Ulysses Polytropos Essays on James Joyce’s Ulysses by Fritz Senn (European Joyce Studies, 32) 9004516700, 9789004516700

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Ulysses Polytropos

European Joyce Studies General Editor Geert Lernout (University of Antwerp)

Editorial Board Scarlett Baron (University College London) Kasia Bazarnik (Jagiellonian University) Valérie Bénéjam (University of Nantes) Teresa Caneda (University of Vigo) Ronan Crowley (University of Antwerp) Anne Fogarty (University College Dublin) Onno Kosters (Utrecht University) John McCourt (University of Macerata) Erika Mihálycsa (Babes-Bolyai University) Fritz Senn (Zürich James Joyce Foundation) Amanda Sigler (University of Virginia) Sam Slote (Trinity College Dublin) Dirk Vanderbeke (Friedrich Schiller University of Jena) Dirk Van Hulle (University of Oxford)

Founded by Christine van Boheemen-Saaf, in association with Fritz Senn

Volume 32

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ejs

Ulysses Polytropos Essays on James Joyce’s Ulysses by Fritz Senn

Edited by

Frances Ilmberger

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022012431

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0923-9855 ISBN 9789004516700 (hardback) ISBN 9789004516717 (e-book) Copyright 2022 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Forewarning vii Editor’s Acknowledgments Abbreviations xiii

xi

1

Joyce, Craftsman, Artificer

1

2

Parallax on Show 15

3

Joyce’s Sense of Rumour 38

4

Joyce’s Malleable Time

5

Joyce’s Different Conjugials

6

Mercurial Interpolations in Ulysses

7

Coincidental Joyce 130

8

Active Silences

9

Transmutation in Digress 166

10

The Joyce of Side Effects

11

Ulysses: Latent Coherence of Deviating Episodes

12

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Hell, Purgatory, Heaven in “Wandering Rocks” 217

13

In the Arms of Classics: Meta-Morpheus in “Eumaeus” 222

14

The Warped Modality of Joyce’s “Ithaca” 234

15

Events in Language: Joycean Extras 252

16

Ulyssean Histrionics in Everyday Life

68 92 115

147

182

268

205

vi

Contents

17

Logodaedalian Bypaths: Evading the Obvious 287

18

The Odyssey through Joycean Lenses Index

317

302

Forewarning Just what we need: yet another book on mainly Ulysses, assembling disparate essays, with not even an overall thesis. Not really my doing. It was Frances Ilmberger who came up with the idea. Of course, I was flattered at the suggestion, and more so when she volunteered to edit a volume, so that I could sit back and let it happen or gracefully interfere with her labours. But by approving, I am taking full responsibility. The justification is that there are indeed various scattered articles that came out in recent years. Since I have been a regular participant in the Joyce Summer Schools of both Dublin and Trieste, as well as the annual Birthday conferences in Rome, this entailed at least two presentations per year. I am more than just grateful, of course, to Anne Fogarty, John McCourt, Franca Ruggieri, Serenella Zanotti (and many others) who made these events possible and also supported publications. Naturally, the pieces assembled reflect my enthusiasms and shortcomings. An outsider and non-academic — well, a seasonal “visiting professor”, but only when actually visiting — I could always pose opportunistically either as a serious scholar or an amateur and autodidact. Not that I was always conscious of it, but I realise in hindsight that all my output was directed far more at Joyce’s text than at other critics, which explains the paucity of references or footnotes. I have frequently pointed out that my handicap was that I never took a Joyce course — and my advantage that I never took a Joyce course. I set out on my own without any of the requirements for a reader of Joyce: no academic background, my English an acquired language, with no idea of what Ireland was except that it lay somewhere behind England, and no Catholic education. So I picked up a copy of Ulysses in 1952, mainly to test my English and with a hope to find spicy bits (on the whole a grave disappointment). My English was not adequate naturally, nor was there much guidance around except Stuart Gilbert and Frank Budgen, but I plodded on with bafflement and curiosity and graduated to Finnegans Wake and then almost by coincidence was drawn into active annotation by James Atherton, who invited me to investigate Zürich traces in the Wake. Such was my entry into the predominantly welcoming international Joyce community. By constitution, I am a pedestrian philological provider of commentaries, a scholiast. There is no modesty in that; in fact it is partly a boast. There is nothing wrong with walking on the ground level (what would Joyce be without it?), nor with philology, the love and study of language: it is a base for all literature. It has produced great insights — and an enormous volume of tedious

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trivialities. In other words, I start at the bottom, leaving the higher spheres of abstraction and theory to those who are qualified. Whatever else Joyce does, he certainly caters to our explorative instinct (though it is always wrong to say “our” or “the reader”), and there is great satisfaction in throwing some light on a tricky problem, even a provisional light. That’s the temptation of Finnegans Wake on which I concentrated in the sixties and years to follow. It grants unique “aha!” experiences and remains a constant source of delight and fun. It also frustrates. My philological conscience leaves me dissatisfied, even deeply worried, about all those passages that still remain opaque and do not offer sufficient revelations — and this, mind you, after seven decades of devoted endeavour (with participation in many reading groups, some still going on). So, apart from occasional comments, I have backed out of extended speculations and find myself incapable of posing as a Wake scholar. The Annotations that we have, first out in 1980, are still not only a fundamental invaluable source, but also, after more than forty years, with its abundance of blank spaces that we really cannot afford, a basic failure of the Wake community — a collective one, not a fault of Roland McHugh, whose achievement remains unchallenged. There is proportionally too much semantic debris in comparison to necessary enlightenment so that I cannot maintain a pretence of expertise. All the better then, that, still holding on to an old-fashioned notion of sufficient “understanding”, I remain an exception and my dissatisfaction is fortunately not shared by others. The focus is on Ulysses as still a rich area for investigation. All my attempts may ultimately derive from admiration for the sheer workmanship, how well put even the simplest stretches are. Maybe all I ever did was to transmit subjective experience, generally in scrupulous detail. I found solace when little discoveries made in my closet could be shared with others, in talk, in class, at a conference, in glosses. Come to think of it — which I haven’t for a long time — all I ever did was try to pass on my own kind of delight, especially to newcomers (which Joyce turns us all into). I always naively wanted my reader(s) to learn something, if possible something worth knowing. At the same time, I am never free of doubts that what I unearthed may be tritely obvious to most readers, being right there in plain sight of the texts. Readers may notice that I rarely bother with long introductions and in general I do not survey the staked-out area, but dive right into concrete passages, trying to deduce something from them. A possible blurb for this book might be that, of all that has been written or lectured on Joyce, this collection is the one that has the lowest proportion of words ending in “-ism” (or beginning with “post-”). Not that I don’t have my own exotic terminology. To make a point, I felt I had to name some salient features and make up terms that were not used

Forewarning

ix

before: “epimorph”, “dislocution”, “eutrapelia”, “symphoric”, and others. They enable me to determine what they ought to mean. In my ramblings, I keep returning to often the same favourite passages or sentences, but generally in an alternative context or through a different approach. Every (a simplification!) Joycean item tends to be polytropical. This epithet from the first line of the Odyssey, “polytropos” (“in many directions” and “versatile”), is superbly suited to call up the dynamics that absorb me. It is easy to go too far, but then Joyce started the game and he seems to invite us to play it by his unstated and perpetually changing game rules. In some cases, there is temptation to go too far, in other cases, of course, not far enough. The Latin verb invenire means not only to find but also to invent, to make up. Whoever is without sin may draw the line. Joyce naturally attracts crackpots, and some extravagancies are amusing or ridiculous but they reflect back on an unsettling awareness that one’s own views may appear equally grotesque or vapid. I do not hold that crackpots are by definition always the others. Cracked pots, or looking glasses, look very Joycean. One of my hobbies is to use translation as control groups. It’s not that translations just lose in substance, as they must, they simply do or act less and on generally fewer levels, while the originals just won’t keep still. It is fascinating to unravel how a passage performs in another language. Displaying inadequacies is too cheap a thrill, but matching (an element of) the original with its translated counterpart sharpens one’s observation. Rather than gloating over “mistakes”, it is constructive to wonder why a translated sentence or phrase goes astray; it tells us something about the original we might otherwise not have noticed. It may be stimulating to ask “how would one translate this?” or “how would one advise a translator to deal with a sentence?” Maybe what I am enthralled by could be called “epiphany” — but not in line with other approaches. I am not especially impressed by those that Joyce wrote down and labelled with the ecclesiastical word. I am probably corrupted by how Joyce introduces the epiphany in Stephen Hero: “a sudden spiritual manifestation” (211). Thinking in terms of insights or revelations, I take Joyce to be almost universally epiphanic, from “There was no hope for him this time” to the end (the exception, for me! is Exiles). In this view, “epiphany” is more of a verb in action than a static noun. Ironically, I find those sketches that Joyce collected as “Epiphanies” the least revealing parts of all his work. The sheer vitality of the text, rather than its “properties”, occupies me. Paradoxically, I am perturbed by large-scale not understanding of the Wake while I also vehemently claim that Joyce tolerates ignorance in his works as it usually contains a healthy dose of scepticism. Joyce is democratic in uniting us in partial ignorance — which in reality remains the rule rather than the

x

Forewarning

exception. Flaunting some insights is an antidote to a predominant nescience. When Molly calls Boylan an “ignoramus”, it is easy to overlook that this latterday noun is originally a verb in the plural stressing that “we do not know”. A casual aside may turn out to be of potential application, as when Haines dismisses Stephen’s remark about payment with a brief, wholly unemphatic “I don’t know, I’m sure”. This can be sublimated into wisdom as old as Socrates: what we can be sure of is that we know next to nothing. Removing some of such ignorance by sporadic explicative glosses is the aim of this enterprise. Fritz Senn

Editor’s Acknowledgments The word polytropos in the title of this collection of essays, as Fritz Senn notes, appears in the first line of the Odyssey. Homer uses this epithet to describe his hero as sagacious, cunning, clever, versatile or a man “of many turns”. This term, in addition to “parallax”, was one of the first terms that Fritz introduced me to when I attended his seminar at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation years ago. Polytropos turns out to be one of the many seemingly innocuous terms that Fritz has taken up in his work in order to show, as he puts it, what is in plain sight. However, the word is also apt for describing Fritz’s approach, as it, too, turns around particular words, phrases, and themes in cunning, clever ways, themselves full of twists and turns that bring us back to Joyce’s texts to shed light on what would not have been noticed otherwise. I am endlessly indebted to Fritz Senn for the opportunity to work with him on this project. He has stoically endured revisiting these essays, suffering with equanimity my suggestions for minor changes. As always, it has been aweinspiring to work closely with Fritz, one of the people who has made my life in Switzerland richer. I also owe a great deal of thanks to the support of many other people, including my colleagues at the English Department at the University of Zurich, Shane Walshe and Anne-Claire Michoux, as well as my colleagues at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, Ruth Frehner, Silke Stebler, and Ursula Zeller. I have also benefited from the wise advice and kind support of many, including Sabrina Alonso, Bill Brockman, Tim Conley, Ron Ewart, Rahel Huwyler, Erika Mihálycsa, Christine O’Neill, Penelope Paparunas, and Jolanta Wawrzycka among others. While many of the essays in this collection have appeared elsewhere, three make their print debut here: “Parallax on Show” is Fritz’s response to Parallaxing Joyce (2017), Penelope Paparunas’ and my tribute to him. His response in this volume fittingly adds yet another layer of parallax to that project. “Joyce’s Malleable Time” was hammered into shape during the August Workshop in Zurich in 2015. “Joyce’s Sense of Rumour” first began to circulate at summer schools in 2019. The remaining essays in this collection have appeared in various scholarly journals and edited volumes in the last ten years or so, and I wish to extend my appreciation to those who kindly granted their permission to reprint them: “Joyce, Craftsman, Artificer” originally appeared with New Dublin Press in 2014, and it is reprinted here by permission of Jonathan Creasy. Three of the essays originally appeared in Joyce Studies in Italy: “Joyce’s Different

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Editor’s Acknowledgments

Conjugials” (2015), “Mercurial Interpolations in Ulysses” (2017), and “Ulyssean Histrionics in Everyday Life” (2013); they are reprinted here with permission of Franca Ruggeri. “Coincidental Joyce” (2012) and “Ulysses: Latent Coherence of Deviating Episodes” (2011), both of which appeared in the Dublin James Joyce Journal, are reprinted with Anne Fogarty’s kind permission. “Transmutation in Digress”, which was originally published in the James Joyce Quarterly (2010), appears here with permission of Sean Latham and Carol Kealiher. “Events in Language: Joycean Extras” (2019), “The Joyce of Side Effects” (2018), and “The Odyssey through Joycean Lenses” (2014), all of which appeared in Hyperion, are reprinted here thanks to Erika Mihálycsa. “James Joyce’s Ulysses: Hell, Purgatory, Heaven in ‘Wandering Rocks’” (2013) originally appeared in the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) and is reprinted by permission of HJEAS and its editor, Donald E. Morse. Noelle Moran at University College Dublin Press has granted permission for “In the Arms of the Classics: Meta-Morpheus in ‘Eumaeus’”, which first appeared in Anne Fogarty and Fran O’Rourke’s Voices on Joyce (2015), to reappear here. “The Warped Modality of Joyce’s ‘Ithaca’”, which originally appeared in 2015 in James Joyce: Whence, Whither and How: Studies in Honour of Carla Vaglio, is reprinted with permission of Terese Prudente. “Active Silences” originally appeared in James Joyce’s Silences (2018) and is reprinted here with permission of Jolanta Wawrzycka. Finally, David Vichnar has granted permission to reprint “Logodaedalian Bypaths: Evading the Obvious”, which appeared in Hypermedia Joyce Studies (2016). There have been some minor changes to some of the essays included in this volume, but these remain futile attempts to avoid the inevitable overlap of topics, one of the side effects of revisiting favorite passages from a different vantage point. My sincere thanks also go to Geert Lernout, who has been tremendously enthusiastic and supportive regarding this project, as well as Masja Horn and her team at Brill, who remained patient throughout the publication process. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the anonymous reader of the manuscript, who has, I believe, made this a better collection. Finally, thanks to my wonderful son, Max Zappe, to whom this book is dedicated with much love. Frances Ilmberger

Abbreviations Below are the abbreviations used in this volume for parenthetical references. Abbreviations that are used infrequently are provided in footnotes. D P U FW

Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes (New York: Viking Press, 1967). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1964). Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et al. (London: The Bodley Head, 1986). References include episode and the first line number. Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press and London: Faber and Faber, 1939). References include page and line numbers.

