Judging from period advertisements for hose worn with suspenders, these were probably not joined together like tights.

These are hanging “in their habitual position,” that is, with the suspender tops at the top and the feet hanging downward, clipped with one peg where the two stockings overlap in the middle and one peg at each outer end.

I cannot help suspecting that Joyce intended some sexual suggestion in the phrase “three erect wooden pegs.”

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82 (U118.880) ーThat is oratory, the professor said

Cast 82. Page 118, line 880.

　ーThat is oratory, the professor said, uncontradicted.

　Gone with the wind. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings. Miles of ears of porches. The tribune’s words, howled and scattered to the four winds. A people sheltered within his voice. Dead noise. Akasic records of all that ever anywhere wherever was. Love and laud him: me no more.

　I have money.

　ーGentlemen, Stephen said. As the next motion on the agenda paper may I suggest that the house do now adjourn?”

 

This is from Episode 7, in the newspaper office. J. J. O’Molloy, Professor MacHugh, Stephen, and others are talking. Professor MacHugh has just quoted a speech by the orator and barrister John F. Taylor. What follows is Stephen’s inward response.

In Taylor’s speech, an Egyptian high priest rebukes the Jewish Moses. The point is clearly allegorical: Egypt stands for Britain, and the Jews for Ireland.

Stephen imagines Taylor’s speech transposed into the landscape of ancient Ireland.

“Gone with the wind” is of course famous as the title of the novel by Margaret Mitchell (published in 1936), and even more through the 1939 film.

But since Ulysses was published in 1922, Mitchell’s novel cannot be relevant here. Her title itself was taken from a line in the poem Cynara by the nineteenth-century English poet Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), and that may well be what Joyce had in mind.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

The Hill of Tara was the legendary seat of the High Kings of Ireland. Mullaghmast was likewise associated with royal or ceremonial gatherings in early Irish history.

It is also an extraordinary coincidence that Tara is the name of the plantation in Gone with the Wind, owned by the O’Hara family, Irish immigrants living near Atlanta. Yet here in Ulysses, Tara appears for wholly Irish reasons.

I was not sure at first about hosts, but dictionary definitions include “a vast multitude,” which fits perfectly here.

“Miles of ears of porches” comes from Hamlet. It echoes the famous speech in Act I, Scene 5, where the ghost of Hamlet’s father describes how Claudius murdered him by pouring poison into his ear.

Brief let me be. Sleeping within mine orchard,
My custom always in the afternoon
Upon my secure hour, thy uncle stole
With juice of cursèd hebenon in a vial,
And in the porches of mine ears did pour
The leperous distillment, whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body,

The ear is imagined as the porch or entranceway of a house. Here Stephen seems to picture long rows of listeners’ ears opening themselves to the orator’s voice.

A little earlier in the chapter, Stephen had already recalled this same phrase in connection with a murder case involving brothers, and that earlier echo leads into the present passage.

　J. J. O’Molloy turned to Stephen and said quietly and slowly:

　ーOne of the most polished periods I think I ever listened to in my life fell from the lips of Seymour Bushe. It was in that case of fratricide, the Childs murder case. Bushe defended him.

　And in the porches of mine ear did pour.

（U114.750）

“Scatter … to the four winds” means to scatter in every direction.

The phrase apparently comes from Jeremiah 49:36 in the Old Testament:

And upon Elam will I bring the four winds from the four quarters of heaven, and will scatter them toward all those winds; and there shall be no nation whither the outcasts of Elam shall not come.

So the “four winds” also connect back to the opening phrase, “Gone with the wind.”

The “Akasic records” refer to the idea of a cosmic memory in which every event, thought, and emotion since the birth of the universe is somehow recorded.

The term is associated either with Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), founder of the Theosophical Society, or with Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), who later developed Anthroposophy. Spiritualism and theosophy were very much in vogue in the world of the novel, that is, in 1904.

