Hanched

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It perfectly suits the omnivoracious imagery of Lestrygonians to make a sandwich snap at the person eating it. And the conceit is not really all that fantastic: since plants cannot move to escape the creatures trying to eat them, they have evolved the defense mechanism of toxic chemicals that bite back when an animal takes a bite, causing it acute pain or discomfort. In mustards, the chemical is allyl isothiocyanate, a volatile organosulfuric compound produced when a herbivore chews on the plant and breaks its seeds. This oil is harmful to the plant itself, so it is produced only when the grinding of a seed makes an enzyme combine with another chemical. And mustard is produced, of course, by grinding mustard seeds.

One could argue that "hanched on Mr Bloom's heart" also does a decent job of evoking human physiological responses to hot mustard seeds. The aerosolized AITC chiefly assaults tiny pores in cells of the nose, eyes, and sinuses, but its gripping pains are also felt in the throat and bronchial passages, which might metaphorically be expressed as something snapping at the heart.

§ All texts of the novel before Gabler's, beginning with the first edition in 1922, had "hauched"––another actual verb of Scottish origin, though seemingly even rarer in most English usage. In a personal communication, Richard Kirkland has directed my attention to a definition in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language: "To cough, esp. to cough up mucus or phlegm in order to clear the throat, to hawk." Under that last spelling, the verb gained some currency in America––the Oxford American Dictionary defines "hawk" as meaning "to clear the throat noisily," and the American Heritage Dictionary says "to attempt to clear the throat by coughing up phlegm"––so it is conceivable that Scots speakers might have brought it to Ireland as well. But this meaning seems impossible to apply to the sentence in Lestrygonians. (It concerns the right part of the body, but hardly makes sense as an action.) And although handwritten "u" and "n" can look quite similar, Joyce's writing in the Rosenbach manuscript seems to support the latter reading. He typically writes "u" without an initial upstroke.

The manuscript clearly rules out another speculative possibility. If the heat of the mustard "haunched," it would be sitting heavily on Bloom's chest, like thighs or buttocks pressing on him. It is not possible to read Joyce's handwriting as "un," and no editor has chosen this reading. Readers should almost certainly go with Gabler's team and hear mustard snapping at Bloom's heart.