"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, if he
read Pound's poem, have readily responded to its 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).
The joy that young Molly, like young "Dante," took in beautiful
fish––"
they were fine all silver in the fishermens baskets"––has
never left her. Unlike most of the men in
Ulysses 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." Molly's simple responsiveness to
the miracles of nature counteracts all the thought-encumbered
chapters that have come before, much as the boy's
"Ch' è
be'a!" corrects the blinkered aesthetics of the speaker of
Pound's poem.
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.
