Cuckoo
Cuckoo
In Brief
The "Cuckoo" sounds that conclude Nausicaa come from
a "clock on the mantelpiece in the priest's house" next to the
Star of the Sea church, and their number tells the time of
day, 9 PM. But the word also recalls a Shakespearean song
referenced by Buck Mulligan in Scylla and Charybdis in
which "Cuckoo" is a "word of fear" to married men, betokening
sexual betrayal. The clock's call performs that significance
for the listening Bloom, just as the melody of St. George's
bells earlier became a nursery
rhyme in his ears while telling the time.
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The words "cuckold" (male) and "cuckquean" (female) are
derived from "cuckoo," probably because some cuckoo species
lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, tricking those
strangers into expending energy on the survival of offspring
genetically foreign to them. (To make matters worse, cuckoo
hatchlings often roll the genuine eggs out of the nest,
killing off their competitors.) The analogy does not seem ever
to have been very exact, as the cuckoo benefits from such
deception while its human equivalents suffer from it: the
cuckold is like the tricked bird, investing energy in raising
offspring not his own, and the cuckquean is tied to a male who
sows his genes like wild oats and cannot be depended on to
provide for her young. But the superficial resemblance was
enough to inspire a vibrant addition to the English language.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the
French and Middle English cuccu (a name apparently
imitative of the familiar two-note call now used in cuckoo
clocks) morphed into the Norman French cucuald and the
Middle English cukeweld and cokewold. (In
France, a cuckold is simply a cocu.)
Shakespeare, whose decades-long preoccupation with sexual
infidelity birthed an endless string of agonized utterances
about cuckolds and the horns that grow from their foreheads (a
separate story), understood the linkage between these words.
When Stephen says that "His unremitting intellect is the
hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall
suffer," Mulligan quotes from one of his plays: "— Cuckoo!
Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!"
He is recalling one of two remarkable songs at the end of Love's
Labour's Lost, performed by men playing Spring and
Winter who imitate respectively the calls of the cuckoo and
the owl. In the spring song, the cuckoo's call evokes
cuckoldry:
When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then on every tree
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
"Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo"—O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,
And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks;
When turtles tread, and rooks and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks,
The cuckoo then on every tree
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
"Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo"—O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
Instead of perching a live bird on a blossoming tree, Joyce inserts a mechanical bird into his text. But its call is the same, and a married man is lying nearby to hear it. What's good for the cuckquean is good for the cuckold, of course: Bloom has spent the first part of Nausicaa engaging in virtual sex with a young woman who is not his wife, in the venerable tradition of middle-aged male infidelity: "Chance. We'll never meet again. But it was lovely. Goodbye, dear. Thanks. Made me feel so young." Nevertheless, the notes sounding in his ears are fearful ones, and the narrative takes pains to call attention to his sad state: "Because it was a little canarybird bird that came out of its little house to tell the time that Gerty MacDowell noticed the time she was there because she was as quick as anything about a thing like that, was Gerty MacDowell, and she noticed at once that that foreign gentleman that was sitting on the rocks looking was / Cuckoo." The sound suffuses the evening air with melancholy.
