Figure of speech. As Bloom listens to the racket of
the printing press ("Thumping. Thumping.... Thumping. Thump"),
he muses that the human body is a kind of machine and he
applies the repetitive language to Paddy Dignam: "His
machineries are pegging away too. Like these, got out of hand:
fermenting. Working away, tearing away. And that old grey rat
tearing to get in." These sentences feature a lot of
repetition: "Thumping," "away," "tearing," the "-ing" suffix.
Rhetoricians called the type in "Working away, tearing away" epistrophe:
ending successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or lines with
the same word or words.
Epistrophe (eh-PIS-truh-phee, from epi- = upon + strephein
= to turn) is also sometimes called epiphora
(eh-PIF-uh-rah) or antistrophe (an-TIS-truh-phee). It
is the opposite of anaphora, which places the same
word or words at the beginning of successive elements. Gideon
Burton offers examples from a prose sentence by Ralph Waldo
Emerson––"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny
compared to what lies within us"––and poetic lines from
Shakespeare's The Tempest:
Hourly joys be still upon you!
Juno sings her blessings on you....
Scarcity and want shall shun you,
Ceres' blessing so is on you.
Seidman
distinguishes between epiphora ("the impressive repetition of
one word at the end of several sentences") and epistrophe ("the
repetition of the same word or groups of words at the end of
successive clauses"). Not only am I unaware of any classical
rhetorical texts that make such a distinction, but I cannot see
how he sees it working in Joyce's text. He identifies "
Working
away, tearing away" as an instance of epiphora, but this
is one fragmentary sentence, not "several." (It does, however,
involve the repetition of only "one word.") Things get really
complicated––needlessly so, I think––when he sees anaphora,
epiphora, and epistrophe all working together in
a passage
that really requires only one or two terms to name.
The term antistrophe seems to be used infrequently in
rhetorical theory. It originated in ancient Greek choral
poetry and drama, and is still used in discussing those works.
