The milk in the coconut – a hairy puzzle
U 12.976-8: Hoho begob says I to myself, says I. That explains
the milk in the cocoanut and the absence of hair on the animal’s chest. Blazes
doing the tootle on the flute.
Grant
Allen’s essay “The Milk in the Cocoa-Nut” provides a rather laborious answer to
the popular conundrum about how the milk got into the coconut in the first
place. Right at the start of his essay Allen states:
For many centuries the occult problem how to
account for the milk in the cocoa-nut
has awakened the profoundest interest alike of ingenious infancy and of maturer
scientific age.
Grant Allen in Popular Science Monthly (1884), May, p. 50
This was considered one of a number of
stock conundrums in the late nineteenth century:
It would be a curiosity to see the names of the men in
public life, to-day, who started out and received their first encouragement by
discussing the somewhat fresh and novel questions: "Whether Columbus was
entitled to more credit for discovering America, than Washington was for
defending it"; "whether there is greater pleasure in participation
than in anticipation"; "which is the more perplexing, a smoky chimney
or a scolding wife"; "which could more easily be dispensed with, fire or water"; and last but not least: "How did the milk get into the cocoanut shell?"
Transactions of
the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1873),
vol. 11, p. 250
But it had already become a popular
witticism at least forty years before:
... when that fat fiddle-player, George Prince Regent,
inquired of an old dowager of eighty-six, at what age woman became insensible
to the tender passion, he received the following simpering reply: - "Your
Royal Highness had better apply to someone older
than myself for an answer to that question," which fully accounts for the milk in the cocoanut, as the showmen
say.
The Satirist; or, the Censor of the Times (1832), 19 August, p. 269
The attribution of the expression to
showmen here suggests that it was considered at least ostentatious if not plain
vulgar at the time. Its appearance in a London publication casts considerable
doubt on the American origin claimed by some slang dictionaries, though much of
the early evidence for the expression does derive from America.
In 1904 this way of expressing that one
had gained a sudden insight into the true nature of a thing or a situation
clearly betrayed a lack of refinement on the part of the speaker:
I have led you through a very sandy desert. But now,
if I may be allowed so vulgar an expression, we begin to taste the milk in the cocoanut.
William James, "Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth" in The Journal of Philosophy (1907),vol. 4,
p. 148
In an early
draft of the Cyclops episode (V.A. 6) the phrase is used in a different context
from the published text: the milk in the coconut being that Bloom is exposed as
a calculating hunter for Mrs Riordan’s legacy. Joyce eventually transferred the
phrase into the interior monologue of the vicious I-narrator when Boylan is
revealed as manager of the concert tour involving Molly Bloom, and added an
unmistakable sexual innuendo, not least with the second part of the phrase (“and
the absence of hair on the animal’s chest”), which has proved so elusive to commentators
on Ulysses.
This turns out to be an as-yet undocumented
version of the standard form (“but not for the hair outside”) not infrequently
added to the first part of the idiom and popularised in publications as diverse
as parliamentary proceedings and Punch:
I have been unable to discover whether it was George
Selwyn, Machiavelli, or the Arabian physician Avicenna, who made use of the
remarkable expression, "That accounts
for the milk in the cocoa-nut; but not for the hair outside."
"The Victorian Parliament Legislative Assembly,
Thursday January 12" in Argus,
(Melbourne: 1860), 13 January
"My faith," said Lord JOHN, "I am
getting tired of this. Shall we never reach the Sun?"
"Courage, my friend," was the well-known
reply of the brave little Doctor. "We deviated from our course one
hair's-breadth on the twelfth day. This is the fortieth day, and by the formula
for the precession of the equinoxes, squared by the parallelogram of an
ellipsoidal bath-bun fresh from the glass cylinder of a refreshment bar, we
find that we are now travelling in a perpetual circle at a distance of one
billion marine gasmeters from the Sun. I
have now accounted for the milk in the cocoa-nut."
"But not",
said the Philosopher, as he popped up through a concealed trap-door, "for the hair outside. That remains for
another volume."
"Mr Punch’s Prize Novels" in Punch (1891), vol. 100, p. 85
Joyce’s version explicitly alludes to the
common belief that hair on a male’s chest is a sign of sexual prowess, and
Molly’s memory of Boylan on top of her confirms this: “down on me like that all
the time with his big hipbones hes heavy too with his hairy chest” (U 18.415-16). The absence of hair on the
animal’s chest seems to be yet another sneer at Bloom’s lack of manliness his
fellow-Dubliners allege. Contrary to his modern readers Joyce’s contemporaries
would have been well aware of the allusion that accounts for the milk in this
particular cocoanut.
Harald Beck
Idaho
Daily Statesman (1904), 16 April p. 3