And again, just a little earlier in the chapter, J. J. O’Molloy had asked Stephen what he thought of the Blavatsky circle, so this too is part of the chain of association in Stephen’s mind.

　ーprofessor Magennis was speaking to me about you, J. J. O’Molloy said to Stephen. What do you think really of that hermetic crowd, the opal hush poets: A. E. the mastermystic? That Blavatsky woman started it. She was a nice old bag of tricks.

（U115.782）

Stephen has money because he was paid this morning by Mr Deasy, the schoolmaster.

He seems, at least here, impatient with Irish nationalist rhetoric. So he declares the meeting adjourned and proposes they all move on to the pub.

Sunset of the Hill of Tara

File:Sunset-hill-of-tara.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

For the method of this blog, click  ⇒ Here.

81 (U642.1531) O I suppose that cant be helped Ill do

 Cast 81. Page 642, line 1531.

O I suppose that cant be helped Ill do the indifferent 1 or 2 questions Ill know by the answers when hes like that he cant keep a thing back I know every turn in him Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head then Ill suggest aboutyes O wait now sonny my turn is coming Ill be quite gay and friendly over it O but I was forgetting this bloody pest of a thing pfooh you wouldnt know which to laugh or cry were such a mixture of plum and apple

This is from Episode 18. The final episode consists of Molly Bloom’s inner monologue. It is made up of eight enormous flowing sentences, without periods or commas. This passage comes from near the end of the eighth and last one. Molly is thinking about Bloom.

“I suppose” appears over and over again in Episode 18. It is probably one of Molly’s characteristic turns of phrase.

As I mentioned in blog Cast 12, Joyce reportedly said that the words ① because, ② bottom, ③ woman, and ④ yes represent the four poles of femininity, and that he uses them repeatedly in this episode. Here too, both yes and bottom appear.

The phrase “plum and apple” also comes up a little earlier in the episode.

that lovely fresh place I bought I think Ill get a bit of fish tomorrow or today is it Friday yes I will with some blancmange with black currant jam like long ago not those 2 lb pots of mixed plum and apple from the London and Newcastle Williams and Woods

(U629.941)

Molly is thinking that she will buy some fish today, and have dessert with blackcurrant jam, like in the old days—not the cheap mixed plum-and-apple jam sold by Williams and Woods of London and Newcastle. So “plum and apple” seems to refer to jam.

Williams & Woods was a Dublin confectionery and jam manufacturer. The factory building they put up on King’s Inns Street in 1910 still survives.

"WILLIAMS & WOODS BUILDING [USED A SIGMA 14mm WIDE-ANGLE LENS]-157962" by infomatique is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

What exactly is the “bloody pest of a thing” Molly had forgotten? And why does it lead her to think of jam? I am not really sure. The novel then goes on for only about two more pages before it ends.

The Williams & Woods postcard

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80 (483.4498) (Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt

 Cast 80. Page 483, line 4498.

　(Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt and peep-o’-day boy’s hat signs to Stephen.)

　KEVIN EGAN: H’lo! Bonjour! The vieille ogresse with the dents jaunes.

　(Patrice Egan peeps from behind, his rabbitface nibbling a quince leaf.)

　PATRICE: Socialiste!

　DON EMILE PATRIZIO FRANZ RUPERT POPE HENNESSY: (In medieval hauberk, two wild geese volant on his helm, with noble indignation points a mailed hand against the privates.) Werf those eykes to footboden, big grand porcos of johnyellows todos covered of gravy!

This is from Episode 15. Stephen, having just left Bella Cohen’s brothel, is being harassed by two British soldiers. It comes immediately after the section discussed in blog post 39. This blog reads Ulysses at random based on generated numbers, but for some reason this stretch keeps coming up.

Since Episode 15 is made up of hallucinations and fantasies, people who are not physically present appear on the scene. It is only a short passage, but a difficult one to make sense of.

Kevin Egan is summoned here from Stephen’s recollections in Episode 3, where he remembers meeting him during his student days in Paris.

