Put A Pin In That Chap
Post Twenty-Three
Among the many interesting lines in Proteus, the sentence “Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you?” is I should say, up there with the best of them. But what is Stephen and Joyce getting at? Some possibilities are considered below.
The most obvious in the chapter that Joyce later suggested might be known as Proteus, concerns the sea god Proteus himself. He lurked around the Nile delta, where sailors were stranded unless Proteus provided wind and waves. Menelaus was stuck there on the rocky island Pharos, just as Stephen will be stranded on a rock on the beach as the serpentine tongues of waves lap about him. Eidothea, daughter of Proteus takes pity on Menelaus. She explains why he’s stranded and that his only chance is to capture Proteus when he comes ashore with his herd of seals for noon slumbers. But that’s easier said than done for Proteus is a shape-shifter and will wriggle, shake and alter for all he's worth to escape. But pin him down and he’ll help.
So there’s our first interpretation: put a pin in Proteus to hold him down, just as Menelaus is equally pinned to the rocky island.
Our second and also pretty obvious, is that in this chapter of change and creativity, Stephen is trying to create. One might in a way, consider his musing as a sort of practical, testing out his theorems on aesthetics; all that very tricky theoretical stuff that Stephen tried to explain to Lynch in A Portrait of the Artist. Stephen is trying to compose a poem and it concerns a vampire and virgin blood.
We have the line:
“He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth's kiss.”
A vampire, a spirit residing in a no-man’s-land between human and animal, often a bat and able to change from one to the other. Killed or pinned down only by the plunging of a wooden stake through its heart. So that’s two.
The third is practical and runs from that lovely Joyce-created word, ‘almosting’. Stephen used it just earlier in the context of trying to grab hold of a dream before it disappeared up the flue of dawning consciousness. Here he needs to scrawl that vampire line on a bit of paper before he forgets it. He finds Deasy’s letter (yes, Nestor was of help in unintended ways) and tears off the blank end on which he can pin it down.
I think though my favourite gloss on the words relates to his erotic reverie. Ever since he imagines that the female cockle-picker gives him a sideways glance, he has uncharitably designated her a gypsy prostitute who can’t wait to get her lustful hands on him, her body he assumes in his poetic and vampiric reverie, being controlled by the moon and free of guilty restraint. He describes his sinful thoughts as ‘Morose delectation’ and fully expects the punishment which Thomas Aquinas says will surely follow. Not to mention that he fears going blind which may well be attributable to the same cause. These Jesuits have much to answer for and poor kid, he’s already on the look-out for vengeful thunderclouds which shall strike him dead. With sex on his mind, one may only imagine what’s going on in his trousers, “Alo! Bonjour, welcome as the flowers in May.”, he thinks, as his lust and his guilt vie for control. So, with his hand grenade in danger of exploding in his underpants, he’d better regain control by putting the pin back in it.
Whether he manages to do so or whether like Bloom in a few hours’ time (on this very rock?), he ejaculates into his trousers, is moot.
For more idle Ulysses thinking or to buy Russell’s guide to Ulysses: www.russellraphael.com
© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023
