Words in _The_World_

[Julian.West@mac.dartmouth.edu]

   Just what everyone wanted:  more Joycean pedantry about _TSW_!

   Ed Suranyi (?) yesterday made the keen observation that Kate has
   made the appropriate decision of focussing on Molly's ultimate "yes".

   More on that, and on two other words that may have been overlooked.

    "yes" represents Molly's great apotheosis at the end of the chapter,
   as readers of Jon Drukman's transcription will have noticed.  It
   is both the first word of the chapter ["Yes because he never did
   a thing like that before..."] and the last ["...and yes I said yes I will
Yes."]
   Consequently, it is the last word of the entire book.  It probably 
   represents her last thought before falling asleep in the early morning
   hours of June 17.

     "yes" has a relative frequency of  .00375 in "Penelope" as opposed
     to .00135 in _Ulysses_ as a whole.  Looked at another way, its
     84 occurences in Molly's monologue represent over 23% of
     its appearances in the book.  The monologue contains only 8.5%
     of the words in _Ulysses_ [my estimate].  The word "yes" is
     thus clearly linked to Molly.

    "mmmmm" is the flip side of "yes".  Molly's _first_ word spoken in
    _Ulysses_, and likely her first thought of the day on June 16, 1904,
    is "Mn".  Although it does not recur (there is a "mm", but in her
    husband Leopold Bloom's thoughts) this word is strongly associated  
    to Molly.  In its two letters it embodies the ambiguity of yes/no.
    Her husband instantly translates it for us as "No", but clearly this
    translation is necessary!  Molly, in her embodiment of the female
    principle, transcends male, boolean logic.

    I'll transcribe the exchange:

         -- You don't want anything for breakfast?
           A sleepy soft grunt answered:
         -- Mn.
            No. She didn't want anything. ...
                                                         [chapter 4, middle of
second page;
                                                          page 46 in Penguin
ed.]

    The third word, easiest to overlook is "he".  "He" is also overrepresented
     in "Penelope", with a relative frequency of .0193 as opposed to .0153
     in the book as a whole. Its 433 occurences in "Penelope" represent
     10.7% of its total number of appearances.

   But this relatively small difference in frequency drastically 
    underestimates the importance of "he" in Penelope.  The pronoun
    appears universally _without_antecedents_.  Molly frequently uses
     "he" to refer to completely different men within a line or two of
    one another.  Even in her remembrances of her marriage proposal,
    she is filtering in thoughts of an adulterous liaison earlier in the day,
    of her first sexual experiences in Gibraltar, of a young student whom
    her husband has just rescued from adversity, etc.  Considerable
    familiarity with the text of _Ulysses_ is required to differentiate
    between these elliptical antecedents.

   "He" appears 4 times in _TSW_, "his" twice and "him" once.
    [My counts, made of course without Kate's transcription of the lyrics.]
 

   Conclusion:  in focussing on these three easily overlooked words
   "Yes" "mn" and "he", Kate betrays considerable sophistication
   in her handling of the literary source material.  Any surprises?


  ------------------------------------------ Julian -----------
 " The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. " 
                                                                  --
attribution, anyone?
  ------------------------------------------------------------