Chapter 1

Joyce, Craftsman, Artificer The name James Joyce calls up bold innovations, eccentricities, profundities, obscurities, layered allusions, verbal pyrotechnics, erudition and no end of literary ventures and thereby all sorts of discomforting challenges. But at the other, lower, end of the spectrum, Joyce is also the skilled craftsman on the trite level of realism, master of vivid sketches that look unspectacularly right, which might create an illusion that they could not have been expressed otherwise. The following probes exhibit short passages that tend to evade the prevailing critical radar and are easily overlooked in the light of more conspicuous accomplishments. Lifted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Joyce’s first pen name was Daedalus; the “old artificer” (253) as he is called in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man was not only a craftsman, a practitioner, a technician, an architect, but also an artist (e.g. he was the first to separate the legs of statues and so to simulate motion). The only motto that Joyce ever used is in front of the Portrait, the story of Stephen Dedalus: “Et ignotas animus dimittit in artes”. The artist, not yet named, sends out (dimittit) his inventive mind (animum) towards crafts (artes) that are as yet unknown (ignotas); the term “artes” has a wide range: skills, cunning, achievement and ultimately arts in the now prevailing sense. The word is related to a root for “joining”, an “artifex” is adept in joining parts. That is a suitable thumbnail sketch of the still developing artist, and it is true of Joyce’s later work, none of which could ever have been predicted on the basis of its predecessors, though the dynamic evolution can be comprehended in retrospect. Joyce was a resourceful joiner of disparate items: a once scandalous novelty like Ulysses combines a realistic novel with items from a Dublin address book, with mythological analogies, intensified by multiple allusions in a musical orchestration. The various elements joined together have become a matter of extensive annotations. Finnegans Wake compounds history, myths, rumours, vague echoes into hybrid language. Its last word is one that cannot possibly ever be a last word, the article “the”, grammatically a “joint”, a connective part, and it is in fact joined to the opening lower case word “riverrun” (FW 628.16, 1.1).1 Finnegans Wake, “the book of Doublends Jined” (FW 20.15), merges 1 The book’s last sentence, “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” (628.15), incidentally joins the book with a line close to be beginning of one of the earliest poems: “There’s music along the river” (Chamber Music, I.5).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_002

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Chapter 1

its main character as “Dublin’s Giant” with a self-description. A writer can do nothing but join words and thereby sounds, overtones, rhythms, implications, and Joyce as always extends all of these devices. Joyce first of all excelled at the basic art of writing. Maybe this is what Ezra Pound (also) had in mind when he proclaimed that Mr Joyce writes a clear hard prose. He deals with subjective things, but he presents them with such clarity of outline that he might be dealing with locomotives or with builders’ specifications. He presents his people swiftly and vividly … He gives the thing as it is …2 The focus of the following pages is on the more realistic sides of Joyce’s prose, where it does not yet dazzle and scintillate; indeed, it is often at the level of effective description. In the terms of Joyce’s early aesthetics, objects or acts can achieve their “epiphanies”; at the moment of their appearance, they come into their own, sometimes radiant, sometimes more low key. On occasion, Joyce seems to evoke an almost physical response as when, in a first example, a funeral carriage arrives at a cemetery: “The felly harshed against the curbstone: stopped” (U 6.490). An effect of almost physical grating seems to be caught. A slight shock is transmitted through simple words, and the adjective “harsh” turned into an intransitive verb enhances the impact, in fact a harsh noise and feeling. (Of necessity, such impressions are subjective, incapable of sound proof.) The construction in itself is jarring: on close inspection, we may notice the slight grammatical oddity that it is not the felly that stops, but the coach. The typical Joycean colon that separates “stopped” from the rest may challenge the assumption that we are really dealing with a “sentence”; at times, it might be preferable to think in terms of verbal events (or orchestrations) than in grammatical ones. Even phonetically, the final word “stopped” is itself a stop, ending on a single syllable that is closed by two consonants. As often in the early chapters of Ulysses, the language seems to do what it says. This also occurs, palpably, where a priest walking in the countryside is reminded of former times: Father Conmee, reading his office, watched a flock of muttoning clouds over Rathcoffey. His thinsocked ankles were tickled by the stubble of Clongowes field. (U 10.184) 2 Pound/Joyce, The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 27.

Joyce, Craftsman, Artificer

3

In this instance, the unusual verb form “muttoning” is an ad hoc translation of the French “moutonner” that has just been on Father Conmee’s mind, a transient attempt at a mot juste (the topic at hand). As he watches the flocking clouds above in the sky, his feet have a tactile memory of their own: the “thinsocked ankles tickled by the stubble of Clongowes field” make the sentence prickly (as though the word “prickly” were actually there) — the sharp consonant k-clusters simulate itchy empathy.3 The expression matches the experience. Translations, aiming in their nature at analogous effects, can serve and will be enlisted here as control groups, often by inevitable default. The seemingly soft nature of the Italian language tends to take the stings and tingles out of the original: “Le calze sottili alle caviglie erano solleticate dalle stoppie del prato di Clongowes”4 does not tamper with the content but results in a different feel. The French “Ses chevilles finchaussettées étaient chatouillées par le chaume du terrain de Clongowes”5 skillfully aligns alliterations and even introduces a new composite, but does not pierce any linguistic skins.

1

Matters of Taste

In an episode dominated by images of food and eating (“Lestrygonians”), Bloom sensually enjoys “clean fresh bread, with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese” (U 8.818). If “[w]ine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish cheese” (U 8.850) is considered a sentence, it is an appropriately masticated one. The French version (“Le vin mouillait et adoucissait la pâtée pain-moutarde au bout d’un moment fromage écœurant”6) twists the tasty complex more towards a logical unit. A scene in a cheap restaurant is full of punchy vignettes: “A man with an infant’s saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet” (U 8.658). An impression of active disgust is achieved by a few deft strokes as Leopold Bloom approaches a butcher’s shop: “Flayed glasseyed sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling nosejam on sawdust” (U 8.726). The impact in part depends on repugnant (certainly for this reader)

3 4 5 6

For the sake of demonstration, bold type indicates the effect in question. Ulisse. trans. Enrico Terrinoni and Carlo Bigazzi (Roma: Newton Compton, 2012), 235. Ulysse, trans. Jacques Aubert et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 324. Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 25.

4

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compounds, with a repetitive sound pattern (“sheepsnouts … snivelling”); “nose” is uneasily connected with “jam”. A toned down but similar effect occurs a few pages later, when a “dewdrop” on Nosey Flynn’s nose is “snuffled up” (U 8.804). Joyce, with stark words, often of one syllable, as well as ponderous and often erudite long ones at his disposal in English, applies them judiciously. Anxiety or excitement can manifest in a series of short words in rapid rhythm, as when Bloom’s reaction at hearing the name of his rival pronounced is expressed physiologically, the experience of mustard inhaled at the wrong moment: “A warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on Mr Bloom’s heart” (U 8.789). The quick pace of short words may not be consciously noticed. The unusual but emphatic verb “hanched”, whether defined or not (“snap greedily” is a meaning), seems to be intuitively appropriate. The shock of mustard in a palate conceals the psychological one in the metaphorical heart. Excitement of a different sort, this time erotic, is evoked when Bloom is breathlessly watching a stylish lady about to get up on a coach on the other side of the street, expecting a quick view of female ankles: “Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!” (U 5.130). Short words in quick succession bring about the staccato effect. Other languages with necessarily inflected adjectives and therefore longer words do not emulate the panting rush in the same manner. In contrast to Joyce’s economical 9 syllables, a German version uses 17: “Aufgepaßt jetzt! Aufgepaßt. Seidenblitz, tolle Strümpfe weiß. Paß auf!”7 A French one uses 23: “Regarde! Regarde moi ça! Éclair soyeux de somptueux bas blancs. Non mais vise un peu!” But “Éclair soyeux de somptueux bas”8 offers additional visual glamour. Joyce’s “Silk flash rich stockings white” with unclear grammatical attributions looks more like a gush of meddled impressions; “rich” is not necessarily tied to stockings whereas the translations have to match each adjective to its noun, which makes the observation slightly more relaxed. In instant contrast to the jumbled series of short items, a noisy cumbersome tram blocking Bloom’s view is brought to life by slow ponderous syllables: “A heavy tramcar honking its gong slewed between” (U 5.131). Heaviness and melody are changed by a considerably more nimble, as well as longer, movement: “Un pesant tramway fit tinter sa cloche, vira de bord et s’interposa”.9

7 Ulysses, trans. Hans Wollschlager (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 104. 8 Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 109. 9 Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 109.

Joyce, Craftsman, Artificer

2

5

Bumps and Humps

There seems to be a basic rightness about Joyce’s phrasing as though it could not be otherwise. Such congruity cannot be objectively proved and remains a matter of dubious impressionistic intuition, yet the verbal economy and conciseness can be quantified. Terms like assonance, alliteration or onomatopoeia (the seeming imitation of sounds) are imprecise but unavoidable. English is full of words that seem to sound like what they mean. A few prominent ones — “plump”, “bump”, “hump”, “plunge” — will be examined in turn. Buck Mulligan is introduced as “plump”, a homely adjective which is followed by — and pointedly contrasts with — the dignified, stately “stately” in the first two words of the novel. His “plump face” is recalled twice, and it is phonetically fitting that finally “His plump body plunged” (U 1.729), in combined agility and gravity. Here an Italian translation manages a fortuitous and sonorous plunge: “Il suo corpo paffuto si tuffò”,10 a French one, “Son corps dodu plongea”,11 may come close; the German “Sein feister Körper platschte ins Wasser”12 achieves a different assonance. (It is hardly necessary to affirm that the translations adduced are not criticized or faulted. Joyce translators are perceptive readers and have to use the vocabulary and the potential of their respective languages. Moreover, it is most likely that translators did not consider the various effects that are being highlighted here significantly important. There is no limit to the possible aspects of any translation.) We first see the main character, Mr Leopold Bloom, moving about the kitchen softly, “righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray” (U 4.6). It is the uneven surface of a tray, intrinsically unimportant, which brings it to Bloom’s attention since the breakfast things demand a careful “righting” on a less than perfect tray; its humps make it noticeable. In the economy in Bloom’s household, few objects are new; many are used or in poor repair. For the same trivial reason later on, the teapot’s “hump bumped as he took it up” (U 4.297). The hump causes the bump as is phonetically underscored; otherwise, such a minor hitch would hardly be registered. The absence of echoing words in translation remove the reverberations, a factual report replaces imitation:

10 11 12

Ulisse: Romanzo, trans. Giulio De Angelis (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1960), 35. Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 37. Ulysses, trans. Wollschlager, 34.

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Come lo sollevava, l’ammaccatura scattò.13 L’ammaccatura schioccò nel sollevarlo.14 Appena lo sollevò, l’ammaccatura nel metallo rifece la sua gobba.15 In all three instances, the perception is reversed. One is hardly aware of a nearly unconscious action such as taking up a tray. It is again the humping bump that draws attention to an irregularity. A German rendering captures the sequence with analogous sounds with a perceptible echo: “Der Buckel darin knackte, als er es aufnahm”.16 Echoing bumps occur where beer barrels are noisily transported: Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. (U 7.21) The gravity of the barrels is reflected in the heavy compound words and is in contrast to a short “bumped”, which however takes up the sound of “dullthudding”, reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon poetry. In a revision, Joyce doubled the echoing sentence in approximate reverse: On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince’s stores. The mirroring doubles the echoes and reinforces the effects. The rhetorical equivalent to aural echoes is the chiasmic structure of the two successive sentences. The newspaper episode of Ulysses is full of oratorical overtones; simple craftsmanship is turned into thematic artistry. In the “Aeolus” episode (in its Homeric context), “Everything speaks in its own way” (U 7.177), something that Joyce has been putting into practice ever since Dubliners.

3

Gravity and Levity

A bulky man sitting down at a piano is conveyed in vigorous weighty sounds:

13 14 15 16

Ulisse: Romanzo, trans. De Angelis, 88. Ulisse. trans. Terrinoni, 88. Ulisse, trans. Gianni Celati (Torino: Einaudi, 2013), 84. Ulysses, trans. Wollschlager, 88.

Joyce, Craftsman, Artificer

7

He plumped him Dollard on the stool. His gouty paws plumped chords. Plumped, stopped, abrupt. (U 11.451) The orchestration of strong (plump?) monosyllables features “plumped” three times with slightly different functions. The musical close is imitated by a rapid sequence of closed syllables, doubled or trebled consonants, with a preponderance of the unvoiced labial “p”: -mpd, -pd, -pt. Phonetically these are stops. When in a language like Italian most words end in vowels, a series of terminal o’s and i’s will not mimic the abruptness of the original wording, and the tune becomes a different, and more lively, one: Piombò giù, Dollard, sullo gabello. Le sue zampe gottose piombarono sugli accordi. Piombarono si fermarono di colpo.17 Lo fece sedere di schianto, Dollard, sullo sgabello. Le zampe gottose schiantarono accordi. Schiantati, bloccati bruschi.18 Si smollò Dollard sullo sgabello. Le sue granfie gottose si smollarono sugli accordi. Brusco accordo smollato di colpo.19 The translations of “His gouty paws”20 are considerably and visibly much longer: “Le sue zambe gottose”/“Le sue granfie gottose”. The number of syllables is almost trebled; more notes are being played. The whole orchestration has changed and, of necessity, a musical episode like “Sirens” has to be transposed into different keys according to the tonal potential of the languages at hand. As against the gravity of the items on show, light sounds and quick movements are at the other end of the scale. One instance is the sound of falling coins, as they are sketched by high-pitched vowels: They lay, were read quickly and quickly slid, disk by disk, into the till. (U 4.183) The mimic effect depends on a brisk succession of short i-sounds. A French translation manages a corresponding impact at least in part, even if longer

17 18 19 20

Ulisse: Romanzo, trans. De Angelis, 361. Ulisse, trans. Terrinoni, 275. Ulisse, trans. Celati, 368. The word “paws” can double as a musical “pause”, but such a thematic gracenote typical for Joyce’s techniques is outside of the scope of this essay.

