OF GETTING THINGS WRONG
Joyce pointed out to Frank Budgen that the Catholic Church was based on the accidental resemblance between “Peter” and the Aramaic for “rock” (Ellmann II, 556). Before then, Socrates had put his faith in the Delphic oracle, which seems to have been mainly a matter of starving and drugging a few poor girls to the point of hallucinatory hysteria and then hearing what you wanted to hear in their babblings. In one case, recorded in one of Joyce’s Cornell notebooks, the oracle prophesied that a petitioner would be raised to a great height, and that Apollo would kiss his forehead and Neptune lave his limbs. In the event, it turned out that this meant being crucified, with the sun beating down on his head and sweat running down his body. In 1066, William invaded England because, he said, Harold had told him he could have it. Harold remembered the conversation differently. Some think Napoleon lost at Waterloo because his directions to General Grouchy, to follow and harass the Prussians, were taken by Grouchy to mean he should follow and observe the Prussians. Fifty-five years later another Napoleon, this one self-styled the Third, started and lost the Franco-Prussian War because of the Ems Dispatch, which was altered by Bismarck, mistranslated by the French press, and so on - so that, in the Wikipedia account, “ [f]ollowing further improper translations and misinterpretations of the dispatch in the press, excited crowds in Paris demanded war.”(1) According to one Scottish account, after the 1746 defeat at Culloden an English officer was interrupted during his dinner by a soldier reporting that a mother and her children were outside and had no place to spend the night. “Oh, hang’em” he said, and went back to his meal. Next morning, on leaving his tent, he was surprised to find the family, literally, hanging from a tree.(2)
Certain authors have long noted how much of history has been made out of totally screwed-up communications. Swift. Shakespeare, in Henry IV I. In The Dunciad, Pope has a hilarious footnote about how his nemesis, Colley Cibber, “unfortunately lost the whole gist of the story” in his translation of the Polyphemus episode of the Odyssey by having Odysseus say, not, “I am Noman,” but “’I take no Name’[...] whereby all that followed became unintelligible.”(3) Dickens’ Mr. Pickwick goes to prison when his landlady interprets an order for chops and tomato sauce as a proposal of marriage.
To add to the list: Lewis Carroll, for instance in assuming that where there’s mock turtle soup there must perforce be a mock turtle. Conrad’s Lord Jim, who, when hearing someone refer to a dog as a “cur,” thinks the word is directed at him, with bad results. Nabokov, whose John Shade of Pale Fire finds his hopes of the afterlife first aroused and then dashed by a misprint, “Mountain” instead of “Fountain.” The title of The Catcher in the Rye.
Mondegreens,(4) malapropisms, and misprisions are subcategories. On the Internet, the term is, commonly, “misheard,” as in “Misheard Lyrics,” the name of the site where I found “Gopher Tuna.” For instance, Celine Dion’s “I believe that the hot dogs go on,” Jimmy Hendrix’s “Scuse me while I kiss this guy,” and the Rolling Stones’ “I’ll never be your pizza burning.” The locus classicus is “Louie Louie,” a love ditty which because of some terrible acoustics had the FBI, the U.S. Congress, and a generation of horny college guys thinking it was all about having raunchy sex.(5)
No way to prove it, but I’d bet that, from “Baby Tuckoo” to, say, “mememormee,” Joyce makes more out of, in particular, mishearing, and in general, getting things wrong, than any writer ever. Partly, no doubt, this is traceable to his island’s vexed bilingualism. Stephen’s thoughts in Portrait about the English words “home, Christ, ale, master,” “so familiar and so foreign” (P 189) adumbrate a lifelong artistic policy - the systematic estrangement of words more familiar than they ought to be.
In some of the space remaining, I’m going to rattle off some Joycean instances of misheard or mistaken attempts at communication, starting with the more familiar ones. “Throwaway,” of course. “Met him pike hoses.” Gabriel watching his wife and thinking he knows what Bartell D’Arcy’s singing is making her feel. “Lux upon Lux and[...] [and] Crux - that is, Cross upon Crux, to show you the difference between their two pontificates” (D 167). “Iron Nails Ran In” (U 5.374). In Portrait, “Auntie” becoming “Dante.” Stephen’s reverie on a line by Thomas Nashe, misremembering “darkness” for “brightness,” and therefore he thinks, rendering his whole production “false” (P 234). (His creator would have thought otherwise.) Miss Douce’s rendering of “to floral lips did hie” as “to Flora’s lips did hie” (U 11.395). Gerty’s “with all my goods I thee and thou” (U 15.375).
Two generalizations about such mishearings: First: they usually replace the less familiar with the more familiar. Doubtless there’s some clinical term for this, but personally I think of it as the “causal” rule. More often than not, when I come to that word in a book I first read it as “casual.” Surely that’s because I’ve encountered the second word more often. I’m used to it. It’s what I’ve come to expect from that combination of letters. Probably Rolling Stones fans are more used to the word “pizza,” burning or not, than to the slightly archaic “beast of burden.” Probably Miss Douce is more used to “Flora,” a common woman’s name, than to the slightly arty “floral.”
