In the third chapter of James Joyce's
Ulysses, one of the novel's main characters, young Stephen
Dedalus, walks on the beach and wallows in angst and intellection.
Stephen is preoccupied with, among other things, prosody. He
composes a poem along the way. As he walks and introspects, he tries
on different metrical hats, much of it centered around tetrameter.
In drafts, Joyce had named chapters,
but in galleys he removed the chapter names. In Joyce studies, the
chapters of Ulysses are traditionally referred to by those
original names. Hence, the third chapter, which is neither named nor
numbered, is known as “Proteus”. Proteus is a sea-god who
Odysseus encounters on a beach in Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus
seeks information from Proteus, but to get that information from the
uncooperative divinity, Odysseus will have to seize and hold him
until Proteus relents and tells Odysseus what Odysseus wishes to
know. But things are never easy on an odyssey, and Proteus has the
power to change form, instantly metamorphosing into different
animals, each one difficult to hold on to or terrifying in aspect.
The parallel in James Joyce's novel is that Steven walks along the
beach while his mind explores many issues with his intimidatingly
educated and incisive mind, including the terrifying: mortality, the
nature of reality, salvation, and the eternal question of “will
anyone see me if, here and now, I....”
I will quote the first five paragraphs
of Proteus herebelow. The text is as printed in the 1992 Modern
Library Edition of Ulysses by James Joyce (Modern 37).
INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT
LEAST THAT IF NO more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all
things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide,
that rusty boot. Snotgreet, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits
of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them
bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against
them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di
color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane,
adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate,
if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
Stephen closed his eyes to hear his
boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it
howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time
through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander.
Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open
your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his
base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting
on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it:
they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs,
nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los
Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?
Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them
a'.
Won't you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?
Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A
catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the
mare.
Open your eyes now. I will. One
moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the
black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.
See now. There all the time without
you: and ever shall be, world without end.
So now I come to the point: the 1986
Gabler edition of Ulysses (Gabler 31) introduces an error into
the above passage—an error based on a misreading that is itself
based on an ignorance of prosody. That error has propagated through
other editions and electronic versions of the text. If one has an
even rudimentary understanding of English-language prosody—an understanding
far below that of Stephen Dedalus, let alone that of Stephen's Author—it
does not make sense.
I refer to the revision in the Gabler
edition (devision is more appropriate in this case) of the words “A catalectic” to the word “Acatalectic”.
“Catalexis” is a technique in
poetry in which a foot at the end or the beginning of a line has a
syllable lopped off. It can be used to emphasize a particular word,
impose a startling brevity, to unsettle the reader's rhythmic
expectations with a syncopation, or to break up a pattern to keep a
poem's form from becoming monotonous or predictable.
For instance, if Tennyson had decided
to “change up” the incessant ta-tum of iambic tetrameter in “The
Lady of Shallot” and changed “On either side the river lie” to
“Either side the river lie” or “And through the field the road
runs by” to “Through the field the road runs by”, by dropping a
syllable from the opening foot, that would be catalexis. William
Blake's “The Tyger” is a famous example of end-line catalexis:
“Tyger, tyger, burning bright”. The meter Blake employed was
catalectic trochaic tetrameter. If that line were acatalectic, it
would read thus: “Tyger, tyger, burning brightly.”
To reiterate: An acatalectic line has
no truncated metrical feet. An acatalectic line of iambic (or
trochaic) tetrameter has eight syllables, not seven. An acatalectic
line of iambic (or trochaic) trimeter has six syllables, not five.
So, for Gabler's change to be
appropriate, the lines of verse preceding “acatalectic”--the
verses in Stephen's stream of consciousness, so we know what he's
thinking about--would have to be acatalectic, not catalectic.
A traditional verse form often used in
Irish songs and poetry is the ballad stanza. Ballads are composed of
quatrains alternating iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter/iambic
tetrameter/iambic trimeter.
Here are the two lines of Stephen's
verse again:
Won't you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?
These are two catalectic lines from a
ballad stanza—seven syllables/five syllables. Here is what the
lines look like with an insertion to make them acatalectic:
Oh, won't you come to Sandymount,
Oh, Madeline the mare?
Admittedly, the “oh” in both cases
is ad hoc, but it clearly delineates (“delines”) what the
rhythm would be if the lines were acatalectic. The change of “A
catalectic” to “Acatalectic” in the Gabler edition is erroneous.
At the root of this error, and its
propagation thereafter, is ignorance of basic English-language
prosody on the part of a surprising number of scholars, some of whom
are quite eminent.
To re-reiterate, the two lines Stephen
recites to himself are both catalectic, a couplet, in ballad form.
They are, as he says, iambs marching.
And Stephen himself, following the row
of seawrack along Sandymount strand, “delines the mare”--mare
being Latin for the sea but conflated with the English word for an
adult female horse so that Stephen can refer to meter as “agallop”.
All through this passage, Stephen is
engaging in metric play. Let's take a look at the intermediary
passage between “Madeline the mare” and “a catalectic
tetrameter of iambs marching”:
Rhythm begins, you see. I hear.
