Saturday, October 9, 2010

sign sure this finance Jews day Joyce

Enter the following string of words in Google Books....

sign sure this finance Jews day Joyce

...and see what eight of the top ten hits are (scroll down for text):

.......


.......


.......


.......


.......

"Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the JEWS. In all the highest places: her FINANCE, her press. And they are the SIGNS of a nation's decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation's vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As SURE as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction. Old England is dying....They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to THIS DAY."


Or, put another way, which my search word order already suggested, and in all caps as Joyce wrote it, to be sure readers paid attention:

HORATIO IS CYNOSURE THIS FINE JUNE DAY


Is this correspondence between Deasy's classic anti Semitic drivel and that cryptic headline a coincidence? I claim it is not, especially when you consider Bloom's recall of the Hughes limerick about Jewish ritual murder near the end of the novel, and also that Nelson's Emma is known with certainty to be one of Joyce's sources for Molly Bloom.

This all suggests, rather convincingly, that Leopold Bloom is a representation of the great Admiral Horatio himself.... and also of the OTHER Horatio, who is anything but a 'cynosure', lurking in the shadows of the novel.

Cheers, Arnie

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