A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (60 page)

199.8
limbo
: literally, Latin: ‘at the edge’; see 198.32–3 n.

199.11
a sugan
: Gaelic:
súgán
: hay- or straw-rope (
O
336).

199.23
spouse of Satan
: Sin; Milton propounds the allegorical espousal of Satan and Sin (from which union comes Death), though he also makes Sin Satan’s daughter; see
Paradise Lost
, ii. 747–67 and Jas. 1: 15.

199.32
Roscommon
: county (and town) in the west of Ireland.

200.8
Come away
: cf. ‘Portrait’ (
PSW
214) and Joyce’s poem ‘O, it is cold and still’ (1902) (
PSW
90).

200.12–13
bird call from Siegfried
: in Richard Wagner (1813–83),
Siegfried
(1876), third opera in the tetralogy
Der Ring des Nibelungen
(composed 1848–74), in which the birds’ song is a significant leitmotiv; in Act II, scene ii, Siegfried attempts to understand the song of the birds: he fails at first but after slaying the dragon Fafner (whose blood he absent-mindedly licks off his finger) he understands: they tell him of the hidden Rhinegold, of the Tarnhelm that makes its wearer invisible, and that whoso masters the Ring will rule the world.

200.17
Adelphi hotel
: see 198.15–16 n.

200.18
Kildare Street
: on the west side of the National Library.

200.18
Maple’s hotel
: small, respectable hotel on Kildare Street.

200.22–3
patricians of Ireland
: the Anglo-Irish, Protestant ‘ascendancy’.

200.23
army commissions
: traditional career for the sons of Anglo-Irish gentry.

200.24
land agents
: managers of the tenanted estates owned, largely, by the Anglo-Irish (often absentee) landlords.

200.26
jarvies
: drivers of hackney coaches.

200.29–30
before their squires begat upon them
: cf. ‘Portrait’: ‘To those multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word’ (
PSW
218).

200.39
Let us eke go
: see 171.25 n.

201.15–16
easter duty
: see 121.10 n.

201.20
I will not serve
: see 99.10 n. and 208.16.

201.21
That remark was made before
: at least twice; see 99.10 n.

201.32
believe in the eucharist
: i.e. do you believe in ‘transubstantiation’—held not only by the Church but by the British government to be the litmus test of whether or not one was a Catholic (see 38.36–7n.).

202.9
Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire
: see 96.6–8 and 105.3–4 n.

202.12
day of judgment
: see 95.19 and
passim
.

202.16–17
bright, agile, impassible … subtle
: supposed characteristics of the risen bodies of saints.

203.25–6
lap of luxury
: cliché.

204.1
a mother’s love
: see 11.6 n.

204.9
Pascal
: Blaise Pascal (1623–62), French mathematician, philosopher, Jansenist (a harsh and morally rigorous—and ultimately condemned as heretical—Catholic movement in seventeenth-century France); his sister (in her life of him) reportedly said that he refused to allow his mother to kiss him (
G
).

204.12
Aloysius Gonzaga
: see 11.6 and 46.38–9 nn.

204.18–19
Jesus, too … scant courtesy in public
: after e.g. Mark 3: 31–5 and
John 2: 1–4, where Jesus seems to ignore, or speak harshly to, his mother in public.

204.19
Suarez
: Francisco Suarez (1548–1617), Spanish Jesuit theologian, who attempted to excuse Jesus’s behaviour to his mother by suggesting that in the original Aramaic ‘woman, what have I to do with thee?’ (John 2: 4) was courteous. Cf. Joyce’s essay on William Blake where he describes Suarez sardonically as a ‘most orthodox church philosopher’ (compared with the ‘undisciplined and visionary heresiarch’ Blake) (
CW
216; cf.
KB
176).

204.21–4
Jesus was not what he pretended to be
…
Jesus himself
: supposedly in showing self doubt (see Matt. 27: 46).

204.27
whited sepulchre
: see 96.16–17 n.

204.30–1
a pervert of yourself
: in the strict sense of one who has been turned away from a right religious system (from the Latin:
pervertere
: ‘turn the wrong way, corrupt’) (
SOED
).

205.1–2
more like a son of God than a son of Mary
: as Stephen will later argue with his mother: Jesus’s relations with his father (God) are of greater significance than those with his mother (Mary) (see 210.2–3).

205.3
communicate
: strictly, to take communion.

205.4–6
host … not a wafer of bread
: see 38.36–7 n.

205.17–18
sacrilegious communion
: one taken when in mortal sin, itself a mortal sin: Stephen’s first mortal sin is what Cranly judges to be his apostasy.

205.24
penal days
: see 28.22 n.

205.29–30
an absurdity … incoherent
: cf. Joyce in ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’ (1907): ‘perhaps … we will see an Irish monk throw away his frock, run off with some nun, and proclaim in a loud voice the end of the coherent absurdity that was Catholicism and the beginning of the incoherent absurdity that is Protestantism’ (
CW
169; cf.
KB
121).

205.31
township of Pembroke
: on the south-eastern edge of Dublin.

205.37
Rosie O’Grady
: song by Maud Jerome, the refrain of which begins ‘Sweet Rosie O’Grady, | My dear little rose, | She’s my steady lady | Most everyone knows’ and ends as Cranly repeats at 206.16–19.

205.39
Mulier cantat
: Latin: ‘A woman sings’.

206.10
Et tu cum fesu Galilœo eras
: Latin: ‘Thou also wast with Jesus of Galilee’ (Matt. 26: 69); said to Peter after Christ’s crucifixion, the occasion for the first of Peter’s three denials of Christ; it forms part of the sung mass on Palm Sunday and is sung by a woman.

206.12
proparoxyton
: in poetic metre: a word having the accent on the antepenultimate syllable (as in the Latin
Galilæ´o
).

207.11
Harcourt Street station
: see 170.18 n.

207.15
Sallygap to Larras
: on either side of the Wicklow mountains, the shortest route being over the mountains (on a road built by the British army in the 1798 rebellion (
G
)).

207.33
Juan Mariana de Talavera
: (1536–1623), Spanish Jesuit historian who argued that killing or overthrowing a tyrant was justified by any man (in his
De Rege et Regis Institutione
(1599), described by Joyce as ‘written for the
stupefaction of posterity[,] a logical and sinister defence of tyrannicide’ (
CW
216; cf.
KB
176).

207.38–9
the secular arm
: the civil (as opposed to the ecclesiastical) authorities.

208.16
I will not serve
: see 99.10, 201.20 nn.

208.20
silence, exile, and cunning
: Stuart Gilbert suggested to Ellmann that Stephen’s motto might come from Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850, French author of ninety-one interconnected novels),
Le Médecin de campagne
, where the hero’s motto is the Latin: ‘
Fuge … Late … Tace
’ (see
E
354).
G
suggests another Balzac novel,
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
, as source for the same motto. Translated it means: ‘flight, subterfuge, silence’.

208.22
Leeson Park
: gives on to Leeson Street bridge over the Grand Canal.

208.28
Yes, my child
: as the priest says to the one confessing.

209.16
coursingmatches
: ‘coursing’: greyhounds chasing hares; cf. Stephen’s memory in
U
32.

209.22–3
Elisabeth and Zachary
: parents of John the Baptist (Luke 1: 5–25).

209.23
precursor
: Stephen imagines Cranly as John the Baptist, ‘precursor’ to his Jesus; see 149.28 n.

209.24
locusts and wild honey
: what John the Baptist ate (Matt. 3: 4).

209.25–6
stern severed head … veronica
: John the Baptist condemned King Herod’s marriage to Herodias (his brother’s wife); when Salome (Herodias’s daughter) dances exquisitely for Herod’s birthday, he promises to give her whatever she wants; she demands (and gets) the head of John on a platter. A ‘veronica’ is a cloth bearing an image of Jesus’s face, after St Veronica, who is said to have offered a cloth to Jesus to wipe the sweat and blood from his face; the cloth is said to have retained the image of his features (
OERD
).

209.26–8
Decollation … saint John at the Latin gate … decollated precursor trying to pick the lock
: ‘decollation’: the beheading of John the Baptist; celebrated by ‘the fold’ (i.e. the Church) on 29 August. ‘Saint John at the Latin gate’: not John the Baptist, but St John the Apostle, who was saved by divine intervention when being persecuted by Romans near the Latin Gate (in Rome); he is referred to as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’. Stephen has thought first of Cranly as this second John (the Beloved) but now thinks of him as the first John (the precursor).

209.29–30
Let the dead … marry the dead
: see Luke 9: 59–60: Jesus to a potential follower: ‘And Jesus said unto another, Follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead; but go thou and preach the kingdom of God’; and Matt. 22: 29–30: ‘Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.’

210.1
B.V.M
.: Blessed Virgin Mary.

210.2–3
relations between Jesus and Papa … lying-in hospital
: see 205.1–2 n. and compare
U
199.3–9.

210.11
Bruno the Nolan
: Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548–1600), Italian Dominican, philosopher, proponent of doctrine of universal love, condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake. Cf. Joyce’s essay ‘The Bruno Philosophy’ (1903) (
CW
132–4 and
KB
93–4) and ‘Portrait’ where Bruno is included among the ‘heresiarchs of initiation’ (
PSW
214).

210.14
risotto alla bergamasca
: Italian: ‘risotto from Bergamo’.

210.18
Stephen’s, that is, my green
: St Stephen’s Green.

210.20–2
quartet of them … overcoat of the crucified
: see John 19: 23–4, of the Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus.

210.26–8
Blake wrote … I wonder if William Bond … very ill
: third and fourth lines of William Blake’s poem ‘William Bond’, the eponymous hero of which has love problems too. See, too, Joyce’s essay on William Blake (
CW
214–22; cf.
KB
175–82).

210.30
diorama in Rotunda
: ‘Rotunda’: group of buildings in corner of Rutland (now Parnell) Square which housed a theatre, concert hall, assembly rooms (and now a cinema and maternity hospital, the latter of which was partly funded by the proceeds of the earlier activities); ‘diorama’: a precursor of the cinema: ‘a scenic painting in which changes in colour and direction of illumination simulate a sunrise, etc.’ (
OERD
).

210.31
William Ewart Gladstone
: (1809–98), British Liberal prime minister, introduced a number of social and political reforms (including elementary education and the Third Reform Bill extending the franchise); he was manœuvred by Parnell into support for Irish Home Rule but didn’t deliver; his withdrawal of support for Parnell over the O’Shea divorce Joyce described as ‘complet[ing] the moral assassination of Parnell with the help of the Irish bishops’ (‘Home Rule Comes of Age’ (1907) (
CW
193; cf.
KB
142)); cf. ‘The Shade of Parnell’ (1912) (
CW
223–4; cf.
KB
191) and ‘Portrait’ (
PSW
212) and 26.18 n.

210.32
O
,
Willie, we have missed you
: penultimate line of a song by Stephen Foster (1826–64), American songwriter.

210.36–7
A long curving gallery … vapours
: cf. Joyce’s ‘epiphany’, no. 29 (
PSW
189).