Buck, trippant
Buck, trippant
In Brief
Authorial simile in Proteus briefly changes the dog
on the beach into a different animal: "Suddenly he made off
like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a
lowskimming gull." Further protean animal metamorphoses ensue,
anticipating the kaleidoscopic transformations of the dog in Circe.
The comparisons must be instances of free indirect narration
approximating the contents of Stephen's consciousness, because
soon after the first of them his interior monologue turns the
dog into a deer, using the language of heraldry: "On a field
tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired." At the end of the
chapter, Stephen himself is presented in the language of
heraldry.
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In a personal communication, Ole Bønnerup offers the wonderful observation that Stephen's "buck, trippant" echoes Mulligan's characterization of himself in Telemachus: "Tripping and sunny like the buck himself." But Stephen manages to map this remembered phrase onto technical terminology. In the language of heraldry, "passant" refers to an animal walking past the viewer, looking straight ahead. (If he looks at the viewer, the word "gardant" is added.) Unlike other animals, a deer depicted in this posture is called "trippant." Stephen presumably sees the dog moving across his field of vision in this way. He also sees it "On a field tenney" (tenné = orange or tawny, i.e. the beach), "proper" (in his natural colors, i.e. not changed by demands of iconography), and "unattired" (without antlers, i.e., a dog).
All of this happens in the midst of the narrative's slightly more realistic depiction of the animal. When the hare-dog hears its master calling, it comes back, now sounding vaguely like a horse or deer, and stops at the water's edge to watch more life-forms approaching: "He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenny a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking." "Seamorse," which the OED identifies as an archaic name for a walrus, captures the heaviness of the breaking waves. "Serpented" captures their sinuous many-headed advance. "Every ninth" foregrounds the human habit of looking for patterns in the fluctuations of magnitude in incoming waves.
In the following paragraph, the dog becomes a bear: "The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning." And a wolf: "Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting from his jaws." And a cow: "His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf's gallop." In the paragraph after that, he plays the part of the fox in Stephen's riddle: "His hindpaws then scattered the sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved. Something he buried there, his grandmother." And finally he leaves in a flurry of changing forms: "He rooted in the sand, dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spousebreach, vulturing the dead."
Thornton traces the leopard and panther to several works in
the medieval tradition of fantastic bestiaries. The most
relevant seems to be the encyclopedic compendium called De
Proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things),
written in the 13th century by a Franciscan friar named
Bartholomeus Anglicus (Bartholomew the Englishman) and
translated into English in the late 14th century by a Cornish
writer named John de Trevisa. The OED quotes this
sentence from the work: "Leopardus is a cruel beeste and is
gendered in spowsebreche [i.e., adultery] of a parde and of a
lionas." On the other hand, the "fury of his claws"
may justify William Schutte's suggestion that Joyce is
following Brunetto Latini's Il Tesoro, which
explains why the female panther gives birth only once: her
young will not wait for the proper time and tear their way out
of her womb.
In the final paragraph of Proteus Stephen himself is
described in heraldic terms as he looks back over its
shoulder: "He turned his face over a shoulder, rere
regardant." In James Joyce and Heraldry
(SUNY Press, 1986), Michael J. O'Shea notes that "None of the
English sources to which I have referred uses the expression
'rere regardant' (they simply use 'regardant' to describe the
lion looking back over its shoulder) except Barron. But Barron
is citing old French usage" (181). The fact that "regardant"
was used to describe lions extends the web of connections to
still one more animal image: "The lions couchant on the
pillars" of Mr. Deasy's gateway at the end of Nestor. There,
Stephen turns back at the gate and sees the sun fling spangles
of light on the "wise shoulders" of his Nestor. At the end of
Proteus he looks back over his own shoulder to see the
masts of a ship evocative of the homecoming of Ulysses.