8

Chapter 1

syllables have to be mustered: “Un instant là, vérifiés vite et vite glissés, pièce à pièce dans le tiroir caisse”.21 Some vignettes, or close-ups, are almost cinematographic. To get rid of the envelope of the clandestine letter he has just picked up in a post office, Bloom “[went] under the railway arch[,] took out the envelope, tore it swiftly in shreds and scattered them towards the road”. The act is visualised in appropriate poise: “The shreds fluttered away, sank in the dank air: a white flutter, then all sank” (U 5.300). The slow descent of paper fragments is caught in a delicate balance of a slow — and implicitly silent — movement, expressed by the repetition of “shreds … shreds”, “scattered … fluttered … flutter”, “sank … dank … sank”. Words become softly falling shreds and come to a halt on a concluding, stressed “sank”. A French recreation, obviously at pains, catches some of the airy poise: “Les morceaux voletèrent au loin, sombrèrent dans l’air humide: petit battement d’ailes blanches puis tout sombra”,22 where the longer words extend the movement. A “white flutter” is a general impression of whiteness, in pedantic French white has to be tied to wings, ailes, and so becomes more concrete, more things than events. Newspaper tissues can be forcefully flung, as imitated in alliteration: “He tossed the tissues on the table” with imitative sibilants (U 7.390). This contrasts notably with the translation of 1929 that focuses less on the sound than an exact rendering and comes close to explanation: “Il lança sur la table le papier pelure de la mise en train”;23 sense prevails over sound. The more recent second translation of 2004 streamlined the wording to a more concise “Il jeta les feuilles sur la table”.24 By force of the vocabulary at hand, translations are often compelled to render the exact content at the mercy of the accompanying sound. The quick movement contrasts notably with a much more gentle sequel, reminiscent of the descending paper shreds above: The tissues rustled up in the draught, floated softly in the air blue scrawls and under the table came to earth. (U 7.396) Softness is put into airy effect, perhaps syntactically underscored by a floating construction, the dangling “blue scrawls” are not the object of an intransitive “floating”. The blue scrawls, in other words, are syntactically floating. That

21 22 23 24

Ulysse, trans. Auguste Morel, Stuart Gilbert, and Valery Larbaud (Paris: Gallimard, 1948, first published 1929), 59. Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 116. Ulysse, trans. Morel, 126. Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 189.

Joyce, Craftsman, Artificer

9

something is grammatically disturbing (though possibly overlooked) must have occurred to a few of the translators who engage in minor repair work. Either they treat the blue scrawls as a kind of apposition: “Les feuilles de papier velours envolèrent en bruissant dans le courant d’air, grimoire bleu qui oscilla un moment dans le vide avant d’atterrir sous la table”;25 “Die Fahnen raschelten im Luftzug auf, segelten sanft durch die Luft, ein blaues Gekritzel, und gingen unter dem Tisch zu Boden”,26 or they add a causative verb: “Le veline frusciando nella corrente dolcemente lasciarono fluttuare nell’aria scarabocchi blu, e sotto il tavolo ricaddero a terra”.27

4

Flaw of Softness

How can the weightless frailty of smoke or steam, not just be described, but brought to verbal life? As he set foot on O’Connell bridge a puffball of smoke plumed up from the parapet. (U 8.44) The sentence, hinging on “plumed up”, suggests more act than substance: it transmits both energy and insubstantiality. Alliterative labials (f, b, p, b, p, f, p), though not consciously noticed, may enhance the effect. The English word “plume” is already less substantial than the native “feather” or the French plume from which it is derived, and it can be turned into a verb, that is to say, a process. A puffball pluming up looks more immediately vivid than a mere emergence in the French phrasing: “Comme il mettait le pied sur O’Connell bridge un champignon de fume émergea du parapet”;28 “plumed” is visual and imaginative, while “émergea” is relatively general and unimaginative. A similar impression occurs when Stephen Dedalus, leaving the library, looks at the sky: Frail from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw of softness softly were blown. (U 9.1218) Plumes are pluming. Again the noun is transposed into a verb and so underlines volatility against mere matter. The airy process and turn owes something 25 26 27 28

Ulysse, trans. Morel, 126. Ulysses, trans. Hans Wollschlager, 180. Ulisse, trans. Terrinoni, 148. Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 222.

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Chapter 1

to a series of “pl-” and “fl-” words. In French, “Fragiles, du sommet des toits s’élevaient deux volutes de fumée, voletant, …”,29 the pluming plumes find their echoing equivalent, but “s’élevaient” is a flat rising, like the previously mentioned “émergea”. The same is true of the German “stiegen zwei Rauchfedern auf ”, which is followed by “federnd”.30 It is easy to imagine how “two plumes of smoke” are associated in Stephen’s mind with a Shakespearean quotation: “Laud we the gods / And let their crooked smokes climb to their nostrils / From our bless’d altars”, which concludes the episode (Cymbeline, 5.5.476, U 9.1223). As it happens, the word “flaw” in the rare sense of a gust of wind is a Shakespearean word and so, on another level, adds to the literary tinge of the Library chapter. A variant of softness can imply silence. The theatrical episode, “Circe”, is full of gestures, mainly in stage directions. They are often concise, but occasionally elongated in parody. A silent act is economically condensed when a dancing master “clipclaps glovesilent hands” (U 15.4060), as though the hapax compound “glovesilent” were to absorb all the noise around it. Here translators rise to the occasion and risk analogous neologisms even when the resulting composites are not common in the respective languages, like French: “Clippeclappe ses mains gantsilencieuses”;31 “Claquements de mains gantfeutrés”;32 or an Italian “Batte mani silentiguantate”,33 “clip clap, manbattendo, di silenzio guantate”;34 or German “klitschklatscht in handschuhstille Hände”.35 How could anyone smile “tinily”? In a vignette, Father Conmee is observing the occupants of a tram in a context of genteel decorum: A tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman with the glasses. She raised her small gloved fist, yawned ever so gently, tiptapping her small gloved fist on her opening mouth and smiled tinily, sweetly. (U 10.125) “Gently, tinily, sweetly” create a mood and also a sense of the slight embarrassment of a few people in an enclosed space who do not quite know where to look or whether to speak. Within the context, a smile can become as tiny

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 316. Ulysses, trans. Wollschlager, 304. Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 856. Ulysse, trans. Morel, 517. Ulisse: Romanzo, trans. De Angelis, 749. Ulisse, trans. Terrinoni, 722. Ulysses, trans. Wollschlager, 729.

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as a yawn. A similar transient but prolonged smile characterizes the owner of a public house at a moment when he pointedly avoids a comment: “Davy Byrnes smiledyawnednodded all in one” (U 8.969). Simultaneity is simulated by verbal agglutination and the absence of pauses. Here translators boldly follow suit: “Davy Byrne souritbâillaopina tout ensemble”36 — and in inverse order: “Davy Byrne opinasouritbâilla tout ensemble”37 — “Davy Byrne sorrisbadigliannuì tutto in uno”,38 “Davy Byrne lächeltegähntenickte in eins”.39

5

Pungency

A “puff” is not equal to a “puff”;40 words also play their roles according to context and situation. Plumes or puffs can be either soft and frail or energetic and strong. In the “Sirens” episode, effects are no longer simple but tend to preen themselves as quasi-musical events, while some still function on a realistic level. Simon Dedalus handles his pipe: “Mr Dedalus struck, whizzed, lit, puffed savory puff. … Puff after stiff, a puff, strong savory crackling” (U 11.511). This climaxes in a sharp “He puffed a pungent plumy blast” (U 11.514). Again the plosive labials are efficient. The verbs used in two French and one Italian renderings are more abstract and less pungent: “Il projette un panache de fumée âcre”,41 “Il dégagea un panache de fumée âcre”,42 “Emise una pungente sbuffata piumosa”.43 It also makes a difference whether the pungency precedes (“pungent plumy blast”) or follows the blast: “fumée âcre” — a nicety of perception. When he returns to the kitchen, Bloom has inadvertently burned the kidneys in the pan: Pungent smoke shot up in an angry jet from a side of the pan. (U 4.384) The initial position of “pungent” makes it a fittingly pungent word. How much the description is in tune with actual, or at least probable, percep36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 259. Ulysse, trans. Morel, 174. Ulisse, trans. Terrinoni, 193. Ulysses, trans. Wollschlager, 249. In the wind-suffused “Aeolus” episode, the word “puff” has the meaning of a supportive newspaper article. It is a nice touch that when Bloom uses the term (on which some of his immediate income depends) his speech is short of breath — “puffing” (U 7.978, 971). Ulysse, trans. Morel, 263. Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 388. Ulisse, trans. Terrinoni, 276.

12

Chapter 1

tion is brought out by a comparison with an early German rendering which rearranges the sequence: “Von der einen Seite der Pfanne schoss in giftigem Strahl beissender Rauch auf ”.44 Instant perception has given way to more distant observation. Bloom is struck, first and immediately, by pungent smoke, then sees it shooting up and finally notices its location. The French equivalent, “Un jet de fumée âcre fusait furieux d’un côté de la poêle”,45 preserving the word order, even adds more alliterative punch to the mini-event. All the examples adduced so far show how an action and its verbal expression are close, as though the events were imitated — or acted out — by words and sounds, so that signified and signifier seem to coincide; language almost does what it says in phantom immediacy. Especially in the later episodes of Ulysses, the nearly successful illusion will be dispelled. In marked contrast, Joyce goes to the opposite extreme and puts a notable distance between language and its target. This is a salient characteristic in the seventeenth episode (Homerically labelled “Ithaca”); it highlights, exaggerates and thereby parodies a scientific, objective, approach and eliminates direct experience or direct emotion. Active verbs are avoided; acts are generally frozen into verbal nouns. So while in the freshness of the early morning Bloom had noticed his teakettle — “On the boil sure enough: a plume of steam from the spout” (U 4.271) — now, late at night, attention is pedantically turned to an abstract “phenomenon of ebullition” (U 17.275). This leads to a further punctilious question in the same register: “What announced the accomplishment of this rise in temperature?” (which can be seen as translation of “how could one tell whether the water was boiling?”), with the answer: A double falciform ejection of water vapour from under the kettlelid at both sides simultaneously. (U 17.272) This is placid distant reporting; pungency is not experienced. The simultaneity of perception is not imitated (and not even taken for granted) but explicitly stated, as though in a clarifying afterthought. The salient term is “falciform” with its show of scientific precision. What form can an ejection of vapour have?46 This adjective is not a word that is familiar to all native speakers and

44 45 46

Ulysses, trans. Georg Goyert (Zürich: Rhein Verlag, 1975), 77. Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 98. The words “jet” and “ejection” have a common origin, the Latin verb jacere, with jectus as participle. The verbal noun “ejection” is apt for descriptive distance, whereas “jet” (imported to English via French forms) is short and felt to be fast, close and direct.

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thus its meaning is occluded. Latin falx is a sickle, and sickles have precise cutting edges, but then vapour (or steam, or smoke) is possibly the most shapeless and volatile of all substances, and emphatically without contours (though one might well represent the blurred impression by drawing a sickle, but that is graphic imagination, not fact). “Pungent smoke” is close to “falciform ejection of water”, removed from immediate experience.

6

Synesthetic and Syntactic Latitude

Bloom talking to his wife through the door “heard then a heavy warm sigh” (U 4.58). If sighs can be warm the warmth can hardly be heard, but the transference can be accounted for by synesthetic shorthand or empirical imagination. An analogous abridgment is at work when, “at [Bloom’s] armpit Bantam Lyons’ voice and hand said: — Hello Bloom” (U 5.519). Waving hands, or gestures, are noticed at the same time, and they do in fact speak in their own way. A multiple impression is conveyed and it takes precedence over pedantic logic. The sound of words, as already demonstrated, may strive to imitate events, but syntax too can be enlisted, as in the dangling “blue scrawls” above. Synesthesia plays its part, or rather, parts. In an unlit warehouse, the question “Who’s that? Ned Lambert asked. Is that Crotty?” is codedly answered: “Ringabella and Crosshaven, a voice replied groping for foothold” (U 10.399). A person is identified by his provenance, two villages near Cork, but perhaps in a similar conflation a voice and feet are brought incongruously together; the oddity may express a physical incoordination in the absence of sight. Some translators tacitly edit the logical discomfort out of view by grammatical disentanglement and by according the feet a separate clause: “… répondit une voix, en même temps qu’un pied cherchait une marche”,47 or by clarification “… rispose una voce, brancolando, in cerca di un posto sicuro da posarci il piede”.48 A German rendering, “eine Stimme, nach Halt tastend”,49 by leaving out feet altogether, remains vague. Bloom has picked up a leaflet, a throwaway, which he inspects: “His slow feet walked him riverward, reading” (U 8.10). Though no misunderstanding is possible, the construction is slightly askew yet it might be tolerated by some grammarians: it is not the feet that are reading, the participle logically

47 48 49

Ulysse, trans. Morel, 224. Ulisse: Romanzo, trans. De Angelis, 213. Ulysses, trans. Wollschlager, 319.

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Chapter 1

refers to “him”. Classical inflected languages would easily distinguish subject and object. In this case, many translations opt for syntactic emendation, for instance by adding conjunctions, “while he was reading” (“mentre legeva”, “pendant qu’il lisait”, “während er las”, etc.).50 Another translation substitutes a different, impeccable construction: “A lenti passi andò verso il fiume, leggendo”, where “he went” (“andò”) is neatly and logically tied to reading.51 A slight awkwardness may be appropriate: while eyes are concentrated on reading, one might become aware of the clumsiness of one’s feet as it is not easy to combine two activities. In fact, the sentence, if that’s what it is, sets out with the focus on the slow feet. It could also be seen as extreme synesthetic shorthand: his feet are slow as he walks in the direction of the river, while he is reading. The device is also economical: practically all translations are significantly longer.

… All of the analyses above add up to the trivial demonstration that Joyce was an uncommonly competent writer, in particular in seemingly low-key passages that rarely draw critical attention to themselves. Translators by nature and necessity are scrupulous and observant readers; that even their best efforts cannot always emulate Joyce’s evocative precision may serve to bring out the contours of Joyce’s original. 50 51

Ulisse: Romanzo, trans. De Angelis, 204; Ulysse, trans. Aubert, 230; Ulysses, trans. Wollschlager, 210. Ulisse, trans. Celati, 206.

Chapter 2

Parallax on Show When Joyce makes one of his characters wonder about a term like “Parallax”, it is worth looking into it, and a lot of criticism has been devoted to the subject. This essay traces textual samples of parallax. The relevant passage is where Bloom thinks of a book on astronomy: Parallax. I never exactly understood. There’s a priest. Could ask him. Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax. Met him pike hoses she called it till I told her about the transmigration. O rocks! (U 8.110) Bloom not understanding a Greek term reminds him of Molly’s changing “Metamorphosis” into “Met him pike hoses”; it is first not heard completely: “Met him what?” (U 4.336), but later remembered, as above, is already an instance of phonetic, not optical parallax, or the frequent dissociations between seeing and hearing. Bloom’s explications by the near synonyms “transmigration” and “reincarnation”1 also signal different perspectives: a “metamorphosis” is a “trans-shaping”, focussing on the body; “transmigration” emphasises the soul wandering; and “reincarnation” stresses the new habitat, a “re-enfleshment” — three different facets. In his “[f]ascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball’s” (U 8.110); Bloom would have found the following exemplary demonstration: Stand near a window whence you can look at buildings, or the trees, the clouds, or any distant objects. Place on the glass a thin strip of paper vertically in the middle of one of the panes. Close the right eye, and note with the left eye the position of the strip of paper relatively to the objects in the background, Then, while still remaining in the same position, close the left eye and again observe the position of the strip of paper with the right eye. You will find that the position of the paper on the background has changed.2

1 Note that Molly later, calling up Bloom’s explanation, changes “reincarnation” into a Christian term she is familiar with: “the incarnation” (U 18.566). See also page 200. 2 Sir Robert Ball, The Story of the Heavens (London: Cassels & Co, Ltd., 1901), 181–2. Incidentally, it is not a “little” book; see also Bloom’s library at U 17.1373.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_003

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Chapter 2

Parallax depends on different views or points of view. Anything can be seen from various angles and perspectives. No one member in a group sees any other person the same way. It is no new insight that Joyce offers divergent views by Stephen, Bloom, Molly, then of minor characters, as well as sundry narrative slants. Past events, in particular, are not narrated coherently, but parallactically dispersed in circumstantial mosaics that invite readers to fit diverse random pieces together. While parallax depends on clear geometrical relations, it can also be ominously reverberating, as when one of the most mysterious of all characters, Virag, pronounces it “with a nervous twitch of his head” (“Parallax!”), and echoingly matches the word with “Pollysyllabax” (U 15.2334). A psychological parallax may be undercurrently at work. Bloom is trying to divert his thoughts from his rival who might potentially be affected by the “clap”, by way of “some chap with a dose burning him”, a disturbance to be avoided: “Think no more about that” (U 8.96, 101, 108). Concentration on the “Timeball on the ballastoffice” offers a distraction: “Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball’s” (U 8.109). The collocation of “Timeball, ballastoffice and Ball’s” may imply another slant — in the parallactic mind of a reader. Joyce’s readers tend to be parallactically inventive. I will apply the term parallax with considerable latitude, especially to things that can be seen, interpreted, (mis)understood in variant ways. In this sense, parallax is ubiquitous in Joyce. My aim is to show parallax at work within the text. That other commentators put their focus on more abstract themes and generalisations shows how all of us are trapped in our own mindset.3 Parallactic diversity is expected and self-evident among lawyers and journalists (“Aeolus”), in politics (“Cyclops”), in views on Literature (“Scylla and Charybdis”), even more so in dreams, nightmares or hallucinations (“Circe”) and everyday judgements, platitudes that need no further elaboration. My focus will be on some minutiae in the text of Ulysses, some of which may not have received much attention. A few obvious samples first. Shakespeare’s classical application of parallax is suitably carried into “Proteus”: “Ay, very like a whale” (U 3.144); a cloud can look like a camel, a weasel, or a whale (Hamlet 3.2.399). An identical matitudinal cloud, covering “the sun slowly, wholly” (U 1.24, 4.218), a minimum of time apart, calls up memories of the death of Stephen’s mother, or throws Bloom into a morose state of mind, similar but not identical effects. An innocent remark by Bloom, “Another gone” (U 5.136), for him expresses visual frustration caused by a tram blocking a mildly erotic view; it is entirely different 3 Parallaxing Joyce (eds. Penelope Paparunas, Frances Ilmberger, and Martin Heusser (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2017)) contains essays on the topic.

Parallax on Show

17

from what McCoy picks up, the sudden death of an acquaintance: “one of the best” — a minor variant of the topic Eros and Thanatos. In “Sirens”, Bloom muses that “Music hath charms”, which in a later, pessimistic, mood becomes “Semingrand open crocodile music hath jaws” (U 11.904, 1055). This encapsules the “Sirens” motif: they are seductively attractive (“charms”) but also dangerous (“jaws”).4 An instructive sample is a single event remembered independently by the participants in “Sirens”. When the Blooms lived in Holles Street and were hard up (“on the rocks”, U 11.485), they lent and sold old clothes. The singer Ben Dollard, in need of a wedding garment for a performance, found unfitting trousers too small for his ample bulk. The occurrence is told from three angles, first by Ben Dollard, then Father Cowley and then Simon Dedalus: — God, do you remember? Ben bulky Dollard said, turning from the punished keyboard. And by Japers I had no wedding garment. […] — Our friend Bloom turned in handy that night, Mr Dedalus said. […] — I saved the situation, Ben, I think. — You did, averred Ben Dollard. I remember those tight trousers5 too. That was a brilliant idea, Bob. Father Cowley blushed to his brilliant purply lobes. He saved the situa. Tight trou. Brilliant ide. — I knew he was on the rocks, he said. The wife was playing the piano in the coffee palace on Saturdays for a very trifling consideration and who was it gave me the wheeze she was doing the other business? Do you remember? We had to search all Holles street to find them till the chap in Keogh’s gave us the number. Remember? Ben remembered, his broad visage wondering. — By God, she had some luxurious operacloaks and things there. […] — Merrion square style. Balldresses, by God, and court dresses. He wouldn’t take any money either. What? Any God’s quantity of cocked hats and boleros and trunkhose. What? — Ay, ay, Mr Dedalus nodded. Mrs Marion Bloom has left off clothes of all descriptions. (U 11.472–97)

4 Such disjunctions, dependent on the phonetic proximity, if they are noticed at all, can usually not be recreated in translations, or only by forced makeshift solutions. 5 Bold type is used throughout this essay for highlighting purposes.

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Chapter 2

The musical embroideries are typical for “Sirens”. By coincidence, Bloom, who overhears Dollard in the dining room of the Ormond Hotel, but not the conversation, recalls the same incident: Ben Dollard’s famous. Night he ran round to us to borrow a dress suit for that concert. Trousers tight as a drum on him. Musical porkers. Molly did laugh when he went out. Threw herself back across the bed, screaming, kicking. With all his belongings on show. O saints above, I’m drenched! O, the women in the front row! O, I never laughed so many! (U 11.554) The “tight trousers” — shortened to “Tight trou” — are echoed as “Trousers tight”. A secondary meta-echo is Molly “screaming, kicking” when in the saloon she was described as “Is she alive? / — And kicking” (U 11.505); her father is referred to as “the old drummajor”, Bloom thought the trousers “tight as a drum on him”. Molly Bloom has her own memory and point of view: … and Ben Dollard base barreltone the night he borrowed the swallowtail to sing out of in Holles street squeezed and squashed into them and grinning all over his big Dolly face like a wellwhipped childs botty I he look a balmy ballocks sure enough that must have been a spectacle on the stage imagine paying 5/- in the preserved seats for that to see him trotting off in his trowlers … (U 18.1284) That a “wedding garment” can also be a “dress suit” or a “swallowtail” is part of parallactic scope. Dollard’s “broad visage wondering” can be set off against Molly’s sight of “his big Dolly face”. She dismisses Dollard as a “balmy ballocks”, ignorant of how much she is on target, “ballocks” originally meant testicles, as they are somehow implicated in “belongings”. A new motif, “belongings on show”, is branching off. Bloom later considers Dollard “[n]o eunuch yet with all his belongings” (U 11.1027); eunuchs and ballocks are mutually exclusive. The phrase is extended to Molly’s charms: “Her crocus dress she wore low-cut, belongings on show” (U 11.1056; note the musical echo “crocus … low-cut”). In addition, the phrase also links back to Bloom’s reflection on a body exposed to X-rays: “But the poor buffer would have to stand all the time with his insides entrails on show” (U 8.1049). A subsection of parallax is the literal use of a word as against a topical one. The cocked hats offered by Bloom are real historical costumes, yet their figurative, that is parallactic, reappearance in “Eumaeus” is metaphorically askew: “… the Gloria in that being, to his mind, the acme of first class music as such,

Parallax on Show

19

literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat” (U 16.1738). In a similar fashion, Gerty MacDowell is physically “seated on the rocks” while Bloom again remembers how “we were on the rocks in Holles street” (U 13.9, 841). Minor motifs like “on show” tend to proliferate; this particular one comes close to an epiphany (a revelation). Fittingly in “Nausicaa”, Bloom reflects: “Glad I didn’t know it when she was on show” (U 13.775), while Molly once warned her daughter: “… 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 …” (U 18.1034). In contrast to voyeuristic applications, Stephen is discomforted by Mulligan when he “suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled handkerchief” (U 1.70).

1

Lilac Memories

A much more complex mosaic hinges around an event or events in the past that brought together the main characters of Ulysses — Bloom, Marion Tweedy and young Stephen — in an earlier constellation of the Bloomsday cast, but it is never clearly or chronologically presented. Bloom often reverts to it as he has cherished memories of Molly, on possibly their first encounter. It happened in Roundtown, in Mat Dillon’s garden, with redolent lilac trees, but seems entangled with a similar setup in Luke Doyle’s house, in Dolphin’s Barn. Luca Crispi details the complexities and confusions in their genetic development.6 The first time the encounter is called up by John Henry Menton, a rival for Molly’s attention at the time, who shows his dislike for Bloom; this occurs in an early change of perspective away from Bloom’s,7 in the cemetery: — Who is that chap behind with Tom Kernan? John Henry Menton asked. I know his face. Ned Lambert glanced back. — Bloom, he said, Madam Marion Tweedy that was, is, I mean, the soprano. She’s his wife. 6 Luca Crispi, Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses: Becoming the Blooms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See especially: “The Courtship of Leopold Bloom and Marion Tweedy: July 1886–October 1888”, 108–39. 7 The first of the departure occurs when Bloom, so far the subjective observer throughout, becomes the subject of conversation: “Martin Cunningham whispered: — I was in mortal agony with you talking of suicide before Bloom” (U 6.526), obviously outside of Bloom’s earshot.

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— O, to be sure, John Henry Menton said. I haven’t seen her for some time. She was a finelooking woman. I danced with her, wait, fifteen seventeen golden years ago, at Mat Dillon’s in Roundtown. And a good armful she was. […] I fell foul of him one evening. (U 6.690) The meeting in the cemetery makes Bloom recall the same occasion, with a different slant: Yes, Menton. Got his rag out that evening on the bowling green8 because I sailed inside him. Pure fluke of mine: the bias. Why he took such a rooted dislike to me. Hate at first sight. Molly and Floey Dillon linked under the lilactree, laughing. Fellow always like that, mortified if women are by. (U 6.1010) Menton evokes his dancing with Molly, a minor success; Bloom remembers beating him at a game (“fell foul of him” or “got his rag out”). In this context, “bias” is the proper word, a physical impetus of bowling; but Bloom and Menton are reciprocally biased. Psychologically, bias results in warped views. In “Sirens”, the scene becomes lush and seductive: Singing. Waiting she sang. I turned her music. Full voice of perfume of what perfume does your lilactrees. Bosom I saw, both full, throat warbling. First I saw. She thanked me. Why did she me? Fate. Spanishy eyes. (U 11.730) Charades occur to Bloom in “Nausicaa”, with Mat Dillon’s daughters: At Dolphin’s barn charades in Luke Doyle’s house. Mat Dillon and his bevy of daughters: Tiny, Atty, Floey, Maimy, Louy, Hetty. Molly too. Eightyseven that was. Year before we. … Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she. Circus horse walking in a ring. Rip van Winkle we played. Rip: tear in Henny Doyle’s overcoat. (U 13.1105) The most extensive treatment is refracted through the literary lenses of Walter Pater:

8 Bowling Green is where Nora Barnacle lived.

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21

A scene disengages itself in the observer’s memory, evoked, it would seem, by a word of so natural a homeliness as if those days were really present there (as some thought) with their immediate pleasures. A shaven space of lawn one soft May evening, the wellremembered grove of lilacs at Roundtown, purple and white, fragrant slender spectators of the game but with much real interest in the pellets as they run slowly forward over the sward or collide and stop, one by its fellow, with a brief alert shock. And yonder about that grey urn where the water moves at times in thoughtful irrigation you saw another as fragrant sisterhood, Floey, Atty, Tiny and their darker friend with I know not what of arresting in her pose then, Our Lady of the Cherries, a comely brace of them pendent from an ear, bringing out the foreign warmth of the skin so daintily against the cool ardent fruit. A lad of four or five in linseywoolsey (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. He 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 the piazzetta giving upon the flowerclose with a faint shadow of remoteness or of reproach (alles Vergängliche) in her glad look. (U 14.1359) The first intimation of the scene occurs when Bloom observes Molly’s “smiling eyes”: The same young eyes. The first night after the charades. Dolphin’s barn. (U 4.344) In “Ithaca”, the encounter is pedantically and factually summarised: How many previous encounters proved their preexisting acquaintance? Two. The first in the lilacgarden of Matthew Dillon’s house, Medina Villa, Kimmage road, Roundtown, in 1887, in the company of Stephen’s mother, Stephen being then of the age of 5 and reluctant to give his hand in salutation. (U 17.466) In her memories, Molly becomes the centre of attention. In her account of the day, Stephen played a major part: I suppose hes a man now by this time he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his lord Fauntleroy suit and curly hair like a prince

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on the stage when I saw him at Mat Dillons he liked me too I remember they all do (U 18.1310) On this early encounter, young Stephen seems to have extended an invitation to Bloom, which he “[v]ery gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, declined” (U 17.473). In delayed reciprocity, Stephen refuses “a proposal of asylum” from Bloom: “Promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully it was declined” (U 17.954), in similarly playful embroidered style, untypical for “Ithaca”. A coherent picture does not arise out of the scattered fragments. Crispi, who has minutely traced every addition in the complex entanglement of the text, judges similarly and with much more expertise: One of the abiding cruxes in Ulysses is a seemingly simple question: when and how did Leopold and Molly first meet? After summing up all the information in the book about the first night, it seems there were indeed two (or possibly more) so-called first nights — different firsts on different evenings — for the soon-to-be Blooms. It might be surprising that even careful readers could be confused about this happy occasion, but what might be considered a more critical fault is that it seems Bloom himself is of two minds about the date and location of this momentous event. (140)

2

Episodic

The episodes in Ulysses, each with its own DNA, foreground specific aspects, and a different thematic tinge can also be described in terms of serial parallax. “Cyclops” and “Nausicaa” are manifest opposites: “Cyclops” centring on hatred, conflict and violence; “Nausicaa” on (imagined, sentimental) love. Practically everything in “Cyclops” evokes a negative, though perhaps witty comment (set off by an occasional euphoric interpolation), whereas the Gerty half of “Nausicaa” tends to blot out grim reality by romanticising everything. A single item may suffice: the Citizen’s, or rather Giltrap’s dog, Garryowen, is either a ferocious threat — “The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps. Be a corporal work of mercy if someone would take the life of that bloody dog” (U 12.124) — or, for Gerty MacDowell, “grandpapa Giltrap’s lovely dog Garryowen that almost talked it was so human” (U 13.232).9 Bloom 9 “Circe” offers yet another facet: “The wolfdog sprawls on his back, wriggling obscenely with begging paws his long black tongue lolling out” (U 15.663).

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is seen, in stereotype, as either repulsive and ugly or as a handsome attractive foreign gentleman. The “Nausicaa” episode itself is split up, before and after its climax, Gerty MacDowell’s daydreaming is counterpointed by Bloom’s resigned attitude, reminiscent of the mood of Ecclesiastes.

3

Parallactic Rearrangement

One leitmotif of “Sirens”, “Bronze by gold”, has its origin in the previous episode, “Wandering Rocks”, where the two barmaids in the Ormond Hotel first appear, with typical local emphasis, but in varying arrangement, first in an interpolation, then as the viceregal cavalcade passes in the Coda: Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head, appeared above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel. (U 10.962) Above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel, gold by bronze, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head watched and admired. (U 10.1192) The pieces are shifted around: the heads are in the same order but “Bronze by gold” is altered to “gold by bronze”. The two heads at first simply “appear”; once the cavalcade passes, they become active, “watched and admired”. The motif is carried into the opening of “Sirens” and so links the two episodes. Appropriately, we move from seeing (“appeared”, “watched and admired”) to hearing (“heard”, “steelyringing”), from eye to ear.10 The (often-called) “Overture” takes up the theme in abbreviated form, and right at the outset the local sirens condense the motif, with a strong emphasis on metals, gold, bronze and steel, first in a short, and then in an extended form: Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing. (U 11.1) Bronze by gold, miss Douce’s head by miss Kennedy’s head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel. (U 11.165)

10

This might remotely echo how the Sirens are presented in the Odyssey. Kirke describes what their island looks like: “about them is a great heap of bones of mouldering men” (Od. 12.45), but when Odysseus approaches them, they “raised their clear-toned song” (Od. 12.183).

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“Bronze by gold”, merely peripheral first, becomes dominant in the musical episode. In mirror fashion, “Wandering Rocks” ends on a Retrospective Arrangement; “Sirens” begins on a Prospective one, the former in clear outlines, the latter in a puzzling jumble of sounds. “Sirens” is a chapter of repetition with variation, which could be a thumbnail description of (traditional) music.

4

Paradigm of Parallax

It feels as though Joyce didactically wanted to present an early example of applied parallax in Buck Mulligan’s itemized exhortation: — God! He said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look. (U 1.77) A compendium of possible views (“Come and look”) is displayed; possible aspects of the “sea” are lined up. The sea can be evoked poetically or mythologically as “a great sweet mother”, as in a poem by Swinburne, “Algy”; all life originates from it. As against such a metaphor, comparison, or analogy, the physical impact can be foregrounded, the sea’s colour: “snotgreen” or “wine-faced”, contained it its Homeric guise “oinopa”. A repulsive “snotgreen”, echoed from a preceding description of a dirty handkerchief, is in contrast to a classical “oinopa”, which is foreign and dignified. What colour is the sea in visual reality, a gradation or mixture?11 Mulligan moves on to its tactile effect, “scrotumtightening”, using an outstanding (in its time) and unexpected new combination, a neologism for all we know, empirically and subjectively, it suggests that some physical (male) parts are more susceptible than others. The instructor then airs his classical erudition and passes on to a familiar tag that occurs six times in the Odyssey: “Epi oinopa ponton”. The next item, “Thalatta! Thalatta!” is a shop-worn quotation from Xenophon’s Anabasis, about a military excursion, a text that was generally studied for learning Greek. Mulligan’s erudition is not necessarily deep at this point. He then returns to “our own” great sweet mother, bringing his exposé full circle. 11

This differs from “Neptune’s blue domain” as a cliché in “Aeolus” has it (U 7.245). Blue may be the single colour that the sea surrounding Ireland is not.

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Five different aspects from various views are sample attitudes. The two Greek appellations express different moods; “epi oinopa ponton” is one of Homer’s best known formulas for a recurrent action, sailing out, which was hazardous, fraught with danger and the possibility of shipwreck (only Odysseus survived it). In drastic contrast, “Thalatta! Thalatta!” evokes one unique occasion, when, after many exertions, the troops finally recognise the Black Sea and know they are close to home, a safe nostos is in sight, so their exclamation is exuberant. Moreover, two separate words for sea are set side by side, one male pontos, the other female, “thalatta”, and in another Greek dialect, Ionian (Homer has “thalassa”). In “Eumaeus”, Bloom falls to “woolgathering on the enormous dimensions of the water around the globe” and parades his own diverse views (U 16.625–52). The Water Hymn in “Ithaca” (U 17.183–228) is a lengthy enumeration of water aspects, each one different — an exercise in parallax. Depending on how you look at it and in which context, something like the sea changes substantially, as we can also learn from the rest of Ulysses. The author of “Thalatta”, Xenophon (whose name means “foreign voice”), is evoked in “Aeolus” and also has the sea in its vision: And Xenophon looked upon Marathon, Mr Dedalus said, looking again on the fireplace and to the window, and Marathon looked on the sea. (U 7.254) This extension on Lord Byron’s “The mountains look on Marathon — And Marathon looks on the sea” (Don Juan, Canto III, after stanza 86) introduces a third look into the composition.

5

Wandering Looks

The different locations in “Wandering Rocks” entail perspectival changes. The Dedalus girls worry about turning old books into money and curse a pawnbroker who refuses a deal: Katey and Boody Dedalus shoved in the door of the closesteaming kitchen. — Did you put in the books? Boody asked. […] — They wouldn’t give anything on them, she said. […] — Where did you try? Boody asked. — M’Guinness’s.

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Boody stamped her foot and threw her satchel on the table. — Bad cess to her big face! She cried. (U 10.258) Father Conmee and the reader have already met the same person: Was that not Mrs M’Guinness? Mrs M’Guinness, stately, silverhaired, bowed to Father Conmee from the farther footpath along which she smiled. And Father Conmee smiled and saluted. How did she do? 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. (U 10.61) Depending on one’s mood or social standing, or past experience, a “big face” is distinguished from “a queenly mien” and a “fine carriage” (potentially misleading). In the kitchen scene just mentioned, the hungry girls hope for something to still their hunger: […] Katey went to the range and peered with squinting eyes. — What’s in the pot? She asked. — Shirts, Maggy said. Boody cried angrily: — Crickey, is there nothing for us to eat? (U 10.258) The pot contains shirts, but nothing to eat, which is contrasted with a great occasion in the same chapter: — There was a big spread out at Glencree reformatory, Lenehan said eagerly. The annual dinner, you know. Boiled shirt affair. The lord mayor was there, Val Dillon it was, and sir Charles Cameron and Dan Dawson spoke and there was music […] Delahunt of Camden street had the catering and yours truly was chief bottlewasher. Bloom and the wife were there. Lashings of stuff we put up: port wine and sherry and curacao to which we did ample justice. Fast and furious it was. After liquids came solids. Cold joints galore and mince pies … (U 10.536) In one constellation, boiled shirts spell hunger and poverty, in another dressing up for a lavish banquet.

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When Bloom is seen bending over books it enlists a comment on his interest in astronomy, as he once had a book with “stars and the moon and comets with long tails” (U 10.528). This inspires Lenehan to recount a story after the Glencree dinner (mentioned above). He boasts that sitting next to Molly Bloom he took some liberties with her, “settling her boa”, while “Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens”, one described as a “pinprick” causes Lenehan to joke “he wasn’t far wide of the mark” (U 10.555–574). Bloom’s absorption with astronomy thus leads to a mildly erotic adventure. All this while, Bloom is not concerned with astronomy but excited over Sweets of Sin, an erotic novel, which features “opulent curves”, “queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint” (U 10.611, 615), not too far a cry from “being lost, so to speak, in the milky way”12 (U 10.570).

6

Retrospective Parallax

There is such a thing as narrative temporal parallax which depends on the progress of reading or, in other words: when is pertinent information parcelled out? It is not in the Throwaway complex, since no reader, practically, would suspect the name of a now wholly unknown race horse in Bloom’s innocent “I was going to throw [the newspaper] away that moment” (U 5.537). What happens will only be revealed — and incidentally often not recognised — through a concatenation of misunderstanding when Lenehan falsely suspects that Bloom has won money on the Gold Cup race (U 12.1550). On occasion the meaning or import of something is not clear until a later occurrence throws light on it. Boylan has a shop girl send his presents to a lady by tram, “Send it at once, will you? It’s for an invalid” (U 10.322), obviously having Molly Bloom in mind, not, as we know, an invalid, and the remark may just express Boylan’s discretion. It is only much later, in “Ithaca”, that we observe in Bloom’s kitchen “a half empty bottle of William Gilbey and Co’s white invalid port” (U 17.305), so the that “invalid” was actually part of the label which may have inspired Boylan’s discreet subterfuge. In “Oxen of the Sun”, we find in Bloom’s mind “… the image of that voluptuous loveliness which the inspired pencil of Lafayette has limned for ages yet to come” (U 14.1220). Lafayette, which calls up historical figures that lead nowhere, remains cryptic for non-Dubliners. Elucidation is delayed for pages

12

This particular “milky way” again differs significantly from “the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way” (U 17.1043).

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yet to come, that is in “Eumaeus” where Bloom shows Stephen a photograph of Molly: “… Lafayette of Westmoreland street, Dublin’s premier photographic artist, being responsible for the esthetic execution” (U 16.1435), where a local photographer is explicitly named. Interestingly enough, the terms “pencil” for drawing, along with “limned”, derived from “lumen”, light, etymologically delineates “photography” = light-drawing.

