“Dante and The Lobster”: It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first canti of the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him ... [9]; He leaned back in his chair to feel his mind subside and the itch of his mean quodlibet die down. Nothing could be done until his mind got better and was still, which it gradually did. [10]; For the tiller of the field the thing was simple, he had it from his mother. The spots were Cain with his truss of thorns, dispossessed, cursed from the earth, fugitive and vagabond. The moon was that countenance fallen and branded, seared with the first stigma of God’s pity, that an outcast might not die quickly. It was a mix-up in the mind of the tiller, but that did not matter. It had been good enough for his mother, it was good enough for him. [11]; The rather handsome face of McCabe stared up at him ... Now the barrel-loaf came out of its biscuit-tin and had its end evened off on the face of McCabe [10] ... the Malahide murderer’s petition for mercy, signed by half the land, having been rejected, the man must swing at dawn in Mountjoy and nothing could save him. Ellis the hangman was even now on his way. Belacqua, tearing at the sandwich and swilling his precious stout, pondered on McCabe in his cell. [15] ... ... Why not mercy and piety both, even down below? Why not mercy and Godliness together? A little mercy in the stress of sacrifice, a little mercy to rejoice against judgement. He thought of Jonah and the gourd and the pity of a jealous God on Nineveh. And poor McCabe, he would get it in the neck at dawn. What was he doing now, how was he feeling? He would relish one more meal, one more night. [18].

“Fingal”: Belacqua & Winnie - a very sad animal [23] a sad animal again [26]; They considered Fingal for some time together in silence. Its coast eaten away with creeks and marshes, tesserae of small fields, patches of wood springing up like a weed, the line of hills too low and close to view. [24]; disimproved [11] misremembered [26]; his feet in ruins [13] ruined voice [16] the high ruin [23] the lovely ruins [27] abstract the asylum and there was little left in Portrane but ruins [28] what the ruins are [30]; Belacqua asked if the tower was an old one, as though it required a Dr Petrie to see that it was not. [26]; His mind subside [9] He had allowed himself to get run down, but he scoffed at the idea of a sequitur from his mind to his body. [28] nature outside me compensating for nature inside me. [28]; Surely it is in such little adjustments that the benevolence of the first cause appears beyond dispute [30]; Descriptions, there was nothing at all noteworthy about his appearance [26] Winnie still sees, as vividly as when they met her anxious gaze for the first time, his great purple face and white moustaches [30] a brief satirical description of Belacqua’s person (given by Sholto, not repeated here) [31]; little fat Presto (Swift) [31]; enlivened the last phase of his solipsism before he toed the line and began to relish the world with the belief that the best thing he had to do was to move constantly from place to place ... it was not thanks to his preferring one place to another ... being by nature however sinfully indolent, bogged in indolence... he was at times tempted to wonder whether the remedy were not rather more disagreeable than the complaint ... boomerang, out and back ... his contrivance did not proceed from and discrimination [35] between points in space ... [36]; I know all this because we were Pylades and Orestes for a period, flattened down into something very genteel ... He lived a Beethoven pause, whatever he meant by that ... He was an impossible person in the end. I gave him up in the end because he was not serious ...’moving pauses’ ... a strong weakness for oxymoron ... Exempt from destinations, it had not to shun the unforeseen nor turn aside from the agreeable odds and ends of vaudeville that [36] are liable to crop up [37];

“Ding-Dong”: Emerging ... from the underground convenience in the maw of College St. ... Tommy Moore’s plinth ... loll against the plinth of this bullnecked bard and wait a sign ... //signs on all hands ... big Bovril sign to start with, flaring beyond the Green. But it was useless. Faith, hope and - what was it - Love, Eden missed, every ebb derided, all tides ebbing from the shingle of Ego Maximus, little me ... What he would not give now to get on the move again! Away from ideas! [37]; ACCOUNT OF PEARSE ST. - most pleasant, despite its name, to be abroad in, full it as always was with shabby substance of coming a going [38] DESCRIPTION OF THE PUB: a great major symphony of supply and demand, effect and cause, fulcrate on the middle C of counter and waxing ... the charming harmonies of blasphemy and broken glass and all the aliquots of fatigue and ebreity ... where ... all the wearisome tactics of egress and dud Beethoven would be done away with ... ... the old itch and algos crept back into his mind [41]; DESCRIPTION OF WOMAN: her speech was that of a woman of the people, but of a gentlewoman of the people. Her gown had served its time, but yet contrived to be respectable. He noticed with a pang that she sported about her neck the insidious little mock fur so prevalent in tony slumland ... She was of more than average height and well in flesh. She might be passed middle age. But her face, ah her face ... [was] brimful of light and serene, serenissime, it bore no trace of suffering ... [all this in ‘sweet style’] [41]; unforeseen with a vengeance, if not exactly vaudeville [42]; the fitness of Moore’s bull neck, not a whit too short, with all due respect to the critics ... Tommy Moore with his head on his shoulders [47].

“A Wet Night”: Doubt, Despair, and Scrounging, shall I hitch my bath-chair to the greatest of these? . Christian scrounging [47]; ... then to pass by the Queens, home of tragedy, was charming at that hour, to pass between the theatre and the long line of poor and lowly queued up for thruppence worth of pictures. ... the Fire Station opposite which seemed to have been copied here and there from the Palazzo Vecchio. In deference to Savonarola? Ha! ha! [48]; The Frica, ‘briefless martyress in rut’; Alba; P.B. [Polar Bear]; the homespun Poet and his little saprophile, an anonymous politico-ploughboy [50]; shabby hero [70]; When with indifference I remember my past sorrow, my mind has indifference, my memory has sorrow. The mind, upon the indifference which is in it, is indifferent; yet the memory, upon the sorrow which is in it, is not sad [73]; But the wind had dropped, as it so often does in Dublin when all the respectable men and women whom it delights to annoy have gone to bed, and the rain fell in a uniform untroubled manner. It fell upon the bay, the littoral, the mountains and the plains, and notably upon the Central Bog it well with a rather desolate uniformity. [after Joyce] [75]

“Love and Lethe”: ‘Reader, a gloria is coffee laced with brandy ... We know something of Belacqua, but Ruby tough is a stranger to these pages. Anxious that those who read this incredible adventure shall not pooh-pooh it as unintelligible we avail ourselves now of this lull, what time Belacqua is on his way. [80]; Perugino Pièta in National Gallery [see ftn. on ‘glittering vitrine’ preventing total statement] [81] (&c..

‘All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead’; It wasn’t true love. The true love was with another. ... I begin at the beginning, like an old ballocks, can you imagine that? ... whereas now it’s nearly the end. Is what I do now any betters? I don’t know [10]; It’s in the head ... They looked alike, but no more than others do. [10]; one black day, having nothing particular to do and turning to height for solace, he had paid his few coppers to climb, slower and slower, up the winding stones ... it is a sorry sight to see him solitary after so many years, so many days and nights unthinkingly given to that rumour of rising at birth and even earlier. What shall we do? What shall we do? now low, a murder, now precise as the headwaiters And to follow? and often rising to a scream. ... the man was innocent, greatly innocent [11]; overtaken (myself) by his anxiety, at least by an anxiety which was not necessarily his, of which as it were he partook. Who knows if it wasn’t my own anxiety overtaking him. ... my soul’s leap out to him, a the end of its elastic [12]; he moved with a mind of loitering indolence which rightly or wrongly seemed to me expressive ... Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it the time needed for it to love you and you it, then throw it away. [13]

BELIEF: I’ve disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallowed everything, greedily. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I’m not sure of it. There I am then, informed as to certain things, knowing certain things about him, things I didn’t know, thing I had craved to know, things I had never thought of ... free, yes, I don’t know what that word means ... at least no worse to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is black and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what is it, senseless, speechless, issueless misery [14]; when the time comes to draw up the inventory of my goods and possessions [15]; an instant of silence, as when the conductor taps on his stand, raises his arms, before the unanswerable clamour ... angelus (recalling the incarnation ...) ... [16]

THE SHIT: Unfortunately it is not of them that I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit. So I shall only add that every hundred yards or so I stopped to rest my legs, the good one as well as the bad one, not only my legs, not only my legs . ... the sun at its pitilessmost and the arctic radiance comes pissing on [17] our midnights ... Ma, Mag, or the Countess Caca, she having been for countless years deaf as a post. I think she was quite incontinent, both of faeces and water, but a kind of prudishness made us avoid the subject when we met ... knocking on her skull ... her ruined and frantic understanding [18]; And if ever I’m reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it’s in that old mess I’ll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of that poor old uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast ... this deaf, blind, impotent mad old woman who called me Dan and whom I call Mag ... [19]; I am full of fear, I have gone in fear all my life, in fear of blows ... on my way to my mother, whose charity kept me dying [22]; my prick in my rectum [20] social workers [24] exasperated good-will of the over-anxious [25]; It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life [25]

APGI: I have always behaved like apgi [recte a pgi/paralysis of the general insane], the fault lies not with me but with my superiors, who corrected me only on points of detail instead of showing me the essence of the system, after the manner of the great English schools, and the guiding principles of good manners, and how to proceed, without going wrong, from the former to the latter, and how to trace back to its ultimate source a given comportment. For that would have allowed me, before parading in public certain habits such as the finger in the nose, the scratching of the balls, digital emun[c]tion and the peripatetic piss, to refer them to the first rules of a reasoned theory. On that subject I had only negative and empirical notions, which means that I| was in the dark, most of the time, and the more completely as a lifetime of observations had left me doubting the possibility of systematic decorum, even within a limited area [25]; pebble in your mouth ... appeases, soothes [26] my raglimp stasis [26]; For when I try to think of that night, on the canal-bank, I find nothing, no night properly speaking, nothing but Molloy in the ditch, and perfect silence, and behind my closed lids the little night and its little lights, faint at first, then flaming and extinguished, now ravening, now fed, as fire by filth and martyrs. [27]; Chameleon in spite of himself, there you have Molloy, viewed from a certain angle [29]; Times Literary Supplement & Farts [29]

MATHEMATICS: Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself [30]; my bicycle ran over a dog [31]; For I always say too much or too little, which is a terrible thing for a man with a passion for truth like mine. ... I mean that on reflection, in the long run rather, my verbal profusion turned out to be penury, and inversely ... whatever I said it was never enough and always too much. [33]; ... happier, livelier, amputated at the groin [34] cullions [35] parrot, ‘putain de merde!’ [36]; Yes, I once took an interest in astronomy, I don’t deny it. Then it was geology that killed a few years for me. The next pain in the balls was anthropology and the other disciplines, such as psychiatry, that are connected with it, disconnected, then connected again, according to the latest discoveries [38]; my ruins ... whether it is not less a question of ruins than the indestructible chaos of timeless things ... a place devoid of mystery ... an end it seems can never come [38]; a sound which begins to rustle in your head, without your knowing how, or why. It’s with your head you hear it, not your ears [39] For if you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that’s what counts, to be done, to have done. [39]; restored in the face of nature’s pranks, to my old atarxy ... I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger ... its misery to stay, misery to go [40]; bicycle [41] sucking stones [42] knife [43] principle & principles [43] sense of values gone [43-44] my dear little sweet little future [44]; All she [Lousse] asked was to feel me near her, and the right to contemplate from time to time this extraordinary body both at rest and in motion [45]; For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible further on [46]; sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved ... stayed in my jar which knew neither seasons nor gardens [46]; understood ... understanding ... understood ... aesthete ... artist [47] eyes [47] taste & smell [48]

Geulincx ... black boat of Ulysses ... the futile wake ... which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck [48]; period of my life ... principle of advertising [50]; merciful torpor shot with brief abominable gleams [51] there was kindling no new seat of suffering or infection, except of course those arising from the spread of existing plethoras and deficiencies [52]

TRUE LOVE [9; 53] hole ... slit ... virile member ... But is it true love, in the rectum? ... I have never known true love after all? ... [53] And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose. [54]; God forgive me, to tell you the horrible truth my mother’s image sometimes mingles with their, which is literally unendurable, like being crucified, I don’t know why and I don’t want to. [55]; here lovers must have lain and exchanged vows [57]; from time to time I shall recall my present existence compared to which this is a nursery tale [58] Oh, it’s only a diary, it’ll soon be over [58]; two crosses joined [knife-rest] [59]; For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know that you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker [59]; time for lynching [63] resumed my spirals [63] these inventions [63] waves in storm and calm ... claws of surf [63]; my life has ebbed away [63]

SUCKING STONES 64ff. principle of trim [66]; deep in the immediate past [70] what a story, God send I don’t make a balls of it [71]; But I am human, I fancy, and my progress suffered, from this state of affairs, and from the slow and painful progress it had always been, whatever may have been said to the contrary, was changed, saving your presence, to a veritable calvary, with no limit to its stations and no hope of crucifixion, though I say it myself, and no Simon, and reduced me to frequent halts. ... My name is Moran, Jacques. That is the name I am known by. [84-85]; I drown in the spray of phenomena [102]; For, in describing this day, I am once more he who suffered it. [112]; Midnight struck, from the steeple of my beloved church. It did not matter. I was gone home. [120]; long anguish of vagrancy and freedom [122]; Physically speaking it seemed to me I was now becoming rapidly unrecognisable. And when I passed my hands over my face ... the face my hands felt was not my face any more, and the hands my face felt were no hands no longer. [156] To tell the truth I not only knew who I was, but had a sharper and clearer sense of my identity than ever before. [156-57]; ... ... Then I went back to the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining [162].

Language: ‘I tried to understand their language better. Without having recourse to mine ... I have spoken of a voice telling me things. I was getting to know it better now, to understand what it wanted. It did not use the words that Moran had been taught when he was little and that he in turn had taught to his littel one. That at first I did not know what it wanted. But in the end I understood this language. I understood it, I understand it, all wrong perhaps This is not what matters.’ (Trilogy, p.176); ‘Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly [...] the search for myself is ended. I am buried in the world, I knew I would find my place there one day, the old world cloisters me, victorious.’ (p.199); ‘But what matter wherther I was born or not, have llived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am’ (ibid., p.226).

‘And when I see my hands, on the sheet, which they love to floccillate already, they are not mine, less then ever mine, I have no arms, they are a couple, they play with the sheet, love-play perhaps, trying to get up perhaps, one on top of the other. But it doesn’t last, I bring them back, little by little, towards me, it’s resting time. And with my feet it’s the same, sometimes, when I see them at the foot of the bed, one with toes, the other without. And that is more deserving of mention. For my legs, corresponding here to my arms of a moment ago, are both stiff now and very sore, and I shouldn’t be able to forget them as I can my arms, which are more or less sound and well. And yet I do forget them and I watch the couple as they watch each other, a great way off. But my feet are not like my hands I do not bring them back to me, when they become my feet again, for I cannot, but they stay there, far from me, but not so far as before. End of the recall.’ (Grove Press Edn. 1955), q.pp.; cited in Antony Easthope, Irish Fantasy, English Fantasy: Beckett and Lewis Carroll’, paper in That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature: Transactions of the Princess Grace Irish Library Conference, 1998.);

‘And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no father land awar, bears me onward to no shipwreck. (Molloy; style of Samuel Johnson acc. Vivian Mercier; quoted in Anthony Cronin, The Last Modernist, 1996, p.257.)

All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. […] It wasn’t true love. The true love was with another. ... I begin at the beginning, like an old ballocks, can you imagine that? ... whereas now it’s nearly the end. Is what I do now any betters? I don’t know [10]

[O]ne black day, having nothing particular to do and turning to height for solace, he had paid his few coppers to climb, slower and slower, up the winding stones ... it is a sorry sight to see him solitary after so many years, so many days and nights unthinkingly given to that rumour of rising at birth and even earlier. What shall we do? What shall we do? now low, a murder, now precise as the headwaiters And to follow? and often rising to a scream. ... the man was innocent, greatly innocent [11]

I’ve disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallowed everything, greedily. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I’m not sure of it. There I am then, informed as to certain things, knowing certain things about him, things I didn’t know, thing I had craved to know, things I had never thought of ... free, yes, I don’t know what that word means ... at least no worse to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is black and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what is it, senseless, speechless, issueless misery [14]

Unfortunately it is not of them that I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit. So I shall only add that every hundred yards or so I stopped to rest my legs, the good one as well as the bad one, not only my legs, not only my legs . ... the sun at its pitilessmost and the arctic radiance comes pissing on [17] our midnights ... Ma, Mag, or the Countess Caca, she having been for countless years deaf as a post. I think she was quite incontinent, both of faeces and water, but a kind of prudishness made us avoid the subject when we met ... knocking on her skull ... her ruined and frantic understanding. [18]

And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose. [54]

But I am human, I fancy, and my progress suffered, from this state of affairs, and from the slow and painful progress it had always been, whatever may have been said to the contrary, was changed, saving your presence, to a veritable calvary, with no limit to its stations and no hope of crucifixion, though I say it myself, and no Simon, and reduced me to frequent halts. ... My name is Moran, Jacques. That is the name I am known by. [84-85]

I tried to understand their language better. Without having recourse to mine ... I have spoken of a voice telling me things. I was getting to know it better now, to understand what it wanted. It did not use the words that Moran had been taught when he was little and that he in turn had taught to his littel one. That at first I did not know what it wanted. But in the end I understood this language. I understood it, I understand it, all wrong perhaps This is not what matters. [176]

‘What puzzles me is the thought of being indebted for this information to persons with whom I have never been in contact. (Trilogy Edn., 300); ‘I was given a pensum at birth perhaps, as a punishment for having been born’ (Unnamable, Calder, 310); ‘Strange notion in any case, and eminently open to suspicion, that of a task to be performed, before one can be at rest. Strange task, which consists in speaking of oneself. Strange hope, turned towards silence and peace.’ (p.313); ‘What I speak of, what I speak with, all comes from them. It’s all the same to me, but it’s no good, there’s no end to it. It’s of me now I must speak, even if I have to do it with [this] language, it will be a start, a step towards silence and the end of madness, the madness of having to speak and not being able to, except of things that don’t concern me, that don’t count, that I don’t believe, that they have crammed me full of to prevent me from saying who I am, where I am, and from doing what I have to do in the only way that can put an end to it, from doing what I have to do’ (Trilogy, p.327); But the other voice, of him who does not share this passion for the animal kingdom, who is waiting to hear from me, what is its burden? Nice point, too nice for me ... Faint calls, at long intervals. Hear me! Be yourself again! Someone has therefore something to say to me. .. I. Who might that be? The galley-man, bound for the Pillars of Hercules, who drops his sweep under cover of night and crawls between the thwarts, towards the rising sun, unseen by the guard, praying for storm. Except that I’ve stopped praying for anything. No no, I, still a suppliant. I’ll get over it, between now and the last voyage, on this leaden sea. It’s like the other madness, the mad wish to know, to remember, one’s transgressions. (Unnamable, Calder, pp.338-39); ‘No, one can spend one’s life thus, unable to live, unable to bring to life, and die in vain, having done nothing, been nothing’ (ibid., 358); ‘[…] with regard to the noise .. it has not been possible up to date to determine with certainty, or even approximately, what it is, in the way of noise, or how it comes to me, or by what organ it is emitted, or by what perceived, or by what intelligence apprehended... (ibid., p.392); ‘... the words fail, the voice fails, so be it, I know that well, it will be the silence, full of murmurs, distant cries, the usual silence, spent listening, spent waiting, waiting for the voice ...’ (p.413); ‘You must go on, no I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (ibid., 414).