Joyce, via Stephen Dedalus tells us, "Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience." And I could see it. The conscience turned in on itself, caught in a mirror realm of its most hectoring regrets that nothing can draw it away from, its thirst for peace of mind unslaked.
According to Weldon Thornton's Allusions in Ulysses, the phrase comes from the title of a medieval moral treatise translated from French into English of the mid-1300s. Ayenbite of Inwyt (Remorse of Conscience) became more incisive, though, when Joyce changed the first y to g and the other one to i.
To an impressionable eighteen-year-old, Ulysses opened up a cosmic vista of language, with infinite possibilities for distilling in words complex ideas and feelings. In the carnival of consciousness that unfolds in Dublin on June 16, 1904, remorse of conscience is just one element among a myriad. Transmuted into "agenbite of inwit," it contributes to what buoys Joyce's dense, heavy book: a lightness of spirit.
I've heard that the gargoyles on churches of the Middle Ages may have been meant to mock, and so drive away, angry or malign thoughts.