The second generalization is that these mishearings tend to reflect the preoccupations of the mis-hearer. They follow the logic of the Freudian slip. Take, as model, one straight-out Freudian slip by Bloom. In “Cyclops,” trying to explain the efforts on behalf of the widow Mrs. Dignam, he refers to “the wife’s admirers” instead of “the wife’s advisers” (U 12.767.) Several critics have observed that this is a revealing slip. Yes, but how? What is supposed to be the problem with “wife’s admirers?” Isn’t that a harmlessly nice thing to say?
The answer, I propose, is that “admirer” is a loaded word for Bloom because Molly’s first letter from her first lover, Mulvey, was signed “an admirer” (U 18.762), that Molly told Bloom about it, and that he’s especially susceptible to such memories - that is, about his wife’s admirer - in “Cyclops,” the chapter that begins just after Boylan and Molly have cuckolded him. Speaking of Boylan, the same process is at work in “Circe” when the text has him using the odd phrase “Blazes Kate!” (U 15.3750). How to explain? The answer is that someone - probably Lynch - has come out with the old Gaelic expression for “nonsense,” Blatherskeit, a word the semi-assimilated Bloom either doesn’t know or doesn’t know well. But, as it happens, there is a Kate in the room, or at least a Kitty, at one point compounded as “Kitty-Kate,” so that takes care of the “Kate” half. The reason for the “Blazes” half is obvious enough. “Blazes Kate” is a mondegreen, composed equally of those two operations I just proposed, the inertial inclination to the familiar over the unfamiliar - “casual,” not “causal,” Kate not keit - and the emotive gravitation to the traumatic, Blazes trumping Blathers.
For Joyce, as for Swift, such misprisions are not, or not just, comic relief. They are not funny stuff on the margins of the main story. To a great extent, they are the story. Odysseus would never have made it to Ithaca without that “Noman” trick, and Bloomsday would have been dramatically different without the “Throwaway” bit. At the end of “Circe,” Bloom mishears fragments of the conked-out Stephen’s broken rendition of “Who Goes with Fergus.” (Tracing further back, Stephen was knocked out in the first place because a drunken soldier misheard his recitation of Blake.) Given his feelings about the Yeats set, Bloom is almost certainly unfamiliar with the poem. Hence his confusion. Again, we get the two operations: first, he doesn’t know who Fergus is, so he hears “Ferguson,” a common Irish surname. The “white breast” business makes him think this person must be a woman, and so “Ferguson” becomes “Miss Ferguson” (U 15.4949-50).
And then the second operation: the prostrate Stephen’s resemblance to Bloom’s idea of what his dead son might have been like makes him feel sentimentally paternal: he wants this young man to turn out well. So he thinks that a lady friend, say “Miss Ferguson,” would be just what Stephen needs, the “[b]est thing could happen him” (U 15.4950-1). He will return to the theme in the next chapter (U 16.1558-61), and his enduring mistake is surely part of why he takes Stephen home in the chapter following that. Considering the date on which it’s set, this may be the closest Ulysses ever comes to tipping its sentimental author’s hand. June 16: best thing that ever happened to him.
Many mishearings and misprisions follow this one, culminating, as I and others believe, in Bloom’s slumberous mumblings about roc’s eggs and Sinbad, which the awakening Molly mishears as “eggs in bed.” Again, the same two processes. One: whether or not Molly has ever heard of Sinbad’s roc’s egg, “eggs in bed” is the more familiar phrase. Two, she has her reasons for being sensitive on the subject, given that the husband who served her breakfast in bed this morning is the same one she betrayed this afternoon.
Will she follow through? By the end of her monologue there are least suggestions that she will dress herself up like a houri and serve him his eggs as if to a sultan; Finnegans Wake has a passage (FW 199.10-21) to the effect that she or some other wife in a similar mold does just that. But if so, what will Bloom, the Bloom whose orientalist dream of the night before could be taken as having forecast just such a scenario, think? And what will he say? And how will what he says be heard by Molly, feeling a bit silly, a bit guilty, a bit put-on? The one sure thing is that the speaking of words and mistaking of those speakings will continue.
Any serious exploration of this subject in Finnegans Wake would be a book. I wonder whether there’s a page that doesn’t contain, for instance, a mondegreen of the “Gopher Tuna” variety. Taken as an oral production, Finnegans Wake may arguably be described as an epic of mishearing - in other words, doubletalk, of the kind at work when Bloom turns “advisers” into “admirers,” or when some Englishmen misheard “fion uisge” as Phoenix, thus putting Phoenix Park on the map. According to one reading, persuasive to me, the book’s male principle gets into trouble - initiating the whole scandal-in-the-park rigmarole - when, asked the time, he answers, correctly, that it is noon, not realizing that this answer to that question was a common convention by which homosexuals identified one another. It is, that is, an example of the kind of coded double-talk formalized in the conventions of bridge players, where a four no-trump bid does not at all mean what it says, and in the “safe words” of S & M role-playing enthusiasts, where “Unhand me you savage bruit” can be just the usual fun and games but “Unhand me you savage artichoke” is something else entirely.
