In Circe, when Bloom sings verses of the song whose
chorus
syllables Corny Kelleher has altered to an
Irish-sounding "Tooraloom," Paddy Leonard accuses him of
playing the "Stage Irishman!" A little later in the chapter,
after being burnt to a "carbonised" lump by the Inquisition,
Bloom jumps back into life as just this figure: "(In
caubeen with clay pipe stuck in the band, dusty brogues, an
emigrant's red handkerchief bundle in his hand, leading a
black bogoak pig by a sugaun, with a smile in his eye.)"
The stage Irishman, often called Paddy, was a stereotypical
theatrical figure: rural, poor, talkative, belligerent,
drunken, and totally unreliable, but often funny and charming.
This figure, born in the late 17th century and sustained in
theaters and music halls throughout the 18th and 19th,
generally insinuated the stupidity of Irish Catholic peasants,
but in some plays he could charm audiences and get the better
of more urbane rivals. Slote and his collaborators quote a
detailed description of his features from Maurice Bourgeois's
John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre: "The stage
Irishman habitually bears the generic name of Pat, Paddy or
Teague. He has an atrocious Irish brogue, makes perpetual
jokes, blunders and bulls in speaking, and never fails to
utter, by way of Hibernian seasoning, some wild screech or
oath of Gaelic origin at every third word; he has an
unsurpassable gift of 'blarney' and cadges tips and free
drinks. His hair is of a fiery red; he is rosy-cheeked,
massive and whisky-loving. His face is one of simian
bestiality, with an expression of diabolical archness written
all over it. He wears a tall felt hat (billicock or wideawake)
with a cutty clay pipe stuck in front, an open shirt-collar, a
three-caped coat, knee-breeches, worsted stockings and
cockaded brogue-shoes" (109-10).
The "clay pipe" was a staple of life for Irish
peasants, produced cheaply in great numbers. The "caubeen"
in which Bloom's is stuck is a beat-up old hat or soft
beret-like cap, from the Irish cáibin = little cape.
His "brogues"
are "dusty," suggesting that he has been tramping the roads,
and indeed he carries "an emigrant's red handkerchief
bundle." Slote quotes from Anna Marie Hall's Ireland:
Its Scenery, Characters, &c. an account of an Irish
emigrant so poor that he landed on the dock with nothing but
"a little handkerchief bundle in his hand." The mass
emigrations that started in the 1840s rejuvenated the figure
of the stage Irishman. Dubliner Dion Boucicault's plays The
Colleen Bawn (1860), Arrah-na-Pogue (1864), and
The Shaughraun (1874) contain several examples of the
type, presented fairly sympathetically.
It is unclear what "a black bogoak pig" may be––a toy
pig made out of bogoak, consistent with the
theatricality of the stage Irishman and of Circe, or a
living animal stained as black as bogoak by dwelling in sties
and bogs? The "sugaun" (súgán) by which Bloom
leads it is a homemade rope fashioned by twisting together
strands of straw or hay. In his Dictionary of
Hiberno-English Terence Patrick Dolan quotes examples of
such uses: "A single pig when driven to a fair has a rope or a
soogaun tied to one of its hind legs. A soogaun was also the
name of the straw collars put on to plough-oxen."
When the caubeened Bloom speaks––"Let me be going now,
woman of the house, for by all the goats in Connemara I'm
after having the father and mother of a bating"––his
non-standard idioms, dialectal pronunciation, and reference to
the west of Ireland complete the picture of a stage type.
"Woman of the house" is the English equivalent of the Irish bean
an tí (Dolan cites also the forms bean tí, bean a'
tí, and beantigh), now often applied to
landladies in the Gaeltacht. Dolan observes
that "after" is often placed before a participle in
Hiberno-English to form perfect and pluperfect tenses, so that
saying "I'm after having my dinner" means "I've just had it."
And Slote cites P. W. Joyce's English As We Speak It in
Ireland as confirming that the "father of a beating" is
a savage one.
This short speech briefly allies Bloom with other
representations of regional speech in the novel, notably the
Aran Islands dialect of the stage Irishmen and Irishwomen in Synge's
plays (a somewhat different species) that Buck Mulligan
imitates in Scylla
and Charybdis and Oxen of the Sun. It is
interesting in this context that Oliver Gogarty complained to
friends that by casting him as Malachi Mulligan Joyce was
trying to make
him into a stage Irishman.
