New Style. "All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street....": ten bewildering paragraphs make up the final stylistic section of Oxen of the Sun. Like the first section––even more so, perhaps––it seems at first almost completely unintelligible, but readers who are patient and extraordinarily diligent can make sense of almost everything and derive great pleasure from doing so. The first sentence describes the young men from the maternity hospital hurrying loudly down Holles Street, arm in arm, for a bout of drinking at Burke's pub, but after that there is nothing like narration, only speech––dramatically immediate as in Circe, but without any identifying character labels, clarifying stage directions, or linear dramaturgic logic connecting utterance to utterance. All one can hear are intertwined voices shouting out fragmentary bursts of unfamiliar slang expressions. What is being said at any given instant, and who is saying it? Reading these paragraphs is like being in a crowded bar in a state of great inebriation, surrounded by foreign speakers discussing topics that change from instant to instant. Something wonderful happened, but what was it?

In a 20 March 1920 letter to his friend Frank Budgen, Joyce described the final paragraphs of Oxen: "it ends in a frightful jumble of Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel." He was still working on the chapter when he wrote that brief account, and it is too simple by half. The finished product has many more kinds of nonstandard language, including Burnsian Scots, stereotypical ethnic Americanisms, French, Latin, Spanish, and Greek. There are bursts of onomatopoeia, Christian and Islamic prayers, quotations from Nietzsche and Swinburne, fragments of songs and nursery rhymes, playful neologisms, shouts of street urchins, the voice of a bartender repeatedly announcing closing time. Occasionally a voice can be reliably identified––usually because it utters subject matter found elsewhere in the book––but much of the time one can only guess who may be speaking.

The slang vocabulary in the first sentence is not particularly exotic. A "buster" is a drinking spree, and "armstrong" means "with arms linked." Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines "bust" as "A frolic; a drunken debauch." Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner note that Joyce took "buster," and other bits of dialectal slang at the end of Oxen, from Heinrich Baumann's Londinismen (1902), "a guide to London slang and cant for German readers." They cite a similar use of "armstrong" in Edward Fitzgerald's "Sea Words and Phrases along the Suffolk Coast," in his Poetical and Prose Writings (1902). The image of the young men linked arm-in-arm recalls a similar scene in Aeolus, when Bloom sees Stephen in the street with other men from the newspaper office: "All off for a drink. Arm in arm." It recurs at the end of the paragraph with reference to a rugby scrum: "Rugger. Scrum in. No touch kicking."

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