Sardines

In Brief

When Molly recalls Bloom taking her out in a seagoing rowboat at Bray, the memory of that alarming misadventure prompts an association between her fine clothes and the fish she used to see on the docks growing up in Gibraltar: "I couldnt even change my new white shoes all ruined with the saltwater and the hat I had with that feather all blowy and tossed on me how annoying and provoking because the smell of the sea excited me of course the sardines and the bream in Catalan bay round the back of the rock they were fine all silver in the fishermens baskets old Luigi near a hundred they said came from Genoa." Many of the details here––a well-dressed lady, piles of beautiful silver fish, childhood, an Italian name––suggest an allusion to one of Ezra Pound's finest short lyrics.

"The Study in Aesthetics" was published in Lustra in 1916, a little more than two years after Pound started helping Joyce get his works into print. To my knowledge no other annotator or critic has yet detected an echo of this poem in Joyce's fiction, but it sets a scene that strikingly anticipates Molly's thoughts:

The very small children in patched clothing,
Being smitten with an unusual wisdom,
Stopped in their play as she passed them
And cried up from their cobbles:
        Guarda! Ahi, guarda! ch’ è be'a!

But three years after this
I heard the young Dante, whose last name I do not                                                                   know—
For there are, in Sirmione, twenty-eight young Dantes                                                        and thirty-four Catulli;
And there had been a great catch of sardines,
And his elders
Were packing them in the great wooden boxes
For the market in Brescia, and he
Leapt about, snatching at the bright fish
And getting in both of their ways;
And in vain they commanded him to sta fermo!
And when they would not let him arrange
The fish in the boxes
He stroked those which were already arranged,
Murmuring for his own satisfaction
This identical phrase:
        Ch’ è be'a.
And at this I was mildly abashed.

The children's cry of "Look! Ah, look! How beautiful!" comes in response to a woman walking along a cobbled Italian street––some dignified English or American lady, no doubt, and certainly dressed in something much finer than "patched clothing," because the speaker of the poem approves of the raggamuffins' "unusual wisdom" in admiring her. But then, three years later, this appreciator of civilized deportment is astonished, and "mildly abashed," to hear the same worship uttered in response to a crate of dead fish. The inference to be drawn from his aesthetic study is that the things of nature––unimproved by artifice, already perfect––contain a beauty as deep as anything fashioned by the hand of man.

Having lived in Trieste from 1904 to 1915, Joyce would have readily responded to the poem's rich sensory evocation of fishermen working on the docks, and he may well be winking at such memories by having Molly recall, not Spaniards or Catalans on the Gibraltar docks, but "old Luigi near a hundred they said came from Genoa." Other echoes of the poem, if indeed they are such, become similarly altered to suit Joyce's purposes in Penelope. Instead of a third-person narrator looking at elegant female finery and crates of fish, Molly herself remembers how her expensive clothes (white shoes, a fancy and delicate hat) were ruined by wind, spray, and waves as the rowboat pitched about, and she contrasts that unpleasantness with her happy childhood memory of sardines. The transition is effected by means of a conjunction, "because." Perhaps this connective records a logical choice that Molly made at Bray (the only reason I agreed to join him on his mad adventure was that "the smell of the sea excited me," bringing back those memories of the Gibraltar docks), or perhaps it simply signals her passage from annoyance to wonder (it was good to remember that maritime excitement, even if it cost me some nice clothes).

Pound sets up a contrast between the finely dressed woman and the fish. The boy's "Ch' è be'a!" corrects the blinkered aesthetics of the speaker, leaving him embarrassed. Joyce rearranges the narrative elements of his model by having the finely dressed woman remember how she admired the fish as a child, and he has a clear purpose in doing so. Just as Pound wants to suggest the limitations of his speaker, Joyce wants to suggest the limitations of all the men in his novel. The joy that young Marion took in the fish––"they were fine all silver in the fishermens baskets"––has never left her. She still experiences childlike wonder at the world of nature: "God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something." These rapturous responses to nature counteract all the thought-encumbered chapters that have come before.

Interestingly, sardines provoke wonder in another part of the novel. The Mandeville section of Oxen of the Sun, which presents everything in the hospital common-room as magical exotica, hilariously includes a can of sardines: "And there was a vat of silver that was moved by craft to open in the which lay strange fishes withouten heads though misbelieving men nie that this be possible thing without they see it natheless they are so. And these fishes lie in an oily water brought there from Portugal land because of the fatness that therein is like to the juices of the olivepress." Although powerfully refracted through irony, this depiction nevertheless presents the little fish as a silver, shining miracle.

John Hunt 2024

Sardines

In Brief

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