Joyce

“Yet may we not see still the brontoichthyan form outlined aslumbered, even in our own nighttime by the sedge of the troutling stream that Bronto loved and Brunto has a lean on. Hiccubat edilis. Apud libertinam parvulam.”

                                                                                    -James Joyce

This quote has a lot going on within in and some of the techniques I saw were imagery, polysemy, and onomatopoeia. The meaning of this quote starts talking about a Brontosaurus specifically. In the first sentence, it describes the edge of a stream at night where there are fish outlined but we just can’t see them. Then the next sentence translates to mean, "here lies the edible man. By the tiny freedwoman." I think the word edible stands for more than one meaning (polysemy) because it is talking about the dinosaur that likes to eat fish. Although the quote is saying that the man, the dinosaur, is edible which is outlandish because a dinosaur cannot be edible. Brontosauruses were herbivores which is another reason that the word edible could be being used in this sentence. On the other hand, the dinosaur could be edible by death. I think he uses the word man instead because death can sometimes only be thought of in humanistic ways. So maybe the dinosaur was edible by death. I relate this part of the quote to death because the sentence starts out with “Here lies…” which usually is on a grave or tombstone. The odd thing about the last part of the quote is that it talks about a freedwoman. The way the sentence is arranged says that the “edible man” is laid to rest with a freedwoman. Joyce chooses to make up a lot of his words in this novel, which is just what Lear and Carroll did for their poems. All three authors did this because they wanted to keep the context of the word the same but also make the phonetic piece of the sentence. For example the word “troutling” was made up to sound like the word trattling to take on two different meanings. Trattling could have been used to describe the sound of the stream (onomatopoeia) but also the trout in the word could be describing the fish in the stream. Also Carroll was famous for using polysemy, which is just what Joyce did in just about every sentence in this novel. “Brontoichthyan” was another word that joined two words together. First there is the beginning of the word Bronto- which in Greek means thunder. The last part of the word –ichthyan which made from ichtyal. Ichtyal means of, pertaining to, or characteristic of fishes which I think relates to the stream. I still can’t figure out where thunder fits into the context of this quote. Overall this was the analysis I percieved from this quote. Analyzing this quote made me see just how much Joyce used polysemy to choose what he wrote.