Hanched
Hanched
In Brief
As Bloom takes a bite of his gorgonzola sandwich, the "yellow
blobs" of mustard under the cheese declare their potency: "A
warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on Mr Bloom's
heart." "Hanch" is a rare verb from the British Isles
(Gifford calls it "Scots dialect") that means to snap at
noisily and greedily. The OED's definition is vivid: "To
snatch, snap at, or bite with violent or noisy action of the
jaws; said of large dogs, wild beasts, cannibals, or greedy
men."
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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 the seeds of
mustard plants.
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." There is no such verb in the
English lexicon. If this error of a typist or printer were
amended to "haunched," very different bodily metaphorics would
result: a warm shock of air sat down heavily on Mr. Bloom's
heart, like thighs and buttocks pressing on him. But no
published text contains this word, and Joyce's handwriting in
the Rosenbach manuscript can only be read as "u" or "n," not
"un." Readers should almost certainly go with Gabler's team
and hear mustard hanching at Bloom's heart.