His fustian shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at his secrets. M. Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called queen Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. Vieille ogresse with the dents jaunes.

（U36.232）

The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose tobaccoshreds catch fire: a flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw facebones under his peep of day boy’s hat.

（U36.241）

Kevin Egan is modeled on Joseph Casey (Joseph Theobald Casey, 1846–c.1907), a member of the Fenian movement, which was devoted to Irish independence and the establishment of an Irish republic. After being imprisoned in London for assaulting a policeman, Casey went to France and later served with the French army in the Franco-Prussian War. Through the fact that his brother knew Joyce’s father, he looked after Joyce when Joyce was studying in Paris in 1903.

The “Spanish tasselled shirt” makes me think of the fringed shirts worn by cowboys in Westerns. Since the cowboy tradition itself has roots in Spaniards based in Mexico, the clothing may well trace back to Spain too.

The Peep o’ Day Boys were a Protestant rural secret society in late eighteenth-century Ireland, formed in opposition to Catholics. They got their name because they attacked Catholic homes at dawn, “at peep of day.” I do not know exactly what a peep-o’-day boy’s hat would have looked like. Since Egan is presumably Catholic, it is odd that he is wearing one.

His line comes from the French antisemitic journalist Édouard Drumont, who had called Queen Victoria “the old hag with the yellow teeth.” In French, vieille ogresse means “old ogress” or “old hag,” and dents jaunes means “yellow teeth.” He is not really speaking to Stephen here, but provoking the British soldiers who have accosted him.

Patrice Egan is Kevin’s son, and his model was apparently Patrice Casey, the son of Joseph Casey. Patrice was an atheist, a socialist, and a soldier in the French army. That is why he shouts “Socialiste!”

His rabbit-like face also appears in Episode 3.

Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar MacMahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father’s a bird, he lapped the sweet lait chaud with pink young tongue, plump bunny’s face.

（U34.165）

I do not know why he is chewing a quince leaf. Quince leaves can be used for herbal tea, so perhaps it is meant to suggest some healthful or rustic habit.

Quince (Cydonia communis) illustration from Traité des Arbres e

by Free Public Domain Illustrations by rawpixel

The long-named figure, Don Emile Patrizio Franz Rupert Pope Hennessy, seems to be a personification of the “Wild Geese.”

After the Protestant army of William III of Orange defeated the forces of the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, Patrick Sarsfield, who had commanded on the Irish side, left for France with his troops. These men, hoping one day to return to Ireland, survived across Europe as mercenaries, craftsmen, merchants, and so on. They came to be known as the “Wild Geese.” More broadly, the term can refer to Irish soldiers of fortune active on the European continent from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.

Since the Wild Geese were active all over Europe, the name of this figure is a jumble of Spanish, Italian, German or Austrian, British, and French elements. The language he speaks is likewise a mixed-up hybrid of several European languages.

Werf is German for “throw.” Boden in footboden is German for “floor.” Porco is Italian for “pig.” Todos is Spanish for “all.” Johnyellows was an Irish derogatory term for Protestant Englishmen. The color yellow also links back to Queen Victoria. Even so, I cannot make out the whole meaning with any confidence.

This too seems to be a fantasy in which the Wild Geese, standing in opposition to Protestant Britain, challenge the British soldiers. Kevin Egan, too, is one of their descendants.

Portrait of a Gentleman, possibly Patrick Sarsfield (d.1693)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_a_Gentleman,_possibly_Patrick_Sarsfield_.PNG

For the method of this blog, see ⇒ Here

79 (U280.1805) —Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza.

 Cast 79. Page 280, line 1805.

　—Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.

　—He had no father, says Martin. That’ll do now. Drive ahead.

　—Whose God? says the citizen.

　—Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.

Episode 12. Barney Kiernan’s pub. Bloom, sun of the Jewish father, gets into an argument with the bigoted nationalist known as “the Citizen.” Martin Cunningham, who has come to meet Bloom, is trying to get him into the carriage and away from the scene. This is where Bloom hurls back his parting abuse at the citizen.

The names Bloom rattles off here are, with the exception of Marx, all privileged proper names in this novel.

First, Spinoza. Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish descent, one of the great metaphysicians of the seventeenth century alongside Descartes and Leibniz.

Bloom has read Spinoza in one of his father’s books, and has talked to Molly about what it says.

Clove her breath was always in theatre when she bent to ask a question. Told her what Spinoza says in that book of poor papa’s. Hypnotised, listening. Eyes like that. She bent. Chap in dresscircle staring down into her with his operaglass for all he was worth.

（U233.1058）

In Episode 17, Bloom names Spinoza as one of the notable Jews.

　Were other anapocryphal illustrious sons of the law and children of a selected or rejected race mentioned?

　Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn (composer), Baruch Spinoza (philosopher), Mendoza (pugilist), Ferdinand Lassalle (reformer, duellist).

(U563.722)

In Episode 17, when the contents of Bloom’s bookshelf are listed, a work by Spinoza appears there.

Thoughts from Spinoza (maroon leather).

（U582.1372）

In Episode 18, Molly in bed remembers Bloom talking about Spinoza at the theatre.

I was fit to be tied though I wouldnt give in with that gentleman of fashion staring down at me with his glasses and him the other side of me talking about Spinoza and his soul thats dead I suppose millions of years ago

（U632.1115）

Next, Mendelssohn. As in the passage quoted above, this is presumably the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847). He also appeared in Cast 32. One of Bloom’s preferred composers.

In the hallucination scene of Episode 15, Bloom’s miraculous transformations turn him into a whole series of historical figures, among them Moses Mendelssohn. Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was a German Jewish philosopher and the grandfather of Felix Mendelssohn.

(…contracts his face so as to resemble many historical personages, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, …)

（U404.1847）

Moses Mendelssohn is paired in this novel with Moses Maimonides, who appeared in Cast 56. Mendelssohn is also connected with Spinoza through the Pantheism Controversy, in which he became involved over whether his friend Lessing had been a Spinozist.

In Episode 17, Bloom names him as one of the great Jews.

　Accepting the analogy implied in his guest’s parable which examples of postexilic eminence did he adduce?

　Three seekers of the pure truth, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, author of More Nebukim (Guide of the Perplexed) and Moses Mendelssohn of such eminence that from Moses (of Egypt) to Moses (Mendelssohn) there arose none like Moses (Maimonides).

(U563.713)

And then Mercadante. Saverio Mercadante (1795–1870) was an Italian composer, prolific especially in opera. Bloom praises Mercadante’s The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross (Le sette ultime parole di nostro Signore sulla croce). The problem is that Mercadante was not Jewish.

Some of that old sacred music splendid. Mercadante: seven last words. Mozart’s twelfth mass: Gloria in that.

（U67.403）

Saverio Mercadante

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mercadante-young-b-w.jpg

In Episode 11 too, Bloom thinks of Mercadante.

Molly in quis est homo: Mercadante. My ear against the wall to hear. Want a woman who can deliver the goods.

（U232.975）

In Episode 16, Bloom talks music with Stephen. He says he likes Mercadante’s The Huguenots and Meyerbeer’s The Seven Last Words on the Cross, but he has the two composers mixed up. Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864) was a German opera composer — and it is Meyerbeer, not Mercadante, who was of Jewish background.

Wagnerian music, though confessedly grand in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to follow at the first go-off but the music of Mercadante’s Huguenots, Meyerbeer’s Seven Last Words on the Cross and Mozart’s Twelfth Mass he simply revelled in, the Gloria in that being, to his mind, the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat.

（U540.1737）

Elsewhere in Episode 11, Bloom again confuses Meyerbeer and Mercadante. He is, as so often, knowledgeable but a little slapdash.

