Ep. 49 – O, My Dimber Wapping Dell

Irish Travellers’ decorated caravan, 1954, National Library of Ireland archive

White thy fambles, Red thy gan!

Wait, what?

Find out what this phrase and much more means in this episode as we continue our discussion of “Proteus,” the third episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Topics covered in this show include: what Stephen means by “red Egyptians,” background on the Romani and Irish Travellers, Stephen’s class insecurity, Terry Pratchett’s Mort, strolling morts more generally, the distinct language of Romani and the Travellers,  The Our Father in Shelta, the secret language of thieves in 17th c. England, strolling morts, The Rogue’s Delight, she-fiends, bawd pimps, whores, an example of too-polite annotations, Stephen’s morose delectation, Thomas Aquinas’ nicknames, and Stephen’s realization that all words are his comrades.

Ep. 41 – Froggreen Wormwood

Édouard Manet, The Absinthe Drinker, 1859

Images of early morning Paris through the ineluctable modality of Stephen Dedalus’ memory, smells of incense and absinthe. We discuss Stephen’s life as a starving artist (literally), Kevin Egan and his unwilling exile in Paris, Egan’s real life counterpart, New York Times write-ups of duels in the 19th century, Irish nationalist groups of the 19th century, the proper way to drink absinthe, dalcassians and Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, Édouard Drumont v. Léo Taxil, and the pitfalls of attempting to make Ireland more like continental Europe.

Ep. 38 – Pico della Mirandola like.

 

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

This episode of Blooms & Barnacles takes an esoteric twist as we continue deeper into “Proteus”, Ulysses‘ third episode. Topics include: why Dermot is not impressed with the Library of Alexandria, the length of a mahamanvantara, what the heck a mahamanvantara is, Joyce’s youthful rage put into poetry, Joyce’s youthful interest in theosophy, Pico della Mirandola’s desire to speak to angels, Renaissance magic, hermeticism, , correspondences in Ulysses, and why Dermot thinks Neil de Grasse Tyson is wrong.

Ep. 33 – Nuncle Richie

Stephen contemplates the horror of a visit to his Aunt Sara and Uncle Richie’s house. We discuss parallels in this scene with Joyce’s real life aunt and uncle, why Joyce’s Aunt Josephine gave away her first edition of Ulysses, the intractable Dubliner/culchie divide, middle class pretension, Hiberno-English, Wilde’s Requiescat, and the difficulty of parsing conversations written in Joyce’s signature stream of consciousness.

Ep. 27 – Nacheinander and Nebeneinander

“Bishop George Berkeley,” John Smybert, c. 1727

Real talk: why are there no seagulls on Sandymount Strand on Bloomsday? Have we stumbled onto a historical seagull-based conspiracy? Stay tuned to find out! Additionally, we’ll also continue discussing how Stephen’s walk on the beach is influenced by Berkeleyan idealism, Stephen’s perception of space and time, how blind people perceive the world and the Demiurg

Decoding Dedalus: Signs on a White Field

Actuality and the material world demand a winnowing down of facts to one linear story which serves one party, is the shout of the victor. In Ulysses, the human form is allowed to be infinite; no fact is considered unhistorical, no victory will be dismissed as pyrrhic. Everything is included because Ulysses is the epic of recovered time and redeemed space. – Alistair Cormack

This is a post in a series called Decoding Dedalus where I take a passage of Ulysses and  break it down line by line.

The passage below comes from “Proteus,” the third episode of Ulysses. It appears on pages 47-48 in my copy (1990 Vintage International). We’ll be looking at the passage that begins “His shadow lay…” and ends “… the more the more.”

Finally, we find ourselves in the closing pages of “Proteus.” Stephen has found his creative spark and begun composing his poem – his main artistic output of June sixteenth. As readers, we find ourselves on the downslope on a mighty hill, but remember, reaching the summit of a mountain is only half the climb. We still have to find our way down. 

His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. 

Here we see Stephen, in the grips of the poetic muse, bending over an ersatz table made of rocks on Sandymount Strand, jotting down the lines about the pale vampire traversing the seas on his bat-winged ship. Stephen sees his own shadows and ponders its limit. Of course, he’s not thinking only of his literal shadow, but also the shadow cast by his genius and the acclaim he hopes to achieve. Keep in mind, this is the same young Artist who requested his works be sent to all the great libraries of the world upon his death (including the long-ago-burned Library of Alexandria) in order to preserve his memory (a request that James Joyce made in real life of his brother Stanislaus).  When Stephen asks, “Why not endless till the farthest star,” he is asking why can’t his “shadow,” his legacy extend to the far reaches of the universe? The thought of “the farthest star” leads to thoughts of the stars visible from Earth, hidden by the brightness of the midday sky. He recalls his earlier inversion of the Bible verse John 1:5, “darkness shining in the brightness.” 