7

Attitudes

Diverging attitudes can lead to social discomfort, as in the funeral carriage in “Hades” when the conversation turns to Dignam’s death: Mr Power gazed at the passing houses with rueful apprehension. — He had a sudden death, poor fellow, he said. — The best death, Mr Bloom said. Their wideopen eyes looked at him. — No suffering, he said. A moment and all is over. Like dying in sleep. No-one spoke. (U 6.310) Bloom’s view that the best possible death is a painless one clashes with that of his Catholic companions, who would be thinking mainly of the requisite rites like confession. His social gaffe results in a ponderous silence that deadens the conversation for a short, awkward while. Emotional parallax also shows itself in Stephen’s protracted mourning over not kneeling down at his mother’s deathbed, which keeps stinging (“biting”: “Agenbite of inwit”, U 1.481) him, while Buck Mulligan flippantly dismisses the dilemma by advising “Humour her until it’s over” (U 1.22). Bloom’s and Stephen’s associations diverge on multiple occasions as when they pass a local landmark: Between this point and the high at present unlit warehouses of Beresford place Stephen thought to think of Ibsen, associated with Baird’s the stonecutter’s in his mind somehow in Talbot place, first turning on the right, while the other who was acting as his fidus Achates inhaled with internal satisfaction the smell of James Rourke’s city bakery, situated quite close to where they were, the very palatable odour indeed of our daily bread, of all commodities of the public the primary and most indispensable. Bread, the staff of life, earn your bread, O tell me where is fancy bread, at Rourke’s the baker’s it is said. (U 16.51)

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Stephen’s mind turns towards literature,13 while Bloom is sensually aware of the smell of bread, quite in keeping with the trait that introduced him in the novel: food preferences (U 4.1). The two characteristic responses exemplify basic attitudes, just as an episode on eating, “Lestrygonians”, is followed by one on literature, “Scylla and Charybdis”. The most dynamic clash of attitudes is reserved for “Cyclops”, where a relatively open-minded — and also very imprudent — Bloom is confronted with the bigoted nationalism of the Citizen and others. Robert Ball explained parallax by looking at a distant object with one eye and then changing to the other to observe the apparent displacement. “Cyclops” underscores one-eyed narrowmindedness in action and conflict, but also formally; the whole episode is parallactically divided into a down-to-earth, monoptic, oral report and the tangential offshoots in generally romanticised or parodied interpolations in a particular written style. The entry of Alf Bergan is typical; an epically noble description mimics translations of Homer, especially in the epithets: And lo, as they quaffed their cup of joy, a godlike messenger came swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth and behind him there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred scrolls of law and with him his lady wife a dame of peerless lineage, fairest of her race. (U 12.244) This is set off against a coarse, sarcastic sketch, full of derision: Little Alf Bergan popped in round the door and hid behind Barney’s snug, squeezed up with the laughing. … I didn’t know what was up and Alf kept making signs out of the door. And begob what was it only that bloody old pantaloon Denis Breen in his bathslippers with two bloody big books tucked under his oxter and the wife hotfoot, trotting like a poodle. I thought Alf would split. (U 12.249) The predominant conflict is also reflected in the language, “noble gait” versus “in his bathslippers”. Alf Bergan does in fact split, parallactically and stylistically — he is both “godlike” and he “popped in”. The outsider Bloom with a code of his own does not fit into the company of a public house which, no wonder, he is reluctant to enter. He does not accept 13

A habitual association already in the Portrait: “… as he went by Baird’s stonecutting works in Talbot place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty” (P 176).

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or offer drinks, he is not entertaining but seriously informative, and he uses terms like “phenomenon” or “sheepdip” devoid of any entertainment value. His infelicities make him an easy target for ridicule or misrepresentation. When, cornered, he talks about “Love” in the sense of “the opposite of hatred” and comes unthinkingly close to Christian charity, the Citizen instantly gives the term an erotic twist: “He’s a nice pattern of a Romeo and Juliet” (U 12.1485, 1492).

8

“A pure misunderstanding” (U 15.4600)

Errors are parallax, sometimes psychological, as when Bloom inadvertently substitutes “the wife’s admirers” for “the wife’s advisers” (U 12.617). He misremembers the Passover rites: “All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage”; a slip that may reveal his pessimistic outlook that conditions do not necessarily improve — that basically conditions never change (U 7.208). But the “Aeolus” chapter also features a correct version in Taylor’s speech as it is quoted, that Moses “would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage” (U 7.864, emphases added). Analogically, the chapter silently deals with a familiar translation issue. Moses, in one model of great oratory, is called “horned”, in accordance with the famous sculpture under discussion (U 7.768). It is based on a mistranslation in the Old Testament: Moses, descending from his talk with the Lord, had rays emanating from his face, for which Hebrew uses a figurative term (“like horns”), which was then taken at face value in the Septuagint and rendered as “cornutus”, horned, the literal sense being at variance with the metaphorical one. But “Aeolus” also contains an adequate version, in Taylor’s speech, as remembered and recited: “with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance” (U 7.867, based on Ex. 34:21). Horns or light of inspiration, two aspects of the same appearance. Bloom is again off target when he mishears Stephen, as he is recovering consciousness in Nighttown, quoting lines from Yeats’ poem: “Who … drive … Fergus now / And pierce … wood’s woven shade …?” — an echo of what had been on his mind in the morning (U 1.240–45). In his parental concern and assuming probably that a young man waking up first utters the name of his girl, Bloom misinterprets the sounds auspiciously: “In the shady wood. The deep white breast. Ferguson I think I caught. Best thing could happen him…” (U 15.4932–52). His assumption persists in “Eumaeus” — “Miss Ferguson (who was very possibly the particular lodestar who brought him down to Irishtown so early in the morning)” (U 16.1569), as though to manifest how little the

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two main characters know of each other. It may be significant that at their parting in “Ithaca”, the bells of St. George’s church remind them of what they already heard in the morning, Stephen: “Liliata rutilantium. Turma circumdet. / Iubilantium te virginum. Chorus excipiat”; Bloom: “Heigho, heigho, / Heigho, heigho” (U 17.1228). These are also the endings of the first Stephen episode, “Telemachus” (U 1.736), and “Calypso” (U 4.546). Both being caught up in their own world, at least in this sense, they have not changed or were coming closer to each other. How far Bloom and Molly may be apart can be seen from a common memory: She looked fine. Her crocus dress she wore lowcut, belongings on show. Clove her breath was always in theatre when she bent to ask a question. Told her what Spinoza says in that book of poor papa’s. Hypnotised, listening. Eyes like that. She bent. Chap in dresscircle staring down into her with his operaglass for all he was worth. (U 11.1055) Bloom, with his penchant to hold forth if anyone ever cares to listen, remembers an event in the theatre when he entranced Molly by his talk about Spinoza, irrespective of whether an interval during a performance is the ideal occasion to bring it up. Molly recalls the same occasion, especially the man spying on her: … I was fit to be tied though I wouldnt give in with that gentleman of fashion staring down at me with his glasses and him the other side of me talking about Spinoza and his soul thats dead I suppose millions of years ago I smiled the best I could all in a swamp leaning forward as if I was interested having to sit it out then to the last tag I wont forget that wife of Scarli in a hurry … (U 18.1113, see also page 107) It was not an interest in philosophy that kept Molly alert, but a physical awkwardness that forced her to fake interest and composure, mind and body going different ways, so here philosophy is pitted against menstruation.

9

Lexical

Parallax can extend to verbal phrases. In a collection raised for the Dignam family, Bloom is seen as generous, in contrast to most others, and it is encapsulated in a verbal phrase:

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I see Bloom put his name down for five shillings. — Quite right, Martin Cunningham said, taking the list. And put down the five shillings too. (U 10.974) As many Irishmen would know, there is a difference between promising a donation and actually making it. Similarly, a shopgirl is asked to “Put these [pears] in first, will you?” (U 10.299), or a coin can be “put in” a machine (U 10.476), but the question “Did you put in the books?” (U 10.260) refers to pawning, a special sense. Joyce attunes us to such trivia. When John Howard Parnell “translated a white bishop” (U 10.1050), he is not manipulating words, but falling back on the old literal sense of “trans-ferring”, that is moving something in space, as on a chessboard.14 It so happens that the term is used ecclesiastically for moving a bishop from one see to another, which incidentally calls up Parnell’s relationship with the Church. His chess-playing brother was ex officio in charge of pawnbrokers. As every dictionary will tell, words are parallactic beings, the same word can go in various directions. In reverse, the same condition can be put in manifold ways, as we are shown for example in the coda of “Oxen of the Sun” where no one says anything straightforward; the same idea spawns colourful variations: “Query. Who’s astanding this here do? Proud possessor of damnall. Declare misery. Bet to the ropes. Me nantee saltee. Not a red at me this week gone” (U 14.14665). This looks like a smallscale replica of the series of idiosyncratic literary periods in the chapter. What is a “Latin quarter hat” (U 1.519)? Presumably not one quarter of a Latin hat. The step from such a partial hat to the Quartier latin in Paris, where Stephen picked up “Paris fads” (U 1.342), may be an obvious one, but it is a step nevertheless, and our annotations assume that not every reader will immediately recognize it. Numerous annotations provide directions to readers who may be likely to go in a wrong or no direction at all. Parallax is also in the reader’s knowledge. With the Bible at their fingertips, most of Joyce’s contemporaries would identify “… previously he had seen as in a glass darkly” (U 12.349) as a familiar quote from the Gospels: “For now we see through a glass, darkly: but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12); now such insights have to be relegated to commentaries. The dangling “Latin quarter hat” can sharpen a sense for potential syntactical ambivalences that may otherwise be overlooked. In “Circe”, Bloom’s 14

Similarly, two boxers “proposed gently each to other his bulbous fists” (U 10.833). They are not offering abstract propositions, but literally and spatially in the spatial episode, “put” (“pose”) their fists “forward” (“pro”). See also page 96.

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“The stiff walk” (U 1.207) relates to his near collision with a sandstrewer and his resulting impeded gait, where “stiff walk” is an adjective followed by a noun. But in “Circe”, many dead (“stiff”) do indeed walk the night, Bloom’s father for one, and many other ghosts. Syntactic diversity easily remains unnoticed. No reader is probably misled by Bloom’s reflection on cats: “Curious mice never squeal” (U 4.28), not a comment on the squalling habits of mice, which the unpunctuated sentence seems to proclaim. Without being conscious of it, we parse it as “[it is] curious [that] mice never squeal”. The book has already conditioned us to come to terms with the interior monologue. The device has been amplified into “Finnegans Wake”, which, due to its notoriously missing apostrophe, can be read as a genitive, or as a noun/name followed by a verb. “I.H.S.” does not stand for “I have sinned”, but it now does (U 5.372). Translators have to contort their makeshift non-equivalents. A French approximation is “Ici horribles supplices”,15 a Spanish one offers “Jesús he pecado”,16 and a German one “Ich habe Sünde”.17 Translations invariably go in different directions.

10

S. Homonymous

As a teacher of his own language, Joyce would have become aware of words looking, or sounding, the same but being of diverse nature — “close”, “horn”, “bar”, “stroke”, etc. Ulysses, whatever else, also instructs us about the intricacies of language. The diversity of “pen”, a confluence of words of multiple origins, is exemplary. It is primarily (in common use) a writing utensil: “a pen behind his ear” or “A pen and ink. Pat set with ink pen quite flat pad” (U 11.847); a stick found on the beach can serve to write a message “He flung his wooden pen away” (U 12.13.1270); it can characterise a competent journalist: “Gallaher, that was a pressman for you. That was a pen” (U 7.630), or serve as synecdoche for newspaper people: “THE CROZIER AND THE PEN”. It may just refer to writing: “the pen of our national poet” (U 16.840). The one word already has multiple applications. One of its unrelated homonyms means an enclosure for cattle: “Those mornings in the cattlemarket, the beasts lowing in their pens, branded sheep, 15 16 17

Ulysse, trans. Jacques Aubert et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 120. Ulises, trans. Francisco Garcia Tortosa and Maris Luisa Venegas (Madrid: Catedra, 2004), 91. Ulysses, trans. Hans Wollschläger (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), 114.

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flop and fall of dung” (U 4.159). Another word of the same shape, with a separate etymology, conjures up swans: “But [Shakespeare] does not stay to feed the pen chivying [sic] her game of cygnets towards the rushes”, fitting for the “Swan of Avon”; it reappears in “Circe”: “a pen chivvying her brood of cygnets” (U 9.150, 15.3840). To top it all, after the many pens, real or synecdochic, in “Aeolus”, a headline proclaims “ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP”, with a “Pen” that is cryptic at first sight until it turns out that, on the basis of an undocumented claim that the philosopher Antisthenes praised Penelope’s beauty as superior to Helen of Troy18 (U 7.1034); the inhabitants of Ithaka, home of Penelope, are depicted as cheering in an imagined beauty contest against Sparta, birthplace of Helen: “Spartans Gnash Molars”. So “Pen” is a modern short form of Penelope, out of place because names in Homeric Greek were never abbreviated. In multiple ways in Ulysses, Pen is champ. (See also pages 188 and 298.) But then there may be entirely coincidental sequences of letters without overt significance at all, possibly pure coincidences. Bloom attempts to recall a name: What was the name of that priestylooking chap was always squinting in when he passed? Weak eyes, woman. Stopped in Citron’s saint Kevin’s parade. Pen something. Pendennis? My memory is getting. Pen …? Of course it’s years ago. Noise of the trams probably. (U 8.176) Molly in turn remembers “that delicate looking student that stopped in no 28 with the Citrons Penrose nearly caught me washing through the window only for I snapped up the towel to my face that was his studenting” (U 18.572). There is no intrinsic connection between Bloom’s “Pen something?” and the same constellation in his literary aspiration as it surfaces in “Eumaeus”: “… suppose he were to pen something out of the common groove (as he fully intended doing) at the rate of one guinea per column (U 16.1227). Some plays on words, including puns, are parallactic by definition, fusing two perspectives. The compulsive joker Lenehan offers a riddle, “What opera resembles a railway line? Reflect, ponder, excogitate” (U 7.514), with the slight

18

Antisthenes “wrote a book in which he took away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope” (U 7.1038). Note Stephen’s parallactic elaboration in the Library: “Antisthenes … took the palm of beauty from Kyrios Menelaus’s brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope” (U 9.621). Helen, the most beautiful woman in antiquity, was not known for breeding.

Parallax on Show

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variant “What opera is like a railway line?” He also volunteers the answer: “The Rose of Castile. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!”19 (U 7.591). The “wheeze”, echoing Lenehan’s “wheezy laugh” (U 10.544), hinges on phonetic dissociation in the direction of a musical work of art as against the modern infrastructure of a country. The same ingredients characterise a novel that calls up the Odyssey but focuses on everyday matters, with trams being omnipresent in “Aeolus”. As to rows or row, how is Bloom’s “His wives in a row to watch the effect” to be read? The effect is that a cannibal chief would consume a victim’s “parts of honour” and thereby become more “tough” (U 8.745). Are the wives lined up neatly in a row or would they, with different pronunciation, compete in a noisy row? Bloom himself would know what he means, readers not necessarily. The same collocation has a different meaning, according to whether it appears in a literary discussion (“the works of sweet William”, U 9.899) or within a garden context: “grassplots set with eccentric ellipses of scarlet and chrome tulips, blue scillas, crocuses, sweet William, sweet pea, lily of the valley” (U 17.1558). Grammar alone cannot decide whether “Boylan eyed, eyed” (U 11.419) is a musical repetition or, much more likely, a passive “eyed” followed by an active verb.20 The same applies to its counterpart: “Lydia admired, admired” (U 11.775). Also in “Sirens”, “bothered Pat”, is primarily deaf, hard of hearing (as the Irish word means, U 11.287, passim), but the English sense of bothered may apply as well, at least the German translator Georg Goyert, who was not informed, rendered it as “der abgearbeitete Pat” (“worked off”).21 Even repetitions or recalls can diversify. In Bloom’s somnolent reminiscences, the names of an actress, Bracegirdle, or Grace Darling, who rescued sailors, take on associations: “O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed …” (U 13.1279). Another category consists of phrases that gratuitously also serve as metacomments, reflecting on the book Ulysses as a work of art, the best-known

19

20

21

The riddle is scrambled in “Circe”: “What railway opera is like a tramline in Gibraltar? The Rows of Casteele” (U 15.1731). Appropriately, the opera The Rose of Castile is featured again in “Sirens” (U 11.329, 331, 1109, 1271); it begins on the metallic note “steelyringing” (U 11.1) Some translation opt for a mere repetition: “Boylan occhieggiava, occhieggiava”, Ulisse, trans. Gianni Celati (Torino: Einaudi, 2013), 367; “Boylan observaba, observaba”, Ulises, trans. Jose Valverde, (Barcelona: Lumen, 1976), I.417. Ulysses, trans. Georg Goyert (Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1926, 1956), 269.

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case of a self-description of Ulysses being a “chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle” (U 14.1412), which clearly reaches beyond its immediate context. Molly Bloom incidentally and innocently even addresses the author himself: “O Jamesy, let me out of this” (U 18.1128).22 A similar familiar example is “Bovril, by James” — Bovril, a beef extract fits into the “Oxen of the Sun” episode (U 14.1547). Finnegans Wake is narcissistically occupied with its own being and format.

… “Language of flow” is in Bloom’s mind as he remembers the letter with the flower he received in the morning (U 11.398). Since “a pin cuts lo[ve]”, a flower is equally cut short. But this being “Sirens”, it is hard for the eye not to pick out “flow of language”, a dominant feature in the musical chapter, quite apart from an earlier “The flow of the language it is” (U 8.65).

11

Out of Context

When a quote is shifted into a different framework, it takes on a new meaning, often with humorous intention. In a discussion of capital punishment in “Cyclops”, an argument is brought forward that it may have a “deterrent effect”, most likely said by Bloom, who as often is not quite playing an expected game. In typical pub talk, it is immediately taken up and anatomically transposed: hanging does not have a deterrent effect on the victim’s genitals and results in an erection, as relayed by a witness: “it was standing up in their faces like a poker”. Which leads to a clever interjection “Ruling passion strong in death, as someone said” (U 12.454–63). As is well-known, it was Alexander Pope who paid tribute to a dead friend: “And you! Brave Cobham, to the latest breath / Shall feel your ruling passion strong in death”.23 Pope did not refer to an erection, but his line is now diverted into an unintended context. Bloom himself attempts to change the topic by giving a scientific account about a “natural phenomenon” which is instantly sidetracked into a parody. In similar fashion, the Citizen reads out a long tedious list of English names from an Irish newspaper and includes one “Cockburn”, 22

23

Actually, the quote goes on “O Jamesy, let me out of this pooh”, and an old issue is whether the closing “pooh” is an exclamation, as I think — “Pooh! Buck Mulligan said” (U 1.554); “Pooh! A livre cries Monsieur Lynch” (U 14.784) — or a noun. Alexander Pope, Moral Essays, Epistle I, 262–3.

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when he is interrupted: “I know that fellow, says Joe, from bitter experience”, in seeming naiveté dividing the name into “cock burn”, for comic relief (U 12.234).24 The narrator of “Cyclops” right at the start is “on two minds” (not to charge a chimneysweep, U 12.9), and in fact the episode itself is on two minds — the oral narrative and the written interpolations that offer tangential views. Thematically, Bloom’s mind clashes with nationalism. One of the features of “Cyclops” is derailing a statement or quote into different context, so that “allegations” can jocularly be twisted into an “alligator” (U 12.1626), or an Italian can be subjected to mock-English pronunciation, “the eyetallyano”, which additionally inserts a Cyclopean tall eye (U 12.1087). One of Joyce’s techniques, not a new one, is changing the context, or transframing. Bloom looking back on his physical response to Gerty’s exhibitionism, adds a new twist to a well-known quote: “Did me good all the same. Off colour after Kiernan’s, Dignam’s. For this relief much thanks. In Hamlet, that is. Lord! It was all things combined” (U 13.939). Another application occurs in a parody of a resolution: “The mystery was unveiled. Haines was the third brother. His real name was Childs. The black panther was himself the ghost of his own father. He drank drugs to obliterate. For this relief much thanks” (U 14.1032). Bloom’s “Wonderworker” in its way insures “instant relief”, as one of its testimonies proves: “What a pity the government did not supply our men with wonderworkers during the South African campaign! What a relief it would have been!” (U 17.1837). The Boer War context adds a historical overtone as some of the best known British exploits were the military “reliefs” of Mafeking and of Ladysmith. In “Oxen of the Sun”, Parallax is personified and “stalks behind [some horses and beasts], the lancinating lightnings of whose brows are scorpions”, in a zodiacal constellation (U 14.1091). Parallax is in charge of the whole episode, which changes view, situation, mood and style of each paragraph in a historical progression and in which Bloom, for one, is in turn a “seeker”, “traveller”, “childe Leopold”, “sir Leopold”, a “Calmer”, “this alien”, “Mr Canvasser Bloom”, “a vigilant wanderer”, or “Pubb. Canv.” and “the stranger”. Parallax does indeed stalk behind. 24

Just to evade such an effect, the name “Cockburn” is generally pronounced, or spelled, Coburn. My assumption is that the Citizen with intentional naiveté mispronounces the name.

Chapter 3

Joyce’s Sense of Rumour Joyce often makes us aware of commonplaces, what we always knew but did not pay particular attention to, such as my topic at hand. Since we are rarely at the scene of action, and certainly not at events that happened before our time, we are dependent on spoken or written reports. In the majority of all cases, we simply cannot verify them and have to trust what we are told, whether it is news, history, biography or whatever. Joyce makes us aware of such platitudes. What is being told need not conform to facts or truth; it has to be articulated in language, which is in itself a precarious process. Joyce is one of the authors who essentially pitted truth (what actually is) against rumour (what is passed on), but by no means is he the first one. The issue is as old as human communication. Tales can always depart from the facts, due to incomplete comprehension, by intention, often for strategic, survival purposes, or they can be aimed at more entertainment. Embellishments, anyway, try to be more amusing than facts. It is classical procedure to turn to the ancients, especially because they knew that communication entails distortion. Greek myth (in itself a type of rumour) invested the Muses, the daughters of Memory, with universal knowledge and the source of all information. Right from the start they caution their listeners by admitting: We know to tell many false things that seem to be true, but we also know how to speak the truth when we wish to.1 Significantly, in their wording, false things precede truth, while truth seems to be an exceptional favour. The Muses2 boast of their skills in misinformation. This is echoed, almost verbatim, by Odysseus, who excelled at making “many falsehood seem like the truths” (Od. 19.203). One term for rumour was “kleos”, rumour, report, in particular a good report, that results in fame or glory, something that Homeric heroes strove for: to be known, remembered in epics, to become famous. In Latin terms, they had acquired a lot of fama. Ulysses is set off against an epic whose hero Odysseus achieved fame by his skill of invent1 δμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα, ἴδμεν δ’ εὖτ’ ἐθέλωμεν ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι. (Hesiod, Theogony 28–9) 2 It is no wonder that in “Circe” the nine Muses themselves are updated and enlarged to twelve (U 15.1707). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_004

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ing strategic rumours that ensured his survival. His initial epithet, “polytropos”, also implicates the skill of fashioning adequate turns (Od. 1.1). In his Metamorphoses, Ovid devotes a detailed description to Fama, the impersonation of Rumour, who “dwells in a house of a thousand apertures, with no doors”:3 The whole place resounds with confused noises … repeats all words and doubles what it hears … only subdued murmur of voices … everywhere wander thousands of rumours, falsehoods mingled with the truths, confused words flit about … while the story grows in size, and each new teller makes contributions … Here is Credulity … heedless Error … unfounded Joy … panic Fear … sudden Sedition … unauthentic Whisperings. Rumour beholds all that is done in heaven, on sea and land, and searches throughout the world for news.4 Fama derives from a verb fari, to speak, its derivatives are “fable, fame, fate, famous, infamy”, etc. In the following observations, “Rumour” is taken in a wide sense, everything that, as Finnegans Wake phrases it, is “putting truth and untruth together” (FW 169.8), so as to include Gossip, Report, Hearsay, Talk, Fabrication, Whispering, News, Fiction, Scandal, Allegation, Story, Legend, Myth, Libel, Slander, Reputation, Phantom, etc. Rumour is omnipresent, a commonplace that will be exemplified in the comments to follow.

1

Dubliners: Elliptical Rumours

Rumour is there right from the start in the first story of Dubliners, “The Sisters”, whose initial paragraph already says of the priest, the central figure: “I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true” (D 9). What is said can be true or else “idle”, which in the New Testament meant “inactive, not effective”: “That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment” (Matt. 12:36). When the young boy in Joyce’s story joins his family, the first words he hears about the priest are rumours not even spelled out:

3 “Metamorphoses” fits the context since all rumours consist of something, or perhaps nothing, transformed into a story. 4 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justius Miller (London: Loeb Classic Library, 1916), 12.39–63.

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— No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly … but there was something queer … there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion … — I have my own theory about it, he said. I think it was one of those … peculiar cases … But it’s hard to say … (D 10, elipses original) Joyce starts with a barrage of haunting ellipses. No one in the story forwards concrete facts; what comes closest to it is what one of the priest’s sisters, who certainly was not on the scene, speculates: — It was that chalice he broke … That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still … They say it was the boy’s fault. But poor James was so nervous, God be merciful to him! (D 17) The cause was some accident: “that chalice he broke”, something very concrete. But can a chalice, made of solid gold and silver, ever be “broken” by force? Chances are that the chalice was just dropped, which would be awkward enough. The strong, active, misleading verb may be a matter of expression, when a plate is dropped, it generally breaks. The report is based on what “they say”; the chalice “contained nothing”, which is also true of many rumours. In “An Encounter”, we read “Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that [Joe Dillon] had a vocation”, which is followed by one of the simplest sentences in Dubliners, or perhaps all of Joyce: “Nevertheless it was true” (D 19). What it might mean is that Dillon actually took orders, but as we learn from the Portrait, nobody except God and the person himself can know whether he really has a vocation.5 In retrospect, one possible reading of “The Sisters” is that Father Flynn found out that he did not have a vocation or began to have doubts about it. Rumour and gossip abound in many of the stories. We cannot tell whether Frank’s account of his adventures (“He had sailed through the Straits of Magellan and he told the stories of the terrible Patagonians”, D 39), with its echoes of Othello, is true or not, just as we cannot tell whether he really plans to marry Eveline in Buenos Ayres. The action in “The Boarding House” hinges on “an affair”: … people in the house began to talk of the affair … All the lodgers in the house knew something of the affair; details had been invented by some. 5 “But you must be quite sure, Stephen, that you have a vocation because it would be terrible if you found afterwards that you have none” (P 160).

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… The affair would be sure to be talked of, and his employer would be certain to hear of it. Dublin is such a small city: everyone knows everyone else’s business. (D 63–5) What exactly happened between Polly, the landlady’s daughter, and Mr Doran we are never told except that she went into his room, in itself cause enough for a scandal. While many readers assume that a pregnancy occurred, though it is never mentioned in the story or in the gossip around Bob Doran later in Ulysses, I for one at least do not know how far the couple went. Doran remembers that in confession the priest had magnified the sin, so that there was something to magnify. It is possible that Doran is punished for doing relatively little, which would make his doom all the more poignant. The main actions in “The Boarding House” occur off stage — Polly’s “interview” with her mother remains vague as a mere memory of the night before (both have been both “frank” and yet awkwardly “awkward”, D 64) — and we are also not present when Mrs Mooney faces her victim downstairs, though the outcome is predictable. The story is dovetailed into Ulysses, where the narrator of “Cyclops” comments on Doran’s plight in customary exaggeration; that Polly’s mother was “procuring rooms for street couples” is not born out in the story itself; Polly’s brother Jack’s threat, “Told him if he didn’t patch up the pot, Jesus, he’d kick the shite out of him” (U 12.814), is not confirmed in the story, which merely states that “they saluted coldly; and the lover’s eyes rested for a second or two on a thick bulldog face and a pair of thick short arms”, before Doran faces the outraged mother. What Doran remembers is an earlier outburst when a lodger “had made a rather free allusion to Polly” (D 68). Of course, Jack Mooney might have said what is claimed in “Cyclops” on some later occasion, but it would have been pointless once Doran’s fate was sealed. In a listing of the Dubliners titles in Finnegans Wake, the story has turned into an outright “boardelhouse”, more suggestive than factual (FW 186.31). Rumours tend to grow in size, as Ovid already had it. Even a casual unfinished remark that “King Edward’s life, you know, is not very …” (“Ivy Day in the Committee Room”, D 132) was enough to scare a potential publisher into a rejection, and Joyce was even prepared to withdraw the offending line. When Ulysses was in the hands of a French publication, he exacted his revenge in a typical unsparing Cyclopean gossip: There’s a bloody sight more pox than pax about that boyo. Edward Guelph-Wettin! …

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— They ought to have stuck up all the women he rode himself … (U 12.1400) Queen Victoria comes in for similar treatment: — And as for the Prooshians and the Hanoverians, says Joe, haven’t we had enough of those sausageeating bastards on the throne from George the elector down to the German lad and the flatulent old bitch that’s dead? Jesus, I had to laugh at the way he came out with that about the old one with the winkers on her, blind drunk in her royal palace every night of God, old Vic, with her jorum of mountain dew and her coachman carting her up body and bones to roll into bed and she pulling him by the whiskers and singing him old bits of songs about Ehren on the Rhine and come where the boose is cheaper. (U 12.1393) Rumours about this particular event were circulating.6 “Grace”, in turn, features a conversation about the Catholic Church and the popes with Martin Cunningham pontificating on papal “mottos”: — Pope Leo XIII, said Mr Cunningham, was one of the lights of the age. … His motto, you know, as Pope, was Lux upon Lux — Light upon Light … it was Lux upon Lux. And Pius IX. his predecessor’s motto was Crux upon Crux — that is, Cross upon Cross — to show the difference between their two pontificates. (D 167) Apart from the fact that popes never took such mottos, they would not conflate uninflected Latin with English (“Lux upon Lux” or “Crux”). Some stories — “Weren’t some of the popes — of course, not our present man, or his predecessor, but some of the old popes — not exactly …” are countered by Cunningham, who holds forth on “the greatest scene in the whole history of the Church”: 6 “The story is told how Queen Victoria, much taken by a melody which a military band was playing on the terrace at Winsor, sent a Court official to ask Dan Godfrey, the bandmaster, for the name of the piece. Only a lifelong habit of discipline enabled the embarrassed man to report that the title was Come Where the Boose is Cheaper. (We are not told whether She was amused.)” (Christopher Pulling, They Were Singing, London: George G. Harrap, 1952, 133). Victory Pomeranz found a different take, see “Come where the boose is cheaper”, James Joyce Quarterly 15.1 (Fall 1977): 94. Verifying the source of some stories is a matter of matching certain reports at hand with others.

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— There they were at it, all the cardinals and bishops and archbishops from all the ends of the earth and these two fighting dog and devil until at last the Pope himself stood up and declared infallibility a dogma of the Church ex cathedra. On the very moment John MacHale, who had been arguing against it, stood up and shouted out with the voice of a lion: Credo! (D 168) There are of course no verbatim reports of how Vatican decisions come about. Cunningham’s presumed inside knowledge comes to a climax when he describes how “the Pope himself stood up and declared infallibility a dogma of the Church ex cathedra” because the Pope is infallible when he speaks “ex cathedra” (D 169). Ex cathedra means “from his seat”, that is from the papal throne, not standing up. (An aside: has anyone ever found the slightest evidence that the action of “The Dead” takes place on Epiphany, January 6? This seems to have become a fact based upon uncritical perpetuation.)

2

Omnirumorous Ulysses

Ulysses is full of hearsay, even within its fictional framework; “fiction” means something made up irrespective of reality of plausibility. Certain episodes are more rumorous than others: in “Aeolus”, news is disseminated, “Cyclops” is full of gossip, Circean hallucinations and nightmares grossly exaggerate, and “Eumaeus” throws doubt on all forms of communication and identity. The interpolations in “Cyclops” could be seen as elaborated tangential rumours. Even the title “Ulysses” is partly misleading, as it promises a foray into classical myths, but describes a specific location contemporary to the time in which it was written; like any self-respecting rumour, it is both true and untrue. Some rumours are taken up from Dubliners. One concerning Cunningham is repeated practically verbatim: “People had great sympathy for him for it was known that he had married an unpresentable woman who was an incurable drunkard. He had set up house for her six times; and each time she had pawned the furniture on him” (D 157). In Ulysses, Bloom remembers the gossip, “And that awful drunkard of a wife of his. Setting up house for her time after time and then pawning the furniture on him every Saturday almost” (U 6.349). The nearly identical phrasing suggests, however, that this particular report has been solidified into a set formula; Bloom recalls what has already been circulated as a phrase. Cunningham’s companion, Jack Power, is also a target of rumour:

44

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Nice fellow. Who knows is that true about the woman he keeps? Not pleasant for the wife. Yet they say, who was it told me, there is no carnal. You would imagine that would get played out pretty quick. Yes, it was Crofton met him one evening bringing her a pound of rumpsteak. What is this she was? Barmaid in Jury’s. Or the Moira, was it? (U 6.244) Molly has heard of it too, possibly through her husband: “… Jack Power keeping that barmaid he does of course his wife is always sick or going to be sick or just getting better…” (U 18.1272).

3

“They Say”

How much in Ulysses is hearsay or grapevine can be measured by the occurrence of “rumour”, or report, especially with Eumaean tautology — “Rumour had it, though not proved”, “if the report was verified”, “if report spoke true”, “if report belie him not” — or in Ithacan precision — “the propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity” (U 17.846) — and in the frequent (and perhaps hardly noticed) use of “they say”: “It was a nun they say invented barbed wire” (U 8.153), “Drowning they say is the pleasantest” (U 6.988), “Wife in every port they say” (U 13.1153), etc.7 7 — He is sitting with Tim Healy, J.J. O’Molloy said, rumour has it, on the Trinity college estates commission. (U 7.800) Mr Russell, rumour has it, is gathering together a sheaf of our younger poets’ verses (U 9.291). And he that had erst challenged to be so doughty waxed wan as they might all mark and shrank together and his pitch that was before so haught uplift was now of a sudden quite plucked down and his heart shook within the cage of his breast as he tasted the rumour of that storm. (U 14.412) His grandfather, Patrick Michael Corley, of New Ross, had married the widow of a publican there whose maiden name had been Katherine (also) Talbot. Rumour had it, though not proved, that she descended from the house of the Lords Talbot de Malahide in whose mansion, really an unquestionably fine residence of its kind and well worth seeing, his mother or aunt or some relative, a woman, as the tale went, of extreme beauty, had enjoyed the distinction of being in service in the washkitchen. (U 16.133) — Was she? Bloom ejaculated surprised, though not astonished by any means. I never heard that rumour before. Possible, especially there it was, as she lived there. So, Spain. (U 16.1418) And now, why? So the scene between the pair of them, the licensee of the place, rumoured to be or have been Fitzharris, the famous invincible, and the other, obviously bogus, reminded him forcibly as being on all fours with the confidence trick… (U 16.1042) He weighed the possible evidences for and against ritual murder: the incitations of the hierarchy, the superstition of the populace, the propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of opulence, the influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances of fanaticism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism. (U 17.844)

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I counted more than 40 such occurrences and, typically perhaps, not one of them was thought or uttered by Stephen Dedalus. The exact Homeric Greek equivalent of “they say” is “phasi”. Zeus, who might know better, complains that the immortals blame the gods. “It is from us, they say, that evils come …” (Od. 1.33). There is a sceptical touch in the account of Pallas Athene, who “departed to Olympos where, they say, is the abode of the gods that stands fast for ever” (Od. 6.41), with a whiff of theological distrust. One verb, “euchomai”, signals potential doubt. It is generally rendered “declare to be” (which also can amount to “boast”), as when Athene presents herself to Ithacans: “I declare to be Mentes” (Od. 1.180), when in fact she is a goddess in disguise. When she asks Telemachos if he is the son of Odysseus, he truthfully answers: “My mother says I am his child; but I know not, for never yet did any man of himself know his own parentage” (Od. 1.215) — the origin of “the wise child that knows her own father” in “Hades” (U 6.53).8 An underlying sense of distrust unites the Odyssey with Ulysses, which may be more significant than all the scattered minor correspondences.

4

Funeral Report

Newspaper reports, in particular, cannot be trusted. A case in point is Dignam’s funeral report in the Evening Telegraph later in the day, where events from “Hades” are condensed into a paragraph, allowing readers to examine what happens in a process of transcription. The account mildly deviates from the strict truth by elevating the paltry funeral into a more dignified affair in conventional euphemisms: “The deceased gentleman was a most popular and genial personality in city life and his demise after a brief illness came as a great shock to citizens of all classes by whom he is deeply regretted” (U 16.1250). The funeral is stylised into a more ceremonial term, “obsequies”, “at which many friends of the deceased were present” (U 16.1253) — as it turns out, they were less than a dozen, the funeral organizer and the journalist and the unknown man in the M’Intosh included. The list of the “mourners” (not all of whom were actually mourning) is less than accurate, in true Eumaean mode: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan (brother-in-law), Jno. Henry Menton, solr, Martin Cunningham, John Power, […] Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus, Stephen Dedalus B. A., Edw. J. Lambert, Cornelius T. Kelleher, Joseph M’C Hynes, L. Boom, CP M’Coy, — M’lntosh and several others. (U 16.1248) 8 In other words: “Paternity may be a legal fiction” (U 9.844).

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In part, we can reconstruct what went wrong. Bloom himself was responsible for including M’Coy as a personal favour, as he had promised in the morning, which amounts to an intentional misrepresentation. Bloom also factually completed the journalist’s question “do you know that fellow in the, fellow was over there in the…” by correctly naming the raincoat: “Macintosh. Yes, I saw him”, which was then misconstrued as a name, as is detailed in “Hades” (U 6.880–99). In actual history, a Scotsman named Macintosh invented a piece of rainwear that was then named after him, usually in the form “mackintosh”; now a fictional character wearing it is misnamed after it (with the various possible spellings of the name — “M”, “Mc”, “Mac”, adding further potential for confusion). The unknown identity of the man in the mackintosh, M’Intosh (U 16.1261), has given rise to speculations. He has been identified as Mr Duffy (“A Painful Case”), Death, or Joyce himself, etc. In fact, it has spawned more rumours. Bloom, who dutifully supplied his “Christian” name: “… L, Mr Bloom said. Leopold” (U 6.882) loses that same L in his surname — another insult to a battered ego. I cannot account for the insertion of Stephen Dedalus next to his father. In any event, readers of the Evening Telegraph will know (and have little reason to doubt) that M’Coy, Stephen Dedalus, someone by the name of M’Intosh, and a gentleman “L. Boom” attended a funeral. All along, the identity of the owner of the cabman’s shelter remains uncertain: “… the former having previously whispered to the latter a few hints anent the keeper of it, said to be the once famous Skin-the-Goat, Fitzharris, the invincible, though he couldn’t vouch for the actual facts” (U 16.322, et passim).

5

“Slander, the viper, has wrongfully accused me” (U 15.1770)

Inevitably, manifold rumours surround Bloom, far too numerous to list. The most eccentric perhaps is that he, of Hungarian descent, may have been advising a new political movement, which would make him a grey eminence behind the scenes: So anyhow when I got back they were at it dingdong, John Wyse saying it was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper all kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes off of the government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk about selling Irish industries. (U 12.1573) The speculation is based on Griffith’s pamphlet The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland”, published in 1904. Oddly enough, even the suspicion

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that Bloom might have helped a nationalist cause does not accrue to his benefit in the narrator’s or anyone else’s view: “Gob, that puts the bloody kybosh on it if old sloppy eyes is mucking up the show. Give us a bloody chance. God save Ireland from the likes of that bloody mouseabout” (U 12.1578). The assumption is immediately confirmed: — Well, it’s a fact, says John Wyse. And there’s the man now that’ll tell you all about it, Martin Cunningham. (U 12.1586) … So in comes Martin asking where was Bloom. — Where is he? says Lenehan. Defrauding widows and orphans. — Isn’t that a fact, says John Wyse, what I was telling the citizen about Bloom and the Sinn Fein? (U 12.1621) Lenehan immediately turns Bloom’s charitable mission into a slur. But the “fact” is immediately qualified: — That’s so, says Martin. Or so they allege. — Who made those allegations? says Alf. — I, says Joe. I’m the alligator.9 (U 12.1625) Cunningham perseveres, without even having heard any details: He’s a perverted jew, says Martin, from a place in Hungary and it was he who drew up all the plans according to the Hungarian system. We know that in the castle. (U 12.1635) This would turn Bloom into a political kind of Odysseus, who is termed “polymetis”, “polymêchanos” — someone skilled in advice and strategies — and it is revealing that Bloom is grudgingly credited with such abilities. It is not easy to determine whether “perverted jew” is just a playful variant of “converted” or yet another specific slur. He is certainly perverted in the sense that he is taking different turns from the others, “polytropos”, a man of variant turns. And then, rumours are possible truths that have been perverted. The narrator of “Cyclops” knows a lot of gossip about everyone, including Bloom. His informant is a certain Pisser Burke, who once resided in the same hotel as the Blooms.

9 The phonetic joke takes the surface form of a rumour though no one would believe it, the kind of latitude that is taken for granted in facetious conversation.

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Time they were stopping up in the City Arms pisser Burke told me there was an old one there with a cracked loodheramaun of a nephew and Bloom trying to get the soft side of her doing the mollycoddle playing bézique to come in for a bit of the wampum in her will and not eating meat of a Friday because the old one was always thumping her craw … (U 12.503) The suspicion that Bloom was hoping to be considered in Mrs Riordan’s will is borne out by Molly, who remembers “the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was …” (U 18.2), so one of Bloom’s strategies is revealed. Another allegation says that Bloom took a nephew out: And one time he led him the rounds of Dublin and, by the holy farmer, he never cried crack till he brought him home as drunk as a boiled owl and he said he did it to teach him the evils of alcohol … (U 12.509) To me, this does not really sound like Bloom and the allegation remains unconfirmed. The same may obtain for another charge that he would vicariously go through the motions of menstruation: One of those mixed middlings he is. Lying up in the hotel Pisser was telling me once a month with headache like a totty with her courses. (U 12.1659) This would be reminiscent of certain rituals like couvade. Almost naturally, Bloom’s virility is mocked: his feminine side is not only ridiculed in “Cyclops” but comes to a head in “Circe”, where he bears eight children (U 15.1821). Rumours in “Circe” are grotesquely magnified.

6

In the Craft

One question that has bothered me, for one, is whether Bloom ever was a real member of the Freemasons. He is assumed to be one, notably by Nosey Flynn: “He’s in the craft, he said. … Very much so, Nosey Flynn said. Ancient free and accepted order. He’s an excellent brother. Light, life and love, by God. They