Re:Joyce Episode 309 - Different Women

A hint of the kinky in Mr. Bloom.

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Comments

[Dan Urbach]

I thought you'd like this article on the fractal structure of Finnegan's Wake. Also, check out the other links at the bottom. The entirety of FW read out loud?!

http://www.openculture.com/2016/03/scientists-discover-that-james-joyces-finnegans-wake-has-an-amazingly-mathematical-multifractal-structure.html

[Lawrence Lebin]

Miriam Dandrade: suggests a "raid" (rade) on the "dandies" (Dand), which indeed what Whelan & Bloom are up to as well as the bargaining for the black undies. Also the name "Miriam" is not only close to Molly's given name Marion, but in itself suggests "mirror" & "I am". The underwear is certainly for Molly. So Miriam mirrors Marion (Molly) & the raid on the dandies ("scavenging what the quality left") combines plums w/second hand underwear for a jolly bit of naughty thoughts in Bloom's noontime meandering

[Barbara Stoner]

Can, canny, ken, cunning - related?

[William Keller]

Re: # 309 Holy mackerel, by way of innuendo, Bloom spills the mayonnaise of life onto the plums at the garden party, much like those the waxies so dwelt upon on their Gargle a chapter ago!

[Michael Gorman]

P.G. Wodehouse's earliest publications were stories set in public (i.e., private) schools. His first book, published in 1902, was called "The Pothunters." The story revolves around the theft of some sporting trophies (known as "pots").

[Michael Gorman]

I sometimes wonder I have been driven mad by thinking about "Ulysses" and Mr. Joyce's wordplay. As we all know the first word of the book is "Stately," and the last word "Yes." Is it possible that Mr. Joyce had noted that the letters of the last word are found in backwards in the first? (StateElY.)

[Mark Tottenham]

A small comment on your description of the Irish Times, and its call for the leaders of the 1916 Rising to be executed. This was probably to be expected, given that it had a very unionist editorial line. But the Irish Independent also called for the executions of leaders:

"On 12 May 1916, for instance, the Irish Independent called for executions of the only two leaders then still alive, James Connolly and Seán Mac Diarmada. ‘Some of these leaders’, it declared, ‘are more guilty and played a more sinister part in the campaign than those who have already been punished with severity and it would hardly be fair to treat these leniently because the cry for clemency has been raised... Let the worst of the ringleaders be singled out and dealt with as they deserve, but we hope there be no holocaust or slaughter.’ On the day this article was published, Mac Diarmada and a badly wounded Connolly were executed, the latter shot by firing squad as he was seated on a wooden box in Kilmainham Gaol."

Source: http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/reporting-the-rising

[William Keller]

Re: 310. "...the pensive bosom of silver effulgence." Thinking myself a clever boots of a literary detective, I wondered was Bloom even present when that bit of purple prose was quoted in Aeolus. Bigger than Stuttgart, he was! It is, indeed, intriguing the way snippets of verbiage, some of which have little relevance to our immediate designs, imprint themselves willy-nilly in the synapses of our memory only to resurface quite unbidden when later the need arises. No surprise, however, that the word "bosom" should trigger a memory in a passage about childbirth.

[William Keller]

Re: 311 Mr. Delaney comments that Dion Boucicault's play "The Shaughraun" was still being produced in Ireland during his (Delaney's) days at school. Said unabashed and very entertaining melodrama was performed as recently as the summer of 2011 in NYC at the Irish Repertory Theater on 22nd St.

[Peter Chrisp]

The Ward Union Stag hunt also pops up in Finnegans Wake:

'the Wald Unicorns Master, Bugley Captain, from the Naul, drawls up by the door with the Honourable Whilp and the Reverend Poynter and the two Lady Pagets of Tallyhaugh, Ballyhuntus, in their riddletight raiding hats for to lift a hereshealth to their robost, the Stag, evers the Carlton hart.' 622.25

Elsewhere HCE is pursued like a fox by the hounds through townships near Ratoath, County Meath, where the Ward Union Staghounds hunted. It's a lovely bit of prose that races along like the Muggleton Coach in the Pickwick Papers:

'Gundogs of all breeds were beagling with renounced urbiandorbic bugles, hot to run him, given law, on a scent breasthigh, keen for the worry. View! From his holt outratted across the Juletide's genial corsslands of Humfries Chase from Mullinahob and Peacockstown, then bearing right upon Tankardstown, the outlier, a white noelan which Mr Loewensteil Fitz Urse's basset beaters had first misbadgered for a bruin of some swart, led bayers the run, then through Raystown and Horlockstown and, louping the loup, to Tankardstown again. Ear canny hare for doubling through Cheeverstown they raced him, through Loughlinstown and Nutstown to wind him by the Boolies.' 96.36

Joyce loved the image of the stag at bay, using it several times. Both the stag and the fox were linked with Parnell, ‘slain by the coward hounds’, in Joe Hynes’ poem in Ivy Day. ‘Mr Fox’ was one the names Parnell assumed when in hiding.

Yeats also wrote, in Parnell’s Funeral, that popular rage ‘dragged this quarry down’.

In The Holy Office, Joyce imagined himself as a defiant stag:

‘I stand the self-doomed, unafraid,
Unfellowed, friendless and alone,
Indifferent as the herring-bone,
Firm as the mountain ridges where
I flash my antlers on the air.’

The stag is a powerful image because, unlike a fox, it's more noble than its pursuers.

On his birthday, Joyce liked to wear a waistcoat decorated with stags and hunting hounds –a family heirloom. You can see it today in the James Joyce Tower museum in Dublin.