Decoding Dedalus: Pale Vampire

Is the mouth south someway? Or the south a mouth? – Stephen Dedalus

This is a post in a series called Decoding Dedalus where I take a passage of Ulysses and  break it down line by line.

The passage below comes from “Proteus,” the third episode of Ulysses. It appears on pages 47-48 in my copy (1990 Vintage International). We’ll be looking at the passage that begins “A side eye…” and ends “… the library counter.” 

In “Proteus,” James Joyce associated the color green with creation. We find green, and by extension creativity, reflected in the seaweed strewn across the strand, in Stephen’s memory of Kevin Egan’s absinthe and, direct from Cock lake, in Stephen’s urine. Thus far on June the sixteenth, Stephen has struggled to exercise his artistic creativity, instead disrupted by the crass Buck Mulligan, the gormless Haines and the calcified Mr. Deasy. Left to his own devices on Sandymount Strand, Stephen is finally stirred to claim his birthright as an Artist:

A side eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I am not. 

As the cocklepickers pass Stephen by, he is first stirred by a different kind of “creative” inspiration. Previously he had let his imagination run wild, imagining the couple to be a pimp and a prostitute scamming the wealthy men of Dublin. Stephen speculates that his Parisian fashion statement has caught the woman’s eye. The Latin Quarter hat has transformed, in accordance with the protean nature of all things found on Sandymount Strand, into a Hamlet hat.  “Latin Quarter hat” is a Mulligan-ism, a phrase used to mock Stephen’s attachment to the trappings of his previous faux-hemian surroundings. Here, Stephen is gaining a bit of agency, at the very least dictating the nickname of his hat. More importantly, he is naming his role in the “story” of his life. He is Hamlet, the aggrieved Prince of Denmark. Usurpers, beware.

Poetry in Ulysses: White Thy Fambles, Red Thy Gan

[Rogues] have their several Wenches, and several places of meeting, where whatsoever they unlawfully obtain they spend, and whatsoever they spend is to satisfie their unsatisfied lust; wallowing in all manner of debauchery, converting the night into day and the day into night, damning and sinkling being four parts in five their discourse…  – Richard Head, 1673

For all posts on music and poetry in Ulysses, visit this page.

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Near the end of “Proteus,” Stephen encounters a couple of cocklepickers “shouldering their bags” and walking along Sandymount Strand. The proceeding description, found on p. 47 in my copy of Ulysses (1990 Vintage International), becomes less and less intelligible as it goes on. At first glance, it’s hardly recognizable as English at all. Consult an annotation or reading guide, and you’ll be told it’s Gypsy speech but not much else. I think we should honor the art of “Proteus” – philology – and pick this one apart word by word.

Ep. 18 – Bloomsday in Melbourne (w/ Steve Carey)

A lifelong lover of the works of Joyce, Steve Carey is an organizer of the Bloomsday celebration in Melbourne, Australia. He chats with Kelly about (briefly) meeting Richard Ellmann, the joys and travails of adapting Ulysses for the stage, a heroic battle over trousers in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, and how to get a period hearse for your Bloomsday procession. This episode is not to be missed!

Maud Gonne

Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, La Patrie, M. Millevoye, Felix Faure, know how he died?

Maud Gonne’s name appears in Ulysses’ third episode, Proteus,  as Stephen rummages through his recollections of his brief sojourn in Paris. Though Gonne did reside in Paris in the early 1900’s, she never met James Joyce (or Stephen Dedalus), but their non-meeting had long lasting effects on James Joyce, though he may have never realized it.

The life of Maud Gonne is often told in close proximity to the men she knew, and since my blog is about James Joyce, her story will be framed by its brief overlap with Joyce’s. However, before we dive into that, I’d like to give space to her biography, warts and all.

Joyce and Maud Gonne never met, though Yeats provided her contact information to Joyce before he left for Paris in 1902. She was living in the city at the time and could be a helpful contact there. Joyce called on her, but was turned away by the concierge. Gonne was nursing her niece who was sick with diphtheria and was under a quarantine as a result. She wrote him a gracious apology letter and offered to meet him post-quarantine. Joyce, ever prickly, took this as a slight and never followed up, though it may have been due to embarrassment about his shabby appearance due to the extreme poverty he experienced during those months. It seems like an episode barely worth mentioning, but as we’ll see, it may have had some long-term consequences.

So, who exactly was Maud Gonne and why are we talking about her?