17 (U224.632)

Richie cocked his lips apout. 

 17th cast. page 224, line 632.

  Richie cocked his lips apout. A low incipient note sweet banshee murmured: all. A thrush. A throstle. His breath, birdsweet, good teeth he’s proud of, fluted with plaintive woe. Is lost. Rich sound. Two notes in one there. Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley.

Episode 11. It's about four o'clock in the afternoon, and Mr. Bloom is having dinner with Stephen's uncle, Richie Goulding, in the restaurant of the Ormond Hotel. In the hotel saloon Stephen's father, Simon is playing the piano.

Episode 11 is written in a music style.

 “all … Is lost”,  title of the song, Simon is playing.

Alliterations of “Richie” – “Rich” and “A thrush” –“ A throstle”.

The repetition of “sweet”, “note” and “bird”

Needless to say, most of the text is written with words related to sound and music.

At the beginning of Episode 11, the motif of this episode is compressed and presented as an overture.

“Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.” (U210.22)

This line corresponds to above passage.

Simon is playing "All is lost" from Vincenzo Bellini's opera "La sonnambula" (The Sleepwalker, 1831). Elvino suspects that his lover Amina is having an affair with the Count, and laments that his love is lost. This echoes Mr. Bloom's feelings who knows that Boylan is now on his way to his wife, Molly.

 

Father Cowley encourages Simon to sing, but he refuses and plays the piano. Richey Goulding whistles along with the song.

 

"Sleepwalking" is one of the key words in Ulysses, featuring urban promenading. It appears in (U375.950) (U496.4926) (U567.849) (U568.854) and (U570.929).

Sleepwalking is believed to be a disease in Mr. Bloom's family.

 

In Episode 6, Mr. Bloom compares the voice of his wife to that of "a thrush, a throstle". His wife Molly is a singer. (U77.240)

In Episode 1, Mulligan's singing voice was described as "birdsweet cries". (U16.602)

 

"Hawthorn" is a shrub with white flowers in the spring and red or yellow fruit in the fall. Its connotations include;

 

1. In the Celtic calendar, it is the tutelary tree of June. The current date in Ulysses is June 16.
2. In ancient beliefs, it is a symbol of fertility and prosperity.
3. The branches have sharp thorns, and it is said that Christ's crown was made of hawthorn.
4. It is said to have the power to ward off evil.
5. The language of flowers is "hope”.
6. Also called Mayflower, hawthorn was painted on the Mayflower (1620) that sailed to America.
7. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was the author of The Scarlet Letter, a novel about adultery in 17th century Puritan society in Boston.

 

I can't tell from the text when Mr. Bloom heard the blackbird in the valley of the hawthorn, but based on the inclusion above, it must have been when he was with Molly.

 

And speaking of hawthorn, I can' t help but think of Proust. The narrator as a boy meets Gilbert in the hedge of the Swan’s house.

 

“And already the charm with which her name, like a cloud of incense, had filled that archway in the pink hawthorn through which she and I had, together, heard its sound, was beginning to conquer, to cover, to embalm, to beautify everything with which it had any association:…“ 

     Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (Remembrance Of Things Past, Volume one), translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff

I fancy that Joyce's reference to hawthorn with the phrase "all is lost" may be a reference to "Swann’s Way" published in 1913.

Blackbird in hawthorn

"Blackbird in hawthorn" by Roger Bunting is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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