A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners - James Joyce [219]
2 (p. 10) the higher line fellows: Students at Clongowes were placed by age into three groups. The higher line was further divided into poetry and rhetoric; the lower line, into second and first grammar. The third line, for the youngest boys (including Stephen), comprised elements and third of grammar.
3 (p. 23) he had got those three cramped fingers making a birthday present for Queen Victoria: This quip is based in Joyce’s family history. A family friend, forced to pick oakum (recycled hemp) while imprisoned for political activism, became crippled in three fingers of his right hand.
4 (p. 31) The Paris Funds! Mr Fox! Kitty O‘Shea!: The “Paris funds” were funds under the control of the Irish National League (the successor to the Irish Land League) that Parnell was accused of misusing. “Mr Fox” was a pseudonym used by Parnell to hide his affair with Kitty O’Shea, wife of Captain William Henry O‘Shea. When Parnell was named in a divorce action by Captain O’Shea, on Christmas Eve, 1899, his political career quickly began to unravel.
5 (p. 35)—Didn’t the bishops of Ireland betray us.... And didn’t they dishonour the ashes of Terence Bellew MacManus?: Mr Casey provides a catalog of Catholic clergy who, he believes, betrayed their country; compare, on p. 28, Mr Dedalus’s slurs on two archbishops. Terence MacManus (1823-1861) was an Irish nationalist deported for treason; his body was returned to Ireland for burial by the Fenians, a gesture opposed by the church (in particular, Cardinal Paul Cullen; see just below).
6 (p. 54) The Count of Monte Cristo: In this 1844 romantic novel by Alexandre Dumas père, Edmond Dantes, prevented by intrigues from marrying Mercedes, returns as the Count of Monte Cristo to avenge his dispossession. Vowing not to eat in the house of his enemy, he refuses Mercedes’s offer of muscatel grapes.
7 (p. 69)—Here. It’s about the Creator and the soul.... I meant without a possibility of ever reaching: Stephen’s heresy is in suggesting not that the soul can never reach the Creator: This is an orthodox position, affirming our inability to effect our own salvation without God’s grace. But Stephen more radically suggests that we can never draw nearer to God through our own efforts, which contradicts Catholic teaching.
8 (p. 69) Cardinal Newman: John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), a convert to Catholicism, wrote Apologia pro vita sua (1864; A Defense of His Life) and The Idea of a University (1873). He served as rector of University College Dublin, which Stephen later attends, from 1854 to 1858.
9 (p. 91) ... the fountains of sanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul.... he might hope wearily to win for himself some measure of actual grace: Sanctifying grace is the habitual, “background” grace against which the Christian’s life plays out; actual grace is displayed in specific moments of God’s reaching out to aid the sinner.
10 (p. 92) Quasi cedrus exaltata sum ... quasi myrrha electa dedi suavitatem odoris: This is a quotation from Ecclesiasticus 24:17-20: “I was exalted like a cedar in Lebanon, and as a cypress tree on Mount Sion. I was exalted like a palm tree in Gades, and as a rose plant in Jericho. As a fair olive tree in the plains, and as a plane tree by the water in the streets was I exalted. I gave a sweet smell like cinnamon and aromatical balm. I yielded a sweet odor like the best myrrh” (Douay version).
11 (p. 94) first beatitude ... second beatitude: The beatitudes are the blessings pronounced by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3-4): “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land” (Douay version).
12 (pp. 95-96)—Remember only thy last things and thou shalt not sin for ever: