Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face” (6.962). Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeagain hello hello amawf krpthsth. One of the many instances of onomatopoetic language in Ulysses, “Rtststr” connects the themes and stylistic preoccupations of the episode “Hades.” On one hand, the sound comes immediately after Bloom’s famous musings on the ability of a gramophone recording to memorialize the voices of the dead: “Put on poor old greatgrandfather. Stop! He looked down intently into a stone crypt. And the light is to illuminate Stephen’s journey “to evening lands.” Shakespeare writes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Well shone Moone” at V.i.262. “Shoon” may mean shoe but it is also the past tense of shine: to give out a light according to the OED. The image of the cockle, hat according to Gifford and Seidman, suggests the lover as pilgrim. The allusion of the sentence is to Ophelia’s speech in Hamlet where she asks in her song how will she know true love? “By his cockle hat and staff/ and his sandal shoon” is her answer (IV.v.23-6). The meaning remains but without the impact of the co-joined words: the sandals of both Stephen and Lucifer shoon. If the word remains “hismy” it implies the elimination of distance between subject and object: “hismy sandal shoon” suggests a merging of Stephen with an other, likely Lucifer alluded to in the preceding sentence with a Latin phrase attached, translated as “the morning star, I say, who knows no setting.” But as “his my,” the phrase clearly separates Stephen from Lucifer. In the 1922 first edition of Ulysses (50), it appears as “hismy” but subsequent editions, beginning with the 1926 corrected edition by Shakespeare and Company, separates the word into “his my.” All subsequent editions, notably the Odyssey Press edition of 1932, the US edition of 1934 and the Bodley Head edition of 1936, reset in 1960, maintain the separation to read “his my.” The Gabler edition of 1984, however, restores the original “hismy” printing. Variants of the word/phrase suggest altered readings. “My cockle hat and staff and hismy sandal shoon.” (U 3.487) Whether Bullock harbour nearby is also echoed (1.467, 14.519) I cannot determine. Possibly with a hint at the precarious friendship, or former friendship, between the two, bullock instead of Buck. But here the manner is Anglo-Saxon, and anticipates passages in fake Old English in Oxen of the Sun (“Before born be bliss had,” ). In this case Stephen obviously imitates Buck Mulligan’s penchant for exaggerated alliteration, as in “jejune jesuit,” partly in imitation of an Irish trait. Joyce has a way of forming unhyphened compounds and so creating radiant units that attract attention to themselves. “Mulligan will dub me a new name: the bullockbefriending bard.” (U 2.431)įirst I would be hesitant to call such a composition a “neologism,” though technically it might be – the spelling checker instantly bristles.
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