The Cast of Characters: A Reading of Ulysses 9780300159509

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The Cast of Characters

A Reading of Ulysses

Yale University Press

New Haven and London

For Rosemary and Catherine and in memory of Bess and Dave Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund. Copyright 0 1999 by Yale University. All rights reserved. Extracts from Ulyrser and exceptionally from two letters are reproduced with the permission of the Estate of James Joyce, who are the copyright holders. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Caslon type by Tseng Information Systems. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schwaber, Paul, 1936T h e cast of characters : a reading of Ulysses / Paul Schwaber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. I S B N 0-300-07805-6 (cl : alk. paper) I. Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses. 2. Psychological fiction, English-Irish authors-History and criticism. 3. Psychoanalysis and literature-IrelandHistory-20th century 4. Joyce, James, 1882-1941-Knowledge-Psychology. 5. Characters and characteristics in literature. 6. Psychology in literature. 7. Ireland-In literature. I. Title. P R ~ O I ~ . O ~ 1999 U ~ ~ I ~ 823'.91~-dcz1 99-13446

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. T h e paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources

Acknowledgments / vii

Introduction / xi CHAPTER I

Democratic Vistas /

I

CHAPTER 2

"What the Hell Are You Driving At?" Stephen Dedalus' Shakespeare / 40 CHAPTER 3 The Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom / 79

CHAPTER

4

Vicissitudes of Anger /

121

5 The Odd Couple / 167 CHAPTER

CHAPTER 6 The Vitality of Molly Bloom / 198

References / zz5 Index / 2 3 0

Joyce scholars have a great boon, for the w o ~ kproves endlessly f a s ~ i n a t i n ~ - ~ l a ~too. f u l But Joyce also has been fortunate in his commentators; he has attracted vibrant and talented scholar-critics through the years, to whom I feel enormously indebted. I have learned from wonderful critics but, in the nature of the task, cannot always remember what I have learned where. Studying Ulysses is a cumulative effort, taking years, and dialoguing in one's head with lots of ideas and opinions, not all of which can be traced. If I have failed to cite someone I should have, I apologize now, for I am indeed grateful. M y special gratitude goes to Stanley Sultan, Hugh Kenner, and Karen Lawrence, whose works in particular have informed and energized my thinking. Sultan's The Argument of Ulysses (1964) illuminated my first reading and teaching of the book and remains the guide I most recommend to students and colleagues. Kenner's Joycei Voices (1978) and U(ysses (1980) and Lawrence's Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (1982) explored issues of narrative and style that clarified much for me and continue to absorb me. Richard Ellmann's splendid biography of Joyce (1959) was foundational for me, as for many others. M y ventures into both Joyce studies and psychoanalytic studies have been made possible by the support and exemplary interdisciplinary ethos of my colleagues in the College of Letters, Wesleyan University's undergraduate major in Western literature, philosophy, and history. For their encouragement of this book, I thank Howard Needler, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl,

Glen Mazis, William Firshein, Franklin Reeve, Richard Vann, Howard Bernstein, Robert Richardson, Herbert Arnold, and Jan Miel. Stephen Crites, former Wesleyan president William Chace, and David Phillips provided timely help. The Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute and Society have been welcoming, educating, and sustaining-receptive as well to whatever I brought in turn as a literary scholar. They have become for me an intellectual community beyond price. I am especially grateful to Jay Katz, Samuel Ritvo, Albert Solnit, John Plunkett, Hans Loewald, Rebecca Solomon, James Kleeman, Daniel Schwartz, George Mahl, Theodore Lidz, Sidney Blatt, Morton Reiser, Peter Gay, Gilbert Rose, Myron Hurwitz, Jerome Meyer, and Lawrence Levenson for support, friendship, and astute counsel. Among the many analytic colleagues who brought joy and insight to our joint reading of Ulysseswere Sanford Perlis, Joan Wexler, Ernst Prelinger, Robert Evans, Braxton McKee, Stanley Leavy, Barbara Nordhaus, Sidney Phillips, Kirsten Dahl, Theodore Mucha, Robert King, Janet Madigan, Frank Knoblauch, Steven Marans, James Leckrnan, Linda Mayes, and Nancy Olson. Victor and Iza Erlich, Harry Wexler, Daniel and Gloria Stern, Katherine Dalsimer and Peter Pouncey, Ellen Handler Spitz, Adrienne Munich, Edward Tayler and Christina Moustakis, and John and Priscilla Hicks have been devoted friends and discerning critics. I lament that I cannot show this book to several of them now-and to my old buddy, Erwin Glikes. A t Wellesley College, Helen Corsa allowed that teaching Ulysses would be a fine strategy for a fledgling instructor who had not yet read it. Early on at Wesleyan, Louis Mink gave Joycean blessings to my efforts. Richard Munich kindly shared his office with me when I was starting out as an analyst. Barbara and Arthur Levine, Mark and Marcia Feldman, Richard Marks, and Myron Peikes have been sustaining, and John Hicks

has been "myn owene maister deere" from undergraduate days. Jules and Evelyne have been unfailinglv loving and generative. I thank the presidents and trustees of Wesleyan through the years for sabbaticals, leaves, and grants, which have been crucial. I benefited from discussions of versions of Chapter 2 at the Gardiner Seminar in Psychiatry and the Humanities at Yale and the combined Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine and Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center; of Chapter 3 at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society and the winter 1996 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association; and of Chapter 6 at the Gardiner Seminar, the Lucy Daniels Foundation, and the Interdepartmental Faculty Colloquium at New York University. The pages of Chapter I devoted to Gerty MacDowell were presented at the "Hysterical/Historical Joyce" conference, at the University of Toronto, June 1997. My colleagues in CAPS Group VI did me the honor of discussing a portion of the book for much of an October 1998 weekend. 1 am very grateful for these opportunities. Parts of Chapter 6 appeared in The Massachusetts Review (1983) and are reprinted with permission. Chapter 3 is reprinted from Nancy Ginsburg and Roy Ginsburg, eds., Psychoanalysis and Culture at the Millennium, O Yale University Press, 1999. Gladys Topkis, a friend of long standing, has been a kind, canny, and patient editor, whose advice and corrections proved superb. I have been privileged to work with her. Susan Laity provided invaluable manuscript editing and astute stylistic suggestions. All errors, of course, are my own. I thank my students for their imaginative work and my patients for their trust. The book is dedicated to the memory of my dear parents, Bess and Dave, and to Rosemary and Catherine, for exactly who they are.

In the centennial year of James Joyce's birth, on Bloomsday, Dublin celebrated its famous native son in style. From an embarrassment and a scandal he had become, by 1982, stunningly, a resource, a locus for pride and tourism. Between 3:00 and 4:00 P.M. that June 16, the festivities took an especially antic turn. A t appropriate locations in the city, local and visiting enthusiasts performed a chapter of Ulysses in the streets-the "Wandering Rocks" episode, chapter 10. A flesh-and-blood Father Conmee, smiling and praying, journeyed to Artane; the English viceroy (played by Dublin's mayor) rode through the city in a horse-drawn, period-costumed procession; and players dressed as Leopold and Molly Bloom, Stephen, Simon, and Dilly Dedalus, Blazes Boylan, Gerty MacDowell, Buck Mulligan, Haines, the one-legged sailor, the man in the macintosh, and others acted in plain view as they were depicted at that hour of the novel's day. For a zany span of time-with extraordinary geographical sweep-Irish life actually followed Joyce's art. One could imagine him slyly delighted, or Leopold Bloom, his Odyssean businessman, approving, subject to sawy reflections on commerce. It was all remarkably apt: the fun, eccentricity, democratic scope, and Dublin setting-the long overdue civic gratitude as well. But exuberant good humor notwithstanding, the performance disappointed. In the bustling city, as Clive Hart, a scholar-celebrant that day, attested, "the reenactment was virtually invisible" (1993, p. 436). An observer would have to have been omnipresent or omniscient to take

in the wide-ranging experience, because sentient people going about their lives concurrently are not characters in literature portrayed through crafted form. Turning art convincingly into life is not that easy. The street performance lacked illusion, that location for willing suspension of disbelief or enlisted discontinuable belief that art can afford. Indeed, the impulse to perform the chapter must have arisen from the illusion of persons the words of Ulysses presented, joined with a shared wish to offer playful homage to it. But the presentation bypassed the effects of style and form. How art structures ~ t smimesis of life or life provides grounds for art may not be predictable or summarizable. Clearly, though, one should respect the intricacy of both to comment on their relations, and that is part of my challenge in this book. I am fascinated by the engaging, sustained illusion of complex persons populating the verbal world of Ulysses. I have been since first reading the book and continue to be after three decades of teaching it, my interest enhanced meanwhile by training in clinical psychoanalysis. It is fair to say that I revel in Ulysses, in its frolicking language and unique mix of historical actuality, mythic resonance, literary echo, daunting originality, modernist self-awareness, and sheer psychological brilliance. Like other Joyceans, I enjoy the luxuriating tension of the book's unfolding through what the author called its "initial style" (1957, 1966, I, 129), which grounds the story in the past-haunted consciousnesses of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, and radical forms of narrative and linguistic play that shift the emphasis decidedly in the second, longer part from the emerging story to a tale of the telling (see Sultan, , 1983; Kenner, 1964, 1987; Goldman, 1966; Senn, ~ g p a 197zb, 1978; Lawrence, 1981; Riquelme, 1983; Thomas, 1982; Mahaf-

fey, 1988; Sherry, 1994). Despite early hints of an irrepressible narrator-notably in the set-off headlines and rhetorical display of the newspaper chapter- the transition toward abundant storytelling occurs in "Wandering Rocks," the episode chosen for street performance in 1982 and signaled by Joyce as the entr'acte. For all the subsequent chapters, from "Sirens," where seductions entice musically, through "Penelope," each section has a new and distinct pattern of presentation. But in that second part too, as the storytelling and teller disport, characterization amplifies, even as it proves less apparent. Thus my title bears first of all on the array of characters, major and minor, whose representation I find part of the abidingly fresh intrigue of reading Ulysses. It bears as well on their tenacious presence, how the illusion of their reality persists throughout the book, no less than that of Dublin 1904. Like the cast of a lengthening shadow, character remains visible, and however indeterminate or at times indistinct Leopold and Stephen become, their development, inevitably by way of the manner of the telling, continues and matters (cf. French, 1976; Maddox, 1978; Kenner, 1980). At the end, Molly Bloom's silent, distinctive reverie returns to characterization that is more manifest, akin to the initial style. As a third implication of my title, a cast of character suggests what Joyce at twenty-one described as an "individuating rhythm" or "curve of an emotion" (1965, p. 60), an idiosyncratic idiom of being that lends definition. Rather than implying reification or rigidity, it acknowledges continuities that include contradictoriness and mystery, spontaneity and surprise: the way a person may recognize his self-sameness at strilungly diverse moments or different phases of life, and the way others who know him well discern him as himself even in unexpected behavior or statement. One's cast of psychological character

confirms both inner durability and uniqueness -what a psychoanalyst perceives, for example, when listening to patients one after the other. No one can be confused with another, not in the dynamics of the hour or in the associations and memories. People have similarities, which a working theory helps to address, but psyches are as distinct as faces: everyone has one, and every one is different. James Joyce managed to inscribe that mundane wonder in his fiction, an achievement that commends him-despite his well-known witticisms and aversions-as contemporary in imaginative genius to Freud. H e renders persuasive singularity within variousness through time for many of the characters in Ulysses, most notably, of course, for Stephen, Leopold, and Molly in all their observed, obscured, and implied moments. O r so I aim to show. It may be corroborative of a common impulse that grants an unusual degree of belief to characters in Ulysses, that in my experience as a teacher no other book has proved so convivial. Ulysses turns classrooms into communities; curiosity, observations, and thoughts into sociable exchange-almost dependably so. Undergraduates enjoy reading it together, talking about it on the street, laughing at Bloom in the jakes, wondering at his odd liveliness of mind and puzzling passivity. Often they foresee with some relief that middle age might have some appeal. They ponder Stephen Dedalus as a conundrum, a familiar on campus, an alter ego, or all three. Many worry about Molly Bloom: her delayed entrance is unfair; she is more delightful than they wish to admit, a brave outsider, too much so, a misogynist's fantasy, a victim of the patriarchy, too preoccupied with sex and too self-absorbed to be the mother of a teenage daughter (one gets a lovely honesty of response). O f course the word is out: Ulysses is readable and fun, not prohibitively diffi-

cult as earlier generations thought-owing in large part to their efforts at explication. Ulysses also has a complex rumor of truth about it, as a tale zealous of actuality. Irish-American youngsters take my course at Wesleyan wishing to learn about the Troubles, Parnell, Home Rule, the rebellion, the republic, and all the signs of Irish being they live with but don't fully comprehend. Jewish students want to know about Bloom, the urban, middle-class, advertising canvasser, husband, father, and Jew, who, in the mold of Odysseus, democratizes the epic and represents Everyman. They recognize and take discernible pride in him. All come for a great work of literature, some hoping to address, and others to ventilate, the current critical discourses. Many are ready to explore the confusions of sexuality, knowing that Ulysses does. Reading it, most seem to perceive its depiction of Dublin's moral state in 1904-evident in the political quiescence and nostalgia, patriarchal ties between the sexes, irresponsibility, grounds of friendship, and conditions of women and of children-as bearing on their own lives. A group of adults with whom I read the book began to share confidences about how different life looks at twenty-two, Stephen's age, and thirty-eight, Bloom's; about women's relative gift for intimate talk and men's discomfort with it; about the trials and difficulties of a marriage. Three times in recent years I taught a seminar on Ulysses to candidates and graduates of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, who marveled specifically and repeatedly at Joyce's rendering of the characters' conscious and unconscious mental processes throughout. They confirmed my impression that often in the opening chapters Joyce conveys what it actually feels like to listen to persons thinking associatively and privately. The analogue is striking because the initial style, which combines interior monologue and third-person narration, allows access to

Stephen's and Leopold's thought processes while mediating their degrees of self-consciousness and the reader's subjectivity. The later chapters allow access in other absorbing ways. Being a professor of literature and a Freudian clinician, I call on both of my specialties in this study and hope to contribute to both. By focusing on character within the assurances, uncertainties, and expressiveness of fiction, I aim to explore matters of curiosity to a psychoanalyst that may not have been noticed before in Ulysses studies or addressed in quite the same way: how, for example, Stephen's insistent presentation of his Shakespeare theory augments his characterization, condenses crucial aspects of his layered psyche, and illuminates his subsequent interactions with Bloom and departure from 7 Eccles Street. That brilliant and odd performance in the library reveals much about him. About Leopold Bloom, I readdress the issue of Jewishness but not the symbolism of him as an epic or modernist hero or whether in fact he is a Jew. W h a t intrigues me, rather, is that although eventually he admits to Stephen that he is not a Jew, hefeels Jewish to himself; and certainly he is reacted to in Dublin as one. It hardly suffices to account for this core feeling that his father, a Hungarian Jew, converted, or that Jewishness in important ways is socially constructed. So how this genial Dublin man, born of a Christian mother (as we learn eventually), came to a Jewish identity and why, internally, he assiduously preserves it is a curiosity. Does his felt Jewishness, furthermore, have a connection to his cuckolding? O r is this all muddle and circumstance, not psychological richness? With Molly I begin with a clinical response, my perception of her vivid, continuous flow of thoughts as a registration of anxiety, and proceed to what follows. All three major characters open to psychoanalytic scrutiny and reward it. The narra-

tor too, whose styles proliferate as the book progresses, invites considered attention. If psychoanalysis can contribute to understanding Ulysses, will Ulysses reciprocate? I believe it does, and handsomely. Psychoanalysis from the first has aspired to be not only a clinical theory and treatment for psychopathology but a general psychology. Its professional literature labors under a restriction, however, that qualifies its scientific or hermeneutic claims. The overriding requirement of preserving the confidentiality of patients leads to case studies that do not communicate the particularities of a life or communicate accurately a sustained and distinguishable analytic process-whether in the hesitancies and camouflagings of thought, the specifics of motivations, the tentativenesses of interpretation subject to change, the kinds and durations of agreement or doubt between the parties, or the mesh and match of personalities. A novelist's talent-or Freud's as a writer-would be needed in any event. But even Freud's great case studies could not be that precise; and there is, if anything, more carefulness among psychoanalysts about confidentiality today than in his time. His pioneering case studies, moreover, date from the years of his early theory, before he reformulated it to attend to the identifyingly structured ways of the ego (1923). Without guaranteed privacy and confidentiality, psychoanalytic work would be impossible. Patients would not speak more openly than they would elsewhere, and potentially useful resistances to painful discovery necessarily would dominate. It follows that in the professional literature, exemplifications of theory, challenges to it, or puzzling clinical instances for it to explain remain abstract, curtailed, or to a degree disguised. Only an apprenticeship form of education, involving individual oral supervisions, enables sufficient renderings of distinct persons to be attempted; and supervisory sessions too

are hedged round with rules of anonymity, as are discussions among colleagues. Although the psychoanalytic clinical work may convince both analysand and analyst, therefore, and may help the patient, anyone else has to take it on trust or not at all. Ironically, Ulysses, by means of characterizations that in context make real and credible the inner lives of fictive persons, provides-through artistic form and aesthetic experiencewhat scientific case studies cannot manage. For it portrays minds in action: the specificity, rhythms, ideas, associations, feelings, and recurrences that distinguish and, in the clinical situation, reveal distinct persons. And doing so, it offers occasion for showing, by extrapolation, how an analyst listens and ponders-that is, follows along, notices things, and reflects about a person who is saying whatever comes to mind, or trying to. David Hayman has described Bloom as "perhaps the most particularized character in all literature" (1970b, p. 19). Because of its devotion to psychologization in precise and multifarious detail and because it is accepted as a modernist classicacknowledged, that is, as importantly true- Ulysses allows us to test anew the relevance of psychoanalytic observation and interpretation to literary character as well as the adequacy of psychoanalysis itself when brought to the bar of great literature. In The Cast of Characters I try to reflect the ongoing observation, responsiveness, interpretation, and reconsideration appropriate to both psychoanalytic and literary understanding (Skura, 1981, pp. 271-275). Informed by theory, I proceed to the extent possible without depending on technical jargon, much as I would in class or the clinical situation. For I find the jargon of both fields often vague and obfuscating; and though I risk signaling my limitations as a conceptual thinker that way, I hope to turn such limitations here into the virtues of precision, clarity, subtlety, and availability. Having begun with the

street theater of "Wandering Rocks," I move to a close look at that chapter, pivotal in Ulysses' passage from a story to a tale of storytelling. A gathering place for manifold brief characterizations and transitional in its literary manner, "Wandering Rocks" affords a way into and a centering point for my study. Then, attending always to form and style and their contributions to or denials of meaning, I take up Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in separate chapters, looking at their behaviors immediately before the entr'acte-their curtain scenes, as it were-exploring their psychodynamics, and wondering about the readiness of each to linger with the other later on. Both, I believe, struggle with compromised, displaced, and distinctly powerful angers. The vicissitudes of their hidden angers I trace in chapter 4, where I reflect too upon the narrator's emergence and his entertaining and challenging post-entr'acte performativeness. After considering the time Leopold and Stephen spend together and their parting, as well as how we know what we do, I ponder Molly Bloom's silent reverie, her psychology, and her having the last, unspoken word.

Democratic Vistas

Not much happens in Ulysses. A troubled young man, Stephen Dedalus, and a perky middle-aged canvasser for advertisements, Leopold Bloom, go their separate ways in Dublin and later cross paths. In the course of a day, Stephen teaches a class, debates with literati in the library, and drinks a good deal; around midnight, in the red-light district, he gets himself knocked down. Bloom makes breakfast, attends Paddy Dignam's funeral, tries to place an ad for a client named Keyes, tries not to think of his wife's incipient adultery, and near sunset masturbates. Eventually he comes to Stephen's aid in Nighttown, they accompany each other to Bloom's home, talk for a while, and separate. A t the end Molly Bloom lies sleepless, her affair consummated and her thoughts rushing. Not much happens and little gets resolved, but readers know that plot, characters, locale, society, and modes of storytelling vivify, sprung to life by vivacities of language. It begins in neartransparency. Though often difficult, chapters 1-9 sustain a dependable realism, rendering the inner thoughts and ongoing deeds of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom from 8:oo A.M. to 3:00 P.M. and the social world-with no background exposition- through their consciousnesses. From a third-person perspective that yields to the character's own, the narrator reflects the linguistic idiom of either Stephen or Bloom, opening in that way to the perceptions, awarenesses, and mental rhythms of each: Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through

it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the Nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the Nebeneinander ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark (3.10-IS).* Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn't like her plate full. Right. H e turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high. -Mkgnao! (4.11-16). This flexible "initial" style lends itself not only to observations, interior monologue, and associative mental processes but to interaction, dialogue, and unfolding scenes. W i t h a few eccentricities perhaps, it secures the book's "narrative norm," against which the later chapters strain (Lawrence, 1981, pp. 38-54) I t also culminates Joyce's creative development up to that moment, from his self-described "scrupulous meanness" of style (1957, 1966,II, 134) in the early stories of Dubliners (1914) through the more ranging affects and interiorities of "The Dead" andA Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young M a n (1916). While marking the divide between the early chapters of Ulysses and the more improvisitory ones that follow, "Wandering Rocks" proves a decisive turn in Joyce's career as well. "Last night I thought of an Entr'acte for Ulysses," he wrote 'All quotations from Ulysses are from Joyce, chapter and line number.

1922,

and are cited by

tersely to his friend Frank Budgen, "in middle of book after 9th episode. . . . Short with absolutely no relation to what precedes or follows like a pause in the action of a play" (1957, 1966, I, 149). SOvisually realistic that it could be performed in the streets, the episode indeed promises respite after the rough voyaging of the Shakespeare chapter. One's first impression may be of ease, a bird's-eye view of Dublin and its denizens in mid-afternoon, in a familiar mode of realism. Yet far from bearing "no relation" to what precedes or follows, the entr'acte provides a conduit for both characterization and style. T h e form is new-nineteen short, demarcated segments structured to suggest synchronicity and urban space-it is modernist and cinematic but not daunting. Beginning with Father Conmee's ambiguously charitable trip to the outskirts of town (to arrange church-sponsored schooling for young Patrick Dignam, whose father was buried that morning) and ending with the English governor general's cavalcade through town (to open the Mercer's Hospital bazaar), the chapter situates between them the major and most of the minor personages of the book, all shown in brief or momentary action. The first and last segments being longest, the very form seems to liken the Catholic church and English rule to the wandering rocks that would wreck Odysseus' ship were he not to sail clear of them-and a vibrant, grim, and telling picture of Dublin of an afternoon emerges (see Sultan, 1964, pp. 205-219; Hart, 1974, pp. 181-216; French, 1976, pp. 117-125; McCormick, 1991). But the narrator begins to revoke his dependability. A t unmarked moments in the various sections, attention jumps without warning to another Dublin location and person, then just as suddenly returns. The jump can occur within a single sentence, as when, talking with Constable 57C, Corny Kelleher spits hayjuice from his mouth and Molly Bloom's arm is seen tossing a coin to a beggar elsewhere. When the constable then Democratic Vistas/3

says, "I seen that party last night," the narrator has conveyed both simultaneity and confusion. Such disorienting shifts during the unfolding scenes can provide ironies and implications; some strikingly defamiliarize, and some pique interest and defer it (McCormick, 1991, pp. 15-57). A t times, however, these disjunctions appear to have no other purpose than to disrupt or deceive. When mad Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell bangs into the blind stripling just past "Mr Bloom's dental windows," the reference is to an actual Dublin dentist in 1904 named Bloom-who is identified two chapters later. "Father" Cowley is no priest, nor is he Alderman Cowley, though no contextual clarification is offered; and Dignam's Court has nothing to do with Paddy Dignam's family. In a course of recognizable and presumably dependable realism, therefore, one becomes aware of a quirky, devious, and occasionally unreliable storyteller. Vincent Sherry (1994, pp. 66-74) has praised the narrator's "ethical aesthetic of gratuity," but most commentators, even when lauding his freedom from norms in this episode, have also registered annoyance, describing him or his effects variously as harsh and awkward, bothersome, arbitrary, entrapping, malicious, inscrutable, perverse, and hostile. It would be a rare close reader, I think, who would not at least sometimes feel discomforted by him: competed with, taunted, even misled. And thereafter, the narrator-adventurous, antinomian, polytropic, often alluded to by admirers somewhat quizzically as "the Arranger" (Hayman, 1970b, pp. 88-104, 117, 122-126; Kenner, 1980, pp. 61-71)will openly vie for attention with the characters and world he creates. Still, providing an entr'acte is a sign of courtesy; and the respite secures a basic rhythm in the book, which involves often dense developments followed by comparatively unde-

4/Demorratic Vistas

manding storytelling: Stephen on the strand precedes Bloom in the lutchen, "Sirens" and "Cyclops" come before "Nausicaa." Eccentric, difficult, elusive, the narrator nevertheless is sociable too, a spellbinding verbal craftsman, quite aware of his audience, who presents-often with remarkable empathy-complex, credible, and distinguishable characters and who values the illusion of reality he increasingly disrupts and distends. In "Wandering Rocks," fragments of realism align to at times treacherous montage, a dialectical tension defies closure, and the eruptive narratives of the second part become adumbrated-even as an impression of the variousness, solidity, simultaneity, and agitated pace of a modern city seems to be tenuously maintained. With allusive resonance, technical daring and vivacity, the entr'acte chapter stands symbolically, looking forward and back in Ulysses and suggesting the great sweep of Joyce's fiction, from chiseled D u b h e r s to the enduring experiment of Finnegans Wake.

A locus for characterization and gateway to innovation, chapter 10 presents a vivid array of personages seen contiguously with Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, the two characters about whom, after nine chapters, we know a good deal. O n the basis of allocated narrative space in the episode, however, those two appear as part of a diverse population, neither more nor less important than the others. The bird'seye view yields a democratic vista, Catholic church, English state, and preceding narrative notwithstanding; and the number and variety of characters intrigues us, as does the narrator's acuity about psychological surface and depth-which fascinates a psychoanalyst about the characters and about him. The depiction of Tom Kernan illustrates Joyce's initial style and its disruption in the entr'acte. Plump and middle-aged,

Democratic Vistas/j

Kernan sells tea for Pulbrook Robertson and Company. In midafternoon he marches proudly along James's Street, delighted to have booked an order from a merchant named Crimmins. H e wears a fancy frockcoat and spats, possibly too fanciful for a man of taste on a business day that includes a funeral. But formality to excess, in dress as in speech, is part of his style. When Father Coffey concluded Dignam's funeral service that morning and those attending followed the coffin to the burial site, Kernan approached Bloom. They had ridden in different coaches to the cemetery Respectful and hushed, the two salesmen, the only Protestant and the only Jew there (though neither has as fixed an identity as the designations imply) could chat privately. For the most part Bloom listened. Kernan expressed unease discreetly: -The others are putting on their hats, M r Kernan said. I suppose we can do so too. We are the last. The cemetery is a treacherous place. They covered their heads. -The reverend gentleman read the service too quickly, don't you think? M r Kernan said with reproof. M r Bloom nodded gravely looking in the quick bloodshot eyes. Secret eyes, secretsearching. Mason, I think: not sure. Beside him again. We are the last. In the same boat. Hope he'll say something else. M r Kernan added: -The service of the Irish church used in Mount Jerome is simpler, more impressive I must say. M r Bloom gave prudent assent. The language of course was another thing. M r Kernan said with solemnity: 6/Democratic Vistas

-I am the resurrection and the hj2. That touches a man's inmost heart. -It does, M r Bloom said (6.656-671). Bothered by the Roman ritual, Kernan wanted to register his preference for the Church of Ireland, the Irish branch of the Anglican church. His own dignified speech took on ceremoniousness, a King James cadence markedly different from Bloom's pragmatic vernacular-thought, but not expressedabout "the resurrection and the life" touching the heart: "Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are" (6.672-675). During the funeral Bloom had thought of his own dead-his infant son, his father and mother. But at this moment he wanted no religious consolation; he wanted to leave, to get back to life. H e liked Kernan's confiding in him, the chance, for a change, to share another outsider's feelings. Tom had bloodshot eyes: a drinker. Not a trait Bloom admired. Yet the eyes suggested more: "Secret eyes, secretsearching," and a companionable link: "Mason, I think." Kernan too might travel inwardly. Now, on James's Street, Kernan savors his sale. He'd been affable and polite, frank about his opinions on safe matters and adept at making them mesh with Crimmins' own. "Got round him all right," he confirms (10.720). They'd asked after each other and spoken of the lovely dry weather, dismissing the farmers' complaints. Farmers always grumble. Yes, he would take a thimbleful of Crimmins' best gin. A terrible story from America in the morning press. An excursion boat on the Hudson River; men trampled down women and children; a thousand dead. Attributed to spontaneous combustion. No floatDemocratic Vistas/7

able lifeboats, no firehoses worked. How could the inspectors allow it? Now, you're talking straight, M r Crimmins. You know why? Palm oil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now, look at that. And America they say is the land of the free. I thought we were bad here. I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true? That's a fact. Graft my dear sir. Well, of course, where there's money going there's always someone to pick it up. Saw him looking at my frockcoat. Dress does it. Nothing like a dressy appearance. Bowls them over (10.731-739).

Horror, graft, and scandal, rebuke for the emigrCs and disdain for grumblers: all so unlike an upright business agreement between like-minded folk, arranged quickly and helped along by a splendid appearance and a friendly drink. Kernan is good at his work and knows it. Here he could hug himself. Suddenly, Simon Dedalus and "Father" Cowley greet one another. Neither works; Cowley has not paid rent and worked a swindle about it. The contrast of these two with Kernan and Bloom is obvious, and immediately we are back with Kernan, his glowing self-scrutiny expanding to an emotional idiom. We follow the darting process of his thoughts, talung occasional distance as the narrator does. Tom primps before the mirror in front of Peter Kennedy's hairdresser's shop, admiring his coat and appearance. Worth the money, especially secondhand: "Fits me down to the ground. Some Kildare street club toff had it probably" (10.7~5).There is an element of vain pretense to him: 8/Democratir Vistas

Aham! Must dress the character for those fellows. Knight of the road. Gentleman. And now, M r Crimmins, may we have the honour of your custom again, sir. The cup that cheers but not inebriates, as the old saying has it. North wall and sir John Rogerson's quay, with hulls and anchorchains, sailing westward, sailed by a skiff, a crumpled throwaway, rocked on the ferrywash, Elijah is coming (10.748-754). The second paragraph, descriptive at first, becomes the narrator's-ironic about Kernan, calling on the reader's knowledge of the Elijah throwaway (a leaflet announcing an American evangelist) and its association with Bloom ("Bloo. . . . Me? No. Blood of the Lamb," 8.8-9). Kernan recalls again the pleasure of Crimmins' gin, though trying to downplay it, and jocularly the narrator shows redemption floating away. As the jagged course of Kernan's thoughts resumes, overtly mocking narrative attends it: M r Kernan glanced in farewell at his image. High colour, of course. Grizzled moustache. Returned Indian officer. Bravely he bore his stumpy body forward on spatted feet, squaring his shoulders. Is that Ned Lambert's brother over the way, Sam? What? Yes. He's as like it as damn it. No. The windscreen of that motorcar in the sun there. Just a flash like that. Damn like him. Aham! Hot spirit of juniper juice warmed his vitals and his breath. Good drop of gin, that was. His frocktails winked in bright sunshine to his fat strut (10.755-763). Gratified by the sale and by his romantic self-image, and warmed by the effects of the gin, Kernan turns in his memory Democratic Vistas/p

to heroic instances of Irish history, replete with danger, daring, blood, and violence. Where he now walks, the rebel Robert Emmet, who allied with Napoleon against England, was executed: Down there Emmet was hanged, drawn and quartered. Greasy black rope. Dogs licking the blood off the street when the lord lieutenant's wife drove by in her noddy. Bad times those were. Well, well. Over and done with. Great topers too. Fourbottle men. Let me see. Is he buried in saint Michan's? O r no, there was a midnight burial in Glasnevin. Corpse brought in through a secret door in the wall. Dignam is there now. Went out in a puff. Well, well. Better turn down here. Make a detour (10.764-774. H e makes a detour in thought too, but the disavowed returns under cover of civic concern: "Mr Kernan turned and walked down the slope of Watling street by the corner of Guinness's visitors' waitingroom. Outside the Dublin Distillers Company's stores an outside car without fare or jarvey stood, the reins knotted to the wheel. Damn dangerous thing. Some Tipperary bosthoon endangering the lives of the citizens. Runaway horse" (10.773-777). A complicated fellow, this Irish Protestant salesman given to extremities of form, appearance, and self-definition. H e keeps watch over himself, on the lookout to approve and applaud; but his emotions are labile and responsive to drink. The direction and imagery of his thoughts suggest wildness in his soul: that he thrills to rebellion, mayhem, and bloody punishment and guards against them grandiosely; that he turns his anger round in stylized propriety and tames it with dichotomies (farmers ro/Demorratir Vistas

grumble, "sweepings" emigrate, but businessmen make proper sales) and good effort (he works and tries to make an affable, cgentlemanly impression). Protest fuels his Protestantism, and aggression starches his respectability. But he does not keep steady. H e enjoyed the drink-still does-but his thoughts take fire too: M r Kernan approached Island street. Times of the troubles. Must ask Ned Lambert to lend me those reminiscences of sir Jonah Barrington. When you look back on it all now in a kind of retrospective arrangement. Gaming at Daly's. No cardsharping then. One of those fellows got his hand nailed to the table by a dagger. Somewhere here lord Edward Fitzgerald escaped from major Sirr. Stables behind Moira house. Damn good gin that was. Fine dashing nobleman. Good stock, of course. That ruffian, that sham squire, with his violet gloves gave him away. Course they were on the wrong side. They rose in dark and evil days. Fine poem that is: Ingram. They were gentlemen. Ben Dollard does sing that ballad touchingly. Masterly rendition.

At the siege of Ross did my father fa// (10.781-793). The song Ben Dollard sings, "The Croppy Boy," honors the rebels of 1798. Too readily for his own comfort, Kernan identifies with insurgents, who had the heroic cast he sees in himself-gentleman, knight of the road, British officer returned from India: the stuff of fame and glory, uncontrollable from one perspective and failed from another. Carried away, he has to remind himself who is what and where his loyalties are. Democratic Vistas/rr

"Course they were on the wrong side." Lest he awake one day to find himself a nationalist or wild without aim, he posts frequent watch, then nods off at his post. A passionate man, not quite equal to the struggle with himself, he is at once purposeful and easily muddled. The narrator's glance across the city at Denis Breen-the hapless recipient of a taunting postcardmay imply Kernan's capacity for self-defeat. Now, however, aware of the viceroy's cavalcade passing near, Kernan rushes toward it, all conscious ambivalences erased, eager to see the man. Not surprisingly, he doesn't:

A cavalacade in easy trot along Pembroke quay passed, outriders leaping, leaping in their, in their saddles. Frockcoats. Cream sunshades. M r Kernan hurried forward, blowing pursily. His excellency! Too bad! Just missed that by a hair. Damn it! W h a t a pity! (10.794-798). In the next chapter he will join the men in the Ormond bar for drinks and take the lead in coaxing Ben Dollard to sing "The Croppy Boy." Getting tight in public may be his refuge, his way of shutting down discordant excitement and fitting in. (The Dubliners story "Grace" accentuates his discomfort with Catholicism, to which he converted in order to marry; it begins with him falling down the stairs of a pub, drunk and unconscious.) H e is remarkably conflicted internally. Except for the flashes to Simon Dedalus and Cowley, the crumpled Elijah throwaway, and Breen, this is Tom Kernan in the initial style. The narrator-as he did with Stephen and Bloom for most of the first nine chapters-shares Kernan's linguistic manner and registers his perceptions, thoughts, memories, and feelings in the third person as Kernan walks down James's Street, enabling us to observe him from the outside and

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merge with his stream of consciousness, which has swift and powerful countercurrents. Kernan's distinct character and the world as he experiences it are thereby made dramatic. Comparable to Bloom in several ways, Kernan has an inner life that is taxing for him and that even in brief presentation suggests that there is more of importance to know about him, past and present. U(ysses grants epic attention to the psyches of three Dubliners but implies that it could be given to many. In that fundamental assumption it dovetails with Freud's psychoanalysis-and for all its elite demandingness of readers, with a liberal and democratic politics. Not many characters in "Wandering Rocks" open to scrutiny as swiftly as Kernan does after his successful sale and a shot of gin. Dilly Dedalus, for one, hints at her interiorities with a gesture. She chances upon her brother looking at books for rent on an open cart. He'd just been wondering whether he would find one of his school prizes that had been pawned, the thought itself suggesting his dejection and his family's straits a year after his mother's death. Browsing in an occult book of charms, he lingers at a spell to win a woman's love. "For me this," he yearns, indulging a wish before beginning to dismiss it, when Dilly's voice intrudes, "What are you doing here, Stephen?" and we watch him, unnerved, locate her shoulders and shabby dress. "Shut the book quick," he urges himself. "Don't let see" (10.847-856). Being discovered while secretly wishing for love embarrasses him. Until this moment he has thought of his siblings only once all day, reflecting that "a brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella" and dismissing his own as a "whetstone" (9.974-976). Dilly, however, moves him. H e remembers that she built a fire for him, that he told her about Paris. There is much he feels anguished about:

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-What have you there? Stephen asked. -I bought it from the other cart for a penny, Dilly said, laughing nervously Is it any good? M y eyes they say she has. D o others see me so? Quick, far and daring. Shadow of my mind. H e took the coverless book from her hand. Chardenal's French primer. -What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French? She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips. Show no surprise. Quite natural. -Here, Stephen said. It's all right. Mind Maggy doesn't pawn it on you. I suppose all my books are gone. -Some, Dilly said. We had to. She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death. We. Agenbite of inwit. Inwit's agenbite. Misery! Misery! (10.862-880). Bloom, easier with separateness, saw "secretsearching" in Kernan's eyes. Stephen sees himself in Dilly's. Youthful, selfenclosed, tortured, he musters sympathy for others selectively by way of his own pain. H e has been kind to Sargent, a dim student who could not do sums, the kindness linked to awkward boys like himself whom only a mother could love. Now he feels for Dilly, in his learned way. Agenbite of inwit is Middle English: the against- or backward-bite of inward thought, conscience. Stephen's bites him hard when Dilly uses the pronoun

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"we." Seductive and feared images of her eyes and hair fill his consciousness, entangle and begin to drown him in intimate merging and dying. H e is drawn to her, dangerously- tempted too by his guilty fear: "All against us." She, his siblings, need his help. But he has been trying, and failing, to save himself. She holds the French primer and blushes assent to his query, "To learn French?" Earlier, Leopold Bloom noticed her: Dedalus' daughter there still outside Dillon's auctionrooms. Must be selling off some old furniture. Knew her eyes at once from the father. Lobbing about waiting for him. Home always breaks up when the mother goes. Fifteen children he had. Birth every year almost. That's in their theology or the priest won't give the poor woman the confession, the absolution. Increase and multiply. Did you ever hear such an idea? . . . . Good Lord, that poor child's dress is in flitters. Underfed she looks too. Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes. It's after they feel it. Proof of the pudding. Undermines the constitution ( 8 . ~ 8 - ~ 3 ) . Before discovering Stephen at the book cart, Dilly cornered her father near the auction rooms to squeeze money from him for food for the family. She accepted his joking and teasing good-naturedly and managed to wrest a shilling from him, though he'd claimed to have nothing. Soon he added two pennies more and the advice that she buy a glass of milk and a bun for herself. We observed her sisters Katey, Boody, and Maggy commiserating with one another as they sat down to eat the pea soup that a nun had provided for them. "A good job we have that much," Katey said, "Where's Dilly?"

