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The word 'acatalectic' in James Joyce's Ulysses

Jorn Barger June 2000

I've been wanting to create a webpage for a single word of Ulysses, one that illustrates a range of important issues, especially the problems of 'correcting' Joyce's text.

On the first page of Joyce's chapter three (Proteus), the 1922 edition had (I think!):

Won't you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

Gabler's textual note: "Although the preceding lines are catalectic by whatever prosodic analysis one may apply to them, Joyce wrote and insisted on 'acatalectic' in the final working draft, in R [Philadelphia ms], in proof and in the autographed errata list (aE). The proof correction was changed back in another hand and, in the typed errata (tE), Harriet Weaver twice altered the form to 'a catalectic'. Joyce was either consistently in error himself or he imputes a shaky knowledge of the technical terms of prosody to Stephen."

Carla de Petris replies (in Sandulescu & Hart) that her 1983 edition of the chapter favored two words, reasoning:
- Stephen wouldn't make a mistake here
- 'mount' might be pronounced as two syllables (acatalectic)
- Joyce in 1902 praised Mangan's intuitive shift from trochees to "a line of firm, marching iambs"
- 'deline the mare' is emphatically catalectic

Latin "catalecticus", Greek incomplete, fr. to leave off
kata` = down, wholly
lh`gein = to stop
Wanting a syllable at the end, or terminating in an imperfect foot; as, a catalectic verse. [def]

"a type of verse termed by George Puttenham in 1589 "maimed" because it is missing a syllable in the last foot. An acatalectic verse is thus unmaimed or complete. A hypercatalectic line has an extra syllable." [def]

Greek rhythms were matched to dramatic forms: "Comedy sometimes used an iambic tetrameter catalectic, which was less grand than its anapestic counterpart." [defs]

McSweeny's examples: Hankthe Angry Dunken Dwarf

Poe: "...Yet what has been mentioned is all-- if we except the occasional introduction of some pedagogue-ism, such as this borrowed from the Greek Prosodies: "When a syllable is wanting the verse is said to be catalectic; when the measure is exact, the line is acatalectic; when there is a redundant syllable, it forms hypermeter." Now, whether a line be termed catalectic or acatalectic is, perhaps, a point of no vital importance- it is even possible that the student may be able to decide, promptly, when the a should be employed and when omitted, yet be incognizant, at the same time, of all that is worth knowing in regard to the structure of verse." [etext]





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