Glorious Drunk (11 of 738)

If this page were a Friends episode, I'd be tempted to call it, "The One Where Buck Sings About Drinking". But then again, Buck seems given to repetition, so it might be prudent to wait, so we don't eventually end up with "The One Where Buck Sings About Drinking Yet Again and Kinch Tells Him To Shut It Already."

The reason for Buck's exuberance is that Kinch is getting paid later in the day, with Buck going from borrowing a single quid to spending all of Kinch's income, four quid (pounds), on drinking. Buck indulges in a little word play that emphasizes the importance he places on money when he calls Kinch's prospective income "Four shining sovereigns," and "Four omnipotent sovereigns." Buck then bursts into a tune that starts...

O, won't we have a merry time
Drinking whisky, beer and wine

Buck tramped down the stairs leaving his nickel shaving bowl behind.  Kinch debates for two paragraphs whether he should forget the smelly bowl and leave it, and his friendship with Buck.  He ultimately decides to carry it, as he used to carry the bowl of incense at Clongowes (a Jesuit boarding school). He feels while he has changed since then, he is still in some way the same, a server of a servant.

Now, at least, we know why Buck refers to Kinch as the jejune jesuit.

Buck is cooking breakfast at the hearth in the living room, which is not well ventilated, as "a cloud of coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated".  Buck asks Haines to open the doors so they won't choke to death. Haines opens the first set of doors and asks the whereabouts of the key to outer door.  Kinch reveals it is already in the lock, and "when the heavy door had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered".

We finally meet Haines, the crazy Englishman from page 4, though here he does the sane thing and opens the door so that they don't choke on the smoke.  We find out that Haines is tall and likes to sit on a hammock when he is not opening doors. It also seems that having to open the doors is a usual occurrence and Kinch, being prepared, had left the key in the lock.

There are numerous interplays of light and dark on the page. We have "warm sunshine merrying over the sea", "two shafts of soft daylight" and the "welcome light and bright air" entering the gloomy living room. There is also Buck's gowned form moving "to and fro", hiding and revealing the hearth.  This serves to reinforce Kinch's ambiguous feelings about Buck.

Or not, maybe my brain is doing its thing and finding connections where none exist.  So I will stop staring at this page and stop thinking about Buck and the four quid he will borrow from Kinch that will make him an all powerful ruler of his drunken domain.

PS. I stumbled upon the "Annotated" Ulysses wiki, but the annotations are few and far between to date.  I wonder if the annotator succumbed to insanity after realizing what a sisyphean task it is.