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-Gone to meet father, Maggy said. Boody, breaking big chunks of bread into the yellow soup, added: -Our father who art not in heaven. Maggy, pouring yellow soup in Katey's bowl, exclaimed: -Boody! For shame (10.288-293). A t home, parenting themselves and hungry, the girls angrily tried to be good; and the narrator traced the crumpled throwaway, "Elijah is coming," riding lightly down the Liffey. These passages and one more-in which, distracted from her primer, Dilly looks up at the lord lieutenant's entourage riding by (10.1227-12~9)-constitute all we see of her. She elicits responses from her older brother, her father, and her father's acquaintance Bloom that reveal much about her. One of many children-though we see only three of her sisters and Stephen-her mother dead and her father engaging and shiftless, Dilly Dedalus is ill-clothed and hungry. Yet when Simon gives her two pennies for herself, she spends one immediately on the Chardenal primer. Her interactions with him and then with Stephen differentiate her from her sisters by situating her visually with the men of the family (as Bloom did by noting her father's eyes in hers). This supports the impression, fostered also by Stephen's seeing himself in her eyes, that she aims to fly the nets of hopelessness as he did, toward France. The implied wish may be touchingly improbable, not to say ironic, given Stephen's tortured state. But by purchasing the French primer, Dilly signals solidarity with her big brother. Innocently or boldly she challenges expectations and wants more-while he, with his school pay in his pocket, and having treated the newspaper cronies to drinks, gives her only sympathy. One knows little enough about Dilly-not her age, what she looks like, or 16/Demorratic Vistas

her place among her siblings-and little of her temperament and thoughts. Yet there her gesture is: symbolically imitative of her brother and testimony, through action, to an inner life. Her characterization is specific, familial, and rife with cultural and psychological meanings. As with Dilly and Kernan, "Wandering Rocksn-like U/ysses itself-opens to the depicted social and physical reality of Dublin by way of character portrayal. Politics, economics, poverty and hunger, colonial rule, remembered history, religious influence, manners, mores, and expectations of gender and class register mainly through the characters' subjectivities, monitored always by the attending narrator-which is to say, never other than as words on a page. Because Dilly Dedalus is convincing as a creature of words, realized through dialogue with her brother and related other passages, her gesture is memorable and revealing and amplifies as well the meager prospects of children and women in Ulysses. Dilly thus contributes to one's cumulative awareness of her impoverished sisters, Dignam's befuddled son, Josie Breen's painful marriage, Mina Purefoy's and Mary Dedalus' many childbirths, and, before long, of the lonely bargirls Mina Kennedy and Lydia Douce, Gerty MacDowell and her friends, Bella Cohen and her brothel women, and Molly Bloom. Tom Kernan in turn, different as he is from Stephen or Bloom, joins their odd commonality (in which Dilly seems about to enlist) of not fully belonging, of perceiving themselves as outsiders. Kernan, in addition, like Stephen, Simon, Dollard, and many others, drinks; and Bloom, who doesn't, notices who does. The chumminess of drunken, irresponsible men recurs throughout, counterpointing the lack of political home rule. This patriarchy is crumbling, the fathers-with a few exceptions-are not doing their job, and the critically exposed institutions of church and state, with much to answer for, may not be solely at fault. Betrayals are commonplace. Moreover, Democratic Vistas/r7

Kernan's barely buried rage, so integral to him, touches on many other signs and derivatives of anger in the book: not only the back of Almidano Artifone's sturdy trousers as the viceroy rides by but the mutual antagonisms of Catholics and Protestants, nationalists and loyalists, men and women, the easy antiSemitism, the careless and cruel treatment of children, and, as we shall see, Stephen's melancholia, Bloom's inhibitions, Molly's adultery, and the narrator's expressive breakthroughs. Large issues of governance, society, and family interdigitate with personal psychology and action, and the entr'acte, which broadens the scope of the Ulysses' attention to character, offers capsule instances of how. C. P. M'Coy complicates our assessment of Bloom and ventilates various social themes merely by proving to be psychologically fascinating. We first met him in the morning, filtered through Bloom's disdain. Dawdling until Dignam's funeral at II:OO, Leopold claimed a letter at the Westland Row post office under the pseudonym Henry Flower. As he cautiously fingered the letter's odd bulk in his pocket, wanting to read it secretly, M'Coy, to his annoyance, greeted him. When M'Coy asked about his dark suit, therefore, and, reminded of Paddy Dignam's death, started swelling with details of hearing the bad news, Bloom simultaneously listened and evaded his talking head to stare at the deliciously classy and unconcerned woman across the street at the Grosvenor Hotel, who was waiting to ascend an outrider cab while a man attended her and the porter hoisted a valise. Might she sense Leopold's stare, "eye out for the other fellow always"? (5.119). Could he, as she got up, glimpse her stockinged calf or thigh? A clanging tram loomed, blocking his view, and he raged silently, "Curse your noisy pugnose" (5.132)-intending both the tram and M'Coy's unwanted presence. r8/Democratic Vistas

M'Coy next asked about Molly, and Leopold, mentioning her planned tour of the North (which Blazes Boylan would manage), remembered M'Coy's shiftiness-a scam he pulls borrowing suitcases he then pawns. M'Coy's wife sings too, and what galled Bloom was the implication that her voice could compare with Molly's-or that the two husbands of singing wives had much in common: "Reedy freckled soprano. Cheeseparing nose. Nice enough in its way: for a little ballad. No guts in it. You and me, don't you know: in the same boat. Softsoaping. Give you the needle that would. Can't he hear the difference? Think he's that way inclined a bit. Against my grain somehow" (5.18~-187).SO addled was MICoy's judgment, and so angered was Bloom, that he wondered outlandishly whether M'Coy could be "pimping." But in that interaction all sympathy rested with Bloom. M'Coy hardly mattered: a trivial fellow, bizarre about his wife, who, like Molly, sings. We may anticipate more folly, therefore, when M'Coy next appears, walking with the known sponger Lenehan in midafternoon, neither, obviously, at work. But as Lenehan checks the closing odds on the Gold Cup race in L~nam's,M'Coy, outside, nudges a banana peel into the gutter with his shoe and thinks: "Fellow might damn easy get a nasty fall there coming along tight in the dark" (10.512-513). H e has Bloomian social responsibility (as does Kernan, who deplored the "Tipperary bosthoon" whose untended cab horse might bolt and hurt someone), though Bloom would not have thought so quickly of a drunkard's nighttime plight. They resume walking and from afar spot Bloom bent over rental books at an outdoor cart. They cannot know what we soon will, that he is searching for a sexy one for Molly to read and getting remarkably aroused himself. M'Coy comments that Bloom is "dead nuts on sales" and recalls being present when he "bought a book from an old one in Liffey street for two bob. There were fine plates in it worth Democratic Vistas/rg

double the money, the stars and the moon and comets with long tails. Astronomy it was about" (10.525-528). His admiration, bordering on amazement, in no way reciprocates Bloom's attitude toward him. "Astronomy it was about," and a bargain too. Lenehan laughs, "I'll tell you a damn good one about comets' tails," and begins a recollection of his own, of bundling close to Mrs. Bloom in an open cab years earlier on a cold, starry night. Their jolly group had been returning from the annual charity dinner for the Glencree reformatory. In the other seat with Chris Callinan, Bloom pointed out comets and constellations. Lenehan warms to the memory. The Lord Mayor attended; orators gave speeches and singers performed. Carefully recreating setting and mood, he builds to his climax and punchline. M'Coy, though, interrupts, twice, to say that his wife once sang there. There are narrative shifts as well-to Paddy Dignam's young son buying porksteaks, and to a card, Unfurnished Apartments, reappearing on the window sash of 7 Eccles Street (just after, we know, Molly had tossed a coin to the begging one-legged sailor). It is as if the text itself, or a caring narrator, strains against the anecdote. "But wait ti1 I tell you," Lenehan twice protests, the second time linking M'Coy's arm for more control: We started singing glees and duets: Lo, the earh beam ofmorning. She was well primed with a good load of Delahunt's port under her bellyband. Every jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell's delight! She has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that. H e held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning: -I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time. Know what I mean? zo/Demorratic Vistas

His hands moulded ample curves of air. H e shut his eyes tight in delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips. -The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She's a gamey mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way. H e knows them all, faith. A t last she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. And what star is that, Poldy? says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. That one, is it? says Chris Callinan, sure that's only what you might call a pinprick. By God, he wasn't far wide of the mark. Lenehan stopped and leaned on the riverwall, panting with soft laughter. -I'm weak, he gasped (10.552-577). M'Coy, however, doesn't laugh. H e almost smiles, then darkens and says nothing. Unnerved, Lenehan, his joke rife with mockery fallen flat, doesn't know what to do. At last he offers an anxious compliment of Bloom to make amends: "He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He's not one of your common or garden . . . you know . . . There's a touch of the artist about old Bloom" (10.581-583) M'Coy doesn't like the story and may instinctively have tried to stop it. For he is uxorious and more. Here he protects or allies with another man whose wife performs, perhaps because women who perform can engender still other men's prurience and ribaldry. M'Coy admires and likes Bloom and at this moment apparently identifies with him. Does he resent the aspersion on Bloom's potencyor by identification his own? Insecure himself, does he buoy Democratic Vistas/zr

himself up feeling common cause, or wanting to? Being a trickster, might he envy Lenehan's time with Molly? Or is he being shyly chivalrous? In the Dubliners story "Grace" he closely follows Cunningham's lead. Does he now again seek a stronger man's shadow? We can raise these questions but would need more access to his thoughts to answer them. Yet his silence is eloquent. Once a silly character, he now has vulnerability, moral weight, and the will to differentiate himself. His failure to laugh changes much; and our transformed view of him must puzzle our fondness for Bloom, who misread him, just as Lenehan's provoked praise may confirm it. The vignette, furthermore, reveals anew male chumminess, issues of responsibility, love and loyalty, and parochial attitudes toward women and outsiders, while M'Coy emerges distinct, both an analogue and a foil to Bloom, and part of an urban populace made up of intriguing persons. Lenehan behaves here as elsewhere in Ulysses, like a shallow hanger-on, witty and trivial, an overgrown latency jokester unaware (as at moments he is aware in Dubliners' "Two Gallants") of his loneliness. H e contorts himself to regain his companion's goodwill, whatever twist is needed. Adept at staying in company, he's not introspective, and there seems to be some inveterate failure to grow about him. Not all the characters impress as having rich or surprising inner lives. Some serve other narrative purposes, like contrast Jimmy Henry with his aching corns and Long John Fanning with faulty memory when Martin Cunningham approaches them for a fund for Dignam's family, to which Bloom has already donated handsomely. Young Patrick Dignam similarly, who, stunned, saddened, and a little proud of the attention he anticipates getting from his schoolmates, concentrates on externalities: advertisements of a boxing match and of a showgirl,

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the sharp clothes "a toff" (Boylan) is wearing. He has street argot, no apparent skills, and few memories, the most prominent of them of his father beating him and his father dying drunk. Dilly Dedalus at least has an admired brother on whom to base her wishes and a father with a sense of humor. Some minor characters merely provide density, just as strangers do in daily life, when we perceive them but never see or learn anything about them again. Others recur but do not gain in complication (Denis Breen, J. J. O'Molloy), and some remain vague (Ned Lambert, "Father" Cowley, Rev. Love). Buck Mulligan and Blazes Boylan have more notable but quite conventional roles to fill, Mulligan as friendly betrayer and Boylan as seducer. Obviously a complex character, Mulligan toys with Stephen and indeed betrays him. He's witty, shocking, curiously libidinal, and possibly caring. Manipulative and without conscience, he nonetheless appreciates how gloomy Stephen is and tries to cheer him up. H e also tells Haines that Stephen will write something worthy in ten years, which is more hopeful than Stephen is about himself. Boylan's stock mind we glimpse when he orders a basket of fruit to be sent ahead to Molly, flirts with the shopgirl, and admires himself: Blazes Boylan looked into the cut of her blouse. A young pullet. He took a red carnation from the tall stemglass. -This for me? he asked gallantly (10.327-329). H e is predictable. Eventually, though, Molly will shrewdly link his taking his unmarried sisters to tea with his not being a marrying man; and "the citizen" and "the nameless one" in chapter 12 will imply a connection between his canny promotional ways and his father's treachery in selling horses to the enemy during the Boer War. We get glimmers of motivations

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and internalizations that would bear on his deserved reputation, hints of a plausible present and past, even for a Don Juan stereotype. The balance, however, tilts toward psychological richness, because the narrator's sustained attentiveness to surface detail and implied depths, to symbolic gesture, interior monologue, and stream of consciousness establishes believable continuity between the minor and major characters of Ulysses. They fit into the same varied, multiple, and psychological verbal world. In "Wandering Rocks" the panoramic view and democratic array of characters convey the impression that a good number of Dublin's citizens could reward extended consideration-especially if presented by this narrator, who is keen to distinguish facets of personality, generous in imaginative sympathy and curiosity (though unpredictable), and increasingly willing to reveal warts and more of his own presence and attitudes. Mulligan saved a man from drowning, but that matters to the narrator only as it reverberates in Stephen's self-doubt. Tom Rochford rescued someone trapped in a dangerous manhole and is acknowledged a hero. But such traditional acts of heroism hold no lingering interest for a narrator who relishes quirks, perceptions, and motivations. As a storyteller, stylist, and wordsmith, he has other than psychological avidities, to be sure, and they emerge more fully as Ulysses continues. But the interest in absorbing characters remains part of all he accomplishes. The narrator's greater forcefulness registers at the very beginning of the entr'acte, in the opening portrait of Father John Conmee, S.J., who is on a charitable mission to secure schooling for Dignam's son. Following Conmee's mental process and the narrator's wry comments and inferences, one wonders what a spiritual leader devoid of spirituality implies about the church and the society: "Brother Swan was the person to see. M r 24/Demorratic Vistas

Cunningham's letter. Yes. Oblige him, if possible. Good practical catholic: useful at mission time" (10.4-6). Father Conmee is practical and worldly; he repays favor for favor. Passing the one-legged sailor, who inspiredly holds out his cap to him in front of the convent of the sisters of charity, he offers a blessing, "for his purse held, he knew, one silver crownn-no smaller coins, no effort, no charity: "Father Conmee crossed to Mountjoy square. He thought, but not for long, of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs, ending their days in some pauper ward, and of cardinal Wolsey's words: If1 had served my God as I have served my king He would not have abandoned me in my old days" (10.11-16). H e knows texts and suffers no confusions or doubts. Holding on to both money and feelings, and complacent in his belief, he thinks of the fate of grievously wounded veterans, "but not for long." H e reflects on the headlined story about the disaster on the Hudson: "In America those things were continually happening. Unfortunate people to die like that, unprepared. Still, an act of perfect contrition" (10.90-92) He has a ready answer for every circumstance. It is not the downtrodden or victimized who command his concern but well-placed persons. Meeting the wife of David Sheehy, M.P., he offers charm, asking about Mr. Sheehy and their boys at Belvedere and chatting about London, the delightful weather, his vacation plans, and Father Bernard Vaughan, whose sermons Mrs. Sheehy likes. The narrator's cadences ape Conmee's, telegraphing scorn: Father Conmee was very glad to see the wife of M r David Sheehy M.P. looking so well and begged to be remembered to M r David Sheehy M.P. Yes, he would certainly call. -Good afternoon, Mrs Sheehy. Father Conmee doffed his silk hat and smiled, as Democratic V i s t a s / q

he took leave, at the jet beads of her mantilla inkshining in the sun. And smiled yet again, in going. H e had cleaned his teeth, he knew, with arecanut paste (10.26-32). Conmee seems false, a toady and a snob: about Father Vaughan, for example, whom Mrs. Sheehy admires but who to him sounds lower class; or Mrs. M'Guinness: "A fine carriage she had. Like Mary, queen of Scots, something. And to think that she was a pawnbroker! Well, now! Such a . . . what should he say? . . . such a queenly mien" (10.65-67); or the "untidy caps" of Christian Brothers schoolboys ( I O . ? ~ )the , "invincible ignorance" of Protestants (10.71), the bad temper of some elderly ladies, or the solemnity of his fellow tram riders, "excessive for a journey so short and cheap." He likes, we are told, "cheerful decorum" (10.120-121). Glancing at a billboard advertising a blackface entertainer, his thoughts move on to the African mission and "the millions and black and brown and yellow souls that had not received the baptism of water when their last hour came like a thief in the night. . . . It seemed to Father Conmee a pity that they should all be lost, a waste, if one might say" (10.145-152). H e floats along calm and selfsatisfied, superficial but blithely sure, careless of the actuality of others, and soppy when at all reflective: "Moored under the trees of Charleville Mall Father Conmee saw a turfbarge, a towhorse with pendent head, a bargeman with a hat of dirty straw seated amidships, smoking and staring at a branch of poplar above him. It was idyllic: and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of the Creator who had made turf to be in bogs whence men might dig it out and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor people" (10.101-106). This is an institutionally powerful, conniving, and sentimentally foolish man, presented unsparingly. 26/Democratir Vistas

But neither his philosophical flatness nor the narrator's more open assertiveness accounts for the continuing dynamic-the palpable dependability-of Conmee's complacency. That begins to constellate as his attitudes toward the past and toward sexuality emerge together. H e has written Old Times in the Barony, a little book focused on the aristocracy and commensurate with his snobbery. As he toys with the possibility of writing another book, on the great Jesuit houses, he ponders the first countess of Belvedere, imprisoned de facto by her husband after he accused her of adultery with his brother: She would half confess if she had not all sinned as women did. Only God knew and she and he, her husband's brother. Father Conmee thought of that tyrannous incontinence, needed however for man's race on earth, and of the ways of God which were not our ways. Don John Conmee walked and moved in times of yore. H e was humane and honoured there. H e bore in mind secrets confessed and he smiled at smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawingroom, ceiled with full fruit clusters. And the hands of a bride and of a bridegroom, noble to noble, were impalmed by Don John Conmee. It was a charming day (10.169-179). The fascination of mystifying, guilt-saturated, and idealizable erotics struggles with the smug formulas he imposes, all made easier by being set long ago. The mocking epithet "Don John Conmee," however, both needles and sympathizes, because like a good clinical interpretation it clarifies and enables much. That is where Father Conmee's love life is invested, where he could be humane and wish to be honored-a romanDemocratic Vistas/q

tic, legendary, and aristocratic past, where, in reflected glory, alert to but safe from the tumultuous loves of others, vicariously involved but separate, he could bask in self-delight, the "superior, the very reverend John Conmee S.J." (10.1). W h a t ensues provides confirmation: "The lychgate of a field showed Father Conmee breadths of cabbages, curtseying to him with ample underleaves" (10.180-181). Humane and honored, he remembers boys playing at Clongowes, where he was rector and "his reign . . . mild" (10.188). A t the last he gravely blesses a young couple who burst out from behind a hedge. Not party to their erotic flush, he reads in his breviary at the Hebrew letter Sin-disconnected, as the narrator puns. Living up to his name, Father Conmee has conned many, but most of all himself. The narrator's differentiating activity here-mimicking, interpreting, satirizing, and judging-joins with such signs as the striking interpolations and the fragmentary, at moments treacherous, realism of chapter 10 to establish him as a presence. Henceforth he will be not only tacitly if splendidly the creator in words of Ulysses but more clearly a figure desiring recognition of his handiwork. H e never becomes a visible character like Dilly or Kernan or Conmee or Bloom. But unique in power and originality, in verbal range and awareness, in independence, empathy, aloofness, objectivity, sheer knowledge, capacity for indeterminacy, and changeability, the narrator is still perceptibly human-as those qualities indicate. Extraordinary as he is, he remains a storyteller to whom readers respond emotionally as well as cognitively. T h e way I experience the dazzling linguistic virtuosity and protean narrative forms of the chapters after the entr'acte is to let them play over me-to surprise, teach, and stretch me while I retain my own stance of (I trust and strive for) flexible receptivity. That is, I bring my own personality and my hypotheses, 28/Democratic Vistas

perspectives, and self-awareness, such as they are. I shape and limit, comprehend, illuminate, puzzle, and leave open as would any other reader, but by my lights, which by training and congeniality are literary-aesthetic and psychoanalytically psychological. M y tendency, therefore, is to address the later chapters and the narrator's spectacular presence in them as stunning, often uproarious, and dependably delighting but strenuous variations on the initial style. That puts me at odds with majority and certainly admirable trends in the critical literature (Hayman, 1970b; Kenner, 1978, 1980; Lawrence, 1981). Nonetheless, it seems to me that in these highly innovative chapters, each different in manner from the others, the narrative style extends not the verbal and pliantly experiential idiom of a credible character, as it did earlier, but a salient attitude-a quality of one of the characters on show at that moment or a shared quality of experience of two or more-which by exaggerating and sustaining, the narrator identifies with, parodies and explores. He continues thereby (among his other achievements) to unpack the mystery of psyches, including his own. W h a t Karen Lawrence describes aptly as narrative masks, which epitomize Ulysses'transformation from a story to a tale of the telling, I too see as transformational, yet within a continuum of expressive form, in which the performing (though highly elusive) narrator remains attuned to the inner lives of his characters. An illustrative -if inevitably not representative - instance of this post-entr'acte performativeness is the portrayal of Gerty MacDowell in "Nausicaa," who on the strand and from a distance rouses Leopold Bloom, and perhaps herself, to orgasm. Readers have long appreciated the splendid parodic acumen of the presentation of Gerty at dusk, with her two friends who are minding a baby and four-year old twins, engrossed in her thoughts and alert to the morose, darkly dressed gentleman with his hands in his pockets. She was: Democratic Vistas/zg

in very truth, as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see. She was pronounced beautiful by all her knew her though, as folks often said, she was more a Giltrap than a MacDowell. Her figure was slight and graceful, inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welch's female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to get and that tired feeling. T h e waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid's bow, Greekly perfect (1~.80-y). T h e narrative voice, in Bernard Benstock's phrase, belongs to an "implied 'authoress'" (1991, p. 167)-which I take to mean a writer of Victorian sentimental fiction whom the narrator imitates and freely ridicules. Gerty herself alludes to Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter (1854), a much-read model of the genre. By the turn of the century, such fiction appeared commonly in women's magazines alongside advertisements for products to enhance beauty and promote additional feminine aims. Gerty MacDowell seems to have stepped from those magazine pages. She aspires to their recommended and purchasable ideals and (in secret) yearns floridly for romance. As implied authoress, the narrator identifies seamlessly with her, demonstrating a consciousness shaped to those gendered, literary, commercial, and emotional ideals. As presiding and parodying presence, however, he also takes the measure of that sensibility, exposes a popular genre, weighs its appeal, and by way of the pleasures afforded by his double-visioned narration, cajoles the reader to consider Gerty both critically and empathically-to laugh, perhaps, but not dismiss her. 30/Democratic Vistas

Because if formed in the pages of a woman's magazine, she lives crippled-much more encompassingly than her damaged leg or self-consciousness about it actually hinder her. Gerty compounds severe social constraints and powerful inner ones. Thus, it has symbolic force that while Edy Boardman and Cissy Caffrey move busily about tending to their little siblings, she remains seated, static even as she flirts at a distance with Bloom. When eventually she limps away and he realizes she is lame, the desperateness of Gerty's entrapment, external and internal, has been revealed-as has her relative unawareness of it. At twenty-two-stephen Dedalus' age-she has probably passed her time to catch a fellow. Adrift, poorly educated, a pretty girl but lamed by a bad fall on Dalkey hill some years earlier, she has few options: to be a shopgirl, assist at home (though no siblings are mentioned), or help her father sell linoleum when he's sober; she can become a domestic, a nun, a pub girl, or a prostitute. She can also indulge in wishful fantasy, which she does. But outside of marriage and children, the prospects for young women of her class-even those whole in limb-were grim; nor does Ulysses show family life to have been very fulfilling for them. In any event, irritable about the twins Jacky and Tommy and the baby, she hardly seems to want children of her own. She glows with admiration at moments for her friends Cissy and Edy yet quickly feels competitive with them. She indulges in self-celebrating fancies and imagines scenarios of love and marriage. Before long, too, she enjoys day-dreaming about and half-knowingly enticing the attractive mature man in black-preoccupations that mesh with her concerns about appearance and the ideology of consumerism and sentiment she makes her own. Intermittently we are told of the men's temperance retreat audible nearby, at which the Virgin Mary is implored for intercession. Gerty recalls her father's drunken brutalities, but withDemocratic Vistas/31

out specificity ("she had even witnessed in the home circle deeds of violence . . . her own father . . . forget himself completely," 13.298-300); and she blames him for spoiling her chances in life: "Had [he] only avoided the clutches of the demon drink. . . she might now be rolling in her carriage, second to none" (13.290-292). W i t h the narrator's augmentation, she conceives a family romance: There was an innate refinement, a languid queenly hauteur about Gerty which was unmistakably evidenced in her delicate hands and higharched instep. Had kind fate but willed her to be born a gentlewoman of high degree in her own right and had she only received the benefit of a good education Gerty MacDowell might easily have held her own beside any lady in the land and have seen herself exquisitely gowned with jewels on her brow and patrician suitors at her feet vying with one another to pay their devoirs to her. Mayhap it was this, the love that might have been, that lent to her softlyfeatured face at whiles a look, tense with suppressed meaning, that imparted a strange yearning tendency to the beautiful eyes, a charm few could resist (13.96-107). Suppressed disappointment adds to her charm. Yet Gerty's shaping affinity is with the Virgin. A good daughter, she loves her father still and ministers tenderly to her mother's "raging splitting" headaches: "just like a second mother in the house, a ministering angel too with a little heart worth its weight in gold" (13.325-328). A delicate young woman, she finds both protection and comfort in Mary: "And still the voices sang in supplication to the Virgin most powerful, Virgin most merciful. And Gerty, rapt in thought, scarce saw or heard her com32 /Democratic Vistas

panions or the twins at the boyish gambols" (13.303-305). She also aligns herself with the Virgin unconsciously, as the narrator suggests through cunning juxtapositions. She had kicked at and missed the twins' ball that rolled her way, for example, but, laughed at by Cissy and Edy, she succeeded with the next tryin more ways than one: "Pure jealousy of course it was nothing else to draw attention on account of the gentleman opposite looking. She felt the warm flush, a danger signal always with Gerty MacDowell, surging and flaming into her cheeks. Till then they had only exchanged glances of the most casual but now under the brim of her new hat she ventured a look at him and the face that met her gaze there in the twilight, wan and strangely drawn, seemed to her the saddest she had ever seen" (13.364-370). O n the instant we are brought to the open window of the church, through which we hear "the fragrant names of her who was conceived without stain of original sin," and shortly "what the great saint Bernard said in his famous prayer of Mary, the most pious Virgin's intercessory power that it was not recorded in any age that those who implored her powerful protection were ever abandoned by her" (13.372-380). An ironic doubling of Gerty and Mary thus emerges, poignant indeed from within Gerty's wishful fantasy about the sad, handsome stranger and the grace she would offer him-and risible from without, that her sexual teasing and the man's discreet masturbating could be so wrapped in unwitting denial and pretense. To conceive of herself as virginal, however, as without sexual stain or sin, seems a governing aim of her consciousness. T h e narrator's citing of Master Tommy's "unmentionables" becoming full of sand anticipates Gerty's embarrassment when Cissy speaks loudly enough for Bloom to hear of spanking the baby on "the beeoteetom": "[She] bent down her head and crimsoned at the idea of Cissy saying an unladylike thing like Democratic Vistas/33

that out loud she'd be ashamed of her life to say, flushing a deep rosy red" (13.26~-266)Gerty believes herself to be prudish and innocent. She likes euphemisms. When she feels a dangerous flush surge in her cheeks, she follows quickly with contemplating the saddest face she had ever seen. Sweetening her perceptions, she disavows or misses much, though she can shift sharply to angry criticism. She proves most guarded, however, and vulnerable, about her body, which she decorates and poses with evident care. And she deceives herself about adult intimacy, which consciously she desires yet consistently in her thoughts diverts and evades. Excited by Bloom's stare, she responds with this emotive scenario: It was he who mattered and there was joy on her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he was like no-one else. The very heart of the girlwoman went out to him, her dreamhusband, because she knew on the instant it was him. If he had suffered, more sinned against than sinning, or even, even, if he had been himself a sinner, a wicked man, she cared not. Even if he was a protestant or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved her. There were wounds that wanted healing with heartbalm (13.428-435). Her certainties, hopes, and stock formulations assuage any worries or wariness she might have ("a sinner, a wicked man. . . . if he were a protestant or methodist"), with the reservation implicit in "dreamhusband" and "girlwoman" that all will remain potential. Nothing will become actual. For unconsciously-by way of her idiosyncratic repression and disavowal-she seems to want neither adult love nor genital contact but stoppage: "he would embrace her gently, like a real man, crushing her soft body to him, and love her, his own3g/Democratic Vistas

est girlie, for herself alone" (13.439-441). "With all the heart of her she longs to be his only, his affianced bride for riches for poor, in sickness in health, till death us two part" (13.215217). TObe affianced, not married, a grown man's girlie-to be accepted, that is, as permanently girlish, a melodramatist of imagination but sexually exempt-is what she yearns for: There was the allimportant question and she was dying to know was he a married man or a widower who had lost his wife or some tragedy like the nobleman with the foreign name from the land of song had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind. But even if-what then? Would it make a very great difference? From everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen women off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and coarse men, with no respect for a girl's honour, degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. They would be just good friends like a big brother and sister without all that other in spite of the conventions of Society with a big ess (13.656-666). She imagines exotic agonies and romance but only wants a friend, "without all that other." Struggling with her physical condition and society's restrictions, she is stuck within herself, fearful of further development while frantic for love and reassurance-secure only in rich fantasies that manage to stop time, or reverse it. In Freud's contemporaneous psychoanalysis, between Studies on Hysteria (1895) and the "Dora" case study ( I ~ o s ) ,Gerty would no doubt have been thought of as a hysteric (see Drinka, Democratic Vistas/35

1984; Halberstadt-Freud, 1996; Showalter, 1997). Although she shows no epileptiform seizures, dramatic paralyses of limbs, or physical anesthesias and suffers no dreadful phobias-the famous flamboyant symptoms-she is exceedingly preoccupied with her bodily appearance and given to elaborate fantasizing. Zealous about her dress, she arrays her body to impress and sexualizes her awareness of it. Delighting in Bloom's gaze, and triumphing with it over her friends, she focuses reactive pride on her foot, instep, shoes, and transparent stockings, turning impairment into its opposite. She has other telling signs: labile, exaggerated feelings and an inner theatricality, magical thinking, excited pleasure in pose and exhibitionism. And not open to actual intimacy, she transfers hot, oedipal readiness to Bloom, "her dreamhusband," the unhappy-looking older man she assumes is married. In more disguised form earlier, she deployed those feelings to Reggie Wylie, who, considerably younger than she and a Protestant, is inappropriate on both counts, even were he, as she likes to believe, interested. Their unavailability is part of their lure, just as she keeps herself unavailable, even as she tries to allure. So a psychological portrait begins to emerge that includes current dynamics, which help to illuminate her appearance, thoughts, and action on the strand, and an implied prehistory to the fall on Dalkey hill that damaged her leg and, she believes, her prospects-a prehistory that suggests early conflict and arrest in a frightened little girl to which the trauma in adolescence gave renewed impetus. There are hints too of preoedipal wishes for a bond with her mother that might have led to more ease in her female body. Little enough is revealed of Gerty's mother: only that she suffers debilitating headaches, takes snuff (of which Gerty disapproves), is probably abused by her husband, and scolds him about his drinking without

36/Democratic Vistas

effect. Twice, however, Gerty associates priests with specifically female experiences that frighten her, and each time she connects the priests with women. She recalls the onset of her menarche, for example, for which apparently she was unprepared, and Father Conroy's help: H e told her that time when she told him about that in confession, crimsoning up to the roots of her hair for fear he could see, not to be troubled because that was only the voice of nature and we were all subject to nature's laws, he said, in this life and that that was no sin because that came from the nature of woman instituted by God, he said, and that Our Blessed Lady herself said to the archangel Gabriel be it done unto me according to Thy Word (13.453-459). The priest knew the route through nature to the Blessed Virgin, and Gerty still is grateful to him: "He was so kind and holy and often and often she thought and thought could she work a ruched teacosy with embroidered floral design for him as a present or a clock but they had a clock . . . it was hard to know what sort of a present to give" (13.459-465). Later, when Cissy and Edy lead the children toward the bazaar fireworks and Gerty tarries to be admired by Bloom-while the narrator, empathic with her but at the same time arch, skewers him as "a sterling man, a man of inflexible honour to his fingertips" (13.69~)-her desire, wishfulness, disavowal, and inhibition issue in a seductiveness that she concomitantly acknowledges and denies as, virginal in self-appraisal still, she leans back, her knee in her hands, to watch the fireworks and show her legs, thighs, and more to her admirer-and, with both guilt and longing, wish for absolution from a maternal source,

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she seemed to hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse breathing, because she knew about the passion of men like that, hot-blooded, because Bertha Supple told her once in dead secret and made her swear she'd never about the gentleman lodger that was staying with them out of the Congested Districts Board that had pictures cut out of papers of those skirtdancers and highkickers and she said he used to do something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed. But this was altogether different from a thing like that because there was all the difference because she could almost feel him draw her face to his and the first quick hot touch of his handsome lips. Besides there was absolution so long as you didn't do the other thing before being married and there ought to be women priests that would understand without your telling out (13.699-711). Without quite owning what she is doing, Gerty manages an act of befuddled kindness to both Bloom and herself. As the fireworks burst, he reaches orgasm manually, and she may from sheer excitement. This reader isn't sure and wonders whether Gerty could be. The displacement of accent to exploding fireworks combined with the narrator's coyness leave the matter in doubt-appropriately, given Gerty's contradictory desires. But in her wish for perfect and immediate understanding from women priests, as in her gratitude to Father Conroy, Gerty seems to sense that there are female resources-encouragement, accommodation, reassurance, and permission-she could have used to grow. Indeed, her very psychological frailty may bear on the implied authoress' seamless fit with her, a compensatory sympathy akin to a psychoanalyst's countertransferential 38/Democratic Vistas

wish to protect or rescue certain needy patients. The other, ironic narrative perspective, meanwhile, allows a reader, like an analyst aware of his countertransference, to maintain observing distance while identifying closely-to preserve, so to speak, a locale for active and empathic disinterestedness. Thus the storyteller invites us to appreciate Gerty's intensity and swings of emotion, her self-absorption and frenzy for love, but also to realize what she cannot: that her febrile passion remains adrift and that her busily superficial consciousness, easily influenced and attached to diversion, fantasy, and spectatordom, is far more self-protective than self-governing. By way of the double perspective the narrator devises, we come to know a discrete hysteric named Gerty and her felt quality of mind: what it is like to be her and what it is like, touchingly, to be in her presence. One discerns both Gerty and her sophisticated narrator. After the entr'acte the narrator becomes more extravagant and self-advertising but continues to develop complex characters, though differently. I turn now to Stephen Dedalus, in dramatic focus, just before the entr'acte.

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"What the Hell Are You Driving At?" STEPHEN DEDALUS' SHAKESPEARE

There is a propulsive quality to Stephen's articulation of his Shakespeare theory. It is more than prickliness with the literati he tries to persuade, more than his desire to shine or conviction of truth, more than any lingering effect of drinks with the newspapermen. His ideas about Shakespeare have been part of his aura since the opening chapter, when Buck Mulligan joshed to Haines: "It's quite simple. H e proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father" (1.555-557). Obviously an uncommon theory Stephen worked out and told in detail to Mulligan before June 16,1904, it nonetheless seems, as he holds forth about it in the director's office of the National Library, beyond his full control. "What the hell are you driving at?" he asks himself at an important juncture, and immediately replies: "I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons." Bewildered, he upbraids himself: "Are you condemned to do this?" (9.846849). Something not in his conscious awareness and more than the theory drives him, fueling his dialogue with the othersand himself-despite his keen and considerable self-awareness throughout the episode. Chapter 9, "Scylla and Charybdis," the fast-paced discussion of Shakespeare, continues to puzzle readers, and though the critics have clarified much about it, more remains to be fathomed. (See Goldberg, 1961, pp. 66-99; Shechner, 1974, pp.

I;-49;* Kellog, 1974, p p 147-179; Maddox, 1978, p p 101-114; Brivic, 1980, pp. 125-139; Kenner, 1980, pp. 111-118; Thomas, 1982, pp. 56-82,166-176; McGee, 1988, pp. 37-68; Froula, 1996, pp. 107-120.) I t involves actual participants in the Irish literary and cultural moment of 1904 as well as then-fashionable reconstructions of Shakespeare's biography by such luminaries as Edward Dowden, Georg Brandes, Sidney Lee, Oscar Wilde, Frank Harris, and George Bernard Shaw (Schoenbaum, 1970, PP. 439-526, 667-680; Schutte, 1957, PP. 153-177) But it offers no expository accommodation. Rather, it builds upon dialogue, surges of rhetoric and passion, and tart, at times challenging, confrontations through two sustained scenes separated by a comic interlude when Buck Mulligan enters. Exits and entrances are frequent and clear. Three times Lyster, the librarian, is called from his office-once when Leopold Bloom comes to find a logo of crossed keys for the ad he hopes to place for Mr. Keyes. The assistant librarian, Richard Best, comes in early on. George Russell (pen name AE), poet, critic, journalist, and theosophist, emphatically departs. And at the close, when Buck and Stephen leave the library, Bloom serendipitously cuts between them. This form, which structures the contentiousness about Shakespeare, also registers from within the leading character's mind. Thus the library chapter opens in the initial style, with Stephen Dedalus shaping the emergent action and alert to his doing so. "Local colour," he thinks. "Work in all you know. Make them accomplices" (9.158). H e stage-manages and directs himself: "Flatter. Rarely. But flatter" (9.874). H e notes a repetition he's made, "Said that" (9.399), or praises an achieved cogency, "I think you're getting on very nicely," before turning *Schechnerlsfine commentary on Stephen and Joyce focused on several key psychoanalytic themes that I too explore, though our aims and interpretations differ.

"What the HeNAre You DrivingAt?"/qr

on himself, in Latin: "Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere [the conjugation of "to urinate"]. . . . Suflaminandus sum [I ought to be suppressed]" (9.761-762). Stephen's censures cut outwardly, too, for he mocks his interlocutors, as they do him. H e came to the library to deliver a copy of Deasy's warning letter about foot-and-mouth disease to George Russell, hoping to place it in the Irish Homestead. When Russell suddenly leaves because he is due at the Homestead, he appears to underscore his disagreement with Stephen's provocative view of Shakespeare. He'd already staked out an opposing idealism: -All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex. Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys. . . . I mean, when we read the poetry of King Lear what is it to us how the poet lived? As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de 1'Isle has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet's drinking, the poet's debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal (9.46-53; 184-188). As Russell gets up to go, Lyster, Best, and W. K. Magee (pen name John Eglinton) talk of a party at George Moore's that night which many writers will attend and of a collection

4z/"Wbat the HeNAre You Driving At?"

of young Irish poets Russell is editing. "See this. Remember" (9.2g4), Stephen urges himself-he has been included in neither and is angry about it. H e is also hurt. "Cordelia," he associates, "Cordoglio [deep sorrow]. Lir's loneliest daughter" (9.31~;see Gifford, 1988, p. 215). Hurtful interactions abound, and the most sustained of them proves to be Stephen's impassioned exposition itself. Magee rounds on him crossly near the end with "Do you believe your own theory?" and he promptly answers, "No" (9.1065-1067). Are we to believe he has enlisted their critical keenness-and ours-for an extended hoax? H e appeared genuinely to care about his theory. What, then, other than competitive taunting, might he have been up to, knowingly or unknowingly? What was Stephen driving at? O r the storyteller? The library chapter concludes the first part of Ulysses by completing the presentation of Stephen Dedalus before the entr'acte. Given its vibrancy, weight, and place, the Shakespeare controversy might be expected to add appreciably to our knowledge of Stephen. Yet as he walks from the library behind Mulligan, he thinks dispiritedly: "What have I learned? O f them? O f me?" (9.1113) and offers no answer. What, we may wonder, have we learned? Stephen Dedalus' theory takes a received story seriously: that Shakespeare, who acted and wrote, performed the ghost's part in Hamlet. Conjuring the moment-the man Shakespeare on stage speaking fateful words to the son of his verbal contrivance, Hamlet: "List! List! 0 List!"-Stephen too hears with trepidation, "If thou didst ever . . . [thy dear father love]," for that moment himself son to the embodied specter. The dead king, of course, asks revenge and tells of being murdered in his sleep by his brother, who poured a leperous distillment in the porches of his ears and now rules, married to Hamlet's mother.

"What the HeNAre You Driving At?"/43

"Composition of place," Stephen instructs himself, calling on the Jesuit training of his younger days for secular persuasion, "Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me," and proceeds: -The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. H e speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him by name: Hamlet, I am thyfather? spirit, bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever. Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable, that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway? ( 9 . 1 ~ ~ - 1 8 0 ) . Act I, scene v, of Hamlet: emphatically indicting Claudius, the ghost inveighs against the queen but bids Hamlet leave her to heaven and her own regrets. "Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive /Against thy mother aught" (11. 85-86), he plainly states. Stephen's version, however, shifts the weight of moral qq/"What the HeNAre You Driving At?"

blame to her. "Your mother is the guilty queen": that, for him, is the burden borne by the playwright who "studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre." In art as in life, Stephen goes on to claim, Shakespeare gave expression to psychic wounding by his guilty queen, lubricious Ann- the alluring older woman who seduced and married him, and bore his children, before he set out from her and from Stratford: D o you think the writer of Antony and Cleopatra, a passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose the ugliest doxy in all Wanvickshire to lie withal? Good: he left her and gained the world of men. But his boywomen are the women of a boy. Their life, thought, speech are lent them by males. H e chose badly? H e was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself (9.251-260). For twenty years in London, Will Shakespeare created wondrously. But the ghost's accusation, spoken in performance by the actor-playwright, guides Stephen's argument that the shaping experience with Ann informed an idiom of humiliating desire, loss, and rage indelible in Shakespeare's writings, the dynamic of his creativity no less apparent in the sonnets, for example, than in Hamlet: There's a saying of Goethe's which M r Magee likes to quote. Beware ofwhat you wish for in youth be"What the Hell Are You Driving At?"/45

cause you will get it in middle life. Why does he send to one who is a buonaroba, a bay where all men ride, a maid of honour with a scandalous girlhood, a lordling to woo for him? He was himself a lord of language and had made himself a coistrel gentleman and he had written Romeo and Juliet. Why? Belief in himself has been untimely killed. He was overborne in a cornfield first (a ryefield, I should say) and he will never be a victor in his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down. Assumed dongiovannism will not save him. No later undoing will undo the first undoing. The tusk of the boar has wounded him there where love lies ableeding. If the shrew is worsted yet there remains to her woman's invisible weapon. There is, I feel in the words, some goad of the flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow of the first, darkening even his own understanding of himself. A like fate awaits him and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool (9.450-464). As Stephen tells it, Will Shakespeare's imagination was seized forever by the double blow to his self-worth inflicted by his wife. She overbore him and she betrayed him. Ann, Stephen infers, subsequently seduced Will's brothers-the namesakes of two of his foremost villains, Edmund and Richard: "Two deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom her favor has declined, the deceased husband's brother. Sweet Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer, twice a wooer" (9.666-669); and from that compound origin, being overborne and being betrayedStephen later calls it an "original sinn-emerged the incomparable works from Venus andAdonis through the great comedies, 46/"Wbat the HellAre You Driving At?"

histories, and tragedies to the reconciling romances. "An original sin," Stephen explains, "and, like original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created" (9.1008-1013). Thereby hangs the tale as well of the second-best bed the Bard left her, nowhere else mentioning her in his will; while confirmingly, Ann, who outlived him, ended her days a narrow-souled penitent: -She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the Merry Wives and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches and The Most Spiritual Snuflox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze. Venus has twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god (9.800-810). "Belief in himself. . . untimely killed," undone, cuckolded, and repeatedly moved to redo and heal himself in vain, Shakespeare wrote himself into immortality before returning to Stratford, barely reconciled with Ann: "What the HeNAre You DrivingAtPn/47

He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore's rocks or what you will, the sea's voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father (9.474-481). Consubstantial through words and fathering by his verbal making, spurred always by unassuaged sexual defeat, "an old dog licking an old sore," Shakespeare created, beyond cycles of mortal generations, personages and worlds for all time: "When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born" (9.865-870). We shall return to consubstantiality and fathering. For the moment let us remark the ghost and prince together on stage and the quickening quality of words. Stephen's theory may strain: Richard I1 is no manifest villain, nor was Iago one of Will's brothers. But despite the inveterately revisited pain it posits, it implies a kind of hope. For in it Shakespeare transforms loss into immortal gain, and with it Stephen hears, sees, feels, and expresses kinship to Shakespeare, the literary forebear who, wounded to the core, created descendants, and ancestors too, in words. England's Bard has special appeal for a twenty-two-yearold, remarkably erudite Irish writer with pronounced ambitions &?/"What the HeNAre You Driving At?"

but little on paper. Immersed in Shakespeare's writings, young Dedalus evokes their pungency, eloquence, and very pitch of language, matching wits with members of the Irish literary movement he scorns and envies. Like many an insurgent, he goads those older than he and argues more for victory than for truth. In the heat of confrontation he grows militant, commanding himself, "Unsheathe your dagger definitions" (9.84), before thrusting with Aristotle against their Plato. A later impulse, less expected, is more puzzling: having risen to a peak of persuasiveness, he halts momentarily to gauge his effect. "They list," he notes. "And in the porches of their ears I pour" (9.465). For at that echoing instant he joins with the detested usurper Claudius, who poured leperous distillment in his royal brother's ears-consigning Lyster, Best, and Eglinton, his interlocutors, as victims with the king. Whose side is Stephen on? The question compounds as he resumes speaking: "The soul has been stricken mortally, a poison poured in the porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast with two backs that urged it King Hamlet's ghost could not know of were he not endowed with knowledge by his creator" (9.466-47~).So Shakespeare supplied the ghost's knowledge of the murder and adultery from his own lived pain. Stephen has already stressed the poet's ease with death, citing the proliferation of bodies in Hamlet. But how to understand the shifting loyalties-Stephen's labile identifications with the killer and the killed-is hardly clear. When he first presented the ghost's significance to his theory, he offered an intriguing comparison: "What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as cor"What the HeNAre You Driving At?"/qp

rupt Paris lies from virgin Dublin. W h o is the ghost from limbo patrum, returning to the world that has forgotten him? W h o is King Hamlet?" (9.147-151). London and Stratford were to Shakespeare, we know, as Paris and Dublin to Stephen, journey points of a life. Stephen's theory, then, may tell of his own life even as manifestly and provocatively it deals with Shakespeare's. Indeed, at the close of his argument, he invites exactly that assumption: Shakespeare "found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: I f Socrates leave his house today he willjind the sage seated on his doorstep. IfJudas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves" (9.1041-1046). If Stephen Dedalus meets himself in all his ventures, his mental work about Shakespeare is autobiographical, however cryptically and to whatever degree, and his theorizing and his bristling exposition of it this day presumably add to his unfolding characterization. For his efforts arise from who he is, although he does not, as he recognizes, entirely know what he's about ("What the hell are you driving at?"). His delighted observation, "They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour," might, therefore, shine oedipal light on Stephen comparable to Hamlet's "0 my prophetic soul! M y uncle?" in Ernest Jones's much-contested interpretation of the play (1949); and the momentary identification with Claudius pouring leperous distillment would begin to make sense. But unlike Hamlet, Stephen neither idealizes his father nor ponders revenge; and his father is alive; so his murderous impulse toward his interlocutors remains puzzling. Nor do what psychoanalysts since The Ego and the Id (1923) have called "positive oedipal" dynamics seem suf-

~ o / " W h athe t HellAre You Driving At?"

ficiently to characterize Stephen's doleful state, though they may contribute to it. H e stresses three aspects of the theory: that the ghost is central to it; that Ann devastated her husband's erotic confidence and thereby captured his imagination; and that Shakespeare's writing was reparative-it recurred to and refashioned a fixed heartache. These three themes distinguish Stephen's from the contemporary Shakespearean studies he and the others allude to; and all three open intriguingly to a crucial, unresolved issue of his own-his not having recovered from his mother's death a year ago. Stephen continues staggered, unable-or barely able-to get on, for all his acuity of mind. By early afternoon in the library we know that he wears only black, like Hamlet, and rarely bathes; that his teeth ache but go untended; and that he drinks-hardly unusual in Ulysses and not surprising in Simon Dedalus' son-but by midnight, having binged since noon, he will lie unconscious in a gutter of Dublin's red-light district, hovered over by Leopold Bloom. T h e clothes he wears have been given him by Mulligan, but already this morning, feeling usurped, he has resolved not to return to the Martello Tower they share (1.739-44) Mr. Garrett Deasy and he both expect he'll soon leave the teaching job he's held for several weeks at Deasy's school in Dalkey. Stephen has engaging opinions and wit and memorable disenchantment with English and church rule of Ireland ("I am a servant of two masters . . . , an English and an Italian" [1.638]), with the state of Irish writing ("the cracked looking glass of a servant" [ I . I ~ ~ ]and ) , with history ("a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" [2.377]), but no other discernible aim than to write. Yet apparently he has not written. His intelligence, learning, originality, and ambition notwithstanding, he is deeply troubled and in crisis. T h e ties he has do not suit him, and despite his singularity and

"What the HellAre You Driving Atfn/5r

considerable self-awareness, his deeds bespeak malaise and passivity, that he is lost and self-defeating, depressed-and that he yearns to be taken care of. His mother, Mary Dedalus, died of cancer at forty-four and was buried on June 26, 1903, but lives on in Stephen's consciousness, haunting him at times with horrific vividness, his "ghost by death," as the murdered king was Hamlet's. Stephen had gone to Paris to fly all familial and Irish nets and to test his Daedalian wings as a writer, aspiring, as the ending to Portrait of the Artist as a Young M a n famously has it, to "forge in the smithy of [his] soul" no less than "the uncreated conscience of [his] racen-only to be summoned soon by telegram: "Nother [sic] dying come home father" (3.199). H e attended her agonized dying and sangYeatsls "Who Goes with Fergus?" for her as she asked but would not pray, too alienated from her, the church, and no doubt God for that. This morning when Buck needled him for having "killed" his mother by not granting her dying wish that he pray, he replied gloomily, "Someone killed her" (1.88-90): the likely candidate seemed to be God; and in the library he invokes the phrase dio boia, hangman god. Shaving atop the Martello Tower and looking over the sea, Buck had exuberantly invoked Homer and Swinburne to praise the "snotgreen" and "scrotumtightening" sea, "Epi oinopa ponton [over the winedark sea] . . . . Our mighty mother!" (1.78-84). From that parodic inspiration to Stephen's mother and the refusal to pray took him but an instant, whereupon Stephen's thoughts veered inwardly: Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coatsleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after jz/"What the HellAre You Driving At?"

her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting (1.100-110). Left alone looking at the sea when Mulligan descended for breakfast, Stephen remembered more: her crying in her wretched bed over "love's bitter mysteryn-poignant words from Yeats's song; his discovering mementos from her youthold feather fans, tasseled dance cards, a birdcage; how she allowed herself only a glass of water on the mornings she took the sacrament; her "shapely" fingernails reddened by lice she picked from the children's clothes. All such, Stephen brooded, now were "folded away in the memory of nature with her toys" (9.265)-unimpressed, apparently, by his own recall of them. Then suddenly he came under attack: In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour ofwax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. O n me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to "What the HellAre You DrivingAt?"/j~

strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorurn turrna circumdet: iubilantium te virginurn chorus excipiat. Ghoul! Chewer of corpses! No mother! let me be and let me live (1.270-279). The ritual words of joy from the Latin Mass for the Dead do not tame his dread, which bursts forth. Although his mother figures tenderly and sorrowfully in his thoughts, she can emerge ferociously- here she is implacable, accusing, avenging-while he struggles for very survival. His terrifying guilt is apparent, but psychologically he is desperately torn, both drawn and appalled, raging at once to be rid of her and to keep her with him. These are, after all, his thoughts. They condense his own Scylla and Charybdis. His acute sense of her glazing eyes focusing "on me alone" evokes Horatio's words to Hamlet regarding the ghost: "It beckons you to go away with it, /As if it some impartment did desire/To you alone" ( I . ~ v . ~ ~ -But s ~ )Stephen's . words are about his mother? ghost. Unconsciously, it is her presence and care he desires and, in his searing fantasy, brings about. Usually it is said-following Buck Mulligan's lead-that guilt for not acquiescing to her dying wish that he pray accounts for Stephen's comfortless condition at the beginning of Ulysses, that his continuing bad conscience, stung today by Mulligan's barbs, leads to the nearly hallucinatory experience in which Mary Dedalus looms distinct as an Elizabethan ghost. Yet although that guilt is surely at work, it does not sufficiently explain Stephen's contradictory mix of feelings about her or what we perceive of his isolation, passivity, unhappiness, and affective inclinations. How does guilt for not praying illuminate his fascination with Ann Hathaway Shakespeare's sexuality or his conviction about her husband's life-pain trans54/"Wbat the HeNAre You Driving At?"

formed repeatedly to unique achievement? How does it bear on Stephen's doggedness in debate about a theory he does not believe? Similarly, how would it fuel the odd thematic of his riddle of the fox, to which he returns throughout the morning? Teaching history and poetry to unresponsive charges at Deasy's school, Stephen greeted recess by asking them a riddle. They, in turn, showed their first excitement of the morning, but could make nothing of it. It went like this: The cock crew, The sky was blue: The bells in heaven Were striking eleven. 'Tis timefor this poor soul To go to heaven.

"What is that?" Stephen asked. They asked him to repeat it, which he did: -What is it, sir? We give it up. Stephen, his throat itching, answered: -The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush. H e stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries echoed dismay (2.102-11s). One can sympathize with them. The answer makes no sense -until Stephen's ensuing thoughts imply psychological sense and mark a parapraxis, an expository slip. A boy named Cyril Sargent has stayed behind for help with sums: Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But "What the HeIlAre You DrivingAt?"/jj

for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped (2.1~~-150). Stephen sees Sargent as, like himself, crucially nurtured by maternal love, and both in that way comparing with Columbanus, Ireland's sainted sixth-century missionary to the Continent, who overcame his mother's protests to fulfill his calling. H e turns then to his own mother as she appeared in his dream after her death and again to the scenario of the riddle. The buried "grandmother" now comes into focus as a displacement from his mother, for whom in the guise of a fox he rapaciously and mercilessly scrapes -to get her back? and listens -for what sounds in the night? The animal instinctualness and sexual intensity of the passage link by echo (an odor of rosewood and wetted ashes) and context to his mother and, by avidity, to the Ann Hathaway of his theory. H e thinks on: Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive.

With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddlingbands.

56/"What the HellAre You Driving At?"

Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned (2.165-172). In the dream Mary Dedalus "bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes." What Stephen is driving at in the Shakespeare theory-and what eludes his recognition-may have to do with the secrets of boys and their mothers, of which we learn by indirection: tyrannical and stony secrets lurking wearily in the dark palace of the heart. When he walks on the strand an hour later, contemplating mythic, Irish, familial, and personal histories and the enigma of death, he sees a dog belonging to cocklepickers nosing round the carcass of a dead dog. They cry, "Tatters! Outofthat, you mongrel!" while Stephen watches: The cry brought him [Tatters] skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. H e slunk back in a curve. Doesn't see me. Along by the edge of a mole he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed against it. H e trotted forward and, lifting again his hindleg, pissed quick short at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His hindpaws then scattered the sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved. Something he buried there, his grandmother. H e rooted in the sand, dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with

"What the Hell Are You Driving AtPn/57

a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spousebreach, vulturing the dead (3.354364). Again the prehensile fury and scraping, the animal passion and rapine, this time with a hint of violation, adultery, and bastardy- and more than burying or digging up this time, vulturing: the impulse finally and at base is to eat, to ingest something or incorporate someone who is dead and imperiously wanted. "Chewer of corpses!" he'd called out to his spectral mother. Was it also to himself? Not only self-punitive guilt but secret and primordial desires to uncover and violate ("the beast with two backs," a primal scene) and to take in or be taken in by chewing and swallowing-desires of animal intensity from dark palaces of boyhood and infancy-bear on Stephen's condition of soul. Death and life preoccupy him, and taboo-ridden purposes of retrieving from the dead, while mortal pain transmuted to art's eternity intrigues him. Yet specific links between his Shakespeare theory and his rendered life prove hard to discern, other than an obvious wish to write greatly. His mother's ghost haunts him, not his father's. The lustful Ann Hathaway of his theory has no counterpart other than in his imagined sexual surrogate the fox, in a riddle so secretive that it has no manifest meaning. When Stephen expounds about Ann at twenty-six seducing eighteen year-old Will, "a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself," he wonders wishfully, "And my turn, when? Come!" (9.259-261). Will Shakespeare's damaging initiation seems to him enviable. H e remembers his mother in life, moreover, not as tempestuously seductive but as pious, responsible, and tender. Nonetheless, the autobiographical aspect of his theory gets confirmed in his mental process: $/"What the Hell Are You Driving At?"

-Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries? John Eglinton's carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid for ever. She died, for literature at least, before she was born. -She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born. She saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed when he lay on his deathbed. Mother's deathbed. Candle. The sheeted mirror. W h o brought me into this world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers. Liliata rutilantium. I wept alone ( 9 . 2 1 ~ - 2 2 4 ) . The association of his theory with his mother here is established through the switchword deathbed. Ann interweaves with Stephen: they survived and buried their dead. By dying, Mary Dedalus interweaves with Shakespeare. Her son wept alone. H e showed no grief to others, perhaps because of "secrets, silent . . . weary of their tyrannyn and his rebelliousness at the idea of praying. So theory and person interdigitate, as do dramatic narrative and accruing characterization, although little enough may yet have become clear. Although Stephen tries hard to triumph in the library, he doesn't know what he's after and, when directly asked, admits he doesn't believe his theory. Such blatant illogic suggests that matters commanding of his efforts cluster in the theory and in his exposition of it, unbeknown to him-matters less available because more troublesome to him than Shakespeare's love life or incomparable creativity. The drama of the discussion in the library, replete with taunting interactions and Stephen's in-

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What the Hell Are You Driving At?"/~g

terior metaphors of combat, we have seen sweep him to alliance with the fratricide Claudius. To himself he registers impulses, vulnerabilities, angers, jealousies, criticisms, and self-criticisms he does not openly express. Thus when Mulligan enters the director's office, mocking and joshing as usual, Stephen wonders, "Hast thou found me, 0 mine enemy?" (9.483)-invoking King Ahab's words to Elijah, who had come to chide him for evil deeds ( I Kings 21:zo).In casting Buck as the moralizing prophet in that way, does Stephen imply evil of his own? And if so, does he do so consciously or unconsciously? It is hard to tell with someone so knowledgeable of texts. Stephen knows he envies Buck's manner: "Wit," he reflects: "You would give your five wits for youth's proud livery he pranks in. Lineaments of gratified desire" (9.537). A t breakfast Stephen bitterly resented the respect the old milkwoman gave to Buck and to Haines but not, he thought, to him: H e watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour. . . . 6o/"Wbat the HeN Are You Driving At?"

-Are you a medical student, sir? the old woman asked. -I am, ma'am, Buck Mulligan answered. -Look at that now, she said. Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there is of her but her woman's unclean loins, of man's flesh made not in God's likeness, the serpent's prey. And to the loud voice that now bids her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes (1.397407; 415-423). The old woman radiates meanings for him, as Mother Ireland ("silk of the kine" and "poor old woman" are traditional names for the country) and witch, as secret messenger from a morning (no doubt better) world, and as provider of earliest nourishment. By deferring to Haines, the Englishman, and to Mulligan, she serves "her conqueror and her gay betrayer," to whom Stephen adds the priest ("the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave . . . the serpent's prey"). He, however, the poet, "scorned to beg her favorn-too proud and hurt to do so. Soon afterward, when Mulligan bade him leave the key, he felt usurped. In the director's office of the library, as Lyster, Best, and Magee talk of Moore's party, to which he is not invited, he feels wounded but says nothing. Nor would he pray for his dying mother's soul to please her. Had he scorned then to beg her favor? H e had once, in Portrait. They had quarreled over her wish that he make his Easter duty. Talking it out later with his confidant, Cranly, who tried to persuade him to it, Stephen drew back: "A voice spoke softly to Stephen's lonely heart, bidding him go and telling him that his friendship was "What the Hellhe You DrivingAt?"/61

coming to an end" (1916, p. z45). There do seem to be slights and insults, registrations of nonacceptance that Stephen scouts out, to some degree actively brings about or amplifies, and suffers. They leave him feeling excluded, lonely, and aggrieveda compound of feelings very like that which he attributes, in a summary statement, to Shakespeare: "The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book" (9.999-1002). Shakespeare's affective heritage from his seduction and cuckolding by Ann was a continuous sense of exile. Stephen's locus of pain is similar, and it is sustained in part by his recurrently seeking it out, as Shakespeare did with the dark lady and in manifold writings like the sonnets, in which men are overborne by passionate and powerful women. But whereas Shakespeare, warmed by the birth of a granddaughter, returned to Ann and Stratford after twenty London years, young Stephen has been permanently banished and knows it. If Will lost an idyllic youth, his seductress Ann, his brothers, and the happy confidence of a married masculinity he never reached, all to the benefit of his art, Stephen has lost more-with no art yet to speak of-for he has lost hope in Irish culture and politics, English rule, Roman Catholicism, God, and, as we shall see, all his friends and family. His aim to write still glimmers, but he has not written because, since his mother died, misery has ruled him. His "note of banishment from the heart, banishment from home" sounds uninterruptedly, the more loudly, one suspects, as the anniversary of her death approaches. W h y his mother's dying precipitated such demoralizationdepression rather than a gradually easing grief (Freud, 1917)may be gauged by Stephen's insistent efforts in the director's office, where he competes earnestly with other literati, relating 62 /"What

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to them breezily and scornfully, on the model, it emerges, of an early tie to a brother. A t the tower this morning, as he felt anger at Mulligan, the thought flickered in his mind: "Cranly's arm, his arm" (1.159). Now in the library, responding to John Eglinton's acerbity, Stephen thinks: "Smile. Smile Cranly's smile" (9.21). Exploring the unsettling thesis that Ann cuckolded Shakespeare-and having just jeered at himself for his Daedalian aims that yielded only the low, awkward flight of a lapwing-Stephen speaks and thinks revealingly: -In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie nuncle Edmund . . . I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella. Lapwing. Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. M y Whetstone. Him, then Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They mock to try you. Act. Be acted on. Lapwing. I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink. O n (9.973-982). In thought he traces here a brief history of his brother ties, first with an actual brother, then in sequence with Cranly and Mulligan, and continuing into the tense interaction with Best, Lyster, and Eglinton. Stephen's pattern is that of a knife to a whetstone. Its service done, the whetstone is forgotten. Friends, in other words, are either close and useful or forgotten, and to such brother-types Stephen metes out exile before long. Now he barely knows where his brother is. Cranly, once a trusted ally, he remembers here only by name. Mulligan, from tower mate, has become a prophetic enemy and usurper. And in fan"What the HeNAre You Driving At?"/63

tasy, for a moment at least, Stephen would willingly kill the interlocutors, pour poison in the porches of their ears. Leopold Bloom noticed Dilly Dedalus outside Dillon's auction rooms in the previous chapter and pitied her mother, who had borne fifteen children. Stephen was the oldest. But the younger brother whom Stephen forgets as easily as an umbrella and doesn't name is the first of his many siblings he has brought to mind all day. Knowing all too well the sense of banishment-the core feeling he attributes to Shakespeare-and defending against it, he usually projects it onto his brothers and sisters and their surrogates, banishing them from his thoughts. It is as brothers that Stephen would kill Lyster, Best, and Eglinton, just as Claudius killed his brother-and as a brother that he withholds aid from Dilly. Perhaps it is as a brother that Stephen later will leave Bloom. All of which invites an interim hypothesis, a still-incomplete psychoanalytic reconstruction. T h e oldest of the many Dedalus children, Stephen at twenty-one suffered the unexpected and agonized death of his mother. The loss gave rise to mournfulness in him that a year later remains unmitigated, because, pained and at times frightened of her avenging rage, unconsciously he is raging at her for deserting him-for having banished him again and finally, thus depriving him forever of her always-wished-for care and concern. Stephen's anger, turned by his guilt against himself, surfaces as misery and stasis. H e could not bear his mother's dying because he had never secured the separateness he showily claimed in adolescence, when his intellectual attainments far outdistanced his emotional growth. That exaggeratedly proud independence had obscured an old, buried agony caused by the constant arrival of baby siblings, to as many as fourteen. Early and persistently, he was pushed from his original perch. As Shakespeare was cuckolded by his grown brothers, so Stephen was displaced by little brothers and sis6q/"What the Hell Are You Driving At?"

ters. Finally weary of arguing in the director's office, he muses, "I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau" (9.981), comparing himself to Isaac's firstborn, who because of Rebecca's maternal manipulations favoring his wily brother Jacob, lost his rightful blessing (Genesis 27). Immediately thereafter, parodying Richard 111, he chooses quick solace: "My kingdom for a drink." H e goes the way of his father. At twenty-two Stephen is bereft. H e grows sharply angry at friends or potential friends and colleagues, competes urgently but fruitlessly, readily forgets his siblings, and has worked out a complicated theory beginning with Hamlet's ghost that stresses Ann Hathaway's sexual prowess and disloyalty and the great poet's vulnerability. The oedipal aspects of Stephen's theory (genital sexuality, love triangles, jealousy, competitive hostility, murderous wishes, castration anxiety, guilt) cover and provide structure for his repeated experiences of losing his mother, a cumulative preoedipal trauma of separation and loss that can spread everywhere and, since his mother died, has raged anew. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus relives old misery. H e even uses it imaginatively in his Shakespeare theory, while for all practical purposes he cannot (or unconsciously will not) go on with his life-unless his ancient and revived wish comes true, that he can have his mother to himself alone, at last. Stephen's theory participates in the biographical considerations of Shakespeare and his works that were current in England, Ireland, and America at the time. It can be read autobiographically, as deriving from a distinct person's idiom of being, with recognizable dynamics and a believable inner history, and contributing in turn to our understanding of him. His intellectual and artistic admiration of Shakespeare seems augmented too by a "family romance" (Freud, 1909)-by which a child, losing his original idealization of his parents, claims in "What the HellAre You DrivingAt?"/6~

fantasy a more desirable forebear-and by an adolescent's quest for an "ego ideal" (Freud, 1914a, 1921, 1 ~ 2 figure ~ ) to serve his best image of himself. Both are common adaptive strategies for separating from parents, as one must, while preserving something of the idealization by shifting it. Shakespeare thus serves Stephen's wishes while disguising from him his self-exploration by being another victim of a much-loved woman, but special. In the great poet the young man finds himself foretold as he is and wishes to be. His Shakespeare, in pain, fathered verbally crafted dramatis personae who were transformations of him; and that, to be sure, is the way Stephen, who also is in pain, fathers the Shakespeare of his theory. The interaction, while highly developed, also typifies Stephen's characteristic mode of being-for he is identifiable to others, and to himself, by his erudition and intellectual ambition. Envying Mulligan's joyous ease, Stephen thinks of Blake's "lineaments of gratified desire." Grown weary of disputing, he invokes Richard I11 and Esau. When Haines complimented his trenchant wit-"I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let men-Stephen's mind darted to Middle English and then to Lady Macbeth: "Agenbite of inwit. Conscience. Yet here's a spot" (1.480-482). The Middle English tag seemed to help him shape inchoate pleasure and shame and to that limited extent own the feelings (just as it will again, with an admixture of guilt, when his admiring sister Dilly startles him at the used-book stand). This young Irishman-educated by Jesuits, very literate, very verbal, aspiring to be singled out and victorious, with a faultline running toward his mother-turned long ago to writers for help to grow. By now his ordinary thought processes abound in allusions: to words of Blake, Milton, Swinburne, Kipling, Wilde, and, of course, Shakespeare; to Aristotle and the medieval legends about him; to church fathers and heresiarchs; to Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, the Jesuits' founder Ignatius 66/ "What the HeNAre You Driving At?"

of Loyola, the Kabbalists, and Jakob Boehme. Stephen knows theosophy's lore, though he scoffs at it as so much Platonic filigree. To the newspapermen he relates with meticulous realism his "vision" of two old virgins who climb Nelson's pillar, get dizzy, and spit plum pits. He calls it "A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, or the Parable of the Plums" (7.1057-1058) The biblical title alludes to the mountaintop from which Moses looked into the promised land he could not enter (Deuteronomy 34: 1-5); and the form derives from Jesus. Stephen Dedalus functions by intellectualizing and the hope of sublimating. H e has read voraciously-appears to have engorged authors as guides with whose works he goes about meeting and containing himself, although his deepest turmoil remains unresolved. All Stephen's writer-mentors, furthermore (assuming the patriarchal ethos of the Bible), are male. When turning unconsciously from the exiling mother he represses toward the invigorating supplies he uses for self-acknowledgement and self-worth, he turned, and still turns, apparently, solely to men. Stephen's intense, time-limited friendships have been with brother-, never sister-types (though Dilly, who behaves somewhat maternally toward him, is an exception whose appeal he struggles against). Girls and women he has fancied, fantasized about, aestheticized, and distrusted; prostitutes serve his sense of sin and guilt. But male authors alone has he bound permanently to himself. In the circumstances, the pronouncedly allusive bias of his consciousness suggests not only rare intelligence and intellectual interest but neediness-how lonely he'd have been without books-and how prolonged and crucial male learning has been for him. I t suggests as well that his father, Simon Dedalus, did not or could not help him very much, or both. Simon too is lost in Ulysses, no better able than Stephen to deal with Mary Dedalus' death. H e drinks and sings, has "What the HellAre You Driving At?"/67

boon companions, and indulges in diverting wit and nostalgia. Irresponsible toward his children, although toward others distinctly entertaining, he speaks at times about Stephen, but as an extension of himself, with neither compassion nor understanding. Readers of Portrait will recall him looming vividly in his son's childhood. As Stephen grew in that book, however, Simon's fortunes and presence diminished, and that pattern presaged their depicted relationship of June 16, 1904, when, amid all the Dublin wanderings and greetings, this father and son do not meet. If Simon Dedalus is diminished in Ulysses, a minor player of whom Stephen can be fond or dismissive, fathers and fathering matter urgently-whether as the structuring influence of authors, the poet's creative transforming with words, or the creator-God's consubstantiality with his son in Roman Catholic tradition and doctrine. Not Simon but fathers prove integral to Stephen's consciousness and, today, overtly preoccupy him. The contrast alerts a psychoanalyst to a possible "split": has Stephen banished Simon too-unconsciously denied his importance to him only to find him elsewhere? Stephen comments at length about fathers, sons, and fathering during the complicated sequence that includes his exasperatedly not knowing what he's driving at and an important implied fantasy he has invested in the act of writing. H e recalls being summoned from Paris and his father's meeting him at the quay: Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. D r Bob Kenny is attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me. -A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil (9.825-828). 68/ "What the Hell Are You Driving At?"

His hopelessness reflects in part his waning confidence about persuading the interlocutors to his thesis. The moment follows his mention of the second-best bed and Ann's latter-day piety. "Venus has twisted her lips in prayer," he says. "Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god" (9.809-810). (The force of "whoredom" in that statement illustrates again the containing use Stephen makes of the phrase "agenbite of inwit.") John Eglinton interposes quickly, agreeing about the age but preferring Russell's more aesthetic approach to the plays. Recalling Eglinton's embarrassment about his rough Ultonian father, Stephen moves on to his own-kind but ineffective: "The voice, new warmth, speaking. . . . T h e eyes that wish me well. But do not know me." The hopeless feeling Stephen battles has to do with the ongoing dispute about Shakespeare as well as with his dead mother and that "necessary evil," his disappointing father. Instantly he returns to argument. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet soon after his father's death, Stephen asserts, but no more modeled the ghost on his own father than the guilty queen on his seventy- ear-old mother: "No. T h e corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. H e rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son." T h e issue has shifted from biology to a "mystical estate," passed on or achieved unknowingly, that informed Shakespeare's creativity: Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. O n that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro "What the HellAre You Driving At?"/69

and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. W h o is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son? (9.833-845). In the careful wording of the Nicene Creed, adopted in 325 to resolve controversy and eliminate heresy in the early church, Jesus was (in the traditional English translation) "begotten, but not made, of one essence consubstantial with the Father." Catholic tradition holds that the Son and the Holy Spirit, being of the same divine essence as God, were not and could not have been created-that is, made-by him. God made the world and all its creatures but begot his son by generation and procession from his own substance (New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1967, 4:251-253). Stephen posits consubstantial begetting in God and Shakespeare. Mariolatry, he avers, merely distracts the mob. There is no hope from the mother's direction for him. The paradigm he pursues is the "mystical estate" of fatherhood, where consubstantial God and Son parallel the playwrightghost and prince on stage, the ghost speaking to "the son of his soul," and his voice "heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father." Earlier this day Stephen has thought of the vexed doctrine of consubstantiation, sympathizing with the heresiarchs andwith the church's stand against them: The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph of their brazen bells: et unam sanctum catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam: the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the 70/"What the HeN Are You Driving At?"

apostles in the mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ's terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael's host, who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their shields (1.650-664). So polarized were his loyalties at that moment that he gave way to self-mockery: "Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. Zut! Nom de Dieu! [Damn it! In the name of God!]" (1.665). Allied with heretics, rebellious against God, and scornful of his mocker, Mulligan, Stephen there affirmed the church. And he holds tightly to consubstantiation. In Portrait, Cranly had pleaded with him: "Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not" (1916, pp. 241-242). Stephen now qualifies Cranly's certainty (he thinks amor matris "may be" the only true thing) but uses it to help counter the irresolvable doubt that attends biological fathering. Stephen wants a different certainty. His contentions, which began as he battled hopelessness and moved to encompass mystical fatherhood, faith founded on the void, "What the HeNAre You DrivingAt?"/p

the distraction of Mariolatry, maternal love, and paternity as a legal fiction, now usher in confusion and self-disdain: W h a t the hell are you driving at? I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons. Amplius. Adbuc. Iterum. Postea. [Furthermore. Heretofore. Once again. Hereafter.] Are you condemned to do this? (9.846-849). H e struggles for clarification-but of what? It cannot be of love between mortal fathers and sons because, he continues: -They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. H e is a new male; his growth is his father's decline, his youth his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy (9.850-857). T h e very thought of fathers loving sons or sons loving fathers provokes testimony of competitiveness and more: of a taboo on homosexual incest so powerful that the offense has hardly been recorded in criminal annals. I t is too outrageous even to recognize-although, condemning all the while, that is just what Stephen does here, and not for the first time: In rue Monsieur le Prince I thought it. -What links them in nature? A n instant of blind rut.

72 /"What the He//Are You Driving At?"

A m I a father? If I were? Shrunken uncertain hand (9.858-861). Rue Monsieur le Prince, where the thought occurred to him originally, was located in a Parisian red-light district (Gifford, 1988, p. z41); and now he wonders whether he's become a father. The "instant of blind rut" that, for him, links father and son in nature leads him back to Simon, whose "shrunken uncertain hand" he has recalled touching at the quayside. So as Stephen Dedalus, beginning to feel hopeless, pushes on grimly with his Shakespeare exposition, he associatively links biological fathering with whoring, by way of rue Monsieur le Prince and Ann Shakespeare's final years in "an age of exhausted whoredom." Even if, against all the odds of homosexual horror, a son could love his father-and Stephen must be fighting hard against this yearning: the "negative oedipal" solution (Freud, 1923)-physical fathering is befouled for him and both his parents are hopelessly compromised by having made him and all those other by-him-unwanted children. "Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten," he has reflected on the strand. "By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will" (3.45-47). In the library he thinks fleetingly: "Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A snake coils her, fang in's kiss" (9.s41), and "Afar, in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness" (9.654). In Nighttown, Stephen will learn that his favorite whore, Georgina Johnson, has married a Mr. Lambe of London. "Dead and married" (15.~620),he'll say, to "Lamb of London, who takest away the sins of our world" (15.3639). Probably Stephen could not have turned in banishment from his mother to his father for comfort and strength even had Simon been a dependable, understand-

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ing, and caring father, because sexual desire-the fox's, Ann Hathaway's, Will Shakespeare's, his father's, his mother's, his own-disgusts him in hidden recesses of his soul. To be sure, it also fascinates and captivates him. But from that morass of dismaying heterosexuality and feared homosexuality, Stephen's fantasied solution arises. As the creator God begot the Son, so Shakespeare begot stage creatures of his substance: words. -Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born, for nature, as M r Magee understands her, abhors perfection (9.862-871). Stephen plays cunningly to Magee (Eglinton), who had written of nature abhoring perfection, for he wants assent to the direction of his thought, which is to Shakespeare, "no more a son," consubstantially fathering all his race and generations in verbal art-where natural lineage mattered not at all, perfection was possible, and creatures of imagination were begotten in multitudes, as the poet willed. Stephen's sexually wounded Shakespeare begot artistically, without women and of his own substance, words. Stephen would do likewise, because unconsciously he wants out of the natural cycle of generations, with 7 4 / "What the HeNAre You Driving At?"

all its attendant sexual desires, envies, angers, humiliations, losses, and banishments. Nonsexual begetting, male and selfsufficient, requiring only himself and his consciousness, could yield him a world without end, consubstantial with him, where he would have no need of his mother, father, siblings, or anyone else. That is Stephen's wishful way out-the fantasy he harbors and in the Shakespeare theory all but knows. Mulligan, of course, grasps its folly: "Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The play's the thing! Let me parturiate!" (9.875-877). It is not that Stephen's theory is without merit or originality. After all, it commands his listeners' attention, and it could contain the kernel of an idea of sublimation. But Buck's deflating banter lays bare its exclusionary aim: Stephen's wish through literary creation to banish all others as he has been banished and to have only consubstantial companions. Stephen has paid homage to Shakespeare's openness to human variousness: "All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen's leech Lopez. . . . Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in Love's Labour Lost. His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied." (9.748-753). Shakespeare, wounded by Ann though he was, lived and wrote avidly: Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures. You know Manningham's story of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in Richard 111 and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns and, when Bur"What the He//Are You Driving At?"/7j

bage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon's blankets: William the conyueror came before Richard I 1 (9.631-637). Yet Stephen wishes to escape exactly such vitality. His fantasy of writing is life-defeating, holding out promise of a world without end entirely of his own: either that or the abiding wish that the fantasy counters, to have his mother back and to himself alone. Soon he admits he doesn't believe his theory and-having wondered at purposes he seemed to be driving at but cannot fathom-surrenders anew to Buck Mulligan's lead. Buck proposes drinks, and Stephen, rising to go, tries to console himself: "Life is many days. This will end." John Eglinton says to Buck only: "We shall see you tonight. . . . Notre ami Moore says Malachi Mulligan must be there": Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk straight? Laughing, h e . . . . Swill till eleven. Irish nights entertainment. Lubber. . . . Stephen followed a lubber . . . One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After. His lub back: I followed. I gall his kibe. Stephen, greeting, then all amort [dejected], followed a lubber jester, a wellkempt head, newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering daylight of no thought. What have I learned? O f them? O f me? (9.10971113; ellipses in original). Walking behind Mulligan, and before posing these questions, Stephen seems to take mental notes and to begin to turn 76/"What the HellAre You Driving At?"

lived experience into story: "One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. . . ." Perhaps, however incipiently, the controversy in the library has jarred the writer loose, continuing a process that today has included his composing a derivative quatrain about a vampire kissing a woman's lips, his telling "The Parable of the Plums," and his exhorting the literati about his theory of Shakespeare-the last in something like a one-act play that we experience from within his consciousness and that he dominates as the melancholy prince does Hamlet. What, then, was Stephen driving at? And what have we learned about him from the Shakespeare theory and his dramatic efforts to expound it? Indirectly, while thinking and talking about Shakespeare, Stephen has been working internally on the depression that has psychologically paralyzed him since his mother's death a year earlier, rendering him regressed and unproductive. H e has been unable to feel positive or hopeful about life or to advance his ambition to write because that would be to let her go; and unconsciously he long has been too angry at her for that. Moreover, in crisis, mistrusting male friends and timid with women, not at all secure in his adult sexual orientation, he has characteristically invested interest in the male author he most admires. Yet however gifted Stephen is, his way of intellection does not return him richly to life's common lot or nurture his interactions with the world. The wishes embedded in it are too insular and hence self-enclosing. Stephen cannot do more on his own. His theory is a tour de force, charming and fascinating, but even he doesn't buy it. If help were to come, it would have to be from an accepting, older, and clearly heterosexual man, who likes women and would be capable of offering (maternal) attentiveness and care. Stephen's dream of the previous night might be cited as evidence, with the library chapter as an elaborate commentary upon it: "Wait. Open hallway. Street of "What the HeNAre You Driving AtPn/77

harlots. Remember. Haroun a1 Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who" (3.365369). Walking from the library with Mulligan, when Bloom cuts between them, Stephen remembers his dream again: "I flew. Easily flew. Men wondered. Street of harlots after. A creamfruit melon he held me. In. You will see" (9.1227-1228). By the end of chapter 9, in other words-in time for the intermission- Stephen Dedalus is ready to meet Leopold Bloom.

78/"What the HellAre You Driving At?"

The Enigmatic Jewishness

of ~ e o ~ oBloom ld

About the time that Stephen starts his disquisition on Shakespeare, Leopold Bloom, walking on Kildare Street toward the National Library, glimpses Blazes Boylan coming the other way and panics: "Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is" (8.1168). Boylan will cuckold him later that afternoon, he knows; so, heart sinking, he swerves right and rushes toward the entry gate of the museum for cover. Hurrying, he registers quick images and thoughts: cold statues of goddesses; quiet and safe there; handsome building Sir Thomas Deane designed; sunlight on Boylan-might he not have seen? Still not at the entrance, Bloom simulates looking for something in his pockets, recognizing by touch his handkerchief, purse, Freeman? Journal, amulet potato, and bar of soap. One item surprises him: "Agendath Netaim.* Where did I?" (8.1184)-the Zionist flyer that Dlugacz, the pork butcher, had wrapped meat with that morning. It advertised a planter's colony founded in Palestine by Moses Montefiore and invited subscriptions to a Berlin address. Leopold had taken one, read it, and, apparently, pocketed it. "Nothing doing," he then reflected, "still an idea behind it" (4.200), and soon dismissed Dlugacz from his thoughts as an "enthusiast" (4.493). Yet unwittingly he kept the flyer with him: a Jewish connection that, approaching the library and unnerved by seeing Boylan, he re*An error. It should be Agudath Netaim. Whether Joyce intended the mistake I don't know.

discovers-and, like his potato, newspaper, and lemon-scented soap, uses in his improvised evasion. The exigency of Bloom's crisis is here dramatized. His wife and Boylan will become lovers, and, far from preventing it, he is routed. What today he has recurrently approached and deflected in his thoughts will come to pass. It is extraordinary to see him unravel so, because as we have followed his cerebrations and interactions from early morning until this moment, close to 2 : o o P.M., he has maintained a remarkably calm and controlled public manner. Cautious of speech and action, he earns early the naughty epithet "prudent member" (12.211)Joe Hynes will assign him in Barney Kiernan's, alluding to more, of course, than his membership in the Masons. We, however, privy to his thoughts, have come to know the canny, amiable, ever-curious, irreverent, comical, vulnerable, and compassionate sensibility behind the prudent manner. In my experience most readers, having come to care companionably for him, feel wrenched by this moment of his dismay. Bloom's distress shatters his customary containment but, interestingly, it is restored quickly. For the arc of the disruptive experience, extreme as it is, exemplifies a defining rhythm of his psyche: that following a mood plunge or a perception or thought that could engender one, he will struggle back to equanimity, using characteristic mental maneuvers. At such moments, moreover, he will trust the very process of his thoughts and follow its direction. Leopold Bloom has an idiom of resilience. The startled, frightened shame he evinces on seeing Boylan suggests how poignant Molly's expected tryst is for him and how powerless he feels. Yet even as he flees, searching in his pockets to seem preoccupied, he is reclaiming his selfpossession. Puzzled by "Agendath," recognizing handkerchief, purse, newspaper, and potato, and locating his soap, he reaches

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the entrance of the museum and simultaneously his closing thought of the chapter: "Safe!" (8.1193). Thus, as if bearing touchstones of continuity in his pockets, he reconstitutes his composure. The objects he carries with him, furthermore, symbolize much that intrigues us about him. Guarded, neat, polite, and middle class, he carries a handkerchief and purse, and, notably among his peers in Ulysses, he actually works (see Sultan, 1964, p. 112). At noontime we saw him scurry to place the Keyes ad, while Simon Dedalus, MacHugh, O'Molloy, Lenehan, and others in the newspaper office loafed, joshed, talked nostalgia and politics, and prepared to drink or to continue to drink, and Myles Crawford, the editor, busy reminiscing and already drunk, had no time for him. "Flapdoodle to feed fools on" (8.382), Bloom later remarks tartly to himself about their talk. Just now he was hoping to find in the library the logo of crossed keys, with an "innuendo of home rule" (7.150)-that is, of Irish political independence from England-he wants for the ad. H e often thinks pragmatically and commercially: what ad will work or won't; why a shop or pub at one location will attract customers but across the street would not; whether cattle for England's market could be sent to the docks by tram rather than allowed to obstruct traffic, as happened this morning to Dignam's funeral procession. H e has much business experience and a practical and playful ingenuity. With time for a public bath before Paddy Dignam's funeral, he purchased the soap at the chemist's and ordered a skin lotion Molly likes, for which he will have to return. H e likes to do little services for her-like bringing her breakfast in bed, or selecting pornographic books for her to read. This morning he checked the Freeman for the time of the funeral (11:oo A.M.), and he will fume all day about the advertisement for Plum-

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tree's Potted Meat placed grotesquely under the obituaries; but he has the newspaper still, because when he offered it to Bantam Lyons, explaining that he was about to throw it away, Lyons bolted off to bet on the dark horse Throwaway in the Gold Cup race. Bloom keeps informed about public affairs and politics in a general way. H e has attitudes and opinions about various issues -Home Rule sympathies, for example -that he usually keeps to himself, and he seems unfailingly interested in the workings of the human, natural, and physical world. Tossing a penny's worth of Banbury cakes to the gulls on the Liffey, he watches them swoop down, greedily feed, and flap away: No accounting for tastes. . . . I'm not going to throw any more. Penny quite enough. Lot of thanks I get. Not even a caw. They spread foot and mouth disease too. If you cram a turkey say on chestnutmeal it tastes like that. Eat pig like pig. But then why is it that saltwater fish are not salty? How is that? His eyes sought answer from the river (8.81-87). Similarly: "Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah yes, in the dead sea floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so thick with salt. Because the weight of the water, no, the weight of the body in the water is equal to the weight of the what? O r is it the volume is equal to the weight?" (5.37-41). Often he will seek an answer, though not necessarily a correct one, and move on. Advertising canvasser, husband and father, responsive observer, inquiring and thoughtful- sometimes foolish - citizen, he also eccentrically and always, apparently, carries a potato with him, the meanings of which amplify later in the book. Up to now we assume it a good luck charm perhaps and, to be &/Enigmatic Jewishness

of Leopold Bloom

sure, very Irish in its basic and catastrophic associations. The flyer also proves representative (although Bloom is no Zionist) as does-we shall see-his tardy recognition of it. For, unusual in the Dublin of June 16,1904, Leopold Bloom is Jewish. That is, through much of the day he thinks of himself as and feels Jewish, and he is taken by the other persons in Ulysses as Jewish. Later, nonetheless, it becomes clear that he is not circumcised when his foreskin sticks to his pants after he masturbates; and later still he admits to Stephen that he knows he isn't Jewish. Finally we learn that by Jewish tradition he isn't. Born of a Christian mother (it is not clear whether Protestant or Catholic) and a Jewish father who converted, he was baptized a Protestant at birth and baptized again as a Roman Catholic in order to marry Molly (17.540-547; 1635-16~0).SO how this middle-aged Irish businessman and family man, who today will be cuckolded, came to his felt Jewish soul, and what bearing that representation of himself to himself might have on the events and meanings of the day, merit attention. Bloom's Jewishness, intricately woven into the pattern of his thoughts, provided the first hint in the book that something deeply troubles him. While he fixed breakfast, watching and talking to the cat, reflecting, "they understand what we say better than we understand them," he thought to add the pungent taste of kidney to his morning fare. We'd been told right off that he "ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls" (4.~-z7).Checking first whether Molly, who still was in bed, wanted anything more than toast and tea, and recognizing her "Mn" to be a sleepy "No," he walked to the pork butcher'sobviously not an observant Jew- and contemplated the recent spell of hot, dry weather. H e thought of the suit he's wearing for the funeral: "Black conducts, reflects, (refracts is it?), the heat. But I couldn't go in that light suit. Make a picnic of Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom/83

it." Beginning to bask in the sun's early warmth, he conjured a youthful wanderer with a curious strategy: "Makes you feel young. Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day's march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically." H e elaborated the fantasy: a strange land; a city he would enter, moving "through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking a coiled pipe. Cries of sellers in the streets." H e imagined adventure, danger, then nightfall: "The shadows of the mosques among the pillars: priest with a scroll rolled up. A shiver of the trees, signal, the evening wind. I pass on. Fading gold sky. A mother watches me from her doorway. She calls her children home in their dark language" (4.43-96) There is poetry to his thought. H e himself judged his reverie to be the "kind of stuff you read." Yet the Orientalist imagery called up by an impulse to roam and never grow a day older fit the daydreaming of a middle-aged man about to attend a friend's funeral. It also connected to Molly: "High wall: beyond strings twanged. Night sky, moon, violet, colour of Molly's new garters. Strings. Listen. A girl playing one of those instruments what do you call them: dulcimers. I pass" (4.95-99). Even before his grim certainty that today his wife would commit adultery emerged to consciousness, he defended against it wishfully in fantasy. H e could leave. The Ottoman setting of the daydream refocused soon afterward, when the advertisement for a Zionist settlement in Palestine caught his eye at the pork butcher's. In their brief interaction, Bloom and Dlugacz played cunningly round the recognition each had that the other too was a Jew. When he saw the "pile of cut sheets: the model farm at Kinnereth," Leopold instantly registered, "I thought he was" (4.154-156). Then, paying, he almost spoke about it: "A speck 84/Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom

of eager fire from foxeyes thanked him. H e withdrew his gaze after an instant. No: better not: another time" (4.186-187). Perhaps it is odd that Bloom has never done so, though he's suspected before that Dlugacz is Jewish. But in fact his own Jewishness does not now seem to incline him to communality or easy friendliness with other Jews. H e thinks of no current close Jewish friends, for instance. To Dlugacz, at any rate, he remained reticent-though his thoughts were anything but quiet as he waited for the young woman ahead of him to be served and hoped to leave swiftly in order to follow her: "A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too, calling items from a slip in her hand? Chapped: washingsoda. And a pound and a half of Denny's sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous hips. Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New blood. No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack" (4.1~5-151). While "the ferreteyed porkbutcher" prepared her order, snapping two sheets from the pile, Leopold Bloom, noting Dlugacz's Jewishness, merged the model farm depicted on the flyer with his own memories of work in the Dublin cattle market and of the nextdoor girl's captivating way of whacking a carpet: Farmhouse, wall round it, blurred cattle cropping. He held the page from him: interesting: read it nearer, the title, the blurred cropping cattle, the page rustling. A young white heifer. Those mornings in the cattlemarket, the beasts lowing in their pens, branded sheep, flop and fall of dung, the breeders in hobnailed boots trudging through the litter, slapping a palm on a ripemeated hindquarEnigmatic Jewishness of Leopold BIoom/8j

ter, there's a prime one, unpeeled switches in their hands. H e held the page aslant patiently, bending his senses and his will, his soft subject gaze at rest. The crooked skirt swinging, whack by whack by whack. . . . To catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the morning. Hurry up, damn it. Make hay while the sun shines. She stood outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the right. H e sighed down his nose: they never understand. Sodachapped hands. Crusted toenails too. Brown scapular in tatters, defending her both ways. The sting of disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his breast (4.157-177). Walking to the butcher's shop, he had registered Jewishness as an honorific when delighting in a witty remark he recalled by the nationalist leader Arthur Griffith; he praised it to himself as "Ikey" (4.~03)-that is, smart and Jewish (Gifford, 1988, p. 72). A t the pork butcher's, Jewishness coexisted for him with a manifest appetite for pork and an inclination toward solitude, with his riveted voyeurism and distinct fascination with pleasurable pain "whack by whack by whackn-all of which condensed in his intense desire to walk behind the young woman's moving hams, and again in his glow of weak pleasure at the sting of her disregard. Unable, however, to spot her when he left, he looked at the flyer anew: "Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa. You pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives, oranges, almonds, or citrons. . . . Every year you get a sending of the crop" (4.194-197). H e demurred ("Nothing doing"); but the girl, the white heifer, and the promised

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fruits of Palestine led to happy memories of Molly and him early in their marriage and the apparently Jewish friends they liked being with then: "Oranges in tissue paper packed in crates. Citrons too. Wonder is poor Citron still in Saint Kevin's parade. And Mastiansky with the old cither. Pleasant evenings we had then. Molly in Citron's basketchair." He recalled Moisel explaining the ritual function of citrons at the fall festival of Sukkoth: "Always the same, year after year. They fetched high prices too. . . . Arbutus place: Pleasants street: pleasant old times. Must be without flaw, he said. Coming all that way: Spain, Gibraltar, Mediterranean, the Levant" (4.204-zn). Remembering good times and old friends when they had lived in the largely Jewish neighborhood of Dublin (Hyman, 1972, pp. 167-168,182), he evoked pleasant recurrences and an image of sacramental perfection-the citron at Sukkoth-before suddenly plunging into a fantasy so frightening and forlorn that it taxed his considerable powers of recovery: A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far. No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's, clutching a naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now.

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Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world. Desolation. Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket he turned into Eccles street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his veins, chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak. Well, I am here now. Yes, I am here now. Morning mouth bad images. Got up wrong side of the bed. Must begin again those Sandow's exercises. O n the hands down. Blotchy brown brick houses. Number eighty still unlet. W h y is that? Valuation is only twentyeight. Towers, Battersby, North, MacArthur: parlour windows plastered with bills. Plasters on a sore eye. To smell the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, Yes (4.2~8-239). The vision appalled him: a devastated biblical landscape, gray and desiccated, bearing dead names: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom; a ruinous history of exile, futility, and captivity; and the figure of an old woman's worn-out womb and cunt-the word bristling with rage and scorn. H e hurried back home to Molly's live body, strenuously calming himself with physical explanations, nostrums ("Morning mouth bad images. . . . Must begin . . . exercises"), and his ongoing commercial puzzles until he was again able to affirm life, "Yes." H e seemed to be venting usually repressed feelings there involving women and Jewishness, provoked apparently by thoughts of the girl and the Zionist flyer, his memories of good times with Molly, and the sun disappearing behind a cloud-and roiled implicitly by his marital plight. Molly's incipient affair devastates him. H e feels gray, dried up, like a despised old woman-perhaps unconsciously 88/Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom

wishes she might be one. But in his consciousness the desolation is distinct from Molly. Her wished-for presence would comfort and renew him. The moment taps a well of depression, but his defenses hold. Early on, then, as we follow Bloom's stream of consciousness before the entr'acte, his inner Jewishness proves crucial to who he perplexingly is. It provides a repository of signs for gratifying and radically distressing moments-filters to consciousness that enable even repressed terror, fury, and misery access to affect, however briefly. In his wasteland fantasy, his Jewishness links intriguingly to a desolation in places and possibly persons of origin. It may connect by association, thereby, to the mother calling her children home in the more benign previous fantasy of ageless wandering. We have seen Bloom's Jewishness coexist with sexual fascinations, voyeurism, and masochistic pleasures. It serves too as a point of pride and standard of value ("Ikey touch that"). But as the ground of kinship to Dlugacz, it supports Bloom's holding back and remaining separate. More commonly, of course, being Jewish marks a boundary of distinctness between Bloom and gentiles, across which they see him and he sees them as different. O n this day of his cuckolding, we realize before very long that he enjoys responding mentally to women he stares at or feels drawn to. Passing the time before Dignam's funeral, he picked up a general delivery letter from Martha Clifford, with whom he has been corresponding under the pseudonym Henry Flower. Her letter revealed the lure of their epistolary flirtation: a chance for her to play cruel temptress and long for love, and for him to be a punished naughty boy. In her straining for refinement, she unintentionally showed her lower-class status: "Henry dear, do not deny my request before my patience are exhausted" (5.253-254) A bit later, still waiting for the funeral, he sat in a church thinking of her desire that they meet: "Meet one Sunday after the Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom/89

rosary. D o not deny my request. Turn up with a veil and black bag. Dusk and the light behind. She might be here with a ribbon round her neck and do the other thing all the same on the sly. Their character. That fellow that turned queen's evidence on the invincibles he used to receive the, Carey was his name, the communion every morning" (5.375-379). "Their" in "their character" must mean Catholic: that's the sort of thing those Catholics do. Some moments further on, the same pronoun sweeps up all Irish Christians when, asserting to himself that cricket is not played well in Ireland, he avers: "Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M'Carthy took the floor" (5.561-562). So Jewishness gauges Bloom's separateness and within himself secures a perch for judgment and for fantasies of romance, adventure, and horror. It is central to his identity, his gateway to feelings, his ground of prudence and safety, his locus of solitude. Whatever lonely isolation he feels, therefore, derives not alone from what others assume or do, or from fate, but from the inner demarcation he preserves, a sense of self that prominently includes himself as a Jew. As such, however, Jewishness contributes to his suffering, by meshing with the heavy losses he feels today. His wife will commit adultery. Their daughter Milly, who delights him and who yesterday turned fifteen, has left home to work in Mullingar. The death and funeral of Paddy Dignam, moreover, who seems more an acquaintance than a friend, has prodded his memories of "poor mamma" (6.864) and of "poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to me. Pesach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, 0 dear! All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage alleluia. Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu" (7.206-209); memories of his father's suicide and his infant son's death. The good-hearted midwife Mrs. Thornton, "knew from the first poor little Rudy wouldn't 90/Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom

live. Well, God is good, sir. She knew at once. He would be eleven now if he had lived" (4.4~8-420). O n June 16, 1904, Bloom's losses and deaths accompany him, no doubt fueling his wasteland terror and his passive helplessness about Molly's liaison with Boylan. The slip of memory is telling: "brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage" suggests depressed hopelessness. He has received a letter from Milly, thanking him for the birthday gift he sent and mentioning a boy calling on her. Her fond father thinks protectively of her and of Molly: Milly too. Young kisses: the first. Far away now past. Mrs Marion. Reading, lying back now, counting the strands of her hair, smiling, braiding. A soft qualm, regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will happen, yes. Prevent. Useless: can't move. Girl's sweet light lips. Will happen too. H e felt the flowing qualm spread over him. Useless to move now. Lips kissed, kissing, kissed. Full gluey woman lips. Better where she is down there: away (4.44445').

H e enacts his passivity and acceptance here, moving in thought between Milly and Molly, feeling regret flow down his backbone and issue in stasis, then flow again all over him until he is enclosed in the sensation of "full gluey woman's lips." Milly's coming of age and Molly's infidelity will actually happen. They cannot be prevented. So, not preventing, he joins the experience, becomes vicariously both kisser and kissed, both male and female. Eschewing action, he identifies and thereby gains a muted joy akin to his pleasure at the pork butcher's when, looking at the flyer and conjuring a palm smacking a hindquarter and the girl whacking a carpet, "he held the page Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom/pr

aslant patiently, bending his senses and his will, his soft subject gaze at rest." He was enthralled. This masochistic fulfillment doesn't last, and he pulls back to confirm that Milly is better off where she is, far from her parents' vagaries. Open to such joys of surrender, however, and feeling no anger at Molly, he may well be colluding unconsciously with her affair. For he confronts neither her nor himself about it; and we know that around 2:oo P.M. he will flee from meeting Boylan. Nor, though he thinks of it repeatedly, does he ever keep the appointed tryst in focus for long. That would be too painful. Thus implicitly he cooperates with his cuckolding, distancing himself, steering his course like Odysseus to adventures - albeit mainly mental ones - and finding what comfort he can by turning passivity into activity in fantasy. His tacit collusion would also help to explain Leopold's bizarre thought that M'Coy was "pimping" as a projection of his own disavowed but guilty and compromising cooperativeness. Each time Molly's late-afternoon rendezvous recurs in his thoughts-"afternoon she said"; "at four she saidn-he pushes it away:

All kinds of places are good for ads. That quack doctor for the clap used to be stuck up in all the greenhouses [public toilets]. . . . D r H y Franks. Didn't cost him a red. . . . P O S T N O B I L L S . POST I I O P I L L S . Some chap with a dose burning him. If he . . . ? [Ellipsis in original.] O! Eh? No . . . . . No. [Ellipsis in original.] No, no. I don't believe it. H e wouldn't surely? No, no.

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M r Bloom moved forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that (8.95-109). But there are two other losses that pain him recurrently today, and with both he lingers longer: his father's suicide and his infant son's death. H e first recalled "poor papa" when tarrying at a billboard announcing the performance of Mosenthal's Leah, with the American actress Mrs. Bandmann Palmer in the title role. His father, he remembers, impressed upon him the powerful truth of one scene in particular: Mr. Bloom stood at the corner, his eyes wandering over the multi-coloured hoardings. Cantrell and Chochran's Ginger Ale (Aromatic) Clery's Summer Sale. . . . Hello. Leah tonight. Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Like to see her again in that. Hamlet she played last night. Male impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed suicide. Poor papa! How he used to talk of Kate Bateman in that. Outside the Adelphi in London waited all the afternoon to get in. Year before I was born that was: sixtyfive. And Ristori in Vienna. What is this the right name is? By Mosenthal it is. Rachel, is it? No. The scene he was always talking about where the old blind Abraham recognises the voice and puts his fingers on his face. Nathan's voice! His son's voice! I hear the voice of Nathan who left his father to die of grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of his father and left the God of his father. Every word is so deep, Leopold. Poor papa! Poor man! I'm glad I didn't go into the room to look at his face. That day! 0 , dear!

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0, dear! Ffoo! Well, perhaps it was best for him (5.192-209).

Leah involves a Jewish heroine persecuted by an apostate Jew named Nathan, who has turned anti-Semitic (Gifford, 1988, pp. 88-89). In a climactic scene Nathan is recognized by his dead father's close friend Abraham. Rudolph Bloom's poignant retelling of the dramatic episode-'[Every word is so deep, Leopoldn-suggests torment of his own as a convert, a theme of betrayal and guilt that helps to account for Leopold's having absorbed Judaic lore and connection without formal schooling. His father, we eventually learn, married late and in old age returned, in attention at least, to Judaism (see 17.1893-1~0~). Apparently he talked about it often with his only child, when Leopold could have been no older than his early teens. A guilty Jewish conscience, however, seems not to have been the precipitating cause of Rudolph's suicide. The note he left "To my dear son, Leopold," ofwhich we receive snatches, asked that his dog Athos be cared for and mentioned a longing to be "with your dear mother" (17.1880-1886). Evidently she had died some time in the six years between Leopold's leaving high school and his father's death. There may also be an allusion to business reversals. As it turns out, the lonely old man poisoned himself eighteen years ago, a year before Leopold met Molly. Today he is much on his son's mind: That afternoon of the inquest. The redlabelled bottle on the table. The room in the hotel with hunting pictures. Stuffy it was. Sunlight through the slats of the Venetian blind. The coroner's sunlit ears, big and hairy. Boots giving evidence. Thought he was asleep first. Then saw like yellow streaks on his face. Had slipped down to the foot of the bed.

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Verdict: overdose. Death by misadventure. The letter. For my son Leopold. No more pain. Wake no more. Nobody owns (6.359-365). The matter of suicide came up during the coach ride through the city to Dignam's funeral. Jack Power offered that it was "the greatest disgrace to have in the family," and Simon Dedalus responded, "They say a man who does it is a coward." Martin Cunningham alone seemed to know about Bloom's father and tried to change the subject. Grateful to him, Leopold thought: "They have no mercy on that here or infanticide. Refuse christian burial. They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken already" (6.334-348). His own sadness, his father's pain, and a troubled sense of self as Jewish draw the son to his father this day. O n the eighteenth anniversary of Rudolph's death, June 27, Leopold plans to be in Ennis, where his father died. Molly, who sings, will be touring the North with her impressario, Boylan, at the time when Leopold will commemorate in his way the annual Jewish ritual of remembrance, Yahrzeit. The other loss he returns to repeatedly is that of his little son, who was named after Rudolph and who died eleven days after being born eleven years ago. Today Leopold recalled Rudy first when thinking pleasurably of Milly's sprightly charm and alertness, and again in the funeral coach to Glasnevin Cemetery, when he spotted Dedalus' son Stephen as they passed him in the street. Simon asked if "that Mulligan cad" was with him and then inveighed against his wife's family and Stephen's friends: "He's in with a lowdown crowd," he snarled: M r Bloom glanced from his angry moustache to M r Power's mild face and Martin Cunningham's

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eyes and beard, gravely shaking. Noisy selfwilled man. Full of his son. H e is right. Something to hand on. If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. M y son. M e in his eyes. Strange feeling it would be. From me. Just chance. Must have been that morning Raymond Terrace she was at the window watching the two dogs at it by the wall of the cease to do evil. And the sergeant grinning up. She had that cream gown on with the rip she never stitched. Give us a touch Poldy. God, I'm dying for it. How life begins. Got big then. Had to refuse the Greystones concert. M y son inside her. I could have helped him on in life. I could. Make him independent. Learn German too (6.72-84). H e could have taught Rudy the language of science and high culture, secured opportunities for him, handed something on. But Leopold also holds himself responsible for the boy's death: "Our. Little. Beggar. Baby. Meant nothing. Mistake of nature. If it's healthy it's from the mother. If not from the man. Better luck next time" (6.328-330). However irrational, this puzzling notion occurs to him at Glasnevin Cemetery, as he ponders the little caskets of children. Something he wanted to hand on and couldn't-something in the male line of descent from his grandfather Virag to father Rudolph (who left the home of his father and the faith of his father and changed the patronymic from Hungarian "Virag" to English "Bloom") to Leopold and on to little Rudy-something has died, for which Leopold blames himself. Molly too seems to share that assumption: "a fine son . . . was he not able to make one it wasnt my fault" (18.144496/Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom

1446). Moreover, when their infant son died, a quality of Leopold's sexual arousal died with him, and that powerful source of guilt seems still to be Leopold's secret. In her silent soliloquy Molly doesn't appear to know it; she believes he must be sexually active elsewhere. Again, Bloom laments his lost heritage of male something after recalling better times, not long before he catches a glimpse of Boylan on Kildare Street and flees: "I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I ? Twentyeight I was. She twentythree. When we left Lombard street west something changed. Could never like it again after Rudy. Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then" (8.608611). "Could never like it again after Rudy." The conciseness of phrase obscures who couldn't-he, she, or they. But given the severed line of descent from grandfather to son, Leopold's de facto collusion with the impending adultery, his curious assumption of responsibility for little Rudy's death, and (what follows from never liking it again) eleven subsequent years of failed or disappointing sexual intimacy between husband and wife, a more composite if not yet clear picture of why this cautious and pleasant man will be cuckolded, why he feels guilty, and why he feels Jewish begins to emerge. For him both sexual disfunction and Jewishness touch on the severed male line of family. Home Rulers commonly drew parallels between the Irish under Britain's governance and the ancient Israelites in Egyptian captivity; they compared their lost leader, Parnell, to Moses (Ellmann, 1959, pp. 32, 91"; Hyman, 1972, pp. 179-180; Nadel, 1989, pp. 85-92). When, in the newspaper office, MacHugh declaimed John F. Taylor's stirring speech on the revival of Gaelic, which lauded the young Moses' prophetic vision, he roused Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom/97

Stephen Dedalus' envy and his love of language. Stephen's parable, "A Pisgah Sight of Palestine," alluded to Moses in its title. Earlier, Haines at the tower and Deasy at the school had offered him anti-Semitic gambits, but Stephen joined in with neither. Bloom himself reflected ambiguously on the moneylender Reuben J. Dodd, a Catholic (see Sultan, 1987, pp. 7782): "NOWhe's really what they call a dirty jew" (8.1159). But the apposite actuality of Jews in Ireland becomes a matter for public disputation in Barney Kiernan's pub around 5:oo P.M., climaxing with Bloom's being rushed to a cab by Martin Cunningham and shouting at the bigoted nationalist who is goading him: "Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God." Then for good measure he adds: "Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me." The citizen, as the other is known, a former shot-put champion of Ireland, springs back to the pub to find something to throw, swearing: "By Jesus . . . I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here" (12.1804-1811). The events at Barney Kiernan's are among the funniest and most distressing in Ulysses. They unforgettably depict an anti-Semitic scapegoating and Leopold Bloom's only act of sustained and open defiance. H e was to meet Cunningham and Power at Kiernan's pub and proceed with them to Paddy Dignam's widow's house to discuss her rights to the life insurance policy her husband had heavily mortgaged. A t the cemetery, Bloom had contributed handsomely to the fund Martin took up for the family. Perhaps that was why he was asked to join the others in advising Mrs. Dignam. Was the Jew invited, as Hugh Kenner suspects, because he would be thought to be good at finagling about money (1978, pp. 91,117-118; 1980, pp. 102-IO~)?If SO,the implicit slur would fit the tenor of the chapter, but the evidence is scanty. 98/Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom

What is certain is that the citizen challenges Bloom's Irishness and maligns him as a Jew. "Those are nice things," he snarls, "coming over here to Ireland filling the country with bugs," and adds: "Swindling the peasants . . . and the poor of Ireland. We want no more strangers in our house" (12.11~1-1151). When asked what his nation is, Leopold replies: "Ireland . . . I was born here. Ireland" (12.1431) To which the citizen contemptuously says nothing and spits. Soon Lenehan avers-incorrectly-that Bloom has won on the Gold Cup by betting on Throwaway at 2 0 to I, and the heat glows incandescent. That the Jew may have won and did not buy rounds for all the fellows is beyond bearing, and they turn on him. The very form of this post-entr'acte chapter, with its analogue between the citizen and Homer's one-eyed Cyclops, proffers expressive structure to extremes. The narrative alternates between two voices, the first belonging to a scurrilous and unnamed bill collector, a lowlife and a gossip, who seems to have damaging information about everyone and a nasty, vivid word for all. O f the citizen spitting, for example, he says that he "cleared the spit out of his gullet and, gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner" (12.1432-1433); and of Bloom wondering at the others' anger, he says: "Mean bloody scut. Stand us a drink itself. Devil a sweet fear! There's a jew for you! All for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat. Hundred to five" (12.1760-1761). This scoundrel, who meets Joe Hynes at the beginning of the chapter and accompanies him to Kiernan's to speak with the citizen, reports and comments on events there and thus provides the bitter common denominator for all reference and judgment. The chapter's second voice offers asides, often at considerable length, that slow the action but amplify distinct tones, attitudes, or styles of experience in turn-articulating each in an appropriate rhetoric-and pushing many of them, playfully Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold B/oom/99

and exuberantly, to absurdity. Thereby, the shaping rhythm of narration sustains a series of colorful modes as unvarying and fixed in their ways as the unnamed one is splenetic. In the riveting circumstances, any freshness, nuance, kindness, or grandeur of spirit has to struggle for breath, while the succession of excluding perspectives accumulates to a laughing satire of all one-eyed certainties. At Barney Kiernan's pub we see Leopold Bloom entirely and at length from the outside for the only time in Ulysses. And such externality befits him, because he operates there without his customary self-awareness or caution. The situation is hardly promising, with a bibulous and rabid patriot holding court late in the day. As the first-person narrator winsomely puts it, "there, sure enough, was the citizen up in the corner having a great confab with himself and that bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen, and he waiting for what the sky would drop in the way of a drink" (12.120-121). Everybody who enters Kiernan's, except Bloom-and, at the end, Cunningham-seems primed for raillery; and the citizen inveighs against Britain at every opportunity: "To hell with them! The curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody thicklugged sons of whores' gets! No music and no art and no literature worthy of the name. Any civilization they have they stole from us. Tonguetied sons of bastards' ghosts" (12.1197-1201). After being urged by him to stop pacing back and forth outside, Bloom enters hesitantly. H e refuses Hynes's offer of a drink but accepts a cigar-Hynes, we know, owes him moneyand then joins the conversation with untoward insistence. One loaded topic leads to another: hangmen's letters, capital punishment, foot-and-mouth disease in Irish cattle, Gaelic sports, British naval discipline-and whatever, Leopold quietly argues the point. What has happened to his prudence?

roo/Enigmatic Jewishness ofLeopo1d Bloom

So they started talking about capital punishment and of course Bloom comes out with the why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business and the old dog smelling him all the time I'm told those jewies does have a sort of a queer odour coming off them for dogs about I don't know what all deterrent effect and so forth and so on. -There's one thing it hasn't a deterrent effect on, says Alf. -What's that? says Joe. -The poor bugger's tool that's being hanged, says Alf. -That so? says Joe. -God's truth, says Alf. I heard that from the head warder that was in Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. H e told me when they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a poker. -Ruling passion strong in death, says Joe, as someone said. -That can be explained by science, says Bloom. It's only a natural phenomenon, don't you see, because on account of the . . . And then he starts with his jawbreakers about phenomenon and science and this phenomenon and the other phenomenon. . . . Phenomenon! The fat heap he married is a nice phenomenon with a back on her like a ballalley (12.~50-503). Leopold's persistence irks this narrator, who has a hairtrigger temper. But what could Bloom be about, discussing, debating, and trying to enlighten the incorrigible?

EnigmaticJewishness of Leopold Bloom / r o ~

So then the citizen begins talking about the Irish language and the corporation meeting and all to that the shoneens that can't speak their own language and Joe chipping in because he stuck someone for a quid and Bloom putting in his old goo with his twopenny stump that he cadged off Joe and talking about the Gaelic league and the antitreating league and drink, the curse of Ireland. Antitreating is about the size of it. Gob, he'd let you pour all manner of drink down his throat till the Lord would call him before you'd ever see the froth of his pint. . . . So off they started about Irish sports and shoneen games the like of lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil and building up a nation once again and all to that. And of course Bloom had to have his say too about if a fellow had a rower's heart violent exercise was bad. I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw? That? a straw. Declare to my aunt he'd talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady. . . . -But, says Bloom, isn't discipline the same everywhere? I mean wouldn't it be the same here if you put force against force? Didn't I tell you? As true as I'm drinking this porter if he was at his last gasp he'd try to downface you that dying was living (12.679-686; 889896; 1360-1364). Even if we allow for the intemperate reporter, Bloom here seems decidedly imprudent-pedantic and obdurate too, and inappropriate. 102/Enigmafic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom

The mystery of his untoward behavior is easily solved, at least preliminarily, by way of a parapraxis he makes early on, when explaining his presence there: As a matter of fact I just wanted to meet Martin Cunningham, don't you see, about this insurance of poor Dignam's. Martin asked me to go to the house. You see, he, Dignam, I mean, didn't serve any notice of the assignment on the company at the time and nominally under the act the mortgagee can't recover on the policy. -Holy Wars, says Joe, laughing, that's a good one if old Shylock is landed. So the wife comes out top dog, what? -Well that's a point for the wife's admirers. Whose admirers? says Joe. The wife's advisers, I mean, says Bloom. Then he starts all confused mucking it up about mortgagor under the act like the lord chancellor giving it out on the bench and for the benefit of the wife and that a trust is created but on the other hand that Dignam owed Bridgeman the money and if now the wife or the widow contested the mortgagee's right till he near had the head of me addled with his mortgagor under the act (12.760-775). The slip makes obvious a concurrent drama forcing its way to Bloom's consciousness. A t this very moment at 7 Eccles Street Molly's admirer is with her, and they will have finished the preliminaries. Leopold is defending against anguish by diverting, through repression, his passion and anger and attending stoutly to matters at hand. Doing nothing to intervene at home, he aggresses in talk at Kiernan's, unconsciously looking for trouble with men who laugh at the "pishogue" husband Denis Breen Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold BIoom/ro3

and ask pointedly about Molly's coming tour. The manifestly political topics lead inevitably to national hatreds, which Leopold opposes ("Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations"), and soon to his outrage as a Jew: -And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant. Gob, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar. -Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. A t this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle. -Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen. -I'm talking about injustice, says Bloom. -Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men. That's an almanac picture for you. Mark for a softnosed bullet. Old lardyface standing up to the business end of a gun. Gob, he'd adorn a sweepingbrush, so he would, if he only had a nurse's apron on him. And then he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as limp as a wet rag. -But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not a life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life. -What? says Alf. -Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. 104/Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom

I must go now, says he to John Wyse. Just round to the court a moment to see if Martin is there. If he comes just say I'll be back in a second. Just a moment (12.1467-1487). So he proposes a radical alternative that should be familiar to these Christians but isn't, a message of love that suggests his own struggle against fury at one remove-this very moment, this very instant, plundered, insulted, persecuted, taking what belongs to us by right- that is, not consciously about Molly but about Jews and injustice, national and group hatreds. Touching and overdetermined, his plea is dismissed in his brief absence as unmanly palaver. -Do you call that a man? says the citizen.

-I wonder did he ever put it out of sight, says Joe. -Well there were two children born anyhow, says Jack Power. -And who does he suspect? says the citizen. Gob, there's many a true word spoken in jest. One of those mixed middlings he is. Lying up in the hotel Pisser was telling me once a month with a headache like a totty with her courses. D o you know what I'm telling you? It'd be an act of God to take a hold of a fellow the like of that and throw him in the bloody sea. Justifiable homicide, so it would (12.1654-1662). The psychology of sexually fearful projection in scapegoating could not be more clear, nor Bloom at the end more wondrous- almost: When lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein H e stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld H i m in Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom/ro~

the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And he answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld H'Im even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel (12.1~1o-1y8). Nevertheless, defending the Jews, bringing light to the gentiles, and beloved of heaven, he has by this moment been cuckolded.

"I sometimes think that it was a heroic sacrifice on their part when they refused to accept the Christian revelation," Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen. "Look at them. They are better husbands than we are, better fathers, and better sons" (Budgen, 1941, p. 23). H e wanted those familial qualities for his modern Odysseus because he admired them; and for the most part scholars and critics have approached the matter of his Jewish hero biographically, like Richard Ellmann (1959) pondering Joyce's affinity with Jews as fellow exiles, mental artists, and urbanized everymen never wholly of one time and place (S. Benstock, 1979; Fogel, 1979; Epstein, 1982; Levitt, 1982; Reizbaum, 1982; Hildesheimer, 1984; Nadel, 1986, 1989). As Frank O'Connor said: "Jewish literature is the literature of townsmen, and the greatest Jew of all was James Joyce" (1967, p. 198).These traits bear also on Bloom's appeal. Recently, Brian Cheyette (1993, pp. 206-234) and Neil R. Davison (1996) pondered him anew and discerningly by way of English and European social constructions of "the Jew." But starting with Robert Martin ro6/Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom

Adams (1962, pp. 99-IO~),commentators have also doubted the adequacy of Bloom's Jewishness, pointing to the many ways he is not, by Jewish tradition, Jewish and stressing his apparent uninvolvement with the sturdy Jewish community of Dublin at the time. Erwin R. Steinberg (1981, 1989) made the case convincingly: Bloom was baptized, not circumcised, never was a Bar Mitzvah, became a Catholic to marry Molly, and owns a burial plot in Glasnevin, a gentile cemetery, rather than in Dublin's Jewish cemetery. "In not a single rite of passage, past or future, does Leopold Bloom qualify as a Jew" (1981, p. 29), he states, allowing, however, that Bloom may be metaphorically a Jew because he is rejected, persecuted, and alien even in his own land. Steinberg finds it hard to laud the exemplary family ties of a man who has denied his wife normal sexual relations for more than a decade, sent his daughter away to ease his wife's affair, and in the early morning hours of June 17, 1904, tries to entice Stephen to their home by showing him an alluring photograph of Molly-and one cannot disagree. Finally, like many others, he notes the limited extent and quality of Bloom's knowledge about things Jewish. The honor roll Leopold flaunts to the citizen, as an instance, includes the composer Felii Mendelssohn, whose parents became Christians before he was born; Karl Marx, whose parents had him baptized and himself wrote anti-Semitic tracts; Baruch Spinoza, who was excommunicated from the Amsterdam congregation for unorthodox views; Saverio Mercadante, a Catholic composer of operas and church music; and Jesus. Unintentionally, the list is ironic. Bloom, so attentive to facts, often gets them wrong. But his error also reveals a truth: that for him Jewishness is inclusive, because it includes Jews like him, who by religious tradition don't qualify. Stereotypes about the familial ties of Jews and their dislike of drinking do not adequately define Bloom's consciousness, any more than biblical or rabbinical regulations do- though Molly Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold B/oom/ro7

remembers that he kissed her hall door (18.1406). His sense of Jewishness registers continually with him nonetheless, and although still unaccounted for, it proves variously functional for him through the day and dependably part of his unfolding psychological being. It is, we have seen, a standard of value and a mode of continuity, self-recognition, and s ride; a locus for displacement, defense, and widely ranging affect; an inner space in which to be lustful, voyeuristic, thoughtful, sensitive, and private and in which to memorialize losses, especially those in the line of patriarchal descent severed since little Rudy's death-except in Leopold's regretful memories and guilt. As was evident at Barney Kiernan's, Jewishness also symbolizes Bloom's social isolation and vulnerability. It should, then, be part of any understanding of his publicly cautious ways, as well as of their breakdown at Kiernan's. To fathom what I have called Bloom's felt Jewish soul, we need to know not only how it is present and psychologically useful to him but how it came to be. For in light of the sizable number of Western European Jews who from the eighteenth century onward found it necessary or desirable to become part of the Christian majority, one must wonder about a non-Jew, who has not formally chosen to convert and has no apparent interest in theology, who merely is Jewish within himself-in one of the most Christian of cities to boot. To understand that we need the evidence of the "Circe," or "Nighttown," chapter, which provides entry to Bloom's encompassingly deep fantasies, as well as help from the penultimate chapter, for facts or near-facts about his life when he was younger. Set in the red-light district of Dublin after midnight, "Circe" presents experience in a style evocative of expressionist drama or film, of literary dreamscapes by Goethe and Flaubert, with the insidious clarity of Kaflca, the infernal detail of

ro8/Enigmatic Jewishnei~of Leopold Bloom

the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. It has the vividness and irrational feel of primary process (Freud, 1900, pp. 588-609). But it is not solely a realm of dream and fantasy because, as in every other chapter of the book, a continuing line of naturalistic events is discernible. Concerned about Stephen, who is desperate and drunk and has headed for Nighttown, Bloom follows. After surrendering his potato to Zoe Higgins, he enters Bella Cohen's whorehouse because Stephen is there. H e conjures several extraordinary fantasies of his own, rallies then to reclaim his potato and take charge of Stephen's money before it is stolen, and then again to look after him when, after he is knocked down by a British soldier and nearly arrested, Stephen lies out-cold in the street. There is a zany, illicitly sexual, and paranoid texture to "Nighttown." Uneasy at being there and hardly sure why he is, Leopold proceeds with care. After the lad Tommy Caffrey (whom he observed earlier that evening) runs into him, he quickly searches his pockets to check that they haven't been picked. Such recurrences characterize the place, where comically, surprisingly, and metamorphically people, situations, and phrases from earlier in the book reappear like day residues. A t one point, having to jump out of the way of a sandstrewer, Bloom touches his potato, grateful for "poor mamma's panacea" (15.201-202). Shortly we will get our only direct view of his mother-and a very strange view it is. But first father Rudolph appears, stooped, bearded, and "garbed in the long caftan of an elder of Zion." Yellow poison streaks his face. H e is an exaggerated figure, a stage Jew whose son cringes and feels guilty with the father's own guilt. Crestfallen, Leopold hides the pig's crubeen and trotter he has bought: "Second halfcrown waste money today. I told you not to go with drunken goy ever. So you catch no money. . . . What you making down this place?

EnigmaticJewishness of Leopold Bloom/~og

Have you no soul? (withfeeble vulture talons hefeels the silentface of Bloom) Are you not my son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Are you not my dear son Leopold who left the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham and Jacob?" (15.253-262). Rudolph remembers a time in Leopold's teens when friends brought him home drunk and muddied: "What you call them running chaps?" he asks, and Leopold replies quietly: "Harriers, father. Only that oncen-while his own garb instantly transforms: ( i n youth? smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered in brown A b i n e hat, wearing gent? sterling silver Waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one side of him coated with stzffening mud). . . . RUDOLPH

Once! Mud head to foot. Cut your hand open. Lockjaw. They make you kaputt, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps. BLOOM

(weakly) They challenged me to a sprint. It was muddy. I slipped. RUDOLPH

(with contempt) Goim nachez! Nice spectacles for your poor mother! (15.269-79).

Crucial themes are vented here in extreme form, themes sounded throughout "Nighttown" and centrally in Bloom's experience: a stark, guilt-provoking contrast between Jews and goyim; the boy's disheartened effort to find a more inclusive, independent, stylish, and contemporary way; the father's almost frenzied sense of danger, which serves to introduce "poor mamma's" even more shrill hysterics: rro/Enigmatic Jewishness ofLeopold Bloom

(inpantomime dame's stringed mobcap, widow Twankey? crinoline and bustle, blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her plaited hair in a crispine net, appears over the staircase banisters, a slanted candlestick in her hand, and cries out in shrill alarm) 0 blessed Redeemer, what have they done to him! My smelling salts! (She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks thepouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid dollfall out.) Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all at all? (15.283-290).

This is startling and hard to integrate. Ellen Bloom too is pictured as a stage figure, from the traditional English family entertainment, the Christmas pantomime. The Widow Twankey is Aladdin's mother (Gifford 1988, p. 457)-and Bloom, of course, like Aladdin and Odysseus before him, has adventures. But this mother seems to be a Roman Catholic, with her phrases of prayer and Agnus Dei medal, although Leopold himselfwas baptized a Protestant (see S. Benstock, 1979); or to her Jewish son she seems wildly frightened, superstitious, infantile, and crazily, exceedingly Christian-in the only extended thought he has about her during all of Bloomsday. What else might she have under her skirt? Pantomime Dames are notoriously rambunctious, bawdy, and forceful; they are always played by middle-aged men, with a broad, bisexual humor. They are never easily contained. So this is most curious testimony, which bears on Bloom's characterological caution, his vulnerability to depression, his puzzling, many-sided identity, and his watching, sympathizing with, loving, yearning for, and fantasizing about women. Immediately, another stunning event occurs. Molly appears in a Turkish outfit of jacket and trousers and treats him with Enigmatic Jewishnesr of Leopold B/oom/rrr

teasing condescension. Last night he dreamt of her wearing trousers, and waking he has wondered whether she wears the pants in their home. His mother, meanwhile, has vanishedas, during the day, she has been almost totally missing from his thoughts. In a day so full of memories and losses, that is noteworthy. Does Molly, who figures as male and female to him, often camouflage and cover his mother in his thoughts? If we take this bizarre vision of mother, father, son, and wife as a disguised but important clue, in the manner of a dream, and the rest of "Circe," and indeed of Ulysses, as associations thereto, a new, developmental entry into Bloom's dilemmas will, I think, be opened. H e has very few memories of mamma but repeated thoughts of Molly and a ready fascination with women generally. His relation to them may suggest its beginnings with his mother-at some level terrified and terrifying, superstitious, explosive, very fragile, and yet very powerful, at least in the hold such a mother can have on a child, requiring of him precocious care, attention, cooperation, patience, and no answering explosiveness: the very qualities Bloom displays in the present crisis with Molly. To this day he carries a potato with him, as his mother did, a fetish to augment the phallic forcefulness he could not claim with her and to symbolize basic supplies he did not get from her. This suggests that young Leopold, who cut an attractive figure with the ladies and courted Molly with Byron's poems and his own passion, married her, and fathered two children by her, one of them possibly conceived before the marriage, had not yet, despite appearances, sufficiently secured his adult masculinity before it was doubly traumatized. The two devastating losses he suffered in adulthood that prey on his mind, his father's suicide when Leopold was twenty and his little son's death seven years later, upset his psychosexual equilibrium-most tellingly in his inability after Rudy's death to have complete intercourse with his wife. As the 1r2/Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom

mathematical narrator of the "Ithaca" chapter puts it: "there remained a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ" (17.2282-22g4). Molly's tryst with Boylan today staggers him anew, and he can do nothing to prevent it. In "Circe" he descends first into several elaborate fantasies- he is accused of sexual crimes, for example, and punished for them by hanging. Martha Clifford charges breach of promise. The Blooms' former serving girl, Mary Driscoll, claims assault: "I had more respect for the scouringbrush, so I had. I remonstrated with him, Your lord, and he remarked: keep it quiet" (15.892-893). Mrs. Yelverton Barry, Mrs. Bellingham, and finally the Honourable Mrs. Mervin Talboys accuse him of more perverse twists: This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a partially nude senorita, frail and lovely (his wife, as he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature), practising illicit intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise him as he richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping. She intends to start immediately: "(stamps her jingling spurs in a sudden paroxysm offury) I will, by the God above me. I'll scourge the ~igeonliveredcur as long as I can stand over him. I'll flay him alive." And he likes the idea: "(his eyes closing, pails expectantly) Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom/rz3

Here? (he syuirms) Again! (he pants cringing) I love the danger" (15.106~-1086).J. J. O'Molloy tries to defend him: "I shall call rebutting evidence to prove up to the hilt that the hidden hand is again at its old game. When in doubt persecute Bloom" (15.974-976). But the tide of disapproval is too strong. H e is that guilty and self-punishing. When Zoe Higgins, a young whore-who turns out uncannily to have his mother's maiden name (17.537)-suggests sarcastically that Bloom give a stump speech, he launches another extended fantasy of himself as a reformer and great leader. Made Lord Mayor, proclaimed Leopold the First, and adored as Parnell's successor, he prophesies the New Bloomusalem and gives speeches in ludicrous Hebrew and in English: "Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth Hagadah Tephilim Kosher Yom Kippur Hanukah Roshaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim Meshuggah Talith" (15.162~-1625).

I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state. . . . Mixed races and mixed marriage (15.1685-1693). But again he is toppled, like Parnell, for sexual misconduct, but also for being an Episcopalian, Caliban, Jack the Ripper, 114/Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom

a condom user, and the false messiah. Pronounced "bisexually abnormal" (15.1775-1776) by Mulligan and "a finished example by Dixon, he gives of the new womanly man" (15.1798-179~) birth to "eight male yellow and white children" (15.1821-1822) before being put to the torch by the Dublin Fire Brigade. Leopold Bloom may well represent a pacific and androgynous transformation of the hero in Western literature, but at this moment in "Nighttown," however comically, he is scorned. When the whoremistress Bella Cohen appears, striking and hard, Bloom follows out the path of his masochism. "Powerful being," he says. "In my eyes read that slumber which women love." The fan she is tapping replies, "We have met. You are mine," and Bloom, cowed, answers, "Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination." Before his eyes Bella transforms to Bello, a man, while Bloom manages merely to mumble, "Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen": BELLO

(with a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice) Hound of dishonour! BLOOM

(infatuated) Empress! BELLO

(His heavy cheekchops sagging) Adorer of the adulterous rump! BLOOM

(plaintively) Hugeness! BELLO

Dungdevourer! BLOOM

(with

sinews

sernzjexed)

Magmagnificence!

(15.2834445).

Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom/rrj

Soon Bello squats on Bloom's face, reading the newspaper, quenching his cigar in Bloom's ear, and farting: "Not man," Bloom recognizes: "Woman," and Bello pronounces: "No more blow hot and cold. What you longed for has come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing under the yoke. Now for your punishment frock. You will shed your male garments, you understand. Ruby Cohen? and don the shot silk luxuriously rustling over head and shoulders. And quickly too!" (15.2964-2968). H e will be a young girl, to pander to men's Gomorrahan vices. Bello taunts him: "What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? (he stoops and, peering, pokes with hisfan rudely under thefat suet folds of Bloomj. haunches) Up! Up! Manx cat! W h a t have we here? Where's your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy, sing. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy a bucket or sell your pump. (loudly) Can you do a man's job?" (15.31273132). The only counterthrust during these articulations of Bloom's inner state comes with the sudden arrival of grandfather Lipoti Virag, whose verbal abandon matches his sexual exhilaration. "Stop twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk," Virag lectures his quiescent grandson. "See, you have forgotten. Exercise your mnemotechnic" (15.2383-2385). H e urges vigor and primeval impulse: "Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam. Short time after man presents woman with pieces of jungle meat. Woman shows joy and covers herself with featherskins. Man loves her yoni fiercely with big lingam, the stiff one. (he cries) Coactus volui. Then giddy woman will run about. Strong man grapses woman's wrist. Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Man, now fierce angry, strikes woman's fat yadgana. (he chases his tail) Piffpaff!

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Popo! (he stops, sneezes) Pchp! (he worries his butt) Prrrrrht!" (15.2549-2556). But it is to no avail at that moment. Bloom, who was drawn to Zoe, gave her his potato when she asked for it-he called it a talisman and an heirloom-and thereby exposed himself to the depths of his fearful wishes: for exhibitionistic fame and martyrdom, for anal erotism, perversion, and soiling, for voyeurism, masochistic bondage, homosexual submission, bisexual realization, and continued castration. And having displayed himself to himself, having dramatized his regressive degradation, impotence, and guilt, he had enough, and more than enough. The "Nighttown" chapter seems to embody Freud's original assumption about psychotherapeutic relief, that bringing conflicted material to consciousness would itself bring about change.* Leopold springs into action, first of all getting his potato"a relic of poor mamman-back: "There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it" (15.3520). Consolidated again that much, he acts more effectively than he has all day. H e protects Stephen's money, refuses Bella's charge from it for damages to her lamp, tries to keep Stephen out of a fight, and finally takes charge of the fallen lad. Bending over him and soon to sober him up and offer him a place to sleep, Leopold has a final vision, inspired by Si Dedalus' son. H e sees his own: (Against the dark wall a$gure appears slowly, afairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He readsjom right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.) 'Soon, however, Bloom will peer through a keyhole to cheer for Molly and Boylan, an action that adumbrates Freud's clinical grounds for revising his theory (Freud, 1914b, 1923).

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BLOOM

(wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy! RUDY

(gazes, unseeing, into Bloom's eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his pee left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.) (15.4956-4967). It is so poignant, so fondly idealized, but too sweet. Yet as it reminds us of Bloom's unassuaged grief, it also reveals much about what he, the son of an immigrant father and an Irish mother, had hoped for, for his lost son and for himself: an integration of cultures and opportunities, a sensitive and even feminine sweetness. Rudy wears Cinderella's shoes, a stylishly appointed Eton jacket, Mercury's bronze hat; he holds his phallic but nice ivory cane. Is that a Christian lambkin peeking from his pocket? And of course Rudy is literate. H e reads from right to left, inaudibly, in a Hebrew prayer book, and kisses the page. A t eleven he might have begun to prepare for his Bar Mitzvah (see Levitt, 1972). This is a diaspora idea of assimilation, with Jewish identity and connection a handsome part of it-what the views we get of Bloom in his late teens and twenties would suggest. Before and for a while after marrying Molly, he had lived in the southern, heavily Jewish section of the city (Hyman, 1972, pp. 167, 182). His peers were both Jews and non-Jews. H e had friends, some of them older, more his dead father's age: Matt Dillon, Luke Doyle, and Alderman John Hooper, all of whom gave him and Molly wedding presents. He was thought perhaps to have a chance in politics (see 18.1186-1187, 16.1579-158s). For a couple of hours before Leopold and Stephen part, they will r18/Enigmatic Jewishness fleopold Bloom

walk and talk about a range of subjects trivial and searching, rarely agreeing but comfortable enough to linger with one another. Neither will have had any such companionship all day, and Bloom, we'll learn, hasn't had any for a decade. Had Bloom discussed similar subjects during nocturnal perambulations in the past? In 1884 with Owen Goldberg and Cecil Turnbull at night on public thoroughfares between Longwood avenue and Leonard's corner and Leonard's corner and Synge street and Synge street and Bloomfield avenue. In 1885 with Percy Apjohn in the evenings, reclined against the wall between Gibraltar villa and Bloomfield house in Crumlin, barony of Uppercross. In 1886 occasionally with casual acquaintances and prospective purchasers on doorsteps, in front parlours, in third class railway carriages of suburban lines. In 1888 frequently with major Brian Tweedy and his daughter Miss Marion Tweedy, together and separately on the lounge in Matthew Dillon's house in Roundtown. Once in 1892 and once in 1893 with Julius (Juda) Mastiansky, on both occasions in the parlour of his (Bloom's) house in Lombard street, west (17.4659).

From 1884 to 1893 many, but after 1893, when they moved to another section of Dublin and Rudy died, none. Nor has he talked again this way with Molly. His infant son's death precipitated a regression that held until today. He was more withdrawn, more cautious, more Jewish, yet removed from that community too. His vulnerable masculinity had given way, and he had become sexually inhibited with his wife. His felt Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom/zz9

Jewishness, then, is restitutive, a sign, even as it expresses his weakness and isolation, of his continued attempt to find and be accompanied by his anguished father, to regain his manhood. Jewishness has held him together for the last decade. And like the Agendath flyer, he recognized it late but had it with him. Leopold Bloom's Jewish identity opens up every developmental level of his masculinity, from its shaky roots to its postadolescent synthesis, leading to its breakdown for a decade in adulthood and its possible retransformation today into a more assertive and connected idiom. T h e nadir of his regression is reached in "Nighttown"; and there, having been assertive as a Jew at Kiernan's, and having wishfully extended the paternal line back to an actively sexual grandfather, he begins to reclaim more proximally his phallic power and aggression. In adulthood, Bloom's inner sense of Jewishness has served to define and to bolster his dynamically regressed masculinity, and now by way of a transient son-substitute, it may serve the bare possibility of sexual and familial renewal with Molly.

120/Enigmatic Jewishness of Leopold Bloom

Vicissitudes of Anger

Bloom can fight for the Jews but not for what belongs to him by right. H e protects Stephen but flees Boylan. In "Circe," satiated with self-revelatory fantasies, he begins to act to good effectyet again experiences himself as subservient: providing vaseline, ogling through the keyhole, and cheering Boylan's sexual gymnastics with Molly: "Show! Hide! Show! Plough her! More! Shoot!" (15.3815-3816) Usually Bloom's psychological conflicts surface in his behavior as inhibition, reticence, and evasion, and in affect as masochism, shame, and guilt. Both he and Stephen, furthermore, have shown signs of entrenched angers of which they are not aware-that, roused, displaced, and disguised, inform their miseries. Aggression and a crucial motivation for it, anger, may therefore offer another useful entry to their psychodynamics. The narrator, moreover, becomes more assertiveand not always pleasantly. So aggression may provide perspective on his stunningly new modes of storytelling as well. In this chapter I trace such vicissitudes in Bloom and Stephen before pondering the enigmatic, always impressive, and readily metamorphic post-entr'acte narrator. Leopold flees at lunchtime, at the end of "Lestrygonians," the last chapter to present him wholly in the initial style. His stream of consciousness as Molly's tryst draws near, which corresponds to Od~sseus'adventures among the cannibals, teems with smells and fascinations of food, with ingestion and digestion, and reveals a good deal of why he reacts to her affair as he does, as well as why, seeing Boylan, he scurries away. To a large degree unconsciously, he strains to govern his anger.

Early in the episode, he notices Dilly Dedalus, underfed and poorly clothed, and attributes her condition to her mother's death. Coming upon Josie Breen, he commiserates about her dotty husband, Denis, who, having received a postcard reading "U.p: up," is trying to interest solicitors in suing for libel. Bloom remembers Josie's attractiveness when she was still Josie Powell and registers how careworn she now looks. Josie asks about Molly, and he points out a Dublin eccentric, Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, who, zanily costumed and muttering to himself, walks outside every lamppost. Leopold inquires about Mrs. Purefoy, due with her ninth child, and Josie laments the difficult delivery, which already has lasted three days. To these women-Dilly, her mother, Josie Breen, Mina Purefoy-he brings empathic concern, not qualified by (though it coexists with) his unsentimental awareness of playing for Josie's sympathy, judging her husband "meshuggah," taking note of "that other old mosey lunatic," Farrell, or conjuring as "a feast for the gods" John Henry Menton staring with "oyster eyes" at the "U.p." postcard (8.314-322). Just before spotting Boylan he again is empathic, helping a blind stripling to cross the street and wondering-and experimenting, to find out-what a blind person experiences: "What dreams would he have, not seeing?" (8.1144-11~5).Alert to the actuality of others, he is more so with those in some way wounded, like himself. Bloom has less kind moments too, shifts toward harsh affect or darting thoughts that startle. Recalling a sweet nun he did business with when working for Hely's, he adds: "It was a nun they say invented barbed wire" (8.154). When Josie opens her handbag, he thinks: "Hatpin: ought to have a guard on those things. Stick it in a chap's eye in the tram" (8.239-240). Noting pincushions in a store window, he thinks of Molly's pins lying around the house, her needles in the window curtains, and rz2/

VicissitudesofAnger

looks at a scratch on his forearm. A t such moments of vigilance, women loom dangerously, with sharp edges and points, and his own sharpness shows. He recalls the horsey woman in front of the Grosvenor and moves on to a Mrs. Miriam Dandrade, who once sold him old wraps and black undergarments. "Want to be a bull for her," he suddenly surges: "Born courtesan" (8.356). It would seem that his sexual desire is not quiescent so much as ineffective, bound up in fantasy. He feels fleeting hopelessnesses too, as on the O'Connell Bridge, when his mood dips-"Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt quaywalls, gulls. Rough weather outside. If I threw myself down?" (8.51-52). At Dignam's burial he had the flash thought: "If we were all suddenly somebody else" (6.836). W i t h a trace of melancholy, though in a lighter vein, he considers whether the pigeons will let fly at him. A theme of sadness sounds quietly through the chapter, amplifying whenever he contrasts present circumstances to past: memories of Josie in her teens, before her marriage; Molly in the elephant-gray dress and Milly's tub nights; himself before Rudy died. In Davy Byrne's, he studies two flies stuck together on a windowpane and floats back to when he and Molly courted: Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under Vicissitudes of Anger/rq

ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me. Me. And me now. Stuck, the flies buzzed (8.906-918). In those days too he actively pursued his passive pleasures, but with far more hope and joy. Yet mournfulness, aggressive glimmers, and depressive dips notwithstanding, he stays buoyant. H e softens the anguished memory of their kiss by pondering the oak counter at which he sits: "Beauty: it curves: curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires." From the kiss on Ben Howth he moves to curves of beauty and then to goddessesand on to the statues of naked goddesses in the museum, which he praises soberly as "aids to digestion" (8.920-922). Inner calm extends for him to proper digestion; beauty and other practicalities create comfort zones. Soon he explores contrasts less painful than present to past: goddesses "quaffing nectar at mess with gods golden dishes, all ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar imagine it drinking electricity: gods' food. Lovely forms of women sculpted Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine" (8.925-930). Goddesses, he realizes, may not have anuses, and he resolves to check that at the museum ("Keeper won't see. Bend down let something drop."). Bloom's perky tone and idiom deploy flexibly. H e watches, aestheticizes, idealizes, intellectualizes, divides, strategizes, and problem-solves; he obsesses, denies, z24/ Vicissitudes of Anger

represses; he jokes to himself; and he enjoys the process of thinking. Calling upon this repertoire, he manages, on a trying day, at a very trying hour, to keep steady-losing control only when he sees Boylan coming toward him, and then only briefly. That Bloom has much to monitor, however, can be gauged by two sequences of interior monologue. The first begins after he and Josie part (8.358f.), when he ruminates about Mrs. Purefoy's teetotaling Methodist husband ("method in his madness. . . . Selfish those t.t.'s are") and sets out a plan for the afternoon: first lunch, then pursue that ad in the national library. Mulling over Mina Purefoy's ordeal and the miseries of childbirth ("Kill me that would"), he remembers Molly's deliveries being easy, applauds Queen Victoria's choosing anesthesia, and queries why someone doesn't make it broadly available instead of "gassing," like the men in the newspaper office, about Ireland's moonlit "silver effulgence." His business proclivitiesand socialist leanings-take over: "They could easily have big establishments whole thing quite painless out of all the taxes give every child born five quid at compound interest up to twentyone five per cent is a hundred shillings and five tiresome pounds multiply by twenty decimal system encourage people to put by money save hundred and ten and a bit twentyone years want to work it out on paper come to a tidy sum more than you think" (8.382-388). Nonetheless, he drifts toward Rudy, touching on stillborns ("trouble for nothing") and memories of Molly and Mrs. Moisel pregnant, then their 'lpeaceful eyes," the "weight off their mind"; old Mrs. Thornton, the midwife (who, he has recalled, knew at once that little Rudy wouldn't live), and his own good opinion of doctors, needed urgently and then kept waiting for their fees. It's at that moment that (a mite manically) he fantasizes about the birds dumping on him. After then advocating to himself the advisability of public urinals for women as for men Vicissitudes ofAnger/rzj

-going pragmatic again- he begins a sequence of associations that touch on Irish politics: police filing in and out of a station house; himself years earlier joining a protest against Trinity's honorary degree for Joe Chamberlain, an English statesman who opposed Home Rule (Gifford, 1988, p. 168). "Silly billies," he remarks of the demonstrators, "few years' time half of them magistrates and civil servants." Leopold Bloom sides with both rebels and grown-ups. The motif leads to musings about conspirators, spies, plainclothesmen, then dupes and women who inform on them, who betray, and soon Parnell and other political figures. The route winds from childbirth through stillborns (Rudy), politics, betrayal, and the tough wilyness or arrogance required for public life, to his second steep plunge of the day: His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly, shadowing Trinity's surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same, day after day: squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa. Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. They buy

126/

Vicissitudes ofAnger

the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kenvan's mushroom houses built of breeze. Shelter, for the night. No-one is anything. This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed (8.475-495). Bloom is, of course, hungry. That fact informs the chapter, this passage, and his summary metaphor here of feeling eaten and spewed. H e is interested in others and in politics. But by displacing concern to Mina Purefoy and memories, to landlords, capitalism, and unvarying patterns, he also holds closer pains at bay-his losses and deaths, and Molly's trystwhile hinting at and approaching them too (Mrs. Thornton, women who betray, Parnell). Did Molly betray him once before by giving birth to a baby who died? H e was returning to her from the pork butcher's this morning when he experienced the first mood plummet, his Dead Sea fantasy-before managing clearly to separate her from it. That possibility awaits more evidence. The meaningless repetitiveness he registers, meanwhile, the sense that "no-one is anything," is depression, felt not briefly ("If I threw myself down?") or farcically (the birds dropping on him) but as an encompassing emptiness and swindle. One pole of Bloom's struggle with anger is this usually repressed grinding depression-which turns felt anger guiltily and totally against the self and stretches back to the oral stage of infancy. It is entirely to the point that he feels here that "no-one is anything" and that he has been "eaten and spewed," Vicissitudes of Anger/zz7

not merely because it is lunchtime and there is Homeric precedent. Depression taps one's earliest experiences of feeding and care, the most basic nourishment of body and soul (consider: "A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those waves, grey metal, poisonomous foggy waters"); and it is a way early on of bearing anger-containing it with guilt, structuring it thereby, and assuring safety in which to grow. Beneath Leopold Bloom's calm and cheerful alertness, he oscillates between this depressive pole of charged, in effect selfdirected anger and another, less disguised but well-defended rage, which emerges in a long segment that traces his finding a place to eat. It starts with his remembering walking with Molly and Boylan two weeks earlier (8.587f.). She was humming: "He other side of her. Elbow, arm. He. . . . Touch. Fingers. Asking. Answer. Yes." Seeing Bob Doran on a bender turns his thoughts back further in time. Hovering then for a moment with Rudy, he cushions his pain by calling his very self into question: "I was happier then. O r was that I? O r am I now I? . . . Can't bring back time" (8.608-611). But he avoids a slide by responding to Grafton Street's allure. H e notices displays of silks, ribbons, pincushions and stockings in the shopwindows; he thinks of writing to Martha and decides that white stockings make a woman's legs look clumsy, even Molly's. Her birthday will be in three months. "Useless to go back. Had to be. Tell me all." This last evokes his interchange with Josie Breen. Women and wealth he interweaves with the East, "silkwebs, silver, rich fruits spicy from Jaffa. Agendath Netaim," until "a warm human plumpness settled down over his brain. His brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore" (8.637-639). H e begins to yield, hungering for a woman's plumpness (Molly's?), fantasizing a dialogue between lovers, and enters the Burton, 128/

Vicissitudes ofAnger

where instantly "stink gripped his trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slush of greens." Alarmed, he recoils: "See the animals feed. Men, men, men." Disgusted, even frightened, to be among such ravenous men, he wonders: "Am I like that? See ourselves as others see us. Hungry man is an angry man." He wants out: "Couldn't eat a morsel here. Fellow sharpening knife and fork to eat all before him, old chap picking his tootles. Slight spasm, full, chewing the cud. Before and after. Grace after meals. Look on this picture then on that. Scoffing up stewgravy with sopping sippets of bread. Lick it off the plate, man! Get out of this" (8.673-677). But the scene grips him: That fellow ramming a knifeful of cabbage down as if his life depended on it. Good stroke. Give me the fidgets to look. . . . Tear it limb from limb. . . . A diner, knife and fork upright, elbows on table, ready for a second helping stared towards the foodlife across his stained square of newspaper. Other chap telling him something with his mouth full. Sympathetic listener. Table talk. I munched hum un thu Unchster Bunk on Munchday. Ha? Did you faith? (8.682-693). H e tries a ruse, miming that someone he's looking for isn't there: -Not here. Don't see him. Out. I hate dirty eaters. He backed towards the door. Get a light snack in Davy Byrne's. Stopgap. Keep me going. Had a good breakfast. -Roast and mashed here. -Pint of stout. Vicissitudes ofAnger/rzp

Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail. Gulp. Grub. Gulp. Gobstuff. H e came out into clearer air and turned back towards Grafton street. Eat or be eaten. Kill! Kill! (8.695-703). Yet, having made his escape, he remains horrorstruck, evoking cattlemarket images of butchered animals: "Flayed glasseyed sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling nosejam on sawdust." The last image is vampirish: "Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always needed. Insidious. Lick it up smokinghot, thick sugary. Famished ghosts" (8.726-730). H e has been shocked to his core by this vision of murderously tearing and chewing men; the intensity of his perception, however, likely involves more than their appetitive, rude eating. Its paranoid quality implies an inner source too- an urgent wish to repudiate such savagery in himself. H e does not want it, and lest any of it could be his, triggered by a mute craving to adore juxtaposed with all those terrifying men, he experiences the aggression as wholly theirs. H e projects his anger, unconsciously fearing it and ridding himself of it by locating it in all those chewing others, who are not him. And reassured that much, he crosses over to Davy Byrne's "Moral pub" (8.732f.)moral because civilized, where the Burton was Darwininan: natural, raw, ferocious, frightening. Relieved to be there, he changes tack. Byrne respects boundaries: "He doesn't chat. Stands a drink now and then. . . . Cashed a cheque for me once." The place is pleasant. But from a nook Nosey Flynn greets him, and though they will talk pleasantly enough, Leopold begins to roil with anger: "Sardines on the shelves. Almost taste them by looking. Sandwich? Ham and his descendants musterred and bred there. Potted 130/Vicissitudes of

Anger

meats. What is home without Plumtree's potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad! Under the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree. Dignam's potted meat" (8.74~-745). He toys with a ditty about a cannibal chief who ate a missionary, then reverses direction-"Kosher. No meat and milk together. Hygiene that was what they call now. Yom Kippur fast spring cleaning of insiden-before turning to the sanguinities of war and peace: "Peace and war depend on some fellow's digestion. Religions. Christmas turkeys and geese. Slaughter of the innocents. Eat drink and be merry. Then casual wards full after. Heads bandaged." This carnage occurs to him associatively as he sorts his choices and orders a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy. Flynn annoys him by asking about Molly's singing. "Look at his mouth. Could whistle in his own ear," Bloom flares: "Flap ears to match. Music. Knows as much about it as my coachman." The cooler for thinking that, he speaks sketchily of the tour, reasoning, "Better tell him. Does no harm. Free ad." Flynn pesters on, "Who's getting it up?" and soon, "Isn't Blazes Boylan mixed up in it?" The question staggers him: "A warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on M r Bloom's heart. H e raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock. Two. Pub clock five minutes fast. Time going on. Hands moving. Two. Not yet" ( 8 . 7 5 ~ - 7 9 ~Again ). he projects: the clock is bilious, not he. It's his defense for extreme moments, for feelings he wants to disown-as with the furiously masticating men in the Burton or, earlier, M'Coy "pimping" for his singing wife. And it works. Recovering quickly, he releases anger as mockery behind a polite manner: -Yes, he said. He's the organiser in point of fact. No fear: no brains. Nosey Flynn snuffled and scratched. Flea having a good square meal.

-He had a good slice of luck, Jack Mooney was telling me, over that boxingmatch Myler Keogh won again that soldier in the Portobello barracks. By God, he had the little kipper down in the county Carlow he was telling me . . . Hope that dewdrop doesn't come down into his glass. No, snuffled it up (8.797-805; ellipses in original). Flynn babbles about Boylan's cunning, Davy Byrne joins the conversation, and Bloom, eating "with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese," reflects placidly: "Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there." His inner calm feels almost restored, until Flynn mentions the Gold Cup and Lenehan's pick and Bloom rages anew, continuing what has become by now a sustained if intermittent and unexpressed tantrum-his private fury aimed at Flynn that alludes to Molly and finally, hesitantly, reaches her: "Mr Bloom, champing, standing, looked upon his sight. Nosey numbskull. Will I tell him that horse Lenehan? H e knows already. Better let him forget. G o and lose more. Fool and his money. Dewdrop coming down again. Cold nose he'd have kissing a woman. Still they might like. Prickly beards they like. Dogs' cold noses. Old Mrs Riordan with the rumbling stomach's Skye terrier in the City Arms hotel. Molly fondling him in her lap. 0 , the big doggybowwowsywowsy! " (8 .843-849). H e ridicules Flynn's dewdrop, but women might like it. Maybe Molly would like to kiss Nosey Flynn! And, his sarcasm given that much internal room, he timidly tries out the possibility of going home: "Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I'm not thirsty. Bath of course does r32/ Vicissitudes ofAnger

that. Just a bite or two. Then about six o'clock I can. Six. Six. Time will be gone then. She" (8.850-853). That is his wish, harbored in a mode of doing and undoing. In "Lestrygonians," chapter 8, Leopold Bloom ventilates but does not fathom the anger that eats at him, because by unconscious and conscious means he diffuses it, distributes it on a continuum marked at one end by depression-which surfaces occasionally but which, usually repressed, energizes his inhibitions, defenses, and inactions-and at the other by discerned but disavowed, displaced, or otherwise controlled fury. In between there are many compromises. But his confrontation with the citizen thus clearly is exceptional-occurring exactly when he is being cuckolded, can defend not himself but the Jews, and can champion Christian love in the lists. After a trip to the loo, during which Flynn and Davy Byrne praise him guardedly ("He's not too bad, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling it up. He's been known to put his hand down too to help a fellow."), he leaves Byrne's, still registering anger. Ever curious, with the taste of lunch in his mouth, he watches a terrier choke up its cud and lap it up again. Still annoyed at Flynn, he finds himself humming: Ruminants. His second course. Their upper jaw they move. Wonder if Tom Rochford will do anything with that invention of his? Wasting time explaining it to Flynn's mouth. Lean people long mouths. Ought to be a hall or a place where inventors could go in and invent free. Course then you'd have all the cranks pestering. H e hummed, prolonging in solemn echo the closes of the bars: -Don Giovanni, a cenar teco M'invitasti (8.103~-1041). Vicissitudes ofAnger/r33

The words are the Commendatore's at the climax of Mozart's opera: "Don Giovanni, you have invited me to sup." The wicked seducer must repent or die in hellfire. Bloom's wish toward Boylan, muffled in music and soon in puzzlement, is murderous:

-A cenar teco. W h a t does that teco mean? Tonight perhaps. -Don Giovanni, thou bast me invited To come to supper tonight, The rum the rumdum. Doesn't go properly (8.1051-1056). It doesn't go. Yet round the tune and the murderous wish he clusters anticipations of observing digestion scientifically, collecting the money Hynes owes him, and securing Billy Prescott's ad. "Could buy one of those silk petticoats for Molly, colour of her new garters," he muses, but instantly responds with: "Today. Today. Not think." Having tried to recoup for a moment, he remembers; but whatever anger he may have approached toward Molly has dissipated. His thoughts wander to a tour he could organize for her and, via a book called Why I Left the Church $Rome, to: "They say they used to give pauper children soup to change to Protestants in the time of the potato blight. Society over the way papa went to for the conversion of poor jews. Same bait" (8.1071-1074). H e too, having eatenand ruminated- has recovered: "The rum the rumdum." Thereafter, the blind stripling gets his attention; and the irony is rich because Bloom doesn't see the range and the depth of his own anger or the lengths he goes to master it. Parting from the blind young man, he notes the judge who chastised the moneylender Reuben J. Dodd-another evil man, like Don Giovanni, punished, though given quite an ambiguous formulation by Bloom: "Now he's really what they call a dirty jew" (8.1159).

That repudiation has self-denigration in it. And exactly then he spots Boylan. Bloom's angers-aired and filtered, displaced and camouflaged, approached very closely yet constrainedmight not prove governable in that test: "Don Giovanni, a cenar teco." His ultimate defense is flight. What he experiences as momentary panic involves fear of his own rage. What scares him so about anger? Why, especially, will he not allow himself anger toward Molly? O f course he feels guilty for his sexual failure, but there is more. When next we have entry to his thoughts, he is.selecting a rental book for her at an openair cart in "Wandering Rocks," an hour before Blazes Boylan is due at 7 Eccles Street. That morning Molly dismissed Ruby, Pride of the Ring for having "nothing smutty in it" and asked for another by Paul de Kock. "Nice name he has," she added. Her instructions were quite clear, and her husband accommodates: Sweets of Sin. More in her line. Let us see. H e read where his finger opened, -AN the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliest ffillies. For him! For Raoul! Yes. This. Here. Try. -Her mouth glued on his in a luscious voluptuous kiss while his hands felt for the opulent curves inside her deshabille. Yes, Take this. The end. -You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eying her with a suspicious glare. The beautzful woman threw o f her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her yueenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. A n imperceptible smile played round her perfect lips as she turned t o him calmly. Vicissitudeso f A n g e r / r ~ ~

M r Bloom read again: The beautijiuf woman. . . . Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amply amid rumpled clothes: whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (for him! for Raouf!). Armpits' oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint!). Feel! Press! Chrished! Sulphur dung of lions! Young! Young! ( 1 0 . 6 0 6 4 2 ~ ) . In Molly's line, no doubt, yet surely in his: excitement envelops him. Opening to a presumably much-read passage, he merges with all three protagonists in his exuberance. Aroused and cowed, he cheers for them-husband, beautiful woman, and Raoul- as he feels showered with warmth and yielding in flesh. It is he who provides the smells and tactilities ("Melting breast ointments . . . Fishgluey slime"), he whose eyes roll upward in a swoon, and he who, "nostrils arched . . . for prey," is primordial to the pitch of violence and thrills to the "sulphur dung of lions." His odoriferous, bestial pleasures here, like his active partisanship for adultery, anticipate vivid scenes in Nighttown. As does his vehemence: "Feel! Press! Chrished!" That last compounds "cherished" and "crushed." Might it encompass "Christianed" too-another boundary flooded over and taboo breached, a hint of his own martyrdom and crucifixion? The exclamation that follows ("Young! Young!"), from a man given to nostalgia, whose daughter has her first beau, whose wife within an hour or two will take a lover, and whose thoughts this day are rife with mortality, loss, and sadness, suggests yearnings both insistent and incestuous, a wish, somehow, by regressing, to begin anew. This extraordinary moment of reader responsiveness calls us back to him as we first saw him: serving breakfast, ob136/ Vicissitudes ofAnger

serving, evading, glowing to the sting of disregard, oglingand not obstructing the affair he suspects Molly and Boylan will start. Sampling Sweets of Sin, he releases an unguarded report from the id uncovering a structured masochism that combines libidinous and perverse pleasures with ready identifications, passivity, and self-punishment. I t demonstrates his fixated sexuality, which allows secret masturbation to Gerty's provocativeness but not coitus with his wife-a fact that colors his love for Molly with confusion and shame and motivates his compensatory wish to serve her. In this psychic quagmire, another man's help seems needed to satisfy her sexually. The tugs of abiding depression and restraint, usually disguised and to a degree overridden by his perky, alert, and interested sensibility, contribute to Bloom's characterizing mix. They underlie his regressive fantasies and occasional sense of hopelessness as well as his urge to take things in-to observe, taste, smell, touch, visualize, and reflect. His worldliness, responsiveness, and introspection dialogue with his miserieswhich in turn derive, I've hypothesized, from the developmental burden of a fragile mother and an only child, who fears the damage he could do or has already done. In the Holles Street lying-in hospital, Bloom will remember Molly's anguish after their infant died (1~.263-276);and in her silent soliloquy, she will too: "That disheartened me altogether I suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another" (18.1447-1450). Molly's heartbreak would have fulfilled Leopold's most feared infantile temptations. Might it have triggered his subsequent marital inhibition, social reserve, withdrawal into himself, and increased sense of himself as a Jew? It no doubt would have contributed. And wouldn't Bloom's changed inner equilibrium be secured by a continuing unconscious anger at her that the baby son she bore them Vicissitudes of Anger/r37

died? H e (she, they) "could never like it again after Rudy." In a psychoanalysis I would entertain that reconstruction, hold it in abeyance, and wait for opportunities to test and explore it. If Bloom shifts toward more effective action during the course of the book, he continues recognizably in character. The change is subtle, uncertain. Bouncy, complicated, and conflicted, he helps Stephen and finds his wandering way home to Molly. Concurrently, the narrator transforms extravagantly, constituting a revolution in storytelling. Both processes are apparent immediately after the entr'acte, in "Sirens," chapter 11. When not patronized by fire-eaters like the citizen, Dublin's pubs offered dependable comforts to men at all troubled in mind or spirit. At 4:00 P.M., the appointed time for Boylan to arrive at 7 Eccles Street, Leopold avails himself of that solace. Set for the most part in the Ormond Hotel's dining room and bar, "Sirens" uses the musicality of English to evoke qualities of experience that delight, absorb, and generalizethat dissolve distinctiveness into the amiable satisfactions of chat, booze, flirtation, and song, of comfortable expressions of acceptable sentiments. The narrative-and thereby the music maker-stand out. His words virtuosic as notes, his prose playing melody and harmony, the narrator, though not a visible character, now calls the tune. Often in sound before sense in "Sirens" things connect and merge: city streets and the Ormond interior, its dining room and adjoining saloon, men in various locales, the barmaids with their admirers and each other ("bronze by gold," they seem never more than descriptive parts to their customers), a song from Flotow's light opera Martha and Bloom's letter to Martha Clifford. The narrator duets with his characters ("Soon I am old," Bloom thinks; "But when was young?" comes the re-

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ply). Sentimentality and sexual fantasy converge in lilting prose (bringing forth pipe and pouch "from the skirt of his coat," Simon Dedalus fills his pipe as Lydia Douce serves him a drink: "He fingered shreds of hair, her maidenhair, her mermaid's, into the bowl. Chips. Shreds. Musing. Mute" [11.217-22~]). Miss Douce delights when a man of the Lord Lieutenant's entourage strains to see her from the passing carriage. "He's killed looking back," she announces, "0wept! Aren't men frightful idiots?" (11.77-79). Lost in continuing sound, her triumph adumbrates the chapter's unsettling sobriety: that people die in spirit looking firmly backward, just as they do by merging into a crowd and disappearing. Bloom's memories pain him today, and he has his sets and rigidities; but the feckless Irishmen in the Ormond Hotel's pub -joking, drinking, and singing soulfully of lost loves and failed rebellions-are in effect dead to themselves and the country. For all their camaraderie and palaver, they muster no vitalizing experience. The barmaids Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy, caught in the doubled net of their vamping and male folly, have no future and at times appear aware of their plight and sad because of it. Yet the verbal music teases unstintingly. Not always transparently meaningful, but lyrical and charming, it revives the Sirens' song, the beauty of which lured sailors to their deaths. This prose articulates play, attractiveness, erotic fascination; it seduces. Leopold Bloom, about to be cuckolded (and this reader with him), responds to the allure. Having ,glimpsed Boylan for the third time, Bloom follows, entering the Ormond by the dining-room door to overhear Blazes and others in the bar without being seen by them. Simon Dedalus' brother-in-law, Richie Goulding, already seated, bids Bloom join him; and a pattern of intriguing alliances that throughout the chapter form, fuse, and dissipate flows on.

Vicissitudes ofAnger/139

Laughing, Misses Douce and Kennedy rise to crescendos of delight together, poking fun at men, and the narrator tosses Bloom into the mix as the kind of man they target, before: Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter. And then laughed more. Greasy I knows. Exhausted, breathless, their shaken heads they laid, braided and pinnacled by glossycombed, against the counterledge. All flushed (O!), panting, sweating (O!), all breathless. Married to Bloom, to greaseabloom. -0 saints above! miss Douce said, sighed above her jumping rose. I wished I hadn't laughed so much. I feel all wet. -0 miss Douce! miss Kennedy protested. You horrid thing! And flushed yet more (you horrid!), more goldenly (11.174-184). Their ecstatic fun has a sexual charge. It exhilarates them, and it mocks and excludes men. "Father" Cowley and Ben Dollard prevail upon Simon Dedalus to sing, and with his soft and lovely tenor, Simon wins everybody's attention-even the deaf waiter Pat's. H e sings Lionel's song from Martha, "When First I Saw That Form Endearing," which plaintively tells of the man's love at first sight, the woman leaving, and his plea that she return. Boylan, meanwhile, impatiently rides a hansom cab toward 7 Eccles Street, Miss Kennedy serves stout to two gentlemen, and in the adjoining room Bloom and Goulding, "married in silence" (an answering same-sex alliance to Douce and Kennedy), eat-

y o / Vicissitudes $Anger

the former liver and bacon with cider, the latter steak and kidney pie with whiskey. Bloom, though, begins internally to demarcate himself, reflecting that Goulding, like Dedalus, spends more on drink than he can afford. "Curious types" (11.622),he thinks, and as Simon's singing builds in force, continues: "Glorious tone he has still. Cork air softer also their brogue. Silly man! Could have made oceans of money. Singing wrong words. Wore out his wife: now sings" (11.695-697). Observing thus and judging, he establishes a distance briefly but soon gives over, welling with tenderness, throbbing with excitement -"a pulsing proud erect"-- desiring and joining: "The voice of Lionel returned, weaker but unwearied. It sang again to Richie Poldy Lydia Lidwell also sang to Pat open mouth ear waiting to wait. How first he saw that form endearing, how sorrow seemed to part, how look, form, word charmed him Gould Lidwell, won Pat Bloom's heart" (11.717720). All begin to merge in identical experience. Yet he remembers his first sight of Molly at Mat Dillon's home in Terenure, a game of musical chairs, turning her music when she sang, and wonders: "Why did she me? Fate." As Simon brings the song to a dramatic close-"in cry of passion dominant to love to return with deepening yet with rising chords of harmony. . . . Co-ome, thou lost one! . . . . Come . . . !"-Bloom, swept up again in shared feeling, again tries to separate ("don't spin it out too longH),only to surrender and fuse gloriously this time with Lionel, Simon, and the others: It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent,

Vicissitudes ofAnger/z4z

aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness . . . . . . - To me! Siopold! Consumed. Come. Well sung. All clapped. She ought to. Come. To me, to him, to her, you too, me, us (11.732-753; ellipses in original). In the bar all the men and women clap: "Bravo! Clapclap. Good man, Simon. Clappyclapclap. Encore! Clapclipclap clap. Sound as a bell. Bravo, Simon! Clapclopclap. Encore, enclap, said, cried, clapped all, Ben Dollard, Lydia Douce, George Lidwell, Pat, Mina Kennedy, two gentlemen with two tankards, Cowley, first gent with tank and bronze miss Douce and gold miss Mina" (11.756-760). Bloom, however, links only with men ("Siopold": Lionel, Si, and Leopold, those who feel pain, sorrow, and loss in love); and bonding with them seems to help, to affirm his manhood. As in the barmaids' ecstatic laughter, a partisanship of male, psychologically homosexual, support emerges in this playfully normative heterosexual scene. For Leopold, who turned internally to his long-dead father when little Rudy died, the moment provides support and comfort from the company of men as Molly deserts him. Grateful for the diversion, and for the moment possibly bolstered by it, he lingers a bit but then gathers his will to separate from the group's shared experience. Boylan left shortly after learning that the results of the Gold Cup were not in. His heading to the Ormond addled Leopold: "Be near. A t four. Has he forgotten? Perhaps a trick. Not come: whet appetite. I couldn't do" (11.392-393). Yet having tailed him there, he challenged 142 / Vicissitudes of Anger

no further. Instead, talking with Richie Goulding, plucking a rubber band and pondering the physics of song ("musemathematics"), finding refuge as part of the appreciative audience for Simon Dedalus' singing, and ostensibly penning a business letter but actually writing to Martha, he came to focus again: "Bore this. Bored Bloom tambourined gently with I am just reflecting fingers on the flat pad Pat brought" (11.863-864). H e directs himself: "Walk now. Enough. Barney Kiernan's I promised to meet them. Dislike that job. House of mourning. Walk" (11.909-911). Apprehensive, and therefore uncertain, he wishes they'd sing more: "Keep my mind off." Yet when the singing begins again and the call goes out for Dollard's rendition of "The Croppy Boy," he differentiates himself: "Low sank the music, air and words. Then hastened. The false priest rustling soldier from his cassock. A yeoman captain. They know it all by heart. The thrill they itch for. Yeoman cap" (11.10811083). Miss Douce offers yet another itch. Enamoured, listening to "The Croppy Boy," she fondles the beerpull. Bloom notices, and notices Lidwell notice Douce, and her notice Lidwell, herself, and possibly him: Ha. Lidwell. For him then not for. Infatuated. I like that? See her from here though. Popped corks, splashes of beerfroth stacks of empties. O n the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand, lightly, plumply, leave it to my hands. All lost in pity for croppy. Fro, to: to, fro: over the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and finger passed in pity: passed, reposed and gently touching, then slid so smoothly slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding through their sliding ring (11.1110-1117). Vicissitudes ofAnger/rq3

Whether as the musicality of chat, flirtation, love, or politics, generic fantasies are encouraged in the Ormond. Only they lead nowhere. They sell drinks and provide brief company, and Bloom obviously experiences their appeal. But now, with purpose, as Ben Dollard sings, Bloom asserts his will: I hold this house. Amen. He gnashed in fury. Traitors swing. T h e chords consented. Very sad thing. But had to be. Get out before the end. Thanks, that was heavenly. Where's my hat. Pass by her. Can leave that Freeman. Letter I have. Suppose she were the? No. Walk, walk, walk. Like Cashel Boylo Connoro Coylo Tisdall Maurice Tisndall Farrell. Waaaaaaalk (11.1120-1125). A celebration of Dollard's singing follows, the blind stripling taps back for the tuning fork he's forgotten, and Leopold Bloom departs-not angrily but with enough forcefulness to hold to his course. Evading the whore of the lane, he thinks: "Breathe a prayer, drop a tear. All the same he must have been a bit of a natural not to see it was a yeoman cap" (11.12481 2 ~ 9 ) He's . begun to feel gaseous and traces the source to the cider he drank just now or the burgundy at Byrne's. In the window of Lionel Marks's antiques store he studies a picture of Robert Emmet bearing the hero's famous words-a Jewish merchant making an Irish nationalist statement, set between Bloom's dismissal of croppy-boy sentimentality and the citizen's loud anti-Semitic parochialism forthcoming immediately in "Cyclops." Bloom's controlled anger and felt miseries have quieted, but now he has more call on his aggressiveness. Having sampled and indulged-as the reader has through the uniquely musical narrative-he passes judgment in sound on all that is r44/ Vicissitudes o f h g e r

seductive, sentimental, and unreal in the politics, love, play, and art of the pub: Seabloom, greaseabloom viewed last words. Softly. When my country takes herplace among. Prrprr. Must be the bur. Fff! 0 0 . Rrpr. Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She's passed. Then and not tillthen. Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I'm sure it's the burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Kraaaaa. Written. I have. Pprrpffrrppffff. Done (11.1284-1294). They get a Bronx cheer. The actual judgment may be less Bloom's than the artful narrator's. But the relief is Leopold's. And both he and the narrator have individuated. The Cyclopean escapade at Barney Kiernan's, which rouses Bloom to open confrontation and comical messianic splendor, follows; but within hours-at sunset on the strand-having joined Cunningham and Power to see Dignam's widow about the life insurance, he behaves shamefully with Gerty MacDowell, masturbating in secret to her self-display. As she limps away, the narrative returns to the initial style for the only time in the long post-entr'acte portion of the novel. "Nausicaa," affording the last proximate access to Bloom's stream of consciousness, augments what we know of him, revealing aspects of his feeling about women that hadn't been apparent, as well as more of his expectable fudging about anger. He takes an oddly avuncular libidinous interest in Gerty's limp: "A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them Vicissitudes ofAnger/14~

polite. . . . Hot little devil all the same. . . . Curiosity like a nun or a girl with glasses." Wondering whether she was menstrual, he connects women's "crazy longings" and monthly rhythms to the phases of the moon. Somewhat whimsical, cool, and abstract here, he may be covering unease at women's strangeness, which also draws him. He feels competitive: "Anyhow I got the best of that. Damned glad I didn't do it in the bath this morning over her silly I will punish you letter. Made up for that tramdriver this morning. That gouger M'Coy stopping me to say nothing" (13.77~-789). In retrospect, Gerty and he contested. He won, and his triumph balances the day's disappointments, because without Molly having even to enter his thoughts, Gerty assuaged his self-esteem. Continuing fascinated by the attraction women hold for him, he scrutinizes them as if anthropologically. "I'm all clean come and dirty me," he imagines them signaling one another: "And they like dressing one another for the sacrifice." They have a paradoxical appeal: "Say a woman loses a charm with every pin she takes out." This suspect disinterestedness leads back to Gerty ("She wasn't in a hurry either") before broadening again: "Always off to a fellow when they are. They never forget an appointment. . . . They believe in chance because like themselves . . . vindictive too for what they can't get. Barbed wire. . . . Picking holes in each other's appearance. You're looking splendid. Sister souls. Showing their teeth at one another. How many have you left?" (13.797-819). Women now seem alien and malignant. They cut men and one another. Molly's periods markedly affect her (now he remembers her), and he feels them too. "Wonder if it's bad to go with them then. . . . Turns milk, makes fiddlestrings snap. Something about withering plants I read" (13.825-827). Is menstrual blood demonic? Are women preternatural? Gerty was a "hot little devil." Molly must share that eeriness. Bloom rq6/ Vicissitudes ofAnger

puzzles over what Gerty saw in him, and his answer implies socially encoded self-hatred: "Didn't let her see me in profile. Still, you never know. Pretty girls and ugly men marrying" (1~.8~6-837). Speculating that Molly could be paid by Boylan, he remarks the pitifulness of prostitutes, and then the replaceability of lovers: Gerty "must have been thinking of someone else all the time. What harm?" (13.884-885). Querying whether she realized what he was doing, he answers: "Course. Like a cat sitting beyond a dog's jump." More follows about women's difference: "They understand birds, animals, babies. In their line. . . . Never see them sit on a bench marked Wet Paint. Eyes all over them. Look under the bed for what's not there. Longing to get the fright of their lives. Sharp as needles they are. . . . Handed down from father to, mother to daughter, I mean" (13.908-918). The slip is meaningful: these alien traits he attributes to women. They mirror cultural and male assumptions, but they are his. And surprisingly, when he reflects about the acumen, emotionality, and intuitiveness of women, he desires those qualities himself-or credit for them ("from father to . . . )" Drawn to women, quite aware that he is, yet wary of them, he observes and studies them, yearns for them, desires them, and gives them wide berth. His confluent feelings of respect, desire, and primitive dread accord with behaviors of his that we know: his voyeurism and reserve; his correspondence with Martha; his interplay with Gerty; his bringing Ruby, Pride ofthe Ring and Sweets o f s i n to Molly rather than himself; his sexual inhibition with her and collusion this day in her adultery. This ambivalence contributes as well to his consciously absent but unconsciously diverted anger at her. Late on June 16, 1904, Leopold Bloom, already cuckolded, masturbates. A surreptitious victor over Gerty but afterward dispirited, he reflects on women's witchery: "Funny my watch stopped at half past four. . . . Was that just when he, she?" Vicissitudes o f A n g e r / q

Their intrigue for him, however, their uncanny hold on him, in combination with his skittishness about them, enable him finally to admit to himself a reality that pains him. For only now does he recognize that Molly in fact has committed adultery: " 0 , he did. Into her. She did. Done" (13.847-849). Full of caution, fear, curiosity, and denial, he accepts that truth. His ego defenses protect him, but eventually they help him to acknowledge what he has wanted to evade. However demonizing he is, he feels grateful to Gerty: "Did me good all the same. Off colour after Kiernan's. Dignam's. For this relief much thanks" (13.939-940) Near the end of the chapter he does again: "We'll never meet again. But it was lovely. Goodbye, dear. Thanks. Made me feel so young" (13.1272-1273). AS his thoughts move on to Milly, he becomes admiring: "Neat way she carries parcels too. Attract men, small things like that. Holding up her hand, shaking it, to let the blood flow back when it was red. W h o did you learn that from? Nobody" (13.922-925). Proud of Molly too when comparing her to other men's wives, he reflects on married couples, amused by the pairings. He thinks sympathetically about the lot of Irish women: "Sad however because it lasts only a few years till they settle down to potwalloping and papa's pants will soon fit Willy and fuller's earth for the baby when they hold him out to do ah ah. No soft job" (13.952-955). Before long, he adds, the husbands start coming home drunk. His yearning for women and his randy, fear-ridden fantasizing about them coexist with a sensible, pleasant, and compassionate assessment of them. Doubtless his sympathy involves much compromise formation. H e notes what he takes to be Gerty's perfume wafting tardily in the air, and his scientism clicks in: "It's like a fine fine veil or web they have all over the skin, fine like what do you call it gossamer, and they're always spinning it out of them as fine as

I&/

Vicissitudes oflnget

anything." Molly exudes a natural perfume: "Clings to everything she takes off. Vamp of her stoclungs. . . . Also the cat likes to sniff in her shift on the bed. Know her smell in a thousand. Bathwater too." Dogs socialize by smelling "at each other behind. Good evening. Evening. How do you sniff?" (13.10191029). Turning to menstrual smells, he wonders what men smell like to women. What about priests? Tellingly, after remembering that the newsboys mimicked his walk ("See ourselves as others see us"), he reflects: "So long as women don't mock what matter?" (13.1058-1059) In big and little, women loom powerfully to him. They captivate his imagination and color his self-esteem. Molly does so daily, Gerty today does briefly, and Bella Cohen graphically will in Nighttown. About Molly he laments: "I am a fool perhaps. H e [Boylan] gets the plums, and I the plumbstones" ( I ~ . I O ~ ~ - I O ~ ~ ) . Typically, though, his consciousness moves toward acceptance rather than either anger or sorrow. Alone on the strand, he reviews his day: "Long day I've had. Martha, the bath, funeral, house of Keyes, museum with those goddesses, Dedalus' song. Then that bawler in Barney Kiernan's. Got my own back there. Drunken ranters what I said about his God made him wince. Mistake to hit back. Or? No. Ought to go home and laugh at themselves. Always want to be swilling in company. Afraid to be alone like a child of two. Suppose he hit me. Look at it other way round. Not so bad then. Perhaps not to hurt he meant" (13.1214-1220). Even the citizen gets understanding and forgiveness: just another child on the loose. Besides, "perhaps not to hurt he meant." Sooner or later, Leopold's idiomatic buoyancy takes over, constraining both depression and anger. It overcomes here what he judges to be his worst experience of the day: "Dignam's put the boots on it. Houses of mourning so depressing because

