Cast 91. Page 460, line 3729.
(Zoe whispers to Florry. They giggle. Bloom releases his hand and writes idly on the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves.)
FLORRY: What?
(A hackneycar, number three hundred and twentyfour, with a gallantbuttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue, Donnybrook, trots past. Blazes Boylan and Lenehan sprawl swaying on the sideseats. The Ormond boots crouches behind on the axle. Sadly over the crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze.)
THE BOOTS: (Jogging, mocks them with thumb and wriggling wormfingers.) Haw haw have you the horn?
John Ford’s film The Quiet Man (1952), starring John Wayne: a hackney car
Episode 15. Fantasy and reality overlap. Characters from earlier in the novel reappear and perform little dramas from within the novel itself. At Bella Cohen’s brothel, Bloom is having his palm read by Zoe. This is the moment just after he pulls his hand back. Presumably what Zoe whispers to Florry is something she has read in his palm.
Pencil
Bloom is said to be writing with a pencil (pencilling), but it seems odd that there would be an actual pencil lying around on a brothel table, so I suspect he is writing with eyebrow pencil.
The prostitutes are using eyebrow pencil — pencil — on their brows.
(Zoe and Bloom reach the doorway where two sister whores are seated. They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his hasty bow. He trips awkwardly.)
(U409.2022)
Backhand
Backhand means a left-slanting style of handwriting.
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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Backhand_writing_(PSF).jpg
Now then, why does the hackneycar suddenly appear?
This is a fantasy scene summoned up from the Ormond Hotel episode in Episode 11.
A hackney car, number three hundred and twentyfour, driver Barton James of number one Harmony avenue, Donnybrook, on which sat a fare, a young gentleman, stylishly dressed in an indigoblue serge suit made by George Robert Mesias, tailor and cutter, of number five Eden quay, and wearing a straw hat very dressy, bought of John Plasto of number one Great Brunswick street, hatter. Eh? This is the jingle that joggled and jingled. By Dlugacz’ porkshop bright tubes of Agendath trotted a gallantbuttocked mare.
(U229.878－)
Blazes Boylan, the lover of Bloom’s wife Molly, is on his way by carriage to the Bloom house.
But why does this scene surface now?
Just before Boylan’s carriage scene in Episode 11., Bloom is in the restaurant at the Ormond Hotel, borrowing writing materials and composing a reply to his secret correspondent Martha. He tries to write the letter e as the Greek epsilon ε, then gives up.
Remember write Greek ees. Bloom dipped, Bloo mur: dear sir. Dear Henry wrote: dear Mady. Got your lett and flow.
(U229.860)
On. Know what I mean. No, change that ee. Accep my poor litt pres enclos. Ask her no answ.
(U229.865)
Surely he is trying to disguise his handwriting so as to leave no evidence — and not just by altering the letters, but by changing the whole hand, that is, by writing in backhand. In the fantasy courtroom scene that began around my Cast 87, the society lady Mrs Yelverton Barry testifies that Bloom once sent her an anonymous letter in a left-slanting hand.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: ・・・Arrest him, constable. He wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was in the North Riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James Lovebirch. ・・・
(U379.1017)
His absent-minded scribbling in backhand has called up the Boylan carriage scene that stands next to the Martha-letter scene in Episode 11
Incidentally, just after the passage I wrote about in Cast 88, Nosey Flynn says something odd. There is one thing, he says, that Bloom will never do — and that is put his name to anything.
—He’s not too bad, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling it up. He’s been known to put his hand down too to help a fellow. Give the devil his due. O, Bloom has his good points. But there’s one thing he’ll never do.
His hand scrawled a dry pen signature beside his grog.
—I know, Davy Byrne said.
—Nothing in black and white, Nosey Flynn said.
(U145.984―)Bloom seems to be a man with a very particular caution about handwriting.
Hackney car - Jaunting car
A hackneycar is the same thing as a jaunting car: “a light two-wheeled single-horse carriage with the passengers’ seats arranged back to back and the driver seated in front.”
Nobuaki Tochigi has a fine essay on this vehicle in his book Ireland Monogatari. He also says a great deal there about carriages in Ulysses.
This small, light, open two-wheeled carriage, with two-person seats mounted back to back on either side behind the driver and hung down over the wheel area, was a uniquely Irish conveyance. Its very name is delightful: the ‘jaunting car.’ Since ‘jaunt’ in English means to go on an excursion or pleasure outing, it was, quite literally, the equivalent of a modern taxi.
“Going for an Excursion by Carriage,” in Ireland Monogatari (Misuzu Shobo, 2013)
The Boots riding on the axle is the hotel bootblack from the Ormond Hotel, whom I mentioned in Cast 75. He had been flirting with Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy, the barmaids there.
Crossblind
The windows of the Ormond Hotel are fitted with something called a crossblind.
Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head, appeared above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel.
(U202.963)
Miss Douce’s brave eyes, unregarded, turned from the crossblind, smitten by sunlight.
(U220.460)
What exactly this is turns out to be quite a puzzle, and Naoki Yanase, the Japanese translator of Ulysses, discusses it in detail in one of his books (“Cross Blind,” 2004, in Ulysses Kokaiki, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2017).
According to the Yanase’s theory, crossblind is“a window shade that pulls down from a roller at the middle of a window”.
I think in Japanese interior-design terminology, the nearest equivalent would apparently be what is called a “café curtain.”
A short curtain fitted so as to cover only part of a window, mainly for privacy or decoration, usually hung not from an ordinary curtain rail but from a rod stretched across.
Dictionary of House and Interior Terms
Perhaps it is called a crossblind because the horizontal rod and the vertical lines of the window frame form a cross. Still, what the Ormond has is probably not a curtain but rather a kind of blind or shade. Something like the form below seems closest to me.
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Thumb one's nose
"mocks them with thumb and wriggling wormfingers" is surely the Western gesture known as thumb one’s nose: placing the thumb on the tip of the nose and waggling the fingers outward to mock someone.
Cocking a snook Statue of a street urchin on Old Street, Ashton-under-Lyne
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cocking_a_snook_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1136252.jpg
“Haw haw have you the horn?” — what does that mean?
According to the dictionary, have the horn means to be sexually aroused, especially of a man, or to have an erection.
To be or become lustful or sexually excited, especially of a man; to have an erection.
The Free Dictionary
This too comes from the Boylan carriage scene in Episode 11, on its way toward the Bloom house.
By Bachelor’s walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun in heat, mare’s glossy rump atrot, with flick of whip, on bounding tyres: sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold. Horn. Have you the? Horn. Have you the? Haw haw horn.
(U222.527)
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