Bloom viewed a gallant pictured hero in Lionel Marks’s window. Robert Emmet’s last words. Seven last words. Of Meyerbeer that is.

（U238.1275）

Giacomo Meyerbeer

　　https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giacomo_Meyerbeer_Kriehuber_(cropped).jpg

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78 (U296.530) —A penny for your thoughts.

 Cast 78. Page 296, line 530.

　—A penny for your thoughts.

　—What? replied Gerty with a smile reinforced by the whitest of teeth. I was only wondering was it late.

　Because she wished to goodness they’d take the snottynosed twins and their babby home to the mischief out of that so that was why she just gave a gentle hint about its being late. And when Cissy came up Edy asked her the time and Miss Cissy, as glib as you like, said it was half past kissing time, time to kiss again. But Edy wanted to know because they were told to be in early.

　—Wait, said Cissy, I’ll run ask my uncle Peter over there what’s the time by his conundrum.

　

This is from Episode 13. It is eight in the evening, on Sandymount Strand. Three girls are minding children.

Edy Boardman has the baby in a pram, and Cissy Caffrey has brought along her little twin brothers Tommy and Jacky. This is the moment when Edy speaks to Gerty MacDowell.

Nothing much seems to happen here, but it is surprisingly difficult to pin down the meaning.

“A penny for your thoughts” means, literally, “I’ll give you a penny if you tell me what you’re thinking,” and from that comes the ordinary sense, “What are you thinking about?”

“wish to goodness …” means something like “very much wish that …”

I could not make sense of “to the mischief.”

By the way, perhaps because year 2022 marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, a new annotated edition has appeared from Oxford University Press. 

Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses. Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner. Oxford University Press; 1st edition May 21, 2022.

Looking at Slote’s annotations, I found that “mischief” here means “the devil.” So it does not mean “mischief” in the ordinary sense. And sure enough, the dictionary does indeed give this meaning.

mischief：mis′chif (coll.) the devil, as in 'What the mischief,' &c

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary

Since “go to the devil” means something like “go to blazes” or “be off with you,” I take “take … home to the mischief” to mean “take them home and be done with them.”

Furthermore, according to Slote’s notes, “out of that” is an Irish expression meaning “at once” or “straight away.” Once that is understood, the sentence begins to make sense.

For the record, this book is a massive volume—1,367 pages and five centimetres thick—but unlike Gifford’s annotations it is set in a single column and in larger type, so it is not actually more detailed. I tried looking up a few passages that had long puzzled me, but they did not become any clearer. It seems there is no danger that the pleasures of reading Ulysses will be taken away.

Now then, the phrase that follows—“it was half past kissing time, time to kiss again”—does seem, as far as I can tell from searching online, to come from a poem. It appears as a refrain in Kissing Time by the American writer Eugene Field, who was famous for verse for children.

Sometimes, maybe, he wanders

⁠A heedless, aimless way—

Sometimes, maybe, he loiters

⁠In pretty, prattling play;

But presently bethinks him

⁠And hastens to me then,

For it's half-past kissing time

⁠And time to kiss again!

I am also not quite sure about “uncle Peter.” “Uncle” can mean a pawnbroker. So perhaps it means something like “that rich old uncle.” In that case, it would refer to Bloom, who is sitting there on the strand.

uncle: A pawnbroker: so called in humorous allusion to the financial favors often expected and sometimes received from rich uncles.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

As for “conundrum,” this awkward Latinate word ordinarily means “a riddle” or “a puzzle,” which does not fit the context here at all. It must be referring to Bloom’s watch. My tentative guess is that Cissy means to say “pendulum,” but gets it wrong and says “conundrum” instead.

Episode 13 has a highly distinctive style, but I regret that I do not quite have the ear to appreciate its individuality properly. In the other episodes, I can at least vaguely sense what is interesting about the style, but this one still escapes me.

Sandymount Strand

"Looking South on Sandymount" by Michael Foley Photography is marked with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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