Vicissitudes ofAnger/zqp

you never know. Anyhow she wants the money" (13.1225-1227). That too did some good after all. Nonetheless, Bloom's brooding about demons, whores, menses, smells, and animals suggests condescension and animus, which qualify (and by reaction-formation, ironically, may enhance) his awed respect. The depressive link to women who betray, moreover, is worth flagging. The magical quality of his thoughts on the strand will connect to his fantastic confrontation with Bellat Bello in Nighttown and to the image of his mother there that instantly gets superseded by Molly. Leopold's frantic internalized mother has almost no representability in his thoughts. Molly, a sexual, appealing, and vital young woman as he remembers their early days together, apparently has served to screen her. Molly's mirroring strength for him reassured his masculinity or compensated for any felt lack of it. Rudy's death then tilted the balance between them, and Bloom turned internally toward his father for more support. Molly continued to buffer him but less sufficiently than before-somewhat the way the symbolic potato does (mamma's "panacea"), until, in Nighttown, he gives it away to Zoe (the prostitute with his mother's maiden name) and unleashes a panoply of guiltridden polymorphously perverse fantasies. Today Molly's affair with Boylan put even the later, more precarious balance at risk. Overt anger at her, or his mother, or women in general, however, seems beyond his ken. So in "Circe," having recovered his potato and begun to take responsibility for Stephen, he will still peer through a keyhole at her adultery and cheer. Toward men his anger is less constrained. M'Coy, Boylan, the avid diners in the Burton, Nosey Flynn, and the citizen engender it or feelings easily traceable to it. His ego proves adaptable but little inclined to direct opposition. H e contains, muffles, compromises, takes in, and holds steady; and though depression and anger surface- and a moment of panic- they quickly close

over. When Bloom goes under, he bobs up again. His conflicts over aggression, perhaps slightly altered, continue. In contrast, Stephen Dedalus sinks deeper into crisis as the day goes on, seeking relief from his tortured consciousness and oblivion in drink. In fact, Stephen disappears from the story for a stretch of six hours and returns to it drunk. When last seen in the entr'acte, he too was browsing at a book stand. Perusing a book of love charms when Dilly startled him, he'd been pondering old Russell in the lapidary shop and then, briefly, cosmic beginnings, before imagining a bellydancer being ogled by a sailor-when his intrigued dismay with sexuality glimmered: "She dances in a foul gloom where gum burns with garlic. A sailorman, rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes her. A long and seafed silent rut. She dances, capers, wagging her sowish haunches and her hips, on her gross belly flapping a ruby egg" (10.808-811). Again contemplating old Russell polishing a gem, "Grandfather ape gloating on a stolen hoard," he next turned on himself: "And you who wrest old images from the burial earth? The brainsick words of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat standing from everlasting to everlasting." T h e narrator's sudden leap to two old women with a midwife's bag seemed then to underscore Stephen's preoccupations. Death and art, life and immortality obsess him in his relentless inner argument with God, biological generation, and adumbrations of offending parents in the primal scene: "The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the powerhouse urged Stephen to be on. Beingless beings. Stop! Throb always without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I. Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me you who can. Bawd and Vicissitudes ofAnger/rj~

butcher were the words. I say! Not yet awhile. A look around" (10.81~-827). Stephen then tarried over a print of a prize fight and soon over Abbot Peter Salanka's charms and invocations to win a woman's love, divided emblematically between war and love. In between he wondered about his school prizes, which he might find had been pawned-mementos of his early ways of getting praise. Dilly broke in on his awareness, and they talked of the French primer she'd bought, an act that implied her admiration for him. Stephen struggled not to yearn for closeness with her, not to transfer his abiding unconscious claim on his mother to the companionable sister who made him cocoa (16.168-178), fed the fire to warm him, and listened to his adventures: "I told her of Paris. . . . My eyes they say she has. . . . She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death. We. Agenbite" (10.865879). A t the tower that morning Mulligan had exclaimed of the sea: "Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother" (1.80). Remarking the sea's green mass with nearsighted eyes, Stephen recalled his dying mother's "green sluggish" (1.109) vomit. H e forgets a brother as easily as an umbrella, all his other siblings too, but not Dilly, who cares about him, though she could drown him. She is as close as he can get to his mother-who haunts him, whom he aches to let go of but will not. Artistic creation, loneliness, fury at God, fear, guilt, distress with sexuality, longing for his dead mother, and cold buried rage that she did not-and now cannot-recognize the uniqueness of his claim to her recur insistently when Stephen returns to the story. These themes surface in "Oxen of the Sun," chapter 14, set in the Holles Street maternity hospital, and press urgently in "Circe," chapter IS, until he gets himself knocked out by a British soldier, still mumbling bits of the Yeats song he'd sung to his mother on her deathbed. As leader of revels in 152 / Vicissitudes oflnger

the doctors' lounge of the hospital, Stephen contributes theology and caustic wit to the group's raillery about women, sex, childbirth, and Catholic belief. Yet he so cowers at the thunderclap, though bumptiously dismissing "old Nobodaddy . . . in his cups" (14.419), that Leopold Bloom perceptively tries to comfort him. Bloom discerns bitterness in the young man's soul: "The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an unhealthiness, aflair, for the cruder things of life" (14.1356-1359). The impressionist style conjures up a garden party years before, at which Leopold observed little Stephen perched high on a stone urn, seeking approval in his mother's gaze but not, apparently, finding it: "A lad of four or five in linsey-woolsey (blossomtime but there will be cheer in the kindly hearth when ere long the bowls are gathered and hutched) is standing on the urn secured by that circle of girlish fond hands. H e frowns a little just as this young man does now with a perhaps too conscious enjoyment of the danger but must needs glance at whiles towards where his mother watches from thepiazzetta given upon the flowerclose with a faint shadow of remoteness or of reproach (alles Vergangliche) in her glad look" ( I ~ . I ~ ~ I - 1 3 7Stephen's 8). frown spurs a memory that bears suggestively on that little boy's current state. Thus, in retrospect, Stephen's layered psyche reemerges to view. H e has not recovered from his mother's death of a year ago, which, after all those encroaching brothers and sisters and her disapproval of him during his university days, made her unreachableness final. From early on, words offered him haven: they fascinated and unlocked the world, also protected and isolated him, and, like his later absorption of authoritative writers and theologians -all male -could cushion him from the pain of his protracted loss of his mother. As presented in Portrait Vicissitudes ofAnger/rg

of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen's adolescent whoring, God-terrified guilt, and answering piety and asceticism fit that pattern, as did his voracious reading. So did his exalted flight of thought and feeling away from the wading girl who met his gaze, his Aristotelian aesthetic that emphasized the static effect of art ("The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing," 1916, p. 205), his suspicion of E-C- with the priest, his "Villanelle of the Temptress" ("Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze / A n d you have had your will of him. /Are you not weary of ardent ways?" 1916, p. 223), and his disappointing his mother to invoke the preferred forebear Daedalus and fly the nets of home to his creative quest. In Ulysses, the Shakespeare theory, featuring Ann Hathaway as sexual villainess and Stephen's own anti-sexual consubstantial wishfulness, as well as his "Parable of the Plums," about two aged virgins, representative of sterile Ireland and his own self-censure, continue the pertinacious theme. H e will not let his mother go. But his unconscious fantasy of having God's power has not worked; he has no use for friends or peers; he has neither hope nor, as of today, a place to live. H e intends to quit his job, and he does not write. Stephen has stalled-and aims, apparently, to obliterate his tortured self in drink. It hardly surprises, then, that he leads the group from the maternity hospital to a pub for more drinking and, with Lynch, winds his way to the red-light district, where, peloothered, he spouts phrases from Latin masses, expounds on gesture rather than language rendering visible "the first entelechy, the structural rhythm" (15.105-IO~),talks of "shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates" (15.111-IIZ), looks for his chosen whore Georgina Johnson, or wields his ashplant to shatter light over the world. However surreal or nightmarish his adventures in Nighttown, his characterizing obsessions vivify. Describing Georgina Johnson as "la belle dame sans merci" and, mocking

God and church, '%am qui IaetZficat inventutern meam" (the goddess who has gladdened the days of my youth, 1j.122-123), he learns that she has married a Mr. Lambe and moved to London. "Dead and married," he quips, to "Lamb of London, who takest away the sins of our world" (15.3620; 3638). Fixated on his "dead and married" mother, held and repelled unconsciously by her fecundity and her desertion of him, he hates God, who kdled her and whom he also fears-the stand-in for his vibrant but crushingly fertile father of childhood. He designates his frenzied solo dance in Nighttown a "dance of death"; and as if called up by it, his mother appears to him (15.4139-~z~j). To him alone she comes from the grave, visible to no others. She is emaciated, rotted, attended by a choir of virgins and angels singing 'Ziliatata rutilantium te confessorum" and to his dismay more allied to God than ever: STEPHEN

(choking withfiight, remorse and horror) They say I killed you, mother. He [Mulligan] offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny. T H E MOTHER

( a green rill of bile tricklingfiom a side of her mouth) You sang that song to me. Love? bitter mystery. STEPHEN

(eagerly) Tell me the word mother, if you know now. The word known to all men. T H E MOTHER

W h o saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee? W h o had pity for you when you were sad among the strangers? Prayer is allpowerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the Ursuline manual and forty days' indulgence. Repent, Stephen. Vicissitudes o f A n g e r / q ~

Longing for a sign of love across the mortal gulf, he gets only unimaginative piety. "The ghoul!" he rages, "Hyena!" while Florry sees his pallor and Bloom suspects that he's giddy. But as his mother's words grow puzzling, Stephen understands all too clearly: T H E MOTHER

I pray for you in my other world. Get Dilly to make you that boiled rice every night after your brainwork. Years and years I loved you, 0 , my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb. . . . (with smouldering eyes) Repent! 0 , the fires of hell! STEPHEN

(panting) His noncorrosive sublimate! The corpsechewer! Raw head and bloody bones. T H E MOTHER

(her face drawing near and nearer, sending out an ashen breath) Beware! (she raises her blackened withered right arm slowly towards Stephen's breast and with outstretched$nger) Beware God's Hand! (A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart.) STEPHEN

(strangled with rage, hisfeatures drawn grey and old) Shite!

"Shite!"-authentic Simon-marks a chip off the old block. But Stephen shouts a more drastic opposition: "Ah non, par exemple! The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. Non serviam!"-choosing Satan and himself of old in the circumstances. I t is wildly hallucinatory: Bloom wondering, Florry counseling cold water, Stephen invoking his Shakespeare theory ("The intellectual imagination. With me all or not at all. . . . Break my spirit, all of you, if you can! I'll bring you all

to heel!"), his mother sliding from devotion to God and exhortation of her imperiled son to mad confusion of herself with Jesus-all climaxed by Stephen imposing the Apocalypse with Wotan's sword Nothung: T H E MOTHER

(wrings her hands slowly, moaning desperately) 0 Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, 0Divine Sacred Heart! STEPHEN

No! No! No! Break my spirit all of you, if you can! I'll bring you all to heel! T H E MOTHER

(in the agony of her deathrattle) Have mercy on Stephen, Lord, for my sake! Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary. STEPHEN

Nothung! (He lijh his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. TimeiJinaljame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all pace, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)

It is the end of the God-created world that humans live in, Stephen's ultimate moment of defiance, his escape from mortal time-and the wishful stuff of dreams. For the most part quietly, Bloom sails on. Stephen wants to obliterate himself and everything else. And from the entr'acte on (though with strong hints as early as the newspaper chapter), the narrator displays astonishing formal inventiveness and verbal prowess; he entertains, commands attention, and changes the narrative's emphasis to its modes of telling. What sufficed Vicissitudes o f A n g e r / r g

as unannounced leaps of locale and minor quirks in "Wandering Rocks" transforms to extravagantly musical prose in "Sirens," sequential and contrasting single-minded exaggerations in "Cyclops," pastiche and parody of the history of English prose in "Oxen of the Sun," dramatic dreamscape in "Circe," comical orotundity in "Eumaeus," and pedantry in "Ithaca." I n the latter half of Ulysses each chapter promises strange new abundance and asks readers to learn to read it. The words perform and frustrate, celebrate excess, demand work and ready play; and a magical storyteller presides. His verbal dexterity amazes. H e can be irritating, even burdensome. Yet he is a rereader's joy, because time and again, with delight, surprise, and laughter, he engages one's mind, stretches it beyond its usual reach. Never other than a storytelling presence, never distinguishable as a character, he seems nonetheless to preen himself on his virtuosity, amplifying to an extreme a mood or attitude of one or more of the characters, juxtaposing his own prodigious prose with them, and reflexively scrutinizing both narrative and language. Telling the story, he competes with his characters while eccentrically identifying with them, all the while testing the limits of his medium and the adequacy of his readers. Perhaps all creativity enacts some degree of aggression, for it testifies to dissatisfaction with a status quo and desires to refashion it. And Modernism in the arts valorized difficulty and experiment. But the surge of radical narratives in Ulysses implies its narrator's disaffection with his own initial style. Reading the later chapters involves us in a psychology of restiveness, however playful the manner may be. Protean from chapter to chapter, the Ulysses narrator joins restiveness to verbal celebration and a love of mimicry to flamboyance, pride, self-consciousness, sociability, ambivalence about communicating at all, conflicted empathy for his characters, and challenges to his readers. Such perceptibly human-and in him related158/ Vicissitudes ofAnget

qualities shape the storytelling and the story told. However unpredictable, knowledgeable, attractive, elusive-to say nothing of inconsiderate-he may be, he counts in performance as one of us. He is also a "he" because (on the evidence of chapter I ~ ) gender drives his creativity. All readers of "Oxen of the Sun" recognize a tour de force, told by way of a historical sequence of rapidly changing prose styles, from Old and Middle English through the cadences of the nineteenth century to a farrago of street jargons. Literary lights from Malory to Cardinal Newman and beyond are identifiable, and their signature styles and values often prove functional, illuminating aspects of the current state of the protagonists. It is a triumph of technique and cleverness. Anthony Burgess praised it as "an author's chapter," the one "of all the chapters of Ulysses I should most like to have written" (1965, p. 156). Karen Lawrence explored it splendidly as "a pastiche of words and rhythms already written by someone else" that demonstrates the relativity of styles-the provisional nature of any one style, any one truth. (1981, pp. 124-145 See also French, 1976, p. 171; Maddox, 1978, pp. 172, 184; Kenner, 1978, pp. 48-49; Sherry, 1994, pp. 90-91). But there is something off-balance and inhospitable about "Oxen." Edmund Wilson thought it "too synthetic, too systematic" (1931, p. 2 1 ~ )S. . L. Goldberg judged it "an interesting failure," explaining that "the connections between the represented and formal values can only be described as cerebral" (1961, p. 285). Marilyn French called it "the most censured chapter in Ulysses" (p. 168) and Karen Lawrence "a most exasperating chapter" (p. 125). James Maddox, Jr., noted that it antagonizes readers. M y students, I find, address it grudginglyunusually among the daunting chapters of Ulysses. Perhaps it is too timebound, too limited by turn-of-the-century taste and expectable literary knowledge to offer enough immediacy; but

they seem consistently to feel more shut out than intrigued by its parade of styles. I think the problem is not only temporal and cultural-or in this instance, my own uninspired teaching-but the chapter itself, zestful yet forbidding, obfuscating without engaging, caught in a malaise of its own. Through a dense and ever-changing screen of language, the story continues. Bloom calls at the lying-in hospital to ask about Mrs. Purefoy; he and Stephen are in sustained contact for the first time all day; the Purefoy baby is born; and Stephen leads the carousing group in the doctors' lounge off for more drinking, followed by a now-concerned Leopold Bloom. The clustering effect of the imitations, however, holds the characters and the situation awkwardly at bay (Burgess remarked that Stephen and Bloom "get lost in the process of glorifying an art that is supposed to be their servant," 1965, p. 156); it slights them, as if to insist on the performance itself rather than enlarge the scope of narrative to have room for all. Not that there aren't fine moments: Stephen's drunken theologizing in the mode of Renaissance divines, his Bunyanesque self-indictment for whoring, Bloom's reflections on youth and attempt to calm his anger in the manner of Burke, his rueful "There is none now to be for Leopold, what Leopold was for Rudolph" (14.10761077) in the voice of Lamb, or his Hwdeyan ruminations on evolutionary purpose in Rudy's death. And not that characterization or the unfolding story need have precedence. But there is a choked, clotted feeling pervading the chapter, a resistance or unease discernible in the behavior of just about all the men and encompassed in the narrator's exuberant inclusiveness of, dependence on, and competitiveness with the great prose writers in English. I t emerges in the ribaldry and heavy drinking of the mostly young men assembled in the doctors' lounge-of a maternity hospital, after all-being noisy and loutish, telling dirty jokes,

egging each other on to yet more hilarity about intercourse and pregnancy, births and misbirths. It shows in Stephen's dour contributions to the discussion of the church doctrine that the infant's life takes precedence over the mother's, in his resolution "With will will we withstand, withsay" ( I ~ . ~ I I -and ~I~) his drunken leadership; in Bloom's savage attack on himself (or the narrator's turning on him) in the calumniating tone of Junius; in the Swiftian riff on the bull of Ireland; and in Mulligan's brainstroke of a fertilizing farm run by himself. Anxiety, distress, and frenzy register; and grown men-Bloom and Dr. Dixon excepted-act like boys before the pain and awe of childbirth. When Dixon announces the baby's birth, there "broke out at once a strife of tongues" among the young medic a l ~and their friends: Every phase of the situation was successively eviscerated: the prenatal repugnance of uterine brothers, the Caesarean section, posthumity with respect to the father and, that rarer form, with respect to the mother, the fratricidal case known as the Childs Murder, . . . the rights of primogeniture and the king's bounty touching twins and triplets, miscarriages and infanticides, simulated or dissimulated, the acardiac foetus in foetu and aprosopia due to a congestion, the agnathia of certain chinless Chinamen, . . . the benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep, the ~rolongationof labour pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of pressure on the vein, the premature relentment of the amniotic fluid (as exemplified in the actual case) with consequent peril of sepsis to the matrix, artificial insemination by means of syringes, involution of the womb consequent upon the menopause, the probVicissitudes ofAnger/161

lem of the perpetration of the species in the case of females impregnated by delinquent rape, that distressing manner of delivery called by the Brandenburghers Sturzgeburt, the recorded instances of multiseminal, twilundled and monstrous births conceived during the catamenic period or of consanguineous parents. . . . The abnormalities of harelip, breastmole, supernumerary digits, negro's inkle, strawberry mark and portwine stain were alleged by one as aprima facie and natural hypothetical explanation of those swineheaded (the case of Madame Grissel Steevens was not forgotten) or doghaired infants occasionally born . . . (14.942-1009). Male anxiety romps in the huddle. But though it is general and has special point for Stephen and Bloom, the narrator's efforts circuitously display its urgent focus in him. Invoking English prose stylists and matching them- his elaborately cultured version of the boastful "I can beat any man in the house" -he buoys himself up as best he can because, amazing as his creation in words is or will be, it does not equal the birth of a living child from a mortal woman. The narrator doesn't want to know that, I think, and doesn't want his readers to know it either. His strenuous cooptation of previous prose masters epitomizes his struggle to control the situation. "Oxen," after a brief primitive chant, opens in a garbled prose that suggests the Latinate origin of what became English. Circumambiently, the section praises the Irish for establishing maternity hospitals: Other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicir62/ Vicissitudes of Anger

tude for that proliferant continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction. . . . . . . whereby maternity was so far from all accident possibility removed that whatever care the patient in that allhardest of woman hour chiefly required and not solely for the copiously opulent but also for her who not being sufficiently moneyed scarcely and often not even scarcely could subsist valiantly and for an inconsiderable emolument was provided (14.12-17;

45-49).

So before Bloom enters, to Old English cadences, the narrator has assumed authorial agency and allied himself with devotion to mothers and neonates. H e emerges again as the moral authority near the end, no longer even distantly associated with Bloom's, Stephen's, or other characters' consciousnesses. The tones now are Dickens' and Carlyle's, but the vigorous approval of Purefoy is his: And Doady, knock the ashes from your pipe, the seasoned briar you still fancy when the curfew rings for you (may it be the distant day!) and dout the light whereby you read in the Sacred Book for the oil too has run low, and so with a tranquil heart to bed, to rest. H e knows and will call in His own good time. You too have fought the good fight and played loyally your man's part. Sir, to you my hand. Well done, thou good and faithful servant! . . . By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chafferin allincluding most farraginous chronicle. AsVicissitudes ofAnger/163

tounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou has fructified with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore. . . . Copulation without population! No, say I! Herod's slaughter of the innocents were the truer name (14.1337-1343; 1407-1423). This praise has its oddity, because throughout Ulysses the narrator has been intrigued not by moral exemplars but by complex and interesting persons. W h y the sudden zeal? Stanley Sultan stresses the chapter's censure of wild youth for showing no interest in marriage and families and for talk and behavior that slaughter the cattle of the sun (1964, pp. 277-301) H e takes the Carlyle passage to be Joyce's view. Karen Lawrence counters that Carlylean certainty, however appropriate in context, represents only one moment among many, that no style or its attendant values can claim definitiveness (1981, pp. 136-137). Since I agree with both-though I prefer to leave Joyce out of it and respond to the psychology of the narrator-I would add the significance of timing. Immediately after lauding Purefay's "doughty deed," as Stephen leads the group to Burke's for more drinks, the narrator's own strife of tongues erupts in the rush of incomprehensible street jargon that ends the chapter. The child's birth unhinged first the young men in the doctor's lounge and now, though he makes a last-ditch effort through moral stridency, the storyteller. Birthing defeats him. He cannot match it, not with the best male help in the world. Like Bloom spotting Boylan, he is routed-though again like Bloom, not for long. Whatever competitive anxiety of influence about precursor 164/ Vicissitudes of Anger

writers he may feel (Bloom, 1973), he faces down in successive feats of echoing. T h e deeper stress has to do not with previous authors but with the limits of his and their creativity. Although here he, in a sense, like Stephen consolidates around male authors, he does not share Stephen's wish to transcend mortal life for a verbal world without end. Ulysses throughout stresses the physicality of life and death-as it does again in the praise of Purefoy as a father and husband: Dost envy Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A canting jay and a rheumeyed curdog is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee! He is a mule, a dead gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked kreutzer. Copulation without poulation! No, say I! Herod's slaughter of the innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile cohabitation! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever, bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and trentals and jeremies and all such cogenital defunctive music! Twenty years of it, regret them not. W i t h thee it was not as with many that will and would and wait and never-do. Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison ( I ~ . I ~ I ~ - I ~ ~ I ) . Mina Purefoy's array of symptoms might indicate that Theodore has been bison indeed to his wife. One might wonder about the cheerleader also; but the human body and all its functions are inextricably part of this storyteller's purview. H e accepts creatural life, as Stephen does not.

Presenting the Purefoy baby's birth rattles him, however, and the next chapter plunges into dream logic, expressionist drama, and the night, a world of primary process, where day residues displace freely. Readers note a surge of quotations from earlier chapters and considerable seepage between the charactersBloom, for example, thinking words of Stephen's or the narrator's that he could not have heard. Hugh Kenner (1980, p. 112) and William Chace (1991, p. 894) describe "the mind of the book" dreaming and thus repeating with a difference. Karen Lawrence writes of "the dream of the text" (1981, pp. 151-152). M y own sense is that the performative narrator, shaken badly in "Oxen," recovers in "Circe" by way of the protective manner of dreams-the guardians of sleep, in Freud's formulation ( 1 ~ 0 0p. , 233). Proceeding with the story, tuned-in anew to his characters, and resuming in expressionist drama his narrative experimentation, he gets back to descriptively precise and vivid articulation and distributes earlier lines and phrases from the book as he likes. They are his, after all. Reclaiming his handiwork, he reminds himself and and his readers of all his art has done and can do. That will suffice.

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Strangely enough, neither Bloom nor Stephen appears to remember the dramatic interiorities he experienced in Nighttown. No enraging memory of his mother's talons trouble Stephen in the cabman's shelter or at 7 Eccles Street, no thoughts of Georgina Johnson dead and married or recognition that he'd been punched by a British sailor. Nor does Bloom recall Bella, who became Bello; being tried, convicted, and burned to cinders; giving birth to eight yellow male children; or happening upon his disapproving father and frantic mother. Those striking phenomena have been repressed. The two men do behave differently, however. Bloom acts effectively: he gets Stephen upright, feeds him, and offers a bed for the nightlooks after the young man, whatever he may fantasize about him. Stephen is quieter. Following Bloom's lead and lingering with him, he shows ease and patience, appreciation, even a reciprocity unlike anything we've seen from him, in addition to the prickliness we might expect. They make an odd couple, having little to talk about in any depth, no skills in common, and incommensurate assumptions for comprehending each other. Yet for nearly two hours they are companionable. Neither has had a companion all day, and Bloom, we learn, has not talked with anyone this way for over a decade. We observe them in "Eumaeus" and "Ithaca," chapters 16 and 17, filtered and at a distance, because, as is usual after the entr'acte, the storyteller's audacious moves obscure as well as convey the story. The initial style brought us often into the illusion of Stephen's and Bloom's psychic realities, their un-

guarded processes of thought. Contrastingly, these final chapters in which they appear emphasize artifice: narrative interpositions, extravagances of form and style, self-consciousness, and reflexivity. A t last they have met-and the spotlight trains on the manner of telling. In the latter half of Ulysses, the storyteller puzzles, engages, frustrates, entertains, and fascinates anew with each transformation. In his changeable, consistently impressive presence, we follow the saga of Stephen and Leopold-we readers who by the final chapters hold their accrued memory in trust, retaining what they and he, in his different guises, can and do forget. One function of the convoluted syntax and seemingly inept diction of "Eumaeus" is to suggest how uncertain the connection is between Bloom and Stephen. Many readers have thought that the chapter's sprawling prose reflects Leopold's exhaustion after his long day and the Nighttown experiences just past. Brook Thomas (1982, pp. 133-137), Stanley Sultan (1987, pp. 278-z~I),and others have argued cogently that Bloom's alertness beyond tiredness governs the chapter, an alacrity and formality energized by his powerful wish to impress, please, help, and influence Stephen, who, linked memorably to Rudy in Nighttown, is university educated, erudite, brilliant, and in trouble. Bloom's straining has comic pathos, his pretense to eloquence betrayed by linguistic na'ivete and cliche, while the mutual recognition of Homeric father and son in the swineherd Eumaeus' hut echoes lightly but poignantly. Karen Lawrence, who believes the chapter is a "travesty of the initial style" because of the discrepancy it reveals between language and the reality it seeks to describe, illuminates a contaminated medium: degraded, habitual, and inescapable (1981, pp. 165-179). I think that a strong ironic wish of the narrator is apparent toothrough a virtuosic, entertaining display of flabby language and 168/The Odd Couple

sinewless sentences to mimic Bloom's too-eager formality with Stephen and ally parodically with the reader, if necessary at the characters' expense. T h e splendidly off-kilter words evoke Bloom's periphrastic talk and thought while enacting by exaggeration a differentiation from him. The strategy extends a pattern of narration used for Gerty MacDowell in "Nausicaa," and the skeptical appraisal of style and truth it enables extends that of "Cyclops," "Oxen of the Sun," and "Circe." Far more is at stake in "Eumaeus" than plot and character, although both maintain our interest. Language itself comes under scrutiny in the camouflage of folly and with all inadequacies, repetitivenesses, and sterilities on show. It lends itself to evasion: "So as neither of them were particularly pressed for time, as it happened, and the temperature refreshing since it cleared up after the recent visitation of Jupiter Pluvius, they dandered along past by where the empty vehicle was waiting without a fare or a jarvey" (16.39-42). Deep in crisis, Stephen has little confidence or trust to call on, no place to stay, and soon, in all probability, no job; for several hours he has tried to anesthetize himself in his father's way and moments earlier managed to get himself slugged. Bloom, cuckolded, delays returning home. Soon he'll allow himself to hope to bring Stephen with him. But neither, we are told blandly, was "particularly pressed for time, as it happened." Language fudges human depths, contradictorinesses, nuances, and surfaces, ingeniously and endlessly. It also misleads, as when the duo overhear Italian spoken animatedly near an ice-cream car when they enter the cabman's shelter. "A beautiful language," Bloom offers, "I mean for singing purposes": W h y do you not write your poetry in that language? Bella Poetria! It is so melodious and full. Belladonna. Voglio. The Odd Couple/169

Stephen, who was trying his dead best to yawn if he could, suffering from lassitude generally, replied: -To fill the ear of a cow elephant. They were haggling over money. -Is that so? M r Bloom asked. Of course, he subjoined pensively, at the inward reflection of there being more languages to start with than were absolutely necessary, it may be only the southern glamour that surrounds it (16.345-353). H e doesn't hear the link of a beautiful woman and poison in "belladonna," as he might have, and enjoyed, were he not trying so hard to impress Stephen. Feelings scramble comprehension, as do unwariness or ignorance. Language misleads inevitably, however, by applying words to things and names to people: The keeper of the shelter in the middle of this tite-a-tite put a boiling swimming cup of a choice concoction labelled coffee on the table and a rather antediluvian specimen of a bun, or so it seemed. After which he beat a retreat to his counter, M r Bloom determining to have a good square look at him later on so as not to appear to. For which reason he encouraged Stephen to proceed with his eyes while he did the honours by surreptitiously pushing the cup of what was temporarily supposed to be called coffee gradually nearer him. -Sounds are impostures, Stephen said after a pause of some little time, like names. Cicero, Podmore. Napoleon. M r Goodbody. Jesus, M r Doyle. Shakespeares were as common as Murphies. What's in a name? -Yes, to be sure, M r Bloom unaffectedly con-

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curred. Of course. Our name was changed too, he added, pushing the socalled roll across (16.35~366).

Doubtless the keeper's coffee tastes terrible and does not merit the name. T h e passage, however, seems to invite more rigorous probing. W h a t necessary tie has the word "coffee" with that beverage? W h y that connection and no other? Is the keeper Skin-the-Goat, who was thought to have driven the getaway car after the Phoenix Park murders years ago ("Mr Bloom determining to have a good square look at him later on so as not to appear to")? Signifiers attach lightly, perhaps serendipitously, and signifieds may not be known or knowable. Aren't the bun, metaphor, and straggling language itself "antediluvian"-or, better, "rather" so? The mix here of Bloom, Stephen, keeper, and palavering narrator affords a sense of the characters' hesitant moment and a good deal of fun. It also ventilates the arbitrary, slippery, and habitual nature of language-and those who use it. That which most distinguishes us from the animals appears approximate at best, a play of unreliable or limited signifiers rendering all referent, description, argument, and narrative-to say nothing of introspectiontentative, matters of "so it seemed," "what was temporarily supposed to be called," "imposture," and labels. As but one consequence, the illusion of immediacy and realism to which the initial style of Ulysses aspired, inspiring confidence in the precision of rightly chosen words, is brought into question, its illusoriness exposed. The Dublin world made of words and all the people in it exist in uncertainty, though at times that may not seem so. Moreover, the knowing absence of definitiveness suggests a storyteller whose words make the world and configure his own existence, contending not only with anxieties of influence and The Odd Couple/r71

envy, as in "Oxen of the Sun," but of being. The verbosity and sloppy syntax of "Eumaeus" thus could conflate his fear of nonbeing and responsive struggle for assurance with rhetorical display as, humorously, it goes on with the story of Stephen and Bloom and sniffs at language. The self-awareness of Ulysses, apparent from the first but showing increasing skepticism about words, narratives, and comprehensibility, would dovetail with the flamboyant ventures of form and style by which the story continues and the narrator shines-silently shouting "I am here," afraid he may not be. Whatever else they achieve, the vaunting styles may elaborately deny a fear of nothingness-as continual change may confirm it. May. One's presuppositions and fantasies would matter. Does one imagine an implied author cum storyteller or other, less personal narrative agencies like language, writing, or the book itself? W h a t is less speculative about "Eumaeus" is that it sustains comical events and tonalities; it is a comedy of missed or thwarted connections, all involving vagaries of communication. Among the oddfellows gathered in the cabman's shelter, an arresting one, D. B. Murphy, holds forth, avowing himself returned from the sea to hearth and home after many years. In earlier editions, the initials D. B. were W. B., no doubt a twitting allusion to Yeats and thus potentially to all authors, who, by association with Murphy at any rate, are implied to be buffoons, morally suspect, liars, probable criminals, and irresponsible yarn-spinners. The "goggles" Murphy wears to read, like the tattoo he proudly shows off, with its portrait of an artist capable of many moods (a Greek artist surprisingly named Antonio), sexual innuendoes, and the number 16-the latter permanently claimed for Bloom by Ulysses-encode Joyce himself in whatever implications may be drawn about authors. T h e circle closes round the fiction maker as liar. Bloom quickly sizes up Murphy as unsound but fascinating: a 17z/The Odd Couple

disreputable Sinbad. This Sinbad cannot answer questions satisfactorily, dismissing Bloom's about Gibraltar with the obvious falsehood that he's tired of rocks in the sea. No sooner does he begin to talk with Stephen, however, who reveals his family name, than he relates an amazing tale about Simon Dedalus shooting two eggs off bottles over his shoulder at fifty yards years ago in Hengler's Circus, holding his listeners rapt until he sounds the second, long-suspended, shot: "Pom!" This Sinbad can startle. A coincidence, Leopold avers. But the unexpectedness and broad humor of the moment join and rejoin matters of importance. Truth can astonish. It may be unbelievable. It may not be knowable and is at least obscure. It may be approachable only indirectly or proximately. It clearly can be disguised or fabricated out of whole cloth, whether deliberately or unintentionally, by fictions that must mislead but also can directas well as intrigue, entertain, and absorb. After several of Murphy's yarns of the sea, exotic cultures, natural wonders, murder, and death, Bloom whispers: "Our mutual friend's stories are like himself. . . . D o you think they are genuine?" Then he reflects to himself (with a little help from the narrator): "Yet still though his eyes were thick with sleep and sea air life was full of a host of things and coincidences of a terrible nature and it was quite within the bounds of possibility that it was not an entire fabrication though at first blush there was not much inherent probability in all the spoof he got off his chest being strictly gospel" (16.821-829). In the unsettled linguistic and narrative circumstances, and blanketed with cliches, alternatives to definiteness flourish: "life was full of a host of things . . . quite within the bounds of possibility." The account of Paddy Dignam's funeral Bloom reads in the Evening Telegraph includes bitched type, palliatives about Paddy, and the erroneous report that M'Coy, Stephen Dedalus, B.A., and M'Intosh attended. We know that Leopold The Odd C o u p l e / q

was responsible for the addition of M'Coy and unintentionally for M'Intosh. How Stephen got mentioned remains a mystery. Bloom appears as "Boomn-a printer's mistake and a sly narrative clue, Stephen having quipped earlier to the befogged Deasy that God is a shout in the street. Overtly insufficient communication yields laughter, irony, satire, curiosity, memory, and suggestive insight. The chapter's flaccid manner and slow pace allow for unhurried discoveries, such as unexpected pleasures of ambiguity. Stephen and Bloom open to each other through their very lack of intellectual fit, Bloom's best efforts notwithstanding. When he cautions Stephen against prostitutes, the young man responds theologically. When he confabulates about the soul, Stephen bewilders him further with Aquinas: "They tell me on the best authority it is a simple substance and thereofore incorruptible. It would be immortal, I understand, but for the possibility of its annihilation by the First Cause Who, from all I can hear, is quite capable of adding that to the number of His other practical jokes." Bloom, "a bit out of his sublunary depth," retorts: "Simple? I shouldn't think that is the proper word. O f course, I grant you, to concede a point, you do knock across a simple soul once in a blue moon" (16.756-76~). And so it goes, through God, Holy Writ, and Shakespeare, until Bloom again encourages Stephen to try some coffee. Their idioms, education, and assumptions differ vastly. They share no central understanding. But they stay together, conversing, pleased enough with each other, even as we enjoy them. Their exchange is funny and characterizing of both, and it broaches the enigma of their companionship-a connection that obviously requires little similarity or reciprocal understanding. Bloom continues to be troubled about Stephen, whose quirky statements tend to baffle him. A particularly moving exchange occurs soon after Skin-the-Goat's exaggerated claims for Ire174 / The Odd Couple

land's natural and human resources reminds Bloom, as he tells Stephen, of the citizen's nationalistic and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Praising the Jews for plucky industriousness, he compares their effects favorably with those of the parish priest, and openly savors his reply to the citizen that Christ was a Jew like him, adding "though in reality I'm not" (16.1085).The disclaimer passes Stephen by, who "in a noncommittal accent" mumbles: " E x yuibus . . . Christus or Bloom his name is, or, after all, any other, secundum camem" (16.1oy-1og)-a statement incomprehensible to Bloom but loaded for Stephen, who, unsurprisingly, expresses and protects himself through quotation: "And from that race is Christ, according to the flesh" (Romans 9:5). Although not so that Bloom would understand, Stephen accepts his intercession and views him as a saviorChrist made, not begotten. For those who recognize Stephen's hatred of God, scorn for the church, unconscious fury at his mother, dismissal of his father, dismay and fear about sex, distrust of women, suspicion of friends, and despair in his art and critical thought, this is remarkable-and conciliatory. From a father who is a son (like Christ and like himself), a caregiver who is not a woman, and a man assumed to like women, he will take help. Grateful, he shows -barely- a possibility of compromise with God and his creatures. The recoil will not be long in coming. But this is a wonderful moment, complexly layered and revelatory. Leopold cannot recognize it, knowing little about Stephen. Readers can. And Stephen himself may, conceptualizing a uniqueness but suggesting by his condensed statement, buffered in Latin, that he limits the actual feelings he risks in accepting and complimenting Bloom. He risks, nonetheless, more than he can bear, because as Bloom talks on about political and social amelioration, goodwill, equality, abhorrence of violence and hatred, and a notion of guaranteed income for all in an Ireland where all will The Odd Couple/17~

work, Stephen interjects: "Count me out" (16.11~8).Flustered, Bloom counters with assurances of work for both brains and brawn; but Stephen flabbergasts him again, with a comment the older man could not unpack without benefit of the Shakespeare theory: "You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of half laugh, that I may be important because I belong to the fauboug Saint-Patrice called Ireland for short. . . . But I suspect . . . that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me." Now utterly bewildered, Bloom tries questioning, but Stephen interrupts: "patently crosstempered, [he] repeated and shoved aside his mug of coffee, or whatever you like to call it, none too politely, adding: We can't change the country. Let us change the subject" (16.1160-1171). We can imagine amplifying contents, knowing something of Stephen's baroque wishes, but Bloom understands only enough to disappear into woolgathering. Dramatically-because we are not privy to Stephen's thoughts as we are to Leopold's, filtered through the parodically expansive narrator- Stephen retracts, all trust and agreeableness dissipated. Minutes later he almost apologizes, referring to the newspaper notice about Dignam that Bloom is reading: "Is that first epistle to the Hebrews, he asked, as soon as his bottom jaw would let him, in? Text: open thy mouth and put thy foot in it" (16.1268-1269). Feeling sheepish, and deeply ambivalent, he has not resolved his attitude toward Bloom. Leopold Bloom, meanwhile, bundled in his own awkward formality and screened by the garrulous, ironic narrator, meanders in byways of thought, making few demands of himself for clarity or self-scrutiny His aims limited to looking after Stephen, interesting him, and, eventually, bringing him home (for reasons that shift and waver more than coalesce), he indulges in proximities, analogues, fantasies, opinions, and 176/The Odd Couple

prospects that lead to no conclusions. Generic, often porous categories take over. His obsessionality about details apparently on hold, he orients with typologies: Sinbads, jailbirds, women Stephen should avoid, Jews, superpatriots. When he hears Murphy claim to be returning from the sea after seven years' "sailing about," he conjures scene and analogues: "Mr Bloom could easily picture his advent on this scene, the homecoming to the mariner's roadside shieling after having diddled Davy Jones, a rainy night with a blind moon. Across the world for a wife. Quite a number of stories there were on that particular Alice Ben Bolt topic, Enoch Arden and Rip van Winkle and does anybody hereabouts remember Caoc O'Leary, a favourite and most trying declamation piece by the way of poor John Casey and a bit of perfect poetry in its own small way" ( 1 6 . ~ 2 2 428).

Probably, in Stephen's company, Bloom shows off culturally to himself; but is it he who knows those parallels and extrapolates to Casey's trying declamation piece, or is the narrator intruding and winking? Playful parody in any case diverts attention to Caoc O'Leary just as it drifts Bloomward, though ostensibly it never leaves Murphy: Never about the runaway wife coming back, however much devoted to the absentee. The face at the window! Judge of his astonishment when he finally did breast the tape and the awful truth dawned upon him anent his better half, wrecked in his affections. You little expected me but I've come to stay and make a fresh start. There she sits, a grasswidow, at the selfsame fireside. Believes me dead, rocked in the cradle of the deep. And there sits uncle Chubb or Tomkin, as the case might be, the publican of the Crown and Anchor, in shirtsleeves, eating rumpsteak and onions. No chair for The Odd Couple/rjj

father. Boo! The wind! Her brandnew arrival is on her knee, postmortem child. W i t h a high ro! and a randy ro! and my galloping tearing tandy O! Bow to the inevitable. Grin and bear it. I remain with much love your brokenhearted husband, DB Murphy (16.428-440). Lighthearted displacement -Bloom's and the narrator's -affords Bloom protection from pain about Molly and from immediate worry. Something distinctly worthy about him shows through too in the way he empathizes with the woman's plight: "Never about the runaway wife coming back." His moral originality is to imagine Murphy's wife. Implicitly, Bloom, already cuckolded and with supple defenses working, appreciates at a remove that Molly had cause. But the recognition remains implicit. Thus in roundabout fashion and not, it seems, conscious of doing so, he begins to address his new situation with Molly. In roundabout fashion also, he searches for a way home. Stephen figures notably in the process, but exactly how, Bloom is in no hurry to decide; nor after the culminating moment of epiphany in Nighttown does he link Stephen to Rudy again. A t this hour of his trying day, motifs of return engage him. Recalling a time soon after Parnell's fall, when in a scuffle with the O'Brienites he, Leopold Bloom, "as a matter of strict history" (16.1514)-a delicious irony, another wink-restored the embattled leader's hat to him and was courteously thanked, he compares that memory to John Henry Menton's disagreeable "Thank you" the previous morning, also about a hat, and muses about "history repeating itself with a difference" (16.1525-1526). The interaction with Menton had its own history, competitiveness for Molly's regard in a game of bowls years before, which still rankles Menton and delights Bloom. Patterns of repetition r78/ The Odd Couple

and difference, similitude and comparison, structure his roaming conciousness-as they do this chapter, and Ulysres-hardly definitively, but capaciously. Skin-the-Goat's politicized claims lead to wishful talk that Parnell would return, and thereafter Parnell becomes a magnet for Bloom's reflections and feelings. "Something evidently riled them in his death," he sawily notes, wondering that they still yearn for him so long after widely deserting him: "Either he petered out too tamely of acute pneumonia just when his various different political arrangements were nearing completion," he speculates, "or whether it transpired he owed his death to his having neglected to change his boots and clothes after a wetting when a cold resulted . . . till eventually he died of it amid widespread regret before a fortnight was at an end or quite possibly they were distressed to find the job was taken out of their hands" (16.1312-1~19). Canny about these proclaimed loyalties, he too responds to Parnell's lure. The talk turns quickly to Kitty O'Shea-"That bitch, that English whore" (16.1352), the keeper calls her-and her "cottonball" (16.1357) husband. Leopold remembers details and stages of the scandal and sides with passion: "Whereas the simple fact of the case was it was simply a case of the husband not being up to the scratch, with nothing in common between them beyond the name, and then a real man arriving on the scene, strong to the verge of weakness, falling a victim to her siren charms" (16.1379-1383). The husband failed, the appealing man appeared, the wife seduced. Closer now to his own story, he still makes no acknowledgement of it and admires Parnell as he would not Boylan. But he recognizes Kitty O'Shea's active agency, thinks again of Parnell returning, then merges him with Murphy and other absent husbands: "And then coming back was the worst thing you ever did because it went without saying you would The Odd Couple/r79

feel out of place as things always moved on with the times" (16.1401-1403). Earlier too he reasoned: "Still as regards return. You were a lucky dog if they didn't set the terrier at you directly you got back" (16.1339-16~0).TOreturn might not be wise. If not quite consciously, Bloom seems to be working on his own concerns. But he draws no inference to himself. His focus stays elsewhere, split off from himself. In time he sympathizes with Parnell and both O'Sheas and generalizes from them. Kitty O'Shea, he believes, was "Spanish or half so, types that wouldn't do things by halves, passionate abandon of the south, casting every shred of decency to the winds" (16.1409-1410). H e imagines various appealing scenarios-as an instance, the guilty wife discovered in her lover's arms and pleading with her husband, probably incorrigible but charmingly so, "leading up to a domestic rumpus and the erring fair one begging forgiveness of her lord and master upon her knees . . . if only the aggrieved husband would overlook the matter and let bygones be bygones with tears in her eyes though possibly with her tongue in her fair cheek at the same time as quite possibly there were several others" (16.1537-1542). Before long he sees reasons to forgive: "Men in the plural were always hanging around on the waiting list about a lady, even supposing she was the best wife in the world and they got on fairly well together for the sake of argument, . . . to press their attentions on her . . . , the cause of many liaisons between still attractive women getting on for fair and forty and younger men, no doubt as several famous cases of feminine infatuation proved up to the hilt" (16.15~~-1552). By imagining generic scenes and identifying with the players, Bloom experiments with attitudes and explores his feelings vicariously. Parnell's affair and hot-blooded Spanish types yield a dated photograph of Molly, which he shows Stephen, unarguably

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to tempt the young man-that pimping impulse. Much else might be going on. H e could wish to be admired: not the Captain O'Shea, or only the Captain O'Shea, of the triangle but the man she chose, Parnell. Selecting a lover for his wife, he could be hoping to detach Molly from Boylan; he may gratify his masochism or act to prove his sense that he alone could not reclaim her. H e might be attracting a son for them bothor son-in-law. All are plausible, not verifiable. One wish, however, surfaces directly: "Suppose she was gone when he?"-a wish he does not manage to articulate fully and one that hinges on Molly's preferences and deeds, not his. Chapter 16 prolongs a curiously ruminative period, protected in part by the narrative style, as by the style of Bloom's mentation, which together afford him time and sanctuary-even as he interacts with Stephen-to ventilate in private important feelings, fears, and wishes, to try them out safely, almost always by indirection and identification and without the need to solve or resolve anything. "Eumaeus" surprises as an expressive form for associative mental and emotional process. One recurring thought helps him to turn passivity and delay into return. Having told Stephen of his encounter with the citizen, he thinks twice more and with pleasure of that highlight of his day before and after proposing that they leave: "The least pugnacious of mortals . . . departed from his customary habit to give him (metaphorically) one in the gizzard" (16.15951598). Similarly: "At the same time he inwardly chuckled over his gentle repartee to the blood and ouns champion about his god being jew. People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep" (16.1637-16~0).Being insulted as a Jew had galvanized him to act, and now too-each time with a link to Molly-originally as protest, at present as encouragement to go home to her.

