The first section of Wandering Rocks concludes with
Father Conmee silently reading from one of the psalms in his
"rededged breviary," a little Catholic prayer book with texts
intended to be read at particular canonical hours of the
day—in this case "nones," the ninth hour after dawn. The
reading in the final paragraph begins with "Sin," a
Hebrew letter arbitrarily marking the beginning of one section
of the biblical poem, but as often happens in this chapter a
second obvious meaning lurks in the word to puzzle readers.
Should they pay attention to it? Two details in the immediate
context insist that they must.
The reading begins in preliminary prayers: "Father Conmee
read in secret Pater and Ave
and crossed his breast. Deus in adiutorium."
Then an "ivory bookmark" takes him to the relevant passage, "Res
in Beati immaculati." The words Beati
immaculati begin Psalm 118 in the Latin Vulgate Bible
(119 in other versions), a long poem that is divided into 22
sections titled successively with the 22 letters of the Hebrew
alphabet: Aleph, Beth, Gimel, and so on. Section 20, where
Conmee has left off reading, starts with one of these letters,
Res (or Resh). Its final verse is "Principium verborum
tuorum veritas: in eternum omnia indicia iustitiæ tuæ"
("The beginning of your words [is] truth: in eternity [are]
all the judgments of your justice"). Conmee then moves on to
section 21, titled Sin (or Shin): "Sin: Principes
persecuti sunt me gratis: et a verbis tuis formidavit cor
meum" ("Princes have persecuted me without cause:
and my heart trembles at your words").
Although "Sin" is a mere placeholder in the Hebrew
Bible, in an English text it carries a secondary meaning that
is hard to ignore. As with the non-ecclesiastical meaning of "superior" at the
beginning of Wandering Rocks and the vehicular meaning
of "carriage" soon
after, it jumps out. Readers may be inclined to dismiss it as
a verbal accident, but if they do they must soon come to
realize that the context makes it far from irrelevant. Father
Conmee begins reading section 21 just after "A flushed young
man came from a gap of a hedge and after him came a young
woman with wild nodding daisies in her hand. The young man
raised his cap abruptly: the young woman abruptly bent and
with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig."
Oxen of the Sun will identify these two lovers as
Stephen's friend Lynch and his girlfriend Kitty, and it will
confirm that they have been engaged in sexual activity in the
bushes. Sin, indeed.
As if this detail were not enough to validate one's suspicion
of having spotted an ambiguity, Joyce lodged a second one in
his text. It is one of the most brilliant examples of his gift
for finding just the right word in another literary text to
shape the significance of the allusion, telling readers how to
make sense of it. Before observing the appearance of Kitty and
Lynch the narrative quotes from the preceding section of the
psalm: "Principium verborum tuorum veritas"
("The beginning of your words [is] truth"). The principium
of God's words in the next section—the one that comments on
the lovers lying in the grass—is "Sin."
Once readers make their way through the intricacies of this
little puzzle and realize that their instinctive response was
correct, they are left with the question of whether they are
on the same page with the priest. After Father Conmee sees the
blushing couple he blesses them "gravely" and turns back to
his reading. Does he realize what they have been doing in the
bushes, and then perhaps spot an applicable pun in the Hebrew
word? Probably not: one gets the impression that he is as
blithely blind to the urgency of sexual desire as to the
sufferings of one-legged beggars, the horror of mass
immolations, the hard labor of turf-cutters, the bleak state
of "aged and virtuous females," the anguish of accused
adulterers, the damned "souls of black and brown and yellow
men," or the penny-pinching of impoverished tram riders. The
priest lives in a world of ecclesiastical mysteries and
celestial consolations while the rest of the human race goes
about the messier business of living their lives.
Just as the word "superior" suggests a presumption of
eliteness that Conmee cannot permit himself to dwell on, and
"carriage" an aspiration to aristocratic grandeur in which
only archbishops and cardinals may allow themselves to revel,
the strange Hebrew syllable in his breviary points away from
the main course of Conmee's journey, toward a dim recognition
that probably lies outside the field of his awareness.
