James Joyce was having fun with language in Ulysses when he has the consciousness of Stephen Dedalus stream over the five vowels:
A.E.I.O.U.1
“A.E.” refers to George Russell, the Irish poet and essayist, and “I.O.U.” to the rumor that Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter ego in Ulysses, owes him money. Are the five vowels also an allusion to this passage in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost? —
Armado: [To Holofernes] Monsieur, are you not lettered?
Moth: Yes, yes; he teaches boys the horn book. What is a, b, spelt backward with the horn on his head?
Holofernes: Ba, pueritia [child], with a horn added.
Moth: Ba, most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his learning.
Hol.: Quis [what], quis, thou consonant?
Moth: The third of the five vowels, if you repeat them; or the fifth, if I.
Hol.: I will repeat them: a, e, I—
Moth: The sheep; the other two concludes it: o, U.2
* * *
Note the genial play of words and the capital “I” and capital “U” in the last two lines that rhyme (wryme) with the “you” and the “I” in Moth’s clever line immediately above.
Holofernes uses the word consonant to suggest “nonentity.” Why?—because a consonant requires a vowel to be voiced, and thus we have a binity, consonants and vowels, two units of speech, one requiring the other. Not one. Not two. And all language . . . riding on the wind of our insubstantial breath.
The play’s the thing . . .
Long live language, levity, ludibundity!
Notes
1. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al, 9.213. This is in chapter 9, the Scylla & Charybdis episode.
2. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost, (V.i.44-56).