By calling the passage out isolated and
indented similarly to Stephen's lines of verse, it becomes apparent
that it is itself tetrametric. But it is not purely iambic: the word
“rhythm” is a trochee. “Begins”, “you see”, and “I
hear” are all iambs. (“'I am's” is a pun that runs beneath
“Proteus” as a tacit organum. Many people are put off by
Stephen's introspection throughout Proteus, but a Joycean joke is
behind Stephen's angst. The Arranger has Stephen wrestling with
prosodic composition; Stephen has no choice as to what he can think
about: It is “I am”s all the way down.)
Joycean play is amok through this
delightful passage. “Rhythm begins” brings us (by a commodious
recirculation) back to Los, the Blakean
Demiurge. The music of the spheres is a testament to the rhythm
as well as the harmony initiated with Creation. (What Galileo
saw, God “hears”.) The conversational “you see” separated by
the period from “I hear” turns the period into the crux of a
chiasmus. “I hear” is a homonym for “I here”, which is an
iamb...so the first-person present of the verb to be inheres: iamb is
present, making it “I am here” by yet another commodious
circulation—while riffing on Stephen's earlier counterpoint of the
modalities of sight and sound: “Stephen closed his eyes to hear”.
An intriguing exercise in tetrameter is
in the sound of Stephen's unseen (sea <=> see) footsteps on the
seawrack of Sandymount Strand:
Crush, crack, crick, crick.
Seewrack heard. But not in iambs--the
world speaks to Stephen in monosyllabic feet. It is tetrametric, but
in Stephen's slow blind pace. One syllable, one foot, one step. It is
an interesting exercise in prosodic composition: To write a metric
line in single-syllable, stressed feet. Stephen is trying out his
Dedalean wings; a different rhythm to the same beat. And what could
be more catalectic than an entire line of missing syllables? After
all, the happy patter of little iambs proceeds heel-toe; Stephen's
cracking crush on drying wrack is flat: sole, sole, sole, sole.
- - - - -
Addendum I
This is the poem that Stephen composes
in Proteus:
On
swift sail flaming
From
storm and south
He
comes, pale vampire,
Mouth
to my mouth.
We
don't see what Stephen wrote on the strand until Chapter 7, “Aeolus”,
when Stephen recalls what he had written on a scrap of paper torn
from Mr. Deasy's letter to the editor on hoof and mouth disease
(Everyman 132). When Stephen hands in Mr. Deasey's letter at the
newspaper, one of the newspapermen, Lenehan, notices that the bottom
of the last page was torn off, and jests “Who tore it? Was he short
taken.” With “short taken”, the Arranger has given Lenehan a winking
reference to Stephen's catalexis. [Gabler here makes a change that
holds water, changing the full stop after “short taken” to a
question mark (Gabler 109), thereby reinstating the punctuation of
the first edition of 1922 (Dover 127).]
Note
the last line of Stephen's quatrain. The source for the meter
employed in Stephen's poem, and in particular for the last line, is
“My Grief on the Sea”, a poem by Douglas Hyde (Gifford 62):
My grief on the sea,
How the waves
of it roll!
For they heave between me
And the love of my
soul!
Abandon'd, forsaken,
To grief and to care,
Will
the sea ever waken
Relief from despair?
My grief and my
trouble!
Would he and I were,
In the province of Leinster,
Or County of Clare!
Were I and my darling--
O
heart-bitter wound!--
On board of the ship
For America bound.
On a green bed of rushes
All last night I lay,
And I
flung it abroad
With the heat of the day.
And my Love
came behind me,
He came from the South;
His breast to my
bosom,
His mouth to my mouth. (Hyde)
Stephen
appropriates Hyde's last line for his own last line, but drops the
first syllable, producing a catalectic variant on Hyde's original.
Stephen's thinking is focused throughout on catalectic meter. To
change “a catalectic” to “acatalectic” is simply wrong.
-
- - - -
Addendum
II
In
the Oxford World Classics edition of Ulysses, an edited and
endnoted edition of the original 1922 text, a note on the question of
whether the text should read “a catalectic” or “acatalectic”
quotes a letter from James Joyce to Harriet Weaver in which Joyce
writes “divide better A catalectic” (Oxford 785). The editor
concludes the note, “That ought to settle the matter.” Indeed.
-
- - - -
Works
Cited
Gifford, Don, and Robert J.
Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988.
Print.
Hyde, Douglas. “My Grief on
the Sea”. Poemhunter.com. Poemhunter.com, 1 January 2004.
Web. 20 March 2015.
<http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-grief-on-the-sea/>.
Joyce, James. Ulysses.
Facsim. 1922 ed. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2009.
Print.
---. Ulysses.
New York: The Modern Library, 1992. Print.
---. Ulysses.
Ed. Gabler, Hans Walter, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior. New
York: Vintage Books, 1986. Print.
---. Ulysses.
Ed. Johnson, Jeri. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.