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Not as Odysseus, warrior hero and slayer of suitors, will he return, any more than he will fit Stephen's expectations of a man, father, or friend. Stephen, unsteady on his feet, needs support: -It will (the air) do you good, Bloom said, meaning also the walk, in a moment. The only thing is to walk then you'll feel a different man. Come. It's not far. Lean on me. Accordingly he passed his left arm in Stephen's right and led him on accordingly. -Yes, Stephen said uncertainly because he thought he felt a strange kind of flesh of a different man approach him, sinewless and wobbly and all that (16.1718-172~). The different man, strange, wobbly and all that, provides help that this time earns him neither praise nor homage but interchange. Stephen talks to him. H e even sings. As they walk toward 7 Eccles Street, talking together at length, Bloom fantasizes about money-making schemes for and with Stephen, imagines him fascinating Molly, wonders if he sings like his father. They talk past one another, Bloom ranging through his musical tastes from masses Molly has sung through "M'Appari," sung by Simon in the Ormond pub that afternoon; he taxes his knowledge beyond its power, linking Don Giovanni and Martha, applauding "the severe classical school such as Mendelssohn" (16.1754-1755). Stephen praises Shakespeare's songs, moves arcanely to "Youth Here Has End" by Jans Pieter Sweelinck and then to a German song by Johannes Jeep "about the clear sea and the voices of sirens, sweet murderers of men" (16.1813), from which poets make art. His erudition once again on show, Stephen, after a hint of readiness to grow, invokes his overriding topic this day, his fixation, in sublimated form. Yet he translates and sings: "A phenomenally beautiful tenor 182 /The

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voice like that, the rarest of boons, which Bloom appreciated at the very first note he got out" (16.1820-1821). Excited, Bloom multiplies possibilities that Stephen's talent could make practicable: "He had a capital opening to make a name for himself and win a high place in the city's esteem where he could command a stiff figure" (16.1853-1855). The street-sweeper's horse, of course, mires (another wink), and the driver kmdly waits, overhearing bits of the men's conversation and noting their companionability. They do not communicate well, we know. But the end of the song as Stephen fashions or mistakenly remembers it -"Und alle Schiffe bruckenn--has to do not with destruction but with bridging. In Stephen's version of the song about sirens, or in his singing it for Leopold, or in the comfort these two lonely figures find with each other for a time, or in the form, style, and language of "Eumaeus," contiguity that bridges, rather than fullness of connection, is all there is-and more than enough. Other than Stephen and Bloom's continuing on together to Bloom's home, bridging between "Eumaeus" and "Ithaca" is difficult to see, because the narrative shifts from near-formless drift to a question-and-answer instructiveness. If "Eumaeus" presents the men's interactions and interiorities while radically undermining storytelling and language, "Ithaca" counters with factual, often pedantic objectivity. The catechistic form holds out promise of authoritative truth, clarification, and closure. The actuality proves different- altogether more surprising, befuddling, and enticing. The parodically scientific style of "Ithaca" serves many purposes, including the disappointment of climactic hopes. Again the storytelling manner parallels a quality of Bloom's mind entertainingly, amplifying it to a comically fixed attitude. One's impression is of facts amassed dispassionately, at times effiThe Odd Coup/e/183

ciently but often inordinately-of a scientific manner with neither proportion nor direction. The denotative, technical, and mathematical language seems abstract, bloodless, detached from any emotion that might intrude upon its report. But even this style proves unreliable, a last rebuff to naive realism. Its numbers can add up incorrectly; Leopold's bodily dimensions as given are impossible; his estimating the great fortunes of such magnates as Rothschild, Guggenheim, Hirsch, and Montefiore in six figures seems oddly innocent and silly; and his famous list of Molly's lovers before Boylan is ridiculous- although for decades it led readers to believe her a loose woman, even a whore, or alternatively a heroine of free love. Objectivity and clarity can mislead too, and the resourceful narrator smiles to the knowing. Nor does the dry, deliberate manner suppress feelings. Emotions seep through the stiff form and facts. When Bloom turns on his kitchen tap to boil water for cocoa, the encyclopedic flow of fascination with water transforms to an aria. When Bloom and Stephen emerge from the house and stand beneath "the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" (17.1039), the sudden metaphor warms a world of incipient loss and cold interstellar space. Feelings hardly are eliminated; and we may suspect that the aim to do so carries its own charge, which one way or another finds expression. But the template of science tamps them down and often appears to deny them to the characters. Nonetheless, facts mustered impersonally and with no interpretive purpose can change what we know or realize, startle us to new viewpoints, potentialities, insights, as when we noted that Bloom used often to have companionable talks but hasn't since 1893-which is to say since Rudy died and Bloom recovered with a more Jewish identity. In a passage about selfconsciousness, this index of lineages appears:

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What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom's thoughts about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom's thoughts about Stephen? He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not. What, the enclosures of reticence removed, were their respective parentages? Bloom, only born male transubstantial heir of Rudolf Virag (subsequently Rudolph Bloom) of Szombathely, Vienna Budapest, Milan, London and Dublin and Ellen Higgins, second daughter of Julius Higgins (born Karoly) and Fanny Higgins (born Hegarty). Stephen, eldest surviving male consubstantial heir of Simon Dedalus of Cork and Dublin and of Mary, daughter of Richard and Christina Goulding (born Grier) (17.527-539). We learn more than we knew of the change of name to Bloom and of his father's Odyssean path to Ireland, then of his mother, Ellen, Irish (Hig+) and undoubtedly Christian. Bloom's non-Jewish status in the religious tradition, which requires that his mother be Jewish, thus is verified-and the grounds for probing psychologically the puzzle of his experience of himself as a Jew, which has been emerging and clarifying all day, at last are made firm. (The ensuing question-and-answer records three baptisms for Bloom, the first Protestant, the second comical, the third Catholic; there is no mention of a Jewish ceremony). New doors open in this passage. Ellen's mother was Irish (born

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Hegarty) but her father first had a Hungarian name, Karoly. So exile and wandering may be traceable through both of Leopold's parents. Born Karoly, was Julius Catholic? Might he have been Jewish? Could Rudolph and Ellen have had more in common than we were in a position to suspect? An intergenerational story teases but goes no further. Bloom's mother, meanwhile, who has been largely missing from his musings, reappears (albeit just barely) as he returns to Molly's proximity with Stephen in tow. Were I listening to an analysand and something analogous happened, I would internally flag Karoly, mother, wanderings, and hybrid identities and wait for what followed. I'd also wonder about the push just now for such details. Often at the end of an hour or before a vacation, a compelling memory or association will surface -as a farewell gift or taunt, perhaps, but a promise, an unconscious agenda for work still to do. With the book nearing its end, however, I can only applaud the cogency of psyches as Joyce renders them, organized yet unpredictable, unfailingly interesting, and affording not closure but, dependably, the expectation of more to know. Before long, in "Ithaca," the Jewish-Christian difference looms large for both men. Bloom prepares cocoa "for a gentile." Stephen drinks "Epps's massproduct, the creature cocoa." Bloom is highly cognizant of their difference: Did he find four separating forces between his temporary guest and him? Name, age, race, creed (17.~02-403). Even denial testifies to it: Did either openly allude to their racial differences? Neither (17.525-526).

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Animatedly, they compare ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish, neither knowing much, and Bloom sings the first two lines of "Hatikvah," the Zionist anthem composed late in the nineteenth century, in which Stephen hears "in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation of the past." Bloom sees in him "a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future" (17.777-780). Stephen's display of Gaelic did translate as "walk, walk, walk your way, walk in safety, walk with care" (17.727-728). But crucially, Stephen once again perceives Bloom as a Christlike savior: "The traditional figure of hypostasis [the essential person of Christ, divine and human], depicted by Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as leucodermic [white-skinned], sesquipedalian [tall] with winedark hair" (17.783-785; see Gifford, 1988, p. 579). The image so enfolded in patristics is both rigorously traditional and sexualized-white-skinned, tall, with winedark hair-even Dionysian. And immediately Stephen chants the legend of Hugh of Lincoln, a Christian child lured to his death by a Jew's beautiful daughter, who cut off his head. It is a bizarre moment, simultaneously resonant and hollow, complete with musical notation and buffered by the narrator's impersonal detachment. That Stephen, thoughtlessly or not, should sing a strain of Christian anti-Semitism at that moment-the very genre of blood libel that started pogromssuggests a surge of hostility in him that registers not as affect but as chilling action. His staggering rudeness is told with the feeling removed: most curious. But with it he reverses direction and soon leaves. His behavior, although shocking, is idiomatic: he calls friendships suddenly to an end, after all, forgets a brother like an umbrella, gave Dilly none of the money he then spent on drinking buddies, and would not pray for his mother on her deathbed. Stephen cannot abide trusting intimacy, how-

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ever much he yearns for it. H e doesn't dare because, on the model of his mother (long before she died), it does not last. H e leaves before he is left once more. Apparently inured against affect here, he comments on the legend in an allegorical mode that abstracts and mystifies. Bloom's emotions prove a bit more available in the precise narrator's questions and answers: How did the son of Rudolph receive this first part? W i t h unmixed feeling. Smiling, a jew, he heard with pleasure and saw the unbroken kitchen window. . . . . How did the father of Millicent receive this second part? W i t h mixed feelings. Unsmiling, he heard and saw with wonder a jew's daughter, all dressed in green (17.809-811; 829-831). A t first denying, Bloom focuses backward on the Jew's window, not yet broken by the little boy's ball. Then taking in the matter of the tale, he registers discomfort and possibly annoyance, no longer smiling, and moves on. The closest we get to a distinguishable feeling is the word "sad," to describe him when he "wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him should by him not be told." But the sadness dissipates "in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy" (17.838842). Bloom thinks of evidence, circumstance, envy, then of hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism, both of which he has experienced, and of Milly's night terrors. Memories of her at different stages of growth take over-memories, obviously, of a fond and fascinated father. H e diverts Stephen's nastiness. No deep or sustained rumblings disturb his steady tone; and 188/Tbe Odd Couple

the narrative goes on, having conveyed by its pedagogical questions and earnestly objective answers that neither Stephen nor Leopold aimed to feel much during that strange moment, that their respective defenses against tumult-Stephen repressing and intellectualizing, Bloom obsessing and digressing-served each of them well just then. In catechistic format and at a leisurely pace, the story of their separating proceeds. Facts accumulate in odd proportions and like the stilted, emotionless language draw humorous attention to themselves. The form and style toy with the characters, their importance, and whatever meanings readers seek. Under the starry heavens and in all the material universe that is infinitely indifferent to them, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom part, subject to mere mortality and capable only of human sense making, like the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. One of the most brilliant moments of this brilliant book occurs beneath all stellar constellations and the modest light of Molly's window, when the two men, told of by a zealously passionless narrator, urinate, standing side by side in a final act of male commonality before going off to their separate lives-Bloom thinking of physicality and sensations and Stephen of the sacerdotal status of Jesus' circumcised prepuce (17.1201-1209). A narrator wary of affect refers awkward mechnicalness to overt feeling: How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation? Standing perpendicular at the same door and on different sides of its base, the lines of their valedictory arms, meeting at any point and forming any angle less than the sum of two right angles (17.1221-1223). The Odd Couple/z89

But he gives memorable expression to their parting, including the different echoes each hears in the the church bells' chimes -Stephen, the mass for the dead, reevoking his mother, and Bloom the heigho linked that morning to poor Dignam. Both, that is, associate to death as they part, without doubt permanently. 'Ziliata rutilantium" affords our last hint of Stephen's thoughts, tied to the mother he will not let die. Thereafter we learn solely of Bloom, whose feelings, constrained by the pedantic ideation he and the narrator share, can be inferred from the continuing drift of thought. We hear no more of sadness, nor of disappointment or pain, but rather: Where were the several members of the company which with Bloom that day at the bidding of that peal had travelled from Sandymount in the south to Glasnevin in the north? Martin Cunningham (in bed), Jack Power (in bed), Simon Dedalus (in bed), Ned Lambert (in bed), Tom Kernan (in bed), Joe Hynes (in bed), John Henry Menton (in bed), Bernard Corrigan (in bed), Patsy Dignam (in bed), Paddy Dignam (in the grave) (17.1235-1241). As Stephen's footsteps fade and Bloom again registers the immense, cold cosmos, he lists former companions who have died: O f what did bellchime and handtouch and footstep and lonechill remind him? O f companions now in various manners in different places defunct: Percy Apjohn (killed in action, Modder River), Philip Gilligan (phthisis, Jervis Street hospital), Matthew F. Kane (accidental drowning, Dublin Bay), Philip Moisel (pyemia, 19o/Tbe Odd Couple

Heytesbury street), Michael Hart (phthisis, Mater Misericordia hospital), Patrick Dignam (apoplexy, Sandymount) (17.12~9-1255). So Stephen's leaving resonates deeply, though with the emotionality contained. This is splendid obsessionality, which splits off feeling from thought-and ingeniously presented. But at this instant it may not be enough, because now there is an unannounced turn toward Jewishness: W h a t prospect of what phenomena inclined him to remain? The disparition of three final stars, the diffusion of daybreak, the apparition of a new solar disk (17.1256-1258). By custom and law, the Sabbath ends at nightfall, which is measured by the appearance of three stars in the sky. Bloom's impulse to linger till daybreak, "the disparition of three final stars," provides structure by way of his Jewishness, the connection to his father that bolsters his pained manhood. It is a mere glimpse but a telling one. Losing Stephen matters to Bloomstill staggered by Rudy's death and today suffering Molly's adultery-even though he doesn't consciously feel much. More ensues that underscores the Jewish connection. H e remembers a time he waited for daybreak: Had he ever been a spectator of those phenomena? Once, in 1887, after a protracted ~erformanceof charades in the house of Luke Doyle, Kimmage, he had awaited with patience the apparition of the diurnal phenomenon, seated on a wall, his gaze turned in the direction of Mizrach, the east (17.1259-1263). The Odd Couple/rgr

In "Circe" he fused this 1887 evening with the one at Mat Dillon's, when he bested John Henry Menton at bowls in Molly's presence. But Doyle's was the setting for their first kiss (Raleigh, 1977, p p 80-81). May we infer that later, wakeful, excited, grateful, and fearful too, he looked to Mizrach, the East -toward Jerusalem, the direction in which all Jews pray? This sequence of thoughts, read as associations, suggests grief and-through memory, identifications, and attentiveness to details-recovery. We have seen this dynamic work exigently when, soon after the nextdoor girl's disregard glowed to weak pleasure in his breast, Bloom's thoughts turned to Molly, the sun passed behind a cloud, and he plunged into his Dead Sea depression. H e restabilized finally by contemplating the financial prospects of rental properties-and totally separated the "grey sunken cunt of the world" from Molly's "bedwarmed flesh" (4.2~8-239).The effectiveness there of an exterior focus and his pragmatics signaled defenses both flexible and powerful. Extended to a steady state, that dynamic constitutes the psychic strategy of this chapter, which controls, displaces, moderates, and disguises feelings into obsessional and dispassionate order yet allows for calm and rambling disorder in the assemblage of facts. Might the storyteller, borrowing and amplifying Bloom's obsessionality in "Ithaca," also minimize his own pain at this last appearance of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom? The idiom of containment covers all. The encompassing irony, of course, is that many readers find the chapter, especially when Stephen and Bloom part, very moving-as if the narrator and characters, refusing that responsibility, entrusted it to them. Bloom, reorienting himself after bumping his head- the furniture, intriguingly, has been moved-fumigates the house like Odysseus: in Bloom's case by lighting an incense candle with the Agendath flyer (see Kenner, 1974; Honton, 1976). H e reflects that as he gets older he looks more like his father, and 19z/Tbe Odd Couple

admires the little statue of Narcissus he recently purchased. The narrator apparently more than Bloom ponders his accumulated row of books. Beginning to undress, Bloom compiles the day's budget, when a remarkably Proustian incident unfolds in question-and-answer form. Leopold picks his big toenail, smells it, and enters regions of remembered experience: Did the process of divestiture continue? Sensible of a benignant persistent ache in his footsoles he extended his foot to one side and observed the creases, protuberances and salient points caused by foot pressure in the course of walking repeatedly in several different directions, then, inclined, he disnoded the laceknots, unhooked and loosened the laces, took off each of his two boots for the second time, detached the partially moistened right sock through the fore part of which the nail of his great toe had again effracted, raised his right foot and, having unhooked a purple elastic sock suspender, took off his right sock, placed his unclothed right foot on the margin of the seat of his chair, picked at and gently lacerated the protruding part of the great toenail, raised the part lacerated to his nostrils and inhaled the odour of the quick, then, with satisfaction, threw away the lacerated ungual fragment. Why with satisfaction? Because the odour inhaled corresponded to other odours inhaled of other ungual fragments, picked and lacerated by Master Bloom, pupil of Mrs Ellis's juvenile school, patiently each night in the act of The Odd Coup/e/r93

brief genuflection and nocturnal prayer and ambitious meditation (17.1479-1~96). Smell triggers an inner continuity. Assuredly it is he, Leopold Bloom, who has returned, characteristically sensual and still fond of this childhood pleasure. He recalls genuflecting before sleep-the boy who was baptized a Protestant as an infant, at fourteen declared to friends that he no longer believed the tenets of the Church of Ireland, converted to Roman Catholicism to marry Molly, and after his father's death, but especially after Rudy's, reconfigured himself internally as Jewish. Also noteworthy is the "ambitious meditation" that followed bedtime prayer. It too continues, and we enter a lovingly protracted fantasy of his future, involving respected retirement and local celebrity in his country holding, to be called Bloom Cottage, Saint Leopold's, or Flowerville. "In what ultimate ambition had all concurrent and consecutive ambitions now coalesced?" (17.1498f.). The answer spreads over six tightly printed pages in the Random House "corrected text" edition, articulating first manifold aspects of bourgeois fulfillment, then varieties of ways he could bring about such success. He would like to own a two-story house with "neat doorbrasses," weather vane, and lightning conductor, set on five or six acres of land, with four bedrooms and two servants' rooms, no more than fifteen minutes' drive from tram or train line. It would have a "fumed oak sectional bookcase containing the Encyclopedia Britannica and New Century Dictionary," phone, central chandelier, bathroom with hot and cold water, tub, and shower, and would house a tame parrot, and "distinguished guests." I t would include a rockery, "a beehive managed on humane principles," flowerbeds, many implements, two hammocks, "a lawnmower with side delivery and grassbox," a rabbitry, fowlrun, and dovecote. In "loose allwool 194/The Odd Couple

garments with Harris tweed cap," he would spend his time usefully "ameliorating the soil, multiplying wisdom, achieving longevity." H e would pursue diverse studies and aspire to civic responsibilities, the pinnacle being "resident magistrate or justice of the peace with a family crest and coat of arms and appropriate classical motto." To be sure, more immediate concerns may be discerned. As resident magistrate he would uphold the law against "all orotund instigators of international persecution, all perpetuators of international animosities, all menial molestors of domestic conviviality, all recalcitrant violators of domestic connubiality." But listed objects, satisfactions, interests, activities, and duties effectively eclipse them, as do his schemes for moneymaking to pay for it all, which include connecting "by tramline the Cattle Market (North Circular road and Prussia street) with the quays (Sheriff street, lower, and East Wall, parallel with the Link line railway" and prescient plans for tourism and advertising in the century that has just begun. The parodic quality of this lengthily articulated fantasy-or series of fantasies-is obvious, as is the fun of surprise available as the specifics unfold. Easily missed, however, are brief but important passages about his motives for such fantasizing: For what reason did he meditate on schemes so difficult of realisation? It was one of his axioms that similar meditations or the automatic relation to himself of a narrative concerning himself or tranquil recollection of the past when practised habitually before retiring for the night alleviated fatigue and produced as a result sound repose and renovated vitality. His justifications? The Odd Couple/195

As a physicist he had learned that of the 70 years of complete human life at least 217, viz. 20 years are passed in sleep. As a philosopher he knew that at the termination of any allotted life only an infinitesimal part of any person's desires has been realised. As a physiologist he believed in the artificial placation of malignant agencies chiefly operative during somnolence. What did he fear? The committal of homicide or suicide during sleep by an aberration of the light of reason, the incommensurable categorical intelligence situated in the cerebral convolutions (17.175~-1768). H e attends to self-esteem and serves calm, respects the need for rest and the insatiability of desire, and fears uncontrolled aggression that could lead to murder or suicide. That he fears it in sleep implies that anxiety makes a contribution to the vibrancy of his waking consciousness. Killing may be Odysseus' way and suicide Rudolph's; but Leopold only moves on to his habitual "final meditations": "Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life" (17.1770-1773). Comfortably cerebral and hidden away, but on target, his self-awareness of rage fits the obsessional preoccupations of his return home to adulterous Molly as well as his reaction to Stephen's leaving, just as it fits with Bloom's more usual interiority, which keeps him distant from others (unconsciously protecting them, though entertaining to himself and to readers), vulnerable to depression, and, since Rudy's death, inhibited rp6/The Odd Couple

with Molly. Soon, in her interior monologue, Molly will recall her deep gloom after the baby died, which-if I am right that his mother's fragility made his strong feelings, especially his anger, frightening to him from early on-would leave him afraid of doing that to her again and in dread of any anger at her he might harbor because Rudy died. Jewishness in particular helped him with rage today, for it is one thing to defend the Jews, quite another to attack, or even protest, on one's own. Eventually, he enters their bed circumspectly, kisses Molly's rump, and enters the big black dot of sleep. Putting Martha's letter away in his drawer occasioned memories, attached to mementos, of Milly young and his father old, and his regrets especially about mocking, in the way of youth, his old father's Jewish beliefs (which he considers "not more rational than they had then appeared, not less rational than other beliefs and practices now appeared" [ I ~ . I ~ o ~ - I ~His o ~ subsequent ]). thoughts touch on humiliation, flight, travel, envy, jealousy, revenge, and assassination but dismiss and calm each and all in the tone of patient equanimity the narrator and he sustain. In time he can ponder "imperfections in a perfect day" (17.2071) and lie in bed head to toe and back to back with his wife-his customary ~osition-adrift in the slowly revolving cosmos, practicing an eccentric form of birth control, and joining her perhaps in a res sexual twinship in the womb, where both can try being mothered again.

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The Vitality of Molly Bloom

A t the end, Molly Bloom's interior monologue returns to the initial style with a difference. Entirely unspoken and in the first person, it allows us to take in her immediate thoughts. But although Joyce trumpeted to Budgen that Molly would have "the last word," the storyteller through his protean narrative has strongly implied that it can only be authentic or persuasive, not final. No one style, point of view, or person has the power of finality in Ulysses-even if last and splendid: Id rather die 2 0 times over than marry another of their sex of course hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do know me come sleep with me yes and he knows that too at the bottom of his heart take that Mrs Maybrick that poisoned her husband for what I wonder in love with some other man yes it was found out on her wasnt she the downright villain to go and do a thing like that of course some men can be dreadfully aggravating drive you mad and always the worst word in the world what do they ask us to marry them for if were so bad as all that comes to yes because they cant get on without us white Arsenic she put in his tea off flypaper wasnt it I wonder why they call it that if I asked him hed say its from the Greek leave us as wise as we were before she must have been madly in love with the other fellow to run the chance of being hanged 0

she didnt care if that was her nature what could she do besides theyre not brutes enought to go and hang a woman surely are they. . . . I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and M r Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves . . . and Gibraltar as a girl when I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes (18.231-45; 1580-1583; 1601-1609). Molly Bloom's vitality is as distinct as her fame. Dramatic, complicated, and ranging in her feelings, she fascinates. The closing words of her unspoken reverie surely are among the most admired in the English language. Yet through the years she has symbolized so much to readers and critics that she still seems both outsized and underrated as a character. She has been idealized as mythic, derided as a slut, reconsidered more equably, of late pondered in her cultural and historical moment (shaped by patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial power), and scoured for feminist promise (McCormick, 1994; Scott, 1984, pp. 156-183; see Pearce, 1994; Henke, 1990, pp. 126-163; Froula, 1996, pp. 170-196). But she has not, I think, received Vitalityof Molb Bloom/rpp

her due as a fictive person in the imagined world of Ulysses who is as real, say, as Leopold Bloom or Stephen Dedalus. The narrator gambles greatly with her-delaying her entrance until the very last chapter, except for early snippets of conversation with her husband and fleeting perceptions of her by others, and then allowing us to overhear her silent thoughts while she, unable to sleep in the early morning hours, having committed adultery for the first time, agitatedly and excitedly ruminates. Her unpunctuated flow of frank thoughts contributed to the initial shock produced by Ulysses' radical narrative experimentation. For many early readers Molly's interior monologue epitomized the cultural breakthrough or horror that the novel, published in 1922, represented. If Bloom and Stephen, whose past-haunted consciousnesses we follow into the wee hours of June 17 through Odyssean paths of narrative, offer modern, urban analogues to Odysseus and Telemachus-an advertising canvasser, sexually insufficient with his wife, who is a Jew yet not one, and a learned young lapsed Catholic who is a nonwriting writer-Molly is the faithless Penelope to whom her husband returns. Such informing schemes and ironies distract as well as serve, however, so I propose to attend closely to Molly as she lies awake in the old brass bed at 7 Eccles Street. Poldy, as she sometimes calls him, sleeps soundly beside her. H e kissed her on the buttocks getting into bed and woke her; but that, like his wily account of his day and surprising request for eggs and tea for breakfast-and like all the events we have followed-is over for him. Having wandered, he sleeps, his cold feet as usual where his head should be. She has been to bed with a man other than him for the first time that afternoon. Now, at nearly z:45 A.M., she is well on in her thoughts, taking note at the moment of her daughter's recent cheekiness, the inadequacies of her cleaning lady, and an assignable cause: her husband's deficiencies as a provider. She zoo/Vitality of M o b Bloom

begins to pity herself when suddenly she realizes she is menstrual: "every day I get up theres some new thing on sweet God sweet God well when Im stretched out dead in my grave I suppose I11 have some peace I want to get up a minute if Im let wait 0 Jesus wait yes that thing has come on me now wouldnt that afflict you of course all the poking and rooting and ploughing he had up in me." Boylan's forcefulness brought it on, she supposes, discomfited by their intention to do it again four days hence: "wouldnt that pester the soul out of a body," she sighs, "unless he likes it some men do." Sorely disappointed, she airs a general complaint: "God knows theres always something wrong with us 5 days every 3 or 4 weeks usual monthly auction isnt it simply sickening" (18.1102-1110). Soon we learn of her relief not to be pregnant by him. But the period surprises her. Hers may not be predictable-"5 days every 3 or 4 weeks," she says, and before long calculates three weeks since her last. Perhaps she's inattentive. Later, wondering whether something might be wrong with her "insides," she thinks fleetingly of seeing a doctor. A t once she recalls an equally unexpected onset one night at the theater. It was their "one and only time" in a box. A fashionable fellow stared through glasses at her, Bloom talked on impercipiently about "Spinoza and his soul that dead I suppose millions of years ago," while she smiled, leaned forward, and, trying to look interested, felt "all in a swamp." They had gone expecting "a fast play about adultery" but some "idiot" in the gallery hissed and shouted at the adulteress all the same. Molly fancies the fellow finding a woman in the next lane after the show "to make up for it," adds "I wish he had what I had then hed boo," and whisks back to the present:

I bet the cat itself is better off than us have we too much blood in us or what 0 patience above Vitality ofMol4 Bloom /201

its pouring out of me like the sea anyhow he didnt make me pregnant as big as he is I dont want to ruin the clean sheets the clean linen I wore brought it on too damn it damn it and they always want to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin for them all thats troubling them theyre such fools too you could be a widow or divorced 40 times over a daub of red ink would do or blackberry juice no thats too purply 0 Jamesy let me up out of this pooh (18.1113-1129). Through the windings of the book, she has been a source of entertainment and pride to Leopold, the powerful magnet too of his regrets, guilts, miseries, pleasurable self-punishments, and attempts at recovery, such as they are. She has appeared from afar as a disloyal if much-tried wife, a singer possessed of a strong but untrained voice and heaving embonpoint, a goad for men's jokes, timidities, and stories, at times a scold, and once as mother earth, Gea-Tellus herself. She never actually left the house and much of the time was in bed. We saw her toss a coin from her window to a crippled beggar-an uncommon act of charity in the book; and we know of her singing tour, which is to be managed by Boylan, and of their appointment that afternoon. Yet except as we might gauge her more complexly through Bloom's thoughts, Molly has been the stuff of male gossip and wish. She attracts attention-while remaining subject to Dublin's severely delimiting expectations, like the other women we ponder: the old milk woman, harried Josie Breen, Stephen's hungry sisters, the lonely barmaids Misses Kennedy and Douce, poignant unmarried Gerty MacDowell, Nurse Callan, Mrs. Purefoy (at last delivered of her ninth child), and the whoremistress Bella Cohen. Ulysses reveals little leeway for the women it depicts. Molly's ruminations, morezoz/Vitality of MoNy Bloom

over, emerge from stereotype: a woman in bed, emotional and garrulous, with little to do but conjure sex, endure biological vulnerability, and be. Yet when we read as if present while she thinks-and try to match evenly hovering attention with her first-person narration-Molly proves alert, witty, and playful though in pain, complaining and engaging in distress. Her perceptions tumble into one another, suggesting acuity and mental richness if also muddle. She dramatizes, allying spontaneity with sharply etched images to produce exaggerations that resonate: "its pouring out of me like the sea"; "you could be a widow or divorced 40 times over." Divorce or Bloom's death-the thought has occurred formulaically, but more than once. She has an eye for fakery, whether her own or others': "a daub of red ink would do." She lacks education but has a cunning intelligence and ready opinions. Dismayed here, she shows willingness to find fault and distribute it. Her mind moves liltingly and swiftly. It reflects convention, stereotype, and her variety: her zest, fun, and shrewdness, her acerbity, outrage, wonder, and pain-and more. Because, although earthy and direct, she is evasive too. Her surprise about her period, for example, jibes with her diction: "that thing" has come upon her; something in her "insides" has produced "pooh." There are specificities Molly ducks, even with herself. "I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him," she has exulted; "I had to hug him after 0 Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all." But she didn't. She said nothing: "who knows the way hed take it . . . I gave my eyes that look with my hair a bit loose from the tumbling and my tongue between my lips up to him the savage bruteu-only to go on: "Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three 0 Lord I cant wait ti1 Monday" (18.587395) Molly functions within both social and inner conVitality of M o b Bloom/zo3

straints, her inner ones flexible enough to allow her to displace her aggression ("fuck," "shit") to Boylan (who has enough of his own, "the savage brute") through time, and retrospectively to increase her pleasure. She wanted to shout but didn't; as she remembers it, she came for five minutes; and through the length of her unspoken monologue, the number of times they had intercourse increases from at least two to ''5 or 6." It may be by way of compromise with her contrary impulses, therefore, that she slips into comical but contained metaphors like "all in a swamp" and the "usual monthly auction." She seems comfortable with half-knowledge ("he didnt make me pregnant as big as he is") and with superstitious explanations ("the clean linen I wore brought it on too damn it"). Perhaps she is straining here for distancing humor, but Molly often fuzzes or distorts a bodily focus of knowledge. She also imposes precipitous finality on what she knows ("unless he likes it some men do"), with the dependable effect of switching her objects of attention rather than pursuing any one. To be sure, she is tired, titillated, and thinking associatively. She does run her diverting idiom to absurdity, however. That Boylan hoped to find her -Bloom's wife and Milly's mother - a virgin is much to be doubted, though the drift may alert us to a wish. Thus Molly may evoke Gea-Tellus and Penelope, but she is a realized, idiosyncratic character- an imagined, specific woman who combines lively curiosity with notable limitations on it. From that bind she indulges in philistinism, like her dismissal of Spinoza, as elsewhere she notices only to disdain politics, religious disputes, nationalism and wars- matters of import to the men in Ulysses. She continues to be untroubled about countering frankness with avoidance, furthermore, because she is apparently unaware of it. Given her many mentions of God, her chiseled memory of the hissed stage adulteress suggests guilt; and earlier she re204/ Vitality of

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membered awakening terrified to the thunderstorm: "as if the world was coming to an end God be merciful to us I thought the heavens were coming down about us to punish" (18.136137). Overridingly in this passage, however, Molly is angry: bitter about her marriage and the demandingness of men (litheyre such fools"), distressed by the monthly exigencies of her body, so encompassingly disgusted at last that she calls out for help"0 Jamesy let me up out of this poohJ'-to Joyce! A vaudevillian flash relaxes the tension. We're reminded that she is fiction. This is literature-only a novel, if a self-conscious one. But she has appealed directly to the top-no performing narrator this time. And remarkably, an anguished character has demanded her rights and comforts as a design of words. Something extreme is going on. Molly is wide awake, tired but in no hurry to sleep. Her thoughts current associatively, through switch words (images, the floating pronoun "he") and moods. The liveliness and disparate movement of her mind impress quickly; and before long one adjusts for its persistence, because Molly's thoughts pulsate on and on. Her silent monologue, its logic and focus elusive, its contiguities insistent, admits little inner silence. Can she bear no rest, no time to absorb? For thirty-six crowded pages the only cessations occur when she cries to Jamesy-a moment instantly closed round by more thoughts-and at eight paragraph endings, the last of which ends the book. We can know her closely only this way: keyed up, mulling present and future, and remembering her past, hours after frolicking with Boylan and soon after her husband requested breakfast in bed. Not since the City Arms Hotel has he asked that-and then he did it under guise of being ill. They lived at the City Arms more than a decade ago, when he worked for Mr. Cuffe at the Cattle Market, at the time their son, Rudy, was born and after Vitality ofMoNy Bloom/zog

eleven days died. Leopold now gets breakfast for her-did so, in fact, that very morning. "I love to hear him falling up the stairs of a morning with the cups rattling on the tray" (18.933934), she muses. In big and little as Ulysses ends, Molly ponders change. Too fed up to continue as she has-witness the first adultery, the cry to be let up out of pooh-she explores other feelings as well: guilt, to be sure, but far more recurrently indulgence and appreciation, nostalgia, sadness, anger, competitiveness, joy and desire. Several of these converge into anxiety when she comes close to fantasizing murder, contemplating Mrs. Maybrick, who poisoned her husband-Molly imagines for love of another man. She remarks disliking being alone in the big "barracks of a place" (18.978) at night. But usually anxiety is not something Molly feels. It is what she avoidswhat translates into the constant press of her thoughts. Her mind here has a runaway tone, suggesting an implicit panic attributable only in part to the specialness of the day. Molly's thoughts push on, I believe, to fill the unknown and to suppress or otherwise contain what frightens her, because, given who she is-who she reveals herself to be-the changes that have already begun endanger her. This dynamic of her characterization-anxiety diverted to pulsating consciousness-may explain why the critics, who have been perceptive about her, have oddly delimited her. It is as if one would drown in that stream of consciousness if immersed too long. Neither the mythologizers and debunkers nor the feminists and contextualizers have offered informing understandings of her as a distinct character, with her own idiom of being. Nonetheless, Molly indeed often evokes delight in physical being, may well embody comic hopefulness and jouissance, and surely is curtailed by historical, social, and economic actuality. She has mythic resonance -her fame alone establishes that; and she too worries that she has been whorish, although 206/VitaIity of MoNy Bloom

she bitterly blames Bloom for it. She can be viewed appropriately as a protofeminist without benefit of theory, latently subversive of the patriarchy, and, less sympathetically, as the projected image of traditional male wishfulness about women. But none of these aspects opens to her individuality. Nor, taken together, do they add up to her-assuming, of course, that she is a realized character. Marilyn French (1976, pp. 243-261) argues that Molly represents the life force and is splendid in that way but impossibly contradictory, a disaster as a character. I find the revisionism of Richard Ellmann (1959, p. 377), Robert Martin Adams (1962, pp. 35-43), Stanley Sultan (1964, pp. 43144), and David Hayman (1970a, pp. 103-135) more useful. They distinguish between Bloom's notions about Molly's admirers and lovers, her own thoughts about specific men, and her first adultery that day, eliminating the possibility of presuming her either a loose woman or a heroine of free love. By establishing such consensual facts, they clarify a good deal about her and can appreciate the difficulty with which she decides, finally, to give Leopold one more chance. They too, however, do not offer an inclusive and psychologically plausible reading of her. Since then, Elaine Unkeless' skeptical reading of Molly's conventionality (1982, pp. 150-168), Bonnie Kime Scott's sensible overview (1984, pp. 156-183), Suzette Henke's ranging Lacanian discernment (1990, pp. 126-163), and Richard Pearce's collection of cultural studies ( 1 ~ ~have 4 ) enhanced what we know. Yet historicized, politicized, abstracted, empiricized, and psychologized, Molly Bloom's living image has not been addressed sufficiently in all its confusing and engaging qualities in the here and now. Valuable as the commentaries have been, a poignant irony emerges: readers of Ulysses have matched Molly's depicted contemporaries in a readiness to foreclose her. I run the same risk, of course, but will try to convince by staying close to the text and remaining hospitable to other perspectives. Vitality of Molly B/oom/zo7

About some things we can be clear. She was born on Gibraltar thirty-three years earlier. She never knew her mother, for reasons that remain mysterious. Her father, Brian Tweedy, an Irish sergeant-major in the British army, raised her with the aid of several elderly women, most notably pious and stern Mrs. Rubio, whom Molly remembers with annoyance-an attitude she transfers easily to her cleaning lady and to Mrs. Riordan (Stephen's "Dante"), whom the Blooms knew in the City Arms Hotel. Old women do not please her. By contrasting, her father figures kindly in her thoughts. As a soldier's daughter she has glowing memories of parades, ceremonies, and colors, of officers' talk and band-night strolls on an officer's arm. She remembers Gibraltar's hot sun, the flowers and the sea, the multiplicity of peoples on the island, and her discoveries of early adolescence there. Although she mentions no current close women friends, she longingly invokes Hester Stanhope, a Gibraltar friend nearly her own age, married to a much older man. Molly and Hester's husband had begun to be somewhat aware of each other when the Stanhopes left. That was awful: "it got as dull as the devil after they went I was almost planning to run away mad out of it" (18.676-677); ". . . so bored sometimes I could fight with my nails" (18.699-700). She remarks sadly: "people were always going away and we never" (18.668). Eventually, she and her father settled in Dublin, she met Bloom, and at eighteen, she married him. They conceived Milly immediately-and perhaps before the wedding night (17.227~-2278).By now they have been married sixteen years. Milly, herself an adolescent, lately has left home to work as a photographer's assistant in Mullingar. Her mother supposes that Bloom is behind the move, suspecting his prescience and possible permission for herself and Boylan, but she recognizes that she and Milly could no longer abide under the same roof. Milly's departure leaves an empty nest: only Molly 208/ Vitality of

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and Leopold at 7 Eccles Street. Molly has to remind herself not to shop for three. And since their little son died, sexual contact between them has been exceedingly strange, involving attentiveness and often tenderness, varieties of fore- and alternative play, his selecting pornographic books for her to read, and, as the parodically objective "Ithaca" chapter reports it, "a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ" (17.2282-2284). So Molly turned to Boylan after an epic wait-as long as the Trojan War. The aftermath we can observe in her unremitting stream of consciousness early the next morning, which channels her anxiety, thereby energizing her process of thoughts without her being conscious of it. But what could Molly be so deeply anxious about-other than change, that is, which may be crucial for her but as formulated is too abstract, too conceptual, for such sounding? M y answer will be roundabout, essayed by way of the specific contents that bring her thoughts to a halt, however briefly. Literary form comes to our aid. The paragraph endings prove revealing. The first, for example, occurs when she thinks about Mrs. Maybrick, who put arsenic in her husband's tea. "theyre not brutes enought to go and hang a woman surely are they" (18.2~4-2~5), Molly wonders-and halts, presumably not liking the retort she could adumbrate. Then she darts in a different direction, albeit a related one, toward men who have desired her with some success: Bloom, while courting; Boylan; Bartell d'Arcy, the tenor who kissed her on the stairs after a choir concert; and the mysterious Gardner five years back, the one Leopold knows nothing about, who embraced well, whom she did not sleep with, and who died of enteric fever in the Boer War. This drift ends when she recalls trying to persuade Mr. Cuffe, whom Bloom had insulted, not to fire him. Cuffe refusedVitality of Molh Bloom/zo9

