Wax and rosewood
Wax and rosewood
In Brief
In 1908, while living in Trieste, Joyce wrote this sentence
in a notebook: "She came to me silently in a dream after her
death and her wasted body within its loose brown habit gave
out a faint odour of wax and rosewood and her breath a faint
odour of wetted ashes." Telemachus reworks the
sentence not once but twice, making very slight changes each
time, and Stephen is still thinking of it in Nestor
and Proteus. Joyce's habit of dwelling on phrases
in this way, searching for the best way to express their
potential and repeatedly revisiting their implications, is one
of the most distinctive features of his literary art.
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The first time that Joyce frames the words in Telemachus,
he foregrounds the adverb "silently," substitutes the more
vivid word "graveclothes" for "habit," and adds a detail about
his mother's breath actively enforcing guilt in him: "Silently,
in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted
body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour
of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him,
mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes." In
the second passage he continues to play with word order, now
moving "In a dream" to the front of the sentence. He removes
the adjective "brown" and tones down the reproachfulness of
the breath: "In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her
wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an
odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with
mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes." Both
revisions decide that the "odour" of the
wasted body (unlike that of his mother’s breath) is not
"faint." Instead of giving "out" an odour, they give it "off."
Instead of introducing "her breath" with
"and," they do so with a comma.
This searching for an ideal shape within a mass of words
characterizes Stephen’s calling as a poet and also typifies
Joyce’s practice as a prose stylist. It is famously manifested
in two
sentences of Lestrygonians to which he devoted
an entire day's labor, looking not for the right words but for
the right order of the words. The recurrence of the
"wax and rosewood" passage––after its two appearances in Telemachus
it returns in Nestor as "an odour of rosewood and
wetted ashes," and in Proteus as "a ghostwoman with
ashes on her breath"––is also typical of Ulysses. Once
a phrase gains a foothold in the text it may return at any
time, pulling readers' thoughts back to the complex of
associations it first evoked. In the Circe chapter
this happens many, many hundreds of times, so that reading
that chapter becomes an exercise in recalling the entire book.
A rosewood casket. Source: thepineboxagency.com.