Cast 93. Page 331, line 773.
But indeed, sir, I wander from the point. How mingled and imperfect are all our sublunary joys. Maledicity! he exclaimed in anguish. Would to God that foresight had but remembered me to take my cloak along! I could weep to think of it. Then, though it had poured seven showers, we were neither of us a penny the worse. But beshrew me, he cried, clapping hand to his forehead, tomorrow will be a new day and, thousand thunders, I know of a marchand de capotes, Monsieur Poyntz, from whom I can have for a livre as snug a cloak of the French fashion as ever kept a lady from wetting.
Episode 14. The setting is the common room of the National Maternity Hospital. Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and the medical students are eating, drinking, and talking together. Malachi Mulligan, Stephen’s housemate, has met his friend Alec Bannon on the street after Bannon returned to Dublin from Mullingar, and the two of them have come in here together. This is part of Bannon’s speech.
Episode 14 is constructed as a sequence of stylistic imitations tracing the history of English prose from the past to the present. This passage is said to parody the style of Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century English novelist best known for The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, specifically his A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). That work is a travel narrative based on Sterne’s experiences during several journeys in France.
Bloom’s daughter Milly Bloom has only just turned fifteen, but is already living away from home and working at a photographer’s shop in Mullingar, County Westmeath. And Bannon is seeing Milly.
A conversation between Haines and Malachi Mulligan, who live with Stephen:
—Is the brother with you, Malachi?
—Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons.
—Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her.
—Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.
(U18.682)
A passage from Milly’s letter to Bloom:
There is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his cousins or something are big swells・・・
(U54,407)
I looked up “Maledicity!” but could not really pin it down. “Maledict” means something like accursed, or under a curse, so perhaps it is roughly equivalent to “Curse it!”
“Would to God that …” is a literary expression meaning “if only …”.
“Cloak” means a cloak or overcoat, but here it is clearly being used as a euphemistic way of referring to a condom.
“Thousand thunders” does not seem to appear in the dictionary either. It feels much like “by thunder!”—something along the lines of “Good Lord!”, “Really!”, or “Damn it all!” Since there appears to be a thunderstorm outside, perhaps thunder is actually sounding in the scene.
“Capote” is a French word. It can mean (1) a hooded military coat, or (2) a condom. Like “cloak” above, it carries the secondary meaning of condom here.
As is well known, in Britain a condom used to be called a “French letter,” while in France it was called a “capote anglaise,” an “English coat.”
In the end, I think this passage simply means that Bannon is regretting not having had a condom with him, and lamenting that he might otherwise have slept with Milly.
Bloom is sitting there with them, but he does not realize that this man is Bannon, nor that the girl he is involved with is his own daughter.
So what is Sterne’s prose actually like? I flipped through A Sentimental Journey and the following passage seems to me to come closest in atmosphere to the one under discussion here.
The worst fault which divines and the doctors of the Sorbonne can allege against it is, that if there is but a capfull of wind in or about Paris, ’tis more blasphemously sacre Dieu’d there than in any other aperture of the whole city,—and with reason good and cogent, Messieurs; for it comes against you without crying garde d’eau, and with such unpremeditable puffs, that of the few who cross it with their hats on, not one in fifty but hazards two livres and a half, which is its full worth.
Laurence Sterne, THE FRAGMENT PARIS, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
Since it is a French travel narrative, the sprinkling of French is certainly similar. I searched Sterne’s work for some of the unusual turns of phrase that appear in today’s passage, but most of them do not really occur there. In terms of vocabulary and actual sentence texture, the resemblance does not seem all that close to me.
The use of dashes in dialogue, and the blending of speech with narrative prose, are techniques common to Joyce’s fiction in general, so perhaps Sterne’s influence is indeed there.
Joseph Nollekens | Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) | British | The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org)
For the method of this blog, see ☞ Here
No comments:
Post a Comment