Buster
Buster
In Brief
New Style. The final ten paragraphs of Oxen of the
Sun make up the chapter's last stylistic section. Like
the first section it seems bewildering to the point of
unintelligibility, but with patience and extraordinary
diligence a reader can make sense of most of it. Like Circe
it is dramatic, though without the character labels and stage
directions of that chapter. After a single sentence, narrative
disappears entirely and is replaced by a tumultuous cacophony
of voices uttering obscure bursts of mostly unfamiliar
language. The one sentence of narrative at the outset
describes the young men from the maternity hospital hurrying
loudly down Holles Street, arm in arm, for a bout of drinking
at Burke's pub: "All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering
down the street."
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In a 20 March 1920 letter to his friend Frank Budgen, Joyce
described the final paragraphs of Oxen: "it ends in a
frightful jumble of Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney,
Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel." He was still working
on the chapter when he wrote that brief account, and it is too
simple by half. The finished product has many more kinds of
nonstandard language, including Burnsian Scots, stereotypical
ethnic Americanisms, French, Latin, Spanish, and Greek. There
are bursts of onomatopoeia, Christian and Islamic prayers,
quotations from Nietzsche and Swinburne, fragments of songs
and nursery rhymes, playful neologisms, shouts of street
urchins, the voice of a bartender repeatedly announcing
closing time. Occasionally a voice can be reliably
identified––usually because it utters subject matter found
elsewhere in the book––but much of the time one can only guess
who may be speaking.
The slang vocabulary in the first sentence is not
particularly exotic. A "buster" is a drinking spree,
and "armstrong" means "with arms linked." Brewer's
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines "bust" as "A
frolic; a drunken debauch." Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner note
that Joyce took "buster," and other bits of dialectal slang at
the end of Oxen, from Heinrich Baumann's Londinismen
(1902), "a guide to London slang and cant for German readers."
They cite a similar use of "armstrong" in Edward Fitzgerald's
"Sea Words and Phrases along the Suffolk Coast," in his Poetical
and Prose Writings (1902). The image of the young men
linked arm-in-arm recalls a similar scene in Aeolus,
when Bloom sees Stephen in the street with other men from the
newspaper office: "All off for a drink. Arm in arm." It
recurs at the end of the paragraph with reference to a rugby scrum:
"Rugger. Scrum in. No touch kicking."