Molly notes with pride-regretfully: "I just half smiled I know my chest was out that way at the door when he said Im extremely sorry and Im sure you were" (18.532-534). Puffed with her attractiveness, triumphant in that way, she holds for a moment, delighted. The third paragraph finishes passionately: "Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three 0 Lord I cant wait ti1 Monday" (18.594-595); and the fourth desperately: "my goodness theres nothing else its all very fine for them but as for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out into the bottom of the ash pit" (18.745-747). Equally charged thoughts mark the ends of the other paragraphs. She passes wind with an accompanying mental rebuke of her husband while a distant train whistle provides cover: "I wish hed sleep in some bed by himself with his cold feet on me give us room to let a fart or do the least thing . . . quietly sweeeee theres that train far away pianissimo eeeeeeee one more tsong . . . that was a relief" (18.905-909). She urinates gleefully, attending to her period on the chamberpot. After articulating a prolonged imaginative scenario about Stephen, who would be her young, clean, intelligent poet-lover, curiously linked to Rudy, who would now have been the age Stephen was when first she saw him-she startlingly remembers Boylan: "0 but then what am I going to do about him though" (18.1~66-1367). So many men to keep track of! It brings her up short. A t the last, her lyrical "yes" ends the book as she merges Bloom with her first beau, Mulvey, who kissed her under the Moorish wall, and Gibraltar and father with Howth Hill, where she got Bloom to propose, affirming felt continuities between her happiest memories, her present, and her future-again, at least for the moment. Murder and adulterous love, pride of beauty, aroused sexual desire, fear of aging and of desertion, bodily discharges and an anal shove, a confusion of admirers, ecstatic fulfillment: these 210 /Vitality ofMol(y Bloom

intensities arrest her inner flow of language. For moments they cannot be contained. Our focusing example, which has its own breakthrough-Molly's association of menses and pooh-provides more clues about the range of what has stirred in her, and the urgency. After calling out to Jamesy, she follows with grumbles about women's lot, a reverie about sex being better in the afternoon, and this fantasy, which combines retaliatory hostility and exhibitionism with a wishful flight to pre-puberty: "I think I11 cut all this hair off me there scalding me I might look like a young girl wouldnt he get the great suckin the next time he turned up my clothes on me Id give anything to see his face." In turn this issues to concern that the chamberpot might break from her weight, self-conscious snippets of herself and Boylan ("he was so busy where he oughtnt to be") and a tendentious thought about urinating: "God I remember one time I could scout it out straight whistling like a man almost," before ending the paragraph with overt fantasizing about being a man: "I bet he [Boylan] never saw a better pair of thighs than that look how white they are the smoothest place is right there between this bit here how soft like a peach easy God I wouldnt mind being a man and get up on a lovely woman 0 Lord what a row youre making like the jersey lily easy 0 how the waters come down at Lahore" (18.1129-1148). In the aspect of lover to Lillie Langtree, Molly here becomes the king of England. This material bespeaks wayward desires awash, a psychic fluidity that approaches boundarylessness, transgression, and diffusion, that sweeps forward to renewed genitality and back to the earliest stages of development. It includes bisexuality, murderousness, dire vulnerability, and a resurgent, flamboyant assertiveness so pleasurable, so intense, that she backs off. Furthermore, it dovetails with aggressive and libidinous preoccupations dealt with throughout the monologue by being presented, diverged from, and continually recurred to, and in Vitalityof Molly Bloorn/zrr

that way (if I may be permitted a pun) mollified- though never fully. Her thoughts press on: "goodbye to my sleep for this night" (18.925). Molly's act of adultery and these early morning ruminations show oedipal configurations. She has made a triangle by adding Boylan, perhaps to replace the one with Milly. She considers one in which Stephen would replace Boylan, connects Stephen and Rudy, remembers her father and Mrs. Rubio and her incipient awareness of Captain Stanhope. She is fascinated with male arousal: "can you ever be up to men the way it takes them" (18.420); "you never know what freak theyd take alone with you theyre so savage for it" (18.31I312); "arent they fearful trying to hurt you"(18.570); "theyre always trying to show it to you every time nearly I passed outside the mens greenhouse near the Harcourt street station just to try some fellow or other trying to catch my eye as if it was I of the 7 wonders of the world" (18.5~9-552); quiet, mild Mr. Mastiansky taking his wife from behind; Bloom's fondness for stockings and drawers, smutty pictures and rumps; his "mad crazy letters" during their courtship ("Precious one everything connected with your glorious Body everything underlined that comes from it is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever something he got out of some nonsensical book" [18.1176-11781) that had her masturbating four or five times a day; Boylan attracted by her foot; Boylan sucking at her breasts, making them firm and her thirsty; sailors flashing; all men "mad to get in there where they come out of youd think they could never get far enough up" (18.806-807). Her own arousal is palpable and polymorphous, stretching to all areas of the body and to preoedipal rebelliousness, rage, and orality. She would like to suck a young boy's penis; she'd like to give Boylan a "great suckin" (18.1135); and she can feel her soul in a kiss: "theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyzes you" (18.105-106). 212 /

Vitality of

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So as Molly Bloom, a somewhat exotic but discreet Dublin housewife, who until that day even by strict Victorian or Edwardian standards was a respectable one-who, committing adultery, wanted to shout obscenities but didn't-thinks through what to do now about Boylan and what about Bloom, including the possibility of having another child with him ("yes thatd be awfully jolly" (18.168), she remarks early and rushes on), she simultaneously gives expression to a flood of id impulses and struggles to control it. She isn't always like this. She is in crisis-when potentials always present clamor to the fore. Two examples will suffice. She remembers herself at ten years of age, "standing at the fire with a little bit of a short shift I had up to heat myself I loved dancing about in it then make a race back into bed Im sure that fellow opposite used to be there the whole time watching" (18.919-921). And she remembers herself courted by Leopold, who perversely beseeched her for a pair of her drawers. Pleased and wonderstruck, she gave him not hers but her doll's. She still had one. Molly's ego, one might say, in both its conscious and unconscious aspects, is working overtime. She is not without controls, though they are tested. I have emphasized that the persistent process of her thoughts counts for much, and it includes such maneuvers as displacement, projection, splitting, and repression ("that thing" has come again). She is also markedly ambivalent, which provides a kind of ballast. Molly gives and takes back, asserts and lightens, expresses distaste only to find something admirable. She intends to take her ring off before going to Belfast with Boylan, "or they might bell it round the town in their papers or tell the police on me but theyd think were married 0 let them all go and smother themselves for the fat lot I care he has plenty of money and hes not a marrying man so somebody better get it out of him" (18.~09-~12). In a more pliant mood, but critical of her cleaning lady, she notes: "arent they a nuiVitality of Molb B l o o m / q

sance that old Mrs Fleming you have to be walking round after her putting the things into her hands sneezing and farting into the pots well of course shes old she cant help it" (18.1084-1085). When concerned about her "insides," she brings Dr. Collins to mind, whom before her marriage she consulted about emissions she now thinks were caused by her masturbating- though she would not use that term: "asking me had I frequent omissions where do those old fellows get all the words they have omissions with his shortsighted eyes on me cocked sideways I wouldnt trust him too far to give me chloroform or God knows what else still I liked him when he sat down to write the thing out frowning so severe his nose intelligent like that" (18.11691174). Later, feeling possessive and ruefully proud of Poldy, she thinks of his coming in late, of Paddy Dignam's funeral and the men who attended it: This is the fruits of M r Paddy Dignam . . . well theyre not going to get my husband into their clutches if I can help it making fun of him then behind his back I know well when he goes on with his idiotics because he has sense enough not to squander every penny piece he earns down their gullets and looks after his wife and family goodfornothings poor Paddy Dignam all the same Im sorry in a way for him what are his wife and 5 children going to do unless he was insured comical little teetotum always stuck up on some pub corner and her or her son waiting Bill Bailey wont you please come home (18.1260-1283). O r consider her asseverations on women: "either he wants what he wont get or its some woman ready to stick her knife in you I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles 21q/Vitality ofMol(y Bloom

we have makes us so snappy" (18.1457-1460). Molly can't be angry or nasty without making amends, or flatly changing the subject. Writ large, her pattern of doing and undoing becomes her path for deciding about Boylan and Bloom-although, given the style, reversals are always possible. Clearly, Boylan thrilled her: "0thanks be to the great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me" (18.732733). But early on she resents him slapping her rump, just as if she were one of his father's horses. She plays with running off with him and provoking a scandal. In time, however, Boylan's crassness and stupidity compare terribly with her hopes for Stephen: "The ignoramus [Boylan] that doesnt know poetry from a cabbage . . . of course hes right enough in his way to pass the time as a joke sure you might as well be in bed with what with a lion God Im sure hed have something better to say for himself an old Lion would" (18.1370-1378). By the end, via the fantasy about Stephen, linked to Rudy and leading to Bloom, Blazes Boylan seems to be dismissed from her thoughts. A similar route, going the opposite way, affects Leopold. Stanley Sultan has argued that through the course of her monologue Molly arrives at her decisive attitude toward her husband, answering in kind his Odyssean return to her. From initial mild favor in her thoughts, Poldy plummets; but by the end she crystallizes her acceptance of him. But Molly's inner oscillations contain and ventilate, can serve stasis or adaptation. So, perhaps. All commentators remark how enmeshed Molly is with Bloom. No matter how far she travels mentally, she always returns to him, and whether puzzled, annoyed, dismayed, fascinated, amused, or pleased, her attention plays on him. She is dependent in that way, but thus she also complements him, answers his preoccupation with her during the day. She reveals Vitality of M o b Bloom /215

qualities akin to his: "because the day before yesterday he was scribbling something a letter when I came into the front room for the matches to show him Dignams death in the paper as if something told me and he covered it up with blotting paper pretending to be thinking about business" (18.46-49). The parallel to his noticing that morning that she'd hidden Boylan's note under her pillow is obvious. Molly watches him as closely and as surreptitiously as he does her. She thinks he has been having sex elsewhere: "so very probably that was it to somebody who thinks she has a softy in him . . . and then the usual kissing my bottom was to hide it" (18.50-53). She has other traits like his. She gave charity-as did he, handsomely, to Dignam's family; and he acted charitably toward Stephen. When Molly hears a train's whistle she pities the trainmen away from their families; and remembering bullfights on Gibraltar she registers dislike for the violence done to the horses. So there is kindness in her. She fits the lonesome man who threw Banbury cake to the gulls. Several times she affirms his preferability to other women's husbands. She likes his manners and cleanliness, his caring and his learning, such as it is-though she mocks it. "still he knows a lot of mixed up things especially about the body and the insides": that she respects. And he is polite to old women. Her anger and complaints are manifest: "any man thatd kiss a womans bottom Id throw my hat at him after that hed kiss anything unnatural where we havent I atom of any kind of expression in us the same 2 lumps of lard before ever I do that to a man pfooh the dirty brutes . . . of course a woman wants to be embraced 20 times a day almost to make her look young no matter by who so long as to be in love or loved by somebody if the fellow you want isnt there sometimes by the Lord God" (18.1~01-1410).Still, "something always happens" (18.357) with Leopold. A willful fellow, officious about his knowledge of music and women's clothes, not sufficiently suc2r6/

Vitalityof Molly Bloom

cessful and at times embarrassing, he is always interesting. She enjoys the oddity in him. Fondly and laughingly she remembers her swollen breasts hurting her after weaning Milly, "till he got doctor Brady to give me the belladonna prescription I had to get him to suck them they were so hard he said it was sweet and thicker than cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea well hes beyond everything I declare somebody ought to put him in the budget if only I could remember the one half of the things and write a book out of it the works of Master Poldy yes" (18.575-580). Poldy is her problem; but psychologically, in her crisis-ruminations, she may be said to organize around him. There is one more pattern of containment cooperating with the unslackening process of her thoughts, her balancing ambivalence, and her recurrence to Bloom: Molly's narcissism. She refers everything to herself- assesses herself validated by it or not, triumphant or failed. That is why she is so competitive. How better to secure a diffusable self than to bang up against what one is not? That accounts for the edge of battle in her pride of beauty, as with Mr. Cuffe; her temper about men who distract Poldy from attending to her; her shortness with causes and learning. Her self-reference bears on her generalized dislike of men or women at different moments, her fascination with who has what and with who has more: "nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure" (18.157); "they have friends they can talk to weve none" (18.1456-1457). She thinks of Boylan at her breasts: "he couldnt resist they excite myself sometimes its well for men all the amount of pleasure they get off a womans body were so round and white for them always I wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they have swelling upon you so hard and at the same time so soft when you touch it" (18.1379-1383). Gardner, she remembers, "said no man could look at my mouth and teeth and not think of it" (18.888-889). Compliments gratify Vitality of M o N y Bloorn/217

her deeply. And ordinariness appalls. She has tart things to say of other Irish women singers: "Kathleen Kearney and her lot of squealers Miss This Miss That Miss Theother lot of sparrowfarts skitting around talking about politics they know as much about as my backside anything in the world to make themselves someway interesting Irish homemade beauties soldiers daughter am I ay and whose are you bootmakers and publicans I beg your pardon coach I thought you were a wheelbarrow" (18.8781883). It's a nice touch that Molly remembers whistling "theres a charming girl I love" when tossing the coin to the crippled sailor. For self-regard preserves her, just as crucially as what she knows about Bloom does: "I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and knew I could always get round him" (18.15781579). Without both, but especially that sense of her power over him, she could be nothing. Why, then, did Molly commit adultery, and why this tremulous aftermath? After long holding to a pattern of complicitly nongenital interaction with Leopold-one they both trace to the death of their infant son and obviously different from their preceding pattern, which produced two children-Molly has pushed forward again to genitality. Her adultery with Boylan broke a regressed tie to Bloom, and that inner change contributes to her tremulousness. W h a t apparently provided the impetus, however, was Milly's puberty: her attendant acerbity to Molly and flirtatiousness with Leopold, and the path she has now taken toward a separate life. Molly reflects on the family name she acquired in marriage, prefers it to Breen, Briggs, Mulvey, Boylan, "or those awful names with bottom in them Mrs Ramsbottom or some other kind of bottom," and suddenly links three generations of women: "my mother whoever she was might have given me a nicer name the Lord knows after the lovely one she had Lunita Laredo the fun we [she zr8/ Vitality of Molb Bloom

and Mulvey] had running along Willis road to Europa point twisting in and out all round the other side of Jersey they were shaking and dancing in my blouse like Millys little ones now when she runs up the stairs I loved looking down at them" (18.844-851). Milly's development has revived Molly's wishfulness about her mother and vibrant memories of her own young sexuality. Annoyed with but proud of Milly, Molly registers delight in herself and her fears of getting old: Leopold "helping her into her coat but if there was anything wrong with her its me shed tell not him . . . I suppose he thinks Im finished out and laid on the shelf well Im not no nor anything like it" (18.1020-1023); "her tongue is a bit too long for my taste your blouse is open too low she says the pan calling the kettle blackbottom and I had to tell her not to cock her legs up like that on show on the windowsill before all the people passing they all look at her like me when I was her age" (18.1033-1036) Before confronting the empty nest, Molly knew the enlivening challenge of an all-too-full one and began to reclaim her desire. Her thrust forward includes her thought, briefly aired early in the monologue, of trying for another child with Leopold; and near the end, during the prolonged fantasy about Stephen through which she arrives at her apparent reacceptance of her husband, she has a poignant series of associations: "when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had thats why I suppose hes running wild now" (18.1~36-1~42). It is Stephen she means, whose mother died and whose father Molly has called a "criticizer": "well its a poor case that those Vitality of

Molb Bloom/z19

that have a fine son like that theyre not satisfied and I none." The imagined lover to replace Boylan thus leads to her dead infant: "that disheartened me altogether I suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same since 0 Im not going to think myself in the glooms about that any more" (18.1~~~-1451). This sequence unlocks a good deal, I think. Their little son's death long ago touched Molly's ache of absence; and she retreated from genitality (Poldy did too, we know) to avoid another such loss. Nothing ventured, nothing gained to potentially and so painfully lose again. Rudy's was their first death but not Molly's. I t evoked hers: the core inner one of the mother "to look after her" she never had, though everyone else did (Schwaber, 1983; Good, 1987; Henke, 1990). Hence the halt to intercourse, though she knew she could bring Poldy round if she wanted to (18.187). Hence the importance to her of Hester, who taught her and held her: "Hester we used to compare our hair mine was thicker than hers she showd me how to settle it at the back when I put it up and whats this else how to make a knot on a thread with the one hand we were like cousins what age was I then the night of the storm I slept in her bed she had her arms around me then we were fighting in the morning with the pillow what fun" (18.638-643). Hence the idealization of Gibraltar-an inclusive, warm, colorful, nurturing place, a maternal substitute or screen-compared with which her life in Dublin inevitably seems gray. Other strands connect with her missing mother too: Molly's aggrandizing narcissism- a compensation; her vulnerability, which she counters with competitive thoughts; her store of anger and ambivalence; her fear of aging; her nostalgia. Her imprecision about bodily knowledge also may derive from this. Freud taught that the ego is first and 22o/Vitality of Molly Bloom

foremost a body ego (1923, p. 26). But Molly had no mother whose dependable touching, washing, hugging, and overseeing could help her to define her boundaries. So she thinks about Milly, for example, "of course she cant feel anything deep yet I never came properly ti1 I was what 22 or so" (18.1050-IO~I),as if the two statements relate simply and logically. Even her belief in God has maternal echoes: "for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves" (18.1563-1566). Create something-the way mothers, she knows, even when not there, can. "People were always going away and we never" (18.668); "I suppose theyre dead long ago . . . its like all through a mist makes you feel so old" (18.636-637); "were never easy where we are" (18.677-678). Loss is what she is heir to, what she guards against most, in living memorial to her old injury of soul. However much she accepts or wants the present changes in her life, therefore, they reverberate deeply and frighteningly. She has lost Milly now, and Poldy too -not actually or completely, of course, but as she has depended on their being for quite a while. O f the mother for whom she still longs, she knows only a name and that her eyes and figure were like her own. Careful and perhaps ashamed of the mystery of her mother, she did not tell Leopold about it until they were engaged. That fact alone invites speculation. But one thing Molly has believed: that Lunita Laredo either was Jewish or looked Jewish (see Herring, 1987, p p 117-40, Henke, 1990, pp. 249-250). And thus Lunita's daughter was ready for Leopold Bloom. She remembers their first meeting vividly: "he excited me I dont know how the first night ever we met when I was living in Rehoboth terrace we stood staring at one another for about 10 minutes as we met somewhere I suppose on account of my being jewess looking after my mother" (18.1181-1185). Their mutual recogVitalityof Molb B/oom/221

nition was mutual transference: "we stood staring as if we met somewhere."* From that instant Poldy fulfilled her abiding wish for a maternal person, whatever else she saw and liked in him. And since the blow to them both of Rudy's death, he has "looked after" her: caring, making breakfast, being the butt of her assertiveness, and making no genital demands. For more than a decade they maintained a holding environment involving mother and child. Consequently, Molly's desire to leave it now and her new experience of adultery stir her from core to periphery. By ending with Molly Bloom, Ulysses extends the democracy of epic interest from Stephen and Leopold to her, and potentially to everyone. So thoroughly is she rendered that one can perceive and ponder her and offer a psychoanalytically informed interpretation of her. Molly has an actual situation, inner dynamics, and an internalized past. A n illusion of verbal art, she exists: a specific woman, real and free, capable even of calling to Joyce. She entered his dreams that way-escaping him, his interpretation, this one, or any other. As he wrote for Herbert Gorman: I saw Molly Bloom on the hillock under a sky full of moonlit clouds rushing overhead. She had just picked up from the grass a child's black coffin and flung it after the figure of a man passing down a side road by the field she was in. It struck his shoulders and she said, "I've done with you." The man was Bloom seen from behind. There was a shout of laughter from some American journalists in the road opposite, led by Ezra Pound. I was very in*At that moment Leopold may have refound his father, who died a year earlier. 222/

Vitality of Molly Bloom

dignant and vaulted over a gate into the field and strode up to her and delivered the one speech of my life. It was very long, eloquent and full of passion, explaining all the last episode of Ulysses to her. She wore a black opera cloak, or sortie de dal, had become slightly grey and looked like la Duse. She smiled when I ended on an astronomical climax, and then, bending, picked up a tiny snuffbox, in the form of a little black coffin, and tossed it towards me, saying, "And I have done with you, too, Mr. Joyce" (quoted in Ellmann, 1959, p. 549). Symbolically, she casts him aside-the final turn of my titleas do Poldy, Stephen, Rudy, and all the others, whenever the Ulysses narrator and a reader settle into the play space of culture for a good read.

Vitality of Molh Bloom /223

Adams, R. M. (1962). Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce's Ulysses. New York: Oxford University Press. Benstock, B. (1991). Narrative C o n G x t s in Ulysses. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Benstock, S. (197~).IS H e a Jew or a Gentile or a Holy Roman? James Joyce Quarterly 16 :493-497. Bloom, H . (1973). The Anxiety of Injuence: A Theory @Poetry. New York: New York University Press. Breuer, J., and S. Freud. (1893-1895). Studies on Hysteria. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Work of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. (1966-1974), vol. 2. Brivic, S. (11380).Joyce Between Freud andJung. Port Washington: Kennikat Press. Budgen, F. (1941). James Joyce. In James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. S. Givens. New York: Vanguard Press, 1948, pp. 19-26. Burgess, A . (1~65).Re Joyce. New York: Norton, 1968. Chace, W. M. (19~1).Historical Realism: An Eco. James Joyce Quarterly 28: 889-901. Cheyette, B. (1993). Constructions of "theJew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davison, N. R . ( 1 ~ ~ 6James ) . Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction ofJewish Identity: Culture, Biography, and "theJew" in Modernist Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Drinka, G . F. 1 9 8 ~ )The . Birth $Neurosis: Myth, Malady, and the Victorians. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ellmann, R . (195~).James Joyce: New and Revised Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Epstein, E. L. (15182).Joyce and Judaism. In The Seventh $Joyce, ed. B. Benstock. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 221-224. Fogel, D. M. (1979). James Joyce, the Jews and U(yses. James Joyce Quarterly 16:498-501.

French, M. (1976). The Book as World:James Joycei Ulysses. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works gSigmund Freud [hereafter S.E.], trans. and ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. (1966-197~),vols. 4 and j. , (1905). Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. S.E., 7:3-122, . (1909). Family Romances. S.E., 9 : 235-241. . (1~14a).O n Narcissism: A n Introduction. S.E., 14:69-107. . (191~b).Remembering, Repeating, and Worlung-Through (Further Reflections on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis 11). S.E., rz:14j-156. , (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. S.E., 14:239-258 , (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. S.E., 18:67-143. . (1923). T h e Ego and the Id. S.E., 19:3-66. Froula, C . (1996). Modernism's Body: Sex, Culture, andJoyce. New York: Columbia University Press. Gifford, D., with R. J. Seidman (1988). Ulysses Annotated: NotesforJames Joyce's Ulysses. Second edition, revised and enlarged, of Notesfor Joyce, 1974. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldberg, S. L. (1961). The Classical Zmper: A Study ofJames Joyce's Ulysses. London: Chatto and Windus. Goldman, A . (1966). TheJoyce Paradox: Form and Freedom in His Fiction. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Good, J. (1987). Behind Taitering Lips: Molly Bloom's Losses and Sexual Guilt. Literature and Psychology 33 : 1-11. Halberstadt-Freud, H . C . (1996). Studies on Hysteria One Hundred Years O n : A Century of Psychoanalysis. International Journal ofPsychoana4sis 77:983-996. Hart, C . ( 1 9 7 ~ Wandering ) Rocks. I n James Joycei Ulysses: CriticalEssays, ed. C . Hart and D. Hayman. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 181-216. . (1993). Gaps and Cracks in U(ysses.James Joyce Quarter4 30:42737. Hayman, D. (197oa). T h e Empirical Molly. In Approaches to Ulysses: Ten Essays, ed. T. F. Staley and B. Benstock. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 103-136 . (1970b). Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning. New edition, revised and expanded. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.

Henke, S. (1990).James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. New York: Routledge. Herring, P. F. (1987) Joycei Uncertainty Principle. Princeton: Princeton University Press. . Jewishness $Mr. Bloom/Z>asJudische an Hildesheimer, W. ( 1 9 8 ~ )The Mr. B/oom. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Honton, M . (1976). Molly's Mistresstroke. James Joyce Quarter(y 14: 25-30. Hyman, L. (1972). The Jews OfIreland: From Earliest Times to the Year 1910. Shannon: Irish University Press. Jones, E. (19~9).Hamlet and Oedipus. Garden City: Doubleday. Joyce, J. (191~).Dubliners, ed. R. Scholes. New York: Viking, 1967. , (1916). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. R . Ellmann. New York: Vilung, 1964. . (1922). Ulysses; The Corrected Text, ed. H . W. Gabler, with W. Steppe and C . Melchior. New York: Random House, 1986. . (1957, 1966). Letters $James Joyce, Vol. I, ed. S. Gilbert, 1957, reissued with corrections, 1966; Vols. I1 and 111, ed. R . Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1966. . ( 1 9 6 ~ )The Workshop ofDaeda/us; James Joyce and the R a w M a terialsfor A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. R . Scholes and R . PI. Kain. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kellog, R. (197~).Scylla and Charybdis. In James Joyce? Ulysses: Critical Essays, ed. C . Hart and D. Hayman. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 147-179. Kenner, H . (1974). Molly's Masterstroke. In Ulysses: F t f y Years, ed. T. F. Staley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 19-28. . (1978). Joycei Voices. Berkeley: University of California Press. . ( 1 ~ 8 0 )Ulysses. . Revised Edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Lawrence, K. (1981). The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Levitt, M . P. (1972). The Family of Bloom. In New Light on Joycefrom the Dublin Symposium, ed. F. Senn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 141-148. . (1~82). T h e Humanity of Bloom, the Jewishness of Joyce. In The Seventh of Joyce, ed. B. Benstock. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 225-228. "Wandering Rocks,"and the Reader: McCormick, K. ( 1 ~ ~ 1Ulysses, ). Multiple Pleasures in Reading. Studies in British Literature, vol. 12. Lewiston, Me.: Edwin Mellen Press.

, ( 1 9 9 ~ )Reproducing . Molly Bloom: A Revisionist History of the Reception of "Penelope," 1922-1970. In MoNy Blooms: A Polylogue on "Pene1ope"and Cultural Studies, ed. R . Pearce. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 17-39. McGee, P. (1988). Paperspace: Styk as Ideology in Joycei Ulysses. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Maddox, J. H., Jr. (1978).Joyce? Ulysses and the Assault upon Character. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Mahaffey, V.(1988). Reauthorizing Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nadel, I. B. (1986). Joyce and the Jews. Modern Judaism 6:301-310. . (1989).Joyce and the Jews: Culture and Texts. London: Macmillan. N e w Catholic Encyclopedia. (1967). 18 vols. New York: McGrawHill. O'Connor, F. (1967). The Backward Look: A Survey of Irish Literature. London: Macmillan. Pearce, R., ed. (1994). Mol(y Blooms; A Po(y1ogue on "Penelopenand Cultural Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Raleigh, J. H . (1977). The Chronicle of Leopold and Mol(y Bloom: Ulysses as Narrative. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reizbaum, M . (1982).T h e Jewish Connection, Cont'd. In The Seventh oSJyce, ed. B. Benstock. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 229-237. Riquelme, J. P. (1983) Teller and Tale in Joyce? Fiction; Oscillating Perspectives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schoenbaum, S. (1970). Shakespeare? Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schutte, W . M . (1957).Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in the Meaning of Ulysses. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schwaber, P. (1983) Molly Bloom and Literary Character. Massachusetts Review z4:767-89. Scott, B. K. (1984).Joyce and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Senn, F. (1972a). Book of Many Turns. In Joyce? Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. J. P. Riquelme. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, pp. 121-137. . (1972b). T h e Rhythm of U(ysses.In Joyce? Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. J. P. Riquelme. Baltimore: Johns Hopluns University Press, 1984, pp. 188-198. . ( 1 9 7 ~ )Nausicaa. . In James Joycei Ulysses: Critical Essays, ed.

C . Hart and D. Hayman. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 277-3" , (1~83). Dislocution. In Joyce? Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. J. P. Riquelme. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, pp. 199-212. Shakespeare, W. (1600-1601). Hamlet, ed. E. Hubler. New York: New American Library, 1963. Shapiro, D. (1965). Neurotic Styles. T h e Austen Riggs Center Monograph Series, no. j. New York: Basic. Shechner, M. (1974). Joyce in Nighttown: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sherry, V.(1994). James Joyce, Ulysses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Showalter, E. (1997). Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. A . (1981). The Literary Use of the Psychoana(ytic Process. New Skura, AM. Haven: Yale University Press. Spoo, R. (1994). James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus? Nightmare. New York: Oxford University Press. Steinberg, E. R. (1981). James Joyce and the Critics Notwithstanding, Leopold Bloom Is Not Jewish. Journal $Modern Literature 19:27-49. , (1939). Reading Leopold B l o o m / ~ ~ ino1989. ~ James Joyce Quarter(y 26:397-416. Sultan, S. (1~64).The Argument ofulysses. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. . (197). Eliot, Joyce and Company. New York: Oxford University Press. Thomas, B. (1~82).James Joyce? Ulysses: A Book of Many Happy Returns. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Unkeless, E. (1982). T h e Conventional Molly Bloom. In Women in Joyce, ed. S. Henke and E. Unkeless. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 150-168, ) . Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of Wilson, E. ( 1 ~ ~ 1Axel? 1870-1930. New York: Scribner's.

Characters depicted in U(ysses are denoted with (U). Initials are used in the index for the following characters' names: Leopold Bloom is LB, hIolly Bloom is MB, and Steven Dedalus is SD. Adams, Robert Martin, 106-107, 207 Aggression, 121; creativity and, 158; LB and, 1 2 0 , 144-145, 196; M B and, 210-212; narrator and, 121, 158-159 See also Anger Aging, MB's fears of, 219, 2 2 0 Ambivalence: of LB, 133, 147; of MB, 213-215, 220; of SD, '76-177 Anger, 18, 121; of LB, 103-104, 121, 122-123, 124, 127, 144, 149151, 196-197; of M B , 205, 215, 220; of SD, 64-65, 77, 151-157. See also Aggression Anti-Semitism, 94, 98-106, 133, 134-1351 175, 181, 187-189, 197 Anxiety, of ,MB, 206, 209 Association, 181,192, 205, 219

Benstock, Bernard, 30 Best, Richard (U), 41, 42, 49, 61, 63 Bisexuality, 211 Bloom, Leopold (U), mi, 79-83, 17.1, 124-125; adultery of M B

and, 80,88, 91, 92-93,97,103, 107, "7, 121, 127, 128, 147-148, 181, 7.08; and adultery of others, 177-181; anger and, 103-104, 121, 122-123, 124, 127-138, 144, 149-151,196-197; and Boylan, 79-80, 125, 128, 131, 134, 139, 142-143; as caregiver to MB, 2 0 0 , 205-206, 222; compassion of, 122; correspondence of (with ,Martha), 89-90, "3, 147, 197; daughter of (see Bloom, LMilly); defenses of, 84, 89-91,103-104, 108, 1 2 0 , 135, 148, 189, 191192, 197; depression and, 123, 127-128, 133, 137, 149-150, 196; digestion and hunger of, 121, 124, 127-132, 140-141, 144; and Dignam's funeral, 90, 98, 103, 173-174, 214; and Dilly Dedalus, 15; employment of, 81; erotica and, 19, 135-136, 147, 209; exile and, 18j-186; fantasies of, 84, 85-86,113-118, 123, 125, 127, 143144, 148, 150, 194-196; father of (Rudolph), 90, 93-95, 109-110, 112, 185, 197, 222; grandfather

of (Lipoti Virag), 96, 116-117; guilt of, 204-205, 206; Jewishness of (see Jewishness of LB); and Kernan, 6-7; masculinity and, 21, 105-106, 112, 116, 119120, 142, 150; masturbation of (with Gerty), 29-39, 145-149; and M'Coy, 18-22; mother of (Ellen Higgins),.94, 109, I I O 111, 137, 150, 185, 186, 197; as Odysseus analog, xv, zoo, 215; politics and, 104-105, 114, 125126, 175-176, 178-179; potato of, 82-83, 109, 112, 117,150; sexual dysfunction of, 97, 112-113, 119120,136-138, 147, 209; sexuality and, 18, 85, 88, 89, 91-92, 123, 128; sexuality of, with MB, 123124,134,135-136, 197, 200, 209, 213; and Shakespeare theory, 41, 78; and smells, 148-149, 193194; and son (see Bloom, Rudy); wife of (see Bloom, Molly); and women, generally, 145-151 Bloom, Milly (U), 90, 91, 92, 188, 208, 212, 217, 218, 219, 221 Bloom, ~Molly(U), xvi, 208-209; adultery of, 200-202, 203-204, 206-207, 209, 210, 212-213, 215; adultery of, causes, 218-222; and adultery of others, 201, 204; ambivalence of, 213-215, 220; anger of, 205, 215, 220; anxiety of, 206, 209; attractiveness to others, 20-22, 2 0 2 , 209-210, 217-218; choosing LB, 207, 215-217, 218, 219; compassion of, 202, 216; daughter of (see Bloom, Milly); and empty nest,

208-209, 218, 219; enmeshment of, with LB, 215-217, 218-219; father of (Brian Tweedy), 208, 212; as fictive person, 199-200, 205, 206-207, 222-223; friendship and, 208; guilt of, 204-205, 206; and husband (see Bloom, Leopold); on men, 198, 205, 209-210, 212, 217; menstruation of, 146, 201, 203, 205, 206, 210; mother of (Lunita Laredo), 208, 218-219, 220-222; narcissism of, 217-218, 220; as Penelope analog, 200; pregnancies of, 125; and religion, 221; and SD, 180-181, 210, 212, 215, 219-220; sexual cessation of, 220, 222; as singer, 19,95,131,141,202; smell of, 149; and son (Rudy), 9697, 137, 197, 210, 220; thought processes of, 200-206, 209-213; on women, 208, 211, 214-215, 218, 219 Bloom, Rudy (U), death of, 90-91; LB and, 118, 125, 184, 205-206, 222; LB's sexual dysfunction and, 97, 137-138, 196-197, 222; M B and, 96-97,137,197,210, 220

Boylan, Blazes ( U ) : adultery of (see at Bloom, Molly); function of, 23-24; LB and, 79-80, 125,128, 131, 134, 139,142-143; as MB's agent, 19,9j, 131, 132,202 Breen, Denis (U), 103, 122 Breen, Josie (U), 122,123 Budgen, Frank, 3,106, 198 Burgess, Anthony, 159, 160 Byme, D a y (U), 123, 130, 132, I33

Cast, as term, xiii-xiv, 223 Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism Chace, William, 166 Chamberlain, Joe (U), 126 Cheyette, Brian, 106-107 Childbirth, 122, 125, 126, 127, 160-166 Christianity: LB and, 90. See also Religion "Circe," 108-rr8,1zo, 149,150, 152-153, 154-157, 158, 166, 169, 192 Citizen, the (U), 23, 98-99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 107, 133, 138, 144, 149,150,1752 181 Clifford, Martha (U), 89-90, "3, '47, I97 Cohen, Bella (U), 115-116, 150, 167 Commee, Fr. John (U), 3,24-28 Compromise formation, 148 Consubstantiality, 48, 68, 70-71, 74>75?I54 Consumerism, 30,31 Containment, 192. See also Anger; Recovery Countertransference, 38-39 Cranly (U), 61-62, 63, 71 Crawford, Myles (U), 81 Cunningham, Martin (the citizen)

(u), 22, 25, 95-96, 98, 100, 103, 145,190 "cyclops," 99-101, 158, 169 Dandrade, Miriam (U), 123 Davison, Neil R., 106 Deasy, Garrett (U), 51, 98, 174 Death: LB and, 93-97, 190-191 (see also Bloom, Rudy); M B and, 96-97,137,197, 2x0, 220; S D

and, 51,s~-59,61~64-6577, 190; of spirit, 139; suicide, 95 Dedalus, Dilly (U), 13-17, 23, 122, 152 Dedalus, Stephen (U), xvi, 5052; anger of, 64-65, 77,151-157; defenses of, 64, 189; drinking and, 51, 151, 154, 160; exile and, 42-43> 59-65, 67, 68; father of (Simon), 8, 67-68, 73-74, 81, 95,139,140,141-142,173,185; friendship and, 42-43> 59-65, 67, 154, 175-176, 187-188; and LB, 153, 160, 167,168-171, 174-177, 182-183, 186-191, 192; mother

of (Mary), 51,s~-59,61,64-65, 77, 153, 155-157, 185, 188; and Mulligan, 23; religion and, 52, 54, 61-62, 67, 70-71, 155-157, 161, 174, 175, 187-189; Shakespeare theory of (see Shakespeare theory); siblings of, 13-17, 23, 63-65, 67,73, 122, 152, 153; as teacher, 51, 55-56; as Telemachus analog, zoo; writerly ambitions of, 23, 48-49, 51, 58, 62, 66-67,75-76 Defenses: of LB, 84,89-91, 103104, 108, 1 2 0 , 135, 148, 189, 191-192, 197; of SD, 64,189 Depression: LB and, 123, 127-128, 133,137,149-150,196; SD and, 77 Dignam, Paddy, and family (U), 3, 4, 17, 18, 20, 90, 98, 103,173-1741 214, 216 Digression, 189 Displacement, 127, 178, 213 Dlugacz (U), 7 9 , 8 4 4 5 Dodd, Reuben J. (U), 98

Doubling, 33 Douce, Lydia (U), 139-140, 142, '43 Dreams, 166 Drinking: LB and, 7, 9 9 - I O O , I O ~ , 107, 138, 142; male chumminess and, 17; as refuge, 12, 138; S D and, 51, 151, 154, 160; women's opportunities and, 31-32 Dublin, Ireland, 50 Dubhers, 2, 12, 2 2

Eglinton, John (U), 43,44,49,59, 61, 63,69,74 Ego, body and, 220-221 Ego ideal, 66 Ellmann, Richard, 106, 207 "Eumaeus," 158, 167-183 Exile: LB and, 185-186; S D and, 42-43, 59-65? 673 68 Family romance, 65-66 Fathering: LB and, 90, 93-95, 109-110, rrz, 185, 197,222; M B and, 208, 212; S D and, 48-50, 65-78,155 Flynn, Nosey (U), 130-132, 133, '50 French, Marilyn, 159, 207 Freud, Sigmund: body ego, 2 2 0 221; dreams, 166; hysteria, 3536; negative oedipal dynamics, 73; parents, separation from, 6566; positive oedipal dynamics, 50-51; psychotherapeutic relief, "7. See also Psychoanalysis Friendship: LB and, 118-119, 142; male chumminess, 17, 22, 142, 160-164, 189; M B and, 208;

S D and, 42-43,59-65,67,154, 175-176, 187-188 Gender: M B and, 211, 217; of narrator, 159 Goldberg, S. L., 159 Gorman, Herbert, 222 Goulding, Richie (U), 139, 140141, I43 Griffith, Arthur (U), 86 Guilt: L B and, 96-97,109-110; M B and, 204-205, 206; S D and, 542 58, 64,66,154 Haines (U), 40, 60, 61, 66, 98 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 43-45,48, 50, 51,547 65>69 Hart, Clive, xi Hayman, David, xviii, 207 Henke, Suzette, 207 Higgins, Zoe (U), 114, 117, 150 Homosexuality, 72-73, 74, 142 Hynes, Joe (U), So, 100 Hysteria, 35-36 Illusion, Ulysses and, xii-xvi Intellectualization, 67, 189 "Ithaca," 112-113,158, 167,183-197 Jewishness of Leopold Bloom, 83-91, 106-108; anti-Semitism and, 94,98-106,1o4,133,134135,175,181, 187-189,197; as defense, 8 9 - ~ I , I O ~ , I Z O , I ~ I 192,197; lineage and, 185-186; M B and, 221 Johnson, Georgina (U), 73, 154, '67 Jones, Ernest, 50

Joyce, James, xii, xiii, xiv, 2-3, 106, 172, 198; and MB, 202, 205,211, 222-223 Kennedy, Mina, 139-140,142 Kenner, Hugh, 98, 166 Kernan, Tom (U), 5-13, 17-18, 19 Language, of "Eumaeus," 169-172 Lawrence, Karen, 29, 159, 164, 166, 168 Lenehan, T, (U), 18-22, 81, 99, 132 "Lestrygonians, The," 121-135 Love: LB on, 104-105 Lyons, Bantam (U), 82 Lyster, Thomas William (U), 41, 42,49,61,63

MacDowell, Gerty (U), 29-39, 145-1499 169 MacHugh (U), 81, 97 Maddox, James, Jr., 159 Magee, W. K. See Eglinton, John Male chumminess, 17, 22, 142, 160-164, 189. See also Friendship ,MICoy, C. P. (U), 18-22, 92, 146, '50, '73 Men, M B on, 198, 205, 209210, 212, 217. See aho Gender; Women Menton, John Henry (U), 122, 178, 192 Minor character functions, 22-24 Mothering: LB and, 94, 109, 110111, 137, 150, 185, 186, 197; M B and, 197, 208, 218-219, 220-222; S D and, 51,52-59,64-65,70, 71-72? 77, 153, 188 Mulligan, Buck (U), 23, 40, 41, 50,

Narrative style, xii-xiii, 105; characterization and, 17; of entr'acte, 2-5, 12-13, 24-25, 28-29, 157168, 158; initial, xii, xv-xvi, 1-2, 12-13? 41-46, 49-50> 121, 145, 158, 171, 198; later (see Narrative style, later) Narrative style, later, xiii, 28-29, 157-159,167-168, 171-172, 192; aggression in, 121, I 58-159; anger and, 157-166; of "Circe," 166; of "Cy~lOpS,"99-100, 101, 158; of "Eumaeus," 158, 168-169, 171-172, 176, 178, 181, 192, 283; gender of, 159; of "Ithaca," 112"3, 158, 183-184, 189-190, 209; of MB's monologue, 198, 200, 2 0 2 , 205; of "Nausicaa," 30,3839; of "Oxen of the Sun," 158, 159-166; of "Sirens," 138-139, 145, 158 "Nausicaa," 29-39,145-150 "Nighttown." See "Circe"

Obsessionality, 189,191,192, 196 O'Connor, Frank, 106 Oedipal dynamics: M B and, 212; negative, 73; positive, 50-51; S D and, S O - S , ~ ~73, O'Molloy, J. J. (U), 81, 114 O'Shea, Kitty (U), 179-181 "Oxen of the Sun, The," 152, 158, 159-166,169 Parents, 65-66. See also Fathering; Mothering

Parnell, Charles Stewart (U), 97-98,178-181 Pearce, Richard, 207 "Penelope," 198-222 Politics: characterization and, 1718; Home Rule, 82, 97-98,126; LB and, 104-105, 114, 125-126, 175-176,178-179; M B and, 204; S D and, 176; of U(ysses, 13 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A,2, 52, 61, 68, 71, 153-154 Power, Jack (Ul, 95,98 Primary process, 109 Projection, 64, 92, 105-106, 130, 213 Prostitution: LB and, 115-116,147, 174; S D and, 73, 154, 160, 174 Protestantism, 6-7, 11-12 Psychoanalysis: conflicted material and, 117; knowledge, revelation of, 186; professional literature of, xvii-xviii; reconstructions in, 138; U(ysses as illuminating, xviii. See also Freud, Sigmund; specgh'c topics Psychological character, cast of, xiii-xiv Pubs, function of, 138 Purefoy, Mina (U), 122, 125, 126, 160, 165 Purefoy, Theodore (U), 163-164, '65 Reaction-formation, I jo Recovery: LB and, 80-81,192-197; of narrator, 164, 166, 192; of SD, 775 Regression, 120, 218 Religion: LB and S D conversing and, 186-189; LIB and, 221;

Protestantism, 6-7, 11-12; Roman Catholicism (see Roman Catholicism). See also Jewishness of LB Repression, 103, 167, 189, 213 Roman Catholicism: LB and S D conversing and, 186-187; S D and, 52, 54, 61-62, 67, 70-71, 155-157, 161, 174,175, 187-189; women and, 32-33,37-38. See also Religion Russell, George (U), 41, 42 Sargent, Cyril (U), 55-56 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 207 "Scylla and Charybdis," 40-78 Sexuality: bisexuality, 211; Boylan and, 23-24; erotica, 19, 135-136, 147, 209; homosexuality, 7273, 74, 142; L B and (see entries at Bloom, Leopold); IMB and (see entries at Bloom, Molly); religion and, 15, 27-28; S D and, ~ j - j g ,65, 673 72-78, 151, 154; women and, 33-39, 140 Shakespeare, A n n Hathaway (U), 44~45-47956,58-599 62, 65,75 Shakespeare theory, 52, 64-65, 154; and exile, 59-60, 62-63; and fathering, 48,5o, 69-70, 73, 74, 75-78; and Mary Dedalus, 54-59> 64-65 Shecher, Mark, 4In Sherry, Vincent, 4 "Sirens," 138-145, 158 Splitting, 68, 213 Stanhope, Hester (U), 199, 208, 220

Sublimation, 67, 75 Sultan, Stanley, 164, 168, 207, 215

Switch words, 205 Thomas, Brook, 168 Transference, 38-39 Unkeless, Elaine, 207 Urination, 189, 210 "Wandering Rocks," xi-xii, 2-29; narrative style of, 2-5, 12-13, 24-25, 28-29,157-168, 158 Wilson, Edmund, 159

Women: attitudes toward, 22; barmaids, 139-140, 142, 143; characterization and reality of, 17,202-203; LB and, generally, 145-151; M B on, 208, 211, 214215, 218, 219; menstruation, 146, 149, 150, 201, 203, 205,206, 210; prostitution (see Prostitution); sentimental fiction and, 30-31; and sexuality, 33-39, 1 4 0 See also Bloom, Molly; Gender; r2lacDowel1, Gerty