We have
reached the end of chapter 3, with Stephen continuing his walk on the beach,
observing what he sees and following his thoughts. We leave him on Sandymount
Strand, after he's looked for (and not found) the handkerchief in his pocket,
carefully depositing the bit of snot picked from his nose on a rock. He then looks back over his shoulder "rere regardant"
at a ship, "a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees" (3.504).
"Rere regardant" is terminology
from the language of heraldry and would be used to describe e.g. an animal depicted
on a crest looking backward.
So, the last
sight we get in this chapter is of a ship, the "threemaster" (threemaster, incidentally, recalling the
"two masters" Stephen feels he is serving and that he thought about
earlier). The ship's "crosstrees" recall Calvary Hill, where Jesus was
crucified. We know from Frank Budgen, a close friend of Joyce's who was quite
knowledgeable in the field of ships and with whom Joyce discussed Ulysses rather closely, that he corrected
Joyce about the term "crosstree" and said that it would be wrong in
the language of sailing. But Joyce did not seem to care and replied that he wanted
that term as he was going to need it later in the book (cf. Frank Budgen, The Making of "Ulysses" — a
very good read if you want to know more about their conversations).
Generally,
we may note that terms are of particular interest to Stephen, who has a
fine awareness of language and whose thoughts are often close to utterance
(i.e. he seems to think as he would speak or even write). He is interested in
variations of language, e.g. the language of gypsies (the poem "White thy fambles..." is a slightly erotic love
poem in Gypsy language), the language of heraldry, the lingo of thieves, the language of
monks etc. He experiments with imitative sound (e.g. while listening to the
water, "a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss,
rsseeiss, ooos " (3.456)). He tries
out expressions that would render best, even imitate, what he observes (the woman he watches on the beach "trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines
her load" (3.392)). He depicts
the movements of the dog on the beach closely, making him morph into other
animals (the dog seems like a wolf, then a goat, a calf, a bear, a fawn, a pard,
a panther, a vulture, but then also goes back to being very dog-like). The dog
is observed closely, with all the associations it brings up, including its running and the moving "toward one great goal" (3.351), which recalls the
manifestation of God that Deasy spoke about in Chapter 2 (note in passing that it
was one of Joyce's favourite points that "dog" spell "god"
backward). And he tries out words for phonetic effect ("mouth
to her moomb. Oomb, allwombing tomb"
(3.401)). Stephen also scribbles down his vampire poem on a piece of paper torn
from Mr Deasy's letter, which the reader never gets to see however (i.e. we
don't have the words and hence don't get to see the act of putting thoughts to
paper).
Finally, Stephen's thoughts return to the drowned body and he imagines its expected
turning up in a rather unsavoury way. It occurs to him, in between thoughts,
that "By the way next when is it Tuesday will be the longest
day" (3.491). We can deduce now that, since Tuesday is the longest day (June
21), and the day of the book is a Thursday, it is now June 16 (we do not know the
year yet at this point).
With the close of chapter 3 we have reached the end of
the first book of Ulysses. Chapter 4
will, in a way, open a new book.
Check out Aida Yared's homepage for illustrations of Ulysses lines. This threemaster is taken from her collection at http://www.joyceimages.com/chapter/3/?page=8