And then there’s Book II Chapter 3, in which much of text is generated by drunken pubbers trying to make sense of the staticky radio signal as its reception wanders from one station to another. There’s a kind of visual mondegreen on page 293, the book’s turning point, which graphically represents the result of seeing double and does a double-take on its four cardinal points to phase out the coordinates of a star of David and phase in the coordinates of a cross, B.C. to A.D., Old Testament to New.
But back to Ulysses: here is an old example of mine, published some time ago. I’m resurrecting it because it’s from “Oxen of the Sun,” commonly taken as the most formal, texty, exoskeletal - in short, the least mimetic - episode of the book. It is not. Its many voices are generated out of real-world hearings and, as always, mishearings. The sound of thunder is recorded in the punitive language of a Bunyanesque Puritan pulpit-pounder because Stephen hears the thunder and because it terrifies him (U 14.408-454). The phrase “staggering bob” elicits a rebuke in tones of offended dignity (U 14.1285-12980) because Bloom knows the term from his days in the cattle trade and because he has personal reasons - Rudy - for disliking any reference to misbirths.
In the passage in the accompanying diagram Bloom is in a trance, four minutes in duration, partially induced by staring at the red triangle on a bottle of Bass Ale, the result being a De Quinceyan fugue whose raw materials are the misheard or misunderstood words of the ambient talk-noise around him, Stephen’s “bullockbefriending bard,” for one example, mutating into “Bulls of Bashan and of Babylon,” surely with an alliterative assist from the ever-imminent formula “Blazes Boylan.”
Conclusion. In retrospect there are any number of reasons why Joyce should have found himself drawn to the Gopher Tuna route. In his 1904 essay “A Portrait of the Artist” he already envisioned a writing that would evince not the “iron, memorial aspect” of static states fixed in time but a “fluid succession of presents” (P 257). One way to do that is to keep the language from getting stuck, to keep the verbal ball restlessly in play. In language as in other ways, paralysis is ousted by parallax. Just as problematically pairing Stephen with Daedalus, Bloom with Odysseus, Finnegan with Finn sets up an unstable dynamic between two elements, so for blatherskeit becoming “Blazes Kate,” “fion uisge” become Phoenix. As with Stephen in the Shakespeare chapter and the Shakespeare he there presents, this linguistic habit of self-reinvention has made us accomplices (U 9.158). We don’t take meaning in; we help make it, participants in what is always a work in progress. The fascination with word origin, etymology, and folk-etymology which absorbed the Walter Skeat whose etymological dictionary the young Joyce read by the hour and eventually led to what Hugh Kenner once called the great English epic of its time, the Oxford English Dictionary(6), gets recruited into the substance and energetics of the Joycean fictional universe, a universe which keeps revising itself, from for instance, Portrait Stephen to Ulysses Stephen to Shem.
Which leads to one final example. In the same passage where Stephen meets the dean of studies and ponders the difference between their two kinds of English, the dean starts a fire with what the narrative consistently refers to as “candlebutts” (P 184-190). According to a search through Google Books, “candle-end” at this time, by a ratio of over a hundred to one, would have been the far likelier term. Instead, the homelier “candlebutt” becomes part of Stephen’s judgment that the dean is a dreary figure, someone fitly described as resting “on his hunkers” (P 185).
When I was in junior high, a kind of word game in fashion was naughty book titles. For instance, “The Yellow River,” by I.P. Freely, or “Cream of the Russian Army,” by Ivan Yakinoff. One of the best was “Under the Grandstand,” by Seymour Butts, because “Seymour Butts” was actually a plausible name. It’s infantile humor, to be sure, but Joyce liked infantile humor.
In the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses, we will learn for the first time that the Portrait’s dean of studies was named Father Butt (U 17.145). That, surely, explains “candlebutt” and “hunkers.” If “Christ, ale, home, and master” are English words, so are “butt” and “hunkers” - and that shifts the equation. The relationship between those two books is not one of sequel to original but of what happened once to what is being remembered now, as always triggered, parallactically, by some cue in the present, in this case the sight of Bloom lighting a fire in a posture recalling Father's Butt lighting a fire. Maybe it even helps explain why Stephen, making that mnemonic connection, leaves Bloom’s home, as “Butt” on an earlier occasion helped turn him from the church to art. Father Butt didn’t name himself, and it’s not fair - it’s as accidental as “throw it away” - that Stephen should have held it against him, should have let such an accident help make up his mind, but there it is: a happenstance verbal echo is probably part of why he went on become an artist instead of a priest, accident become portal of discovery. The kind of artist who will let such - one last time - Gopher Tuna incidents sway him is the kind of artist Joyce became.