Figure of speech. Myles Crawford's presumption that Stephen could be a journalist ("I see it in your face") stirs up a painful memory from his time at Clongowes Wood College: "See it in your face. See it in your eye. Lazy idle little schemer." In dwelling on the phrase Stephen employs the rhetorical and poetic device of anaphora, the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, paragraphs, or verses.

Anaphora (uh-NAF-uh-ruh, from Greek ana- = again, back + pherein = to bring, carry) means "carrying back" one's phrases to the same verbal starting point. Orators have often found great power in varying what comes after a simple repeated formula, as have poets in lines like John of Gaunt's praise of England in Richard II ("This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi-paradise, / This fortress built by Nature for herself / Against infection and the hand of war..."), or William Blake's indictment of London ("In every cry of every man, / In every infant's cry of fear, / In every voice, in every ban, / The mind-forged manacles I hear"). Novelists, songwriters, and rappers also frequently resort to this device.

Crawford's words take Stephen back to the time, represented in part 1 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when he was unjustly punished by the sadistic Father Dolan. The demented disciplinarian detects guilts in boys' eyes: "I can see it in your eye"; "I can see it in the corner of his eye"; "I see schemer in your face." In Aeolus Stephen compresses these remarks scattered through the passage in A Portrait into a smaller compass: "See it in your face. See it in your eye." The phrase comes back in Circe when Zoe says, "I see it in your face," prompting Lynch to recall Father Dolan's tool of punishment: "Like that. Pandybat." The crack of a pandybat sounds through the air, the top of the pianola flies open, and Father Dolan pops up like a jack-in-the-box: "Any boy want flogging? Broke his glasses? Lazy idle little schemer. See it in your eye."

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