Buttended a bland old isaac

• Joyce's letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver of 15 November 1926: "Parnell ousted Isaac Butt from leadership"

• Isaac Butt: Irish Protestant lawyer who began the Home Rule Party which was later led by Charles Stewart Parnell → buttended
  • Third Census of Finnegans Wake
  • Re: Etymology as a leisure actrivity & The 'Wake'

• Butthead: Parnell's nickname as a boy (from his habit of charging into others who incurred his displeasure)

• butt: (n) 1. "thick end," O.E. buttuc "end, small piece of land," akin to O.N. butr "short." In sense of "human posterior" it is recorded from 1450. Meaning "remainder of a smoked cigarette" first recorded 1847; 2. "target of a joke," 1616, originally "target for shooting practice" (1345), from O.Fr. but "aim, goal, end," perhaps from butte "mound, knoll," from Frank. *but (cf. O.N. butr "long of wood"), which would connect it with butt(1). [1]

• to butt: (v) "hit with the head," c.1200, from Anglo-Norm. buter, from O.Fr. boter "to thrust against," from V.L. *bottare "thrust," or from Frankish (cf. O.N. bauta, Low Ger. boten "to strike, beat"), from P.Gmc. *butan, from PIE base *bhau- "to strike" (see batter (v.)). To butt in "rudely intrude" is Amer.Eng., 1900. [2]

• to buttend → germ. slang verarschen lit. "to butt s.o." i.e. "to kid s.o., to take s.o. for a ride"
  • Genesis 27:35-36: "And he said, Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing. / And he said, Is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; and, behold, now he hath taken away my blessing. And he said, Hast thou not reserved a blessing for me?"

• to buttend: have sex a tergo (doggy style)

• buttended → bartended
  • Genesis 27:25: "And he said, Bring [it] near to me, and I will eat of my son's venison, that my soul may bless thee. And he brought [it] near to him, and he did eat: and he brought him wine, and he drank."

• butted → goat → Jacob's goatskin (Genesis 27) → the zodiacal sign of Capricorn?

• bed-ended: Jacob sat at Isaac's bed when he tricked him

• buttended: struck with the butt-end of a gun

• buttended: → pretended → scad

• Butt Bridge: a bridge over the River Liffey in Dublin

• bland: dull, uninspiring; tasteless

• blind → Isaac

• Isaac: son of Abraham, second of the patriarchs and father to Jacob and Esau. Isaac was fooled into blessing Jacob, the younger son (who had the aid of his mother, Rebecca), instead of Esau, the elder son, when Jacob wore a goatskin on his arms and neck in order to appear as his more hairy brother

• eye-sick: i.e. blind

• I suck: anticipation of the blow-job scene on page 11f.

• Grand Old Man: an epithet applied to Gladstone by his supporters

• Isaac Bickerstaff: a persona or pseudonym used by Jonathan Swift

• to butt, in combination with a *child* and *blindness*, appears in Ulysses, ch 8, in the context of childbirth: "Child's head too big: forceps. Doubled up inside her trying to butt its way out blindly, groping for the way out."

Commentary

• Parnell and Butt as Shem and Shaun. Shem and Shaun are associated with the bedroom door; this, the fourth of seven clauses in this paragraph, corresponds to "swerve of shore" in the first paragraph, the 4th of 7 elements in a second circuit of HCE's bedroom