![]() ![]() Joyce himself precedes the riddle with, “Observe the delightful inconsequence of riddle and answer.” We could perhaps end our interpretation there: the riddle is nonsense, an example of Stephen’s whimsical teaching style or his desire to torment his students of a higher social class.īut why include such a riddle if it’s just nonsense? ‘Tis time for my poor sowl to go to heaven.Īnswer: the fox burying his mother under a holly tree.įrank Delaney points out on his podcast Re:Joyce that when he was a young boy in Tipperary, this kind of nonsense riddle was common - riddles that were fun to say but had no greater meaning. Joyce altered the original, which went as follows: PWJ says of this riddle, “Though Solomon solved all the riddles propounded to him by the Queen of Sheba, I think this would put him to the pin of his collar.” It was a folk riddle that existed in Ireland in the early 20th century and was included in a 1910 book on Hiberno-English called English as We Speak it in Ireland by Patrick Weston Joyce (no relation). What really opened up my understand of this puzzle, though, was learning the origin of the riddle. We should take note any time they pop up throughout the novel since Joyce thought they were important enough to bear repeating. I’ve cherry-picked these three symbols because they recur frequently throughout Ulysses, and they are often attached to thoughts of guilt or death. This also applies to the John Milton poem “ Lycidas,”an eleven-stanza elegy read by Stephen’s students just prior to the riddle’s unveiling. For instance, Odysseus travels to the underworld in Book XI of The Iliad. Eleven has an association with death in many classical texts. In the first act of Hamlet, Horatio said of the ghost that appeared to the guards on the walls of Elsinore, “ it started like a guilty thing / Upon a fearful summons.”įinally, the number eleven. The cock can be associated with guilt as well, such as Peter’s guilt over denying that he knew Christ. Traditionally, foxes are associated with slyness and cunning, but also with guilt and hiding. A fox is a fossorial creature (there’s your vocabulary word of the day), meaning it digs up buried dead, here supposedly a grandmother. Let's examine that symbolism!įirst, the fox. If you’ve developed a radical new theory about the text, ask yourself, does it advance the narrative or help us understand a character better? If it doesn’t do those two things, then it might need further examination. The allusions, the stream of consciousness, the inscrutable puzzles, and those big rambly lists all have their own appeal, but Ulysses is a still a story, and Joyce was no slouch as a storyteller. What makes it enjoyable and worth re-reading, in my opinion, is its characters and story. ![]() Ulysses is, above all other things, a novel. After all, Stephen Dedalus himself said, “A man of genius makes no mistakes his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” Second, it’s best to favor interpretations that serve narrative and character development. You don’t spend years writing Ulysses just to fill it with meaningless errata. The first is that nothing is there by mistake. There are a couple basic truisms I keep in mind when tackling any particular paragraph in Ulysses. But then you realize the sun doesn’t generally rise at eleven, and what does this all have to do with foxes and hollybushes? Hamlet’s father gave him “seeds to sow,” I suppose, in the form of vengeance. That could be the particular soul going to heaven. There’s that other fragment of riddle just before the main riddle: “Riddle me, riddle me, randy ro./ My father gave me seeds to sow.” Ah ha! Father! Of course, the ghost of Hamlet’s father also disappeared at the dawn, when the cock crowed. Perhaps a father and son angle: God the father, God the son. “Bells in heaven” and “time for this poor soul to go to heaven” also sound religious. That cock crowing (crewing?) does seem to evoke Peter denying Christ three times before the dawn. It’s preceded by the lines, “To Caesar what is Caesar’s, to God what is God’s… a riddling sentence to be woven on the church’s looms.” So, surely there’s a religious angle to it. If you go digging online, you can unearth interpretations running the gamut from total nonsense to the riddle being… riddled with arcane symbolism. Tis time for this poor soulto go to heaven.Īnswer: The fox burying his grandmother under a holly bush. ![]() ![]() Deasy’s school, but also for most adult readers of Ulysses. The riddle, however, is not only unsolvable for the students of Mr. At the close of his lesson in “ Nestor,” Stephen’s students ask for a ghost story, so naturally he provides them an unsolvable riddle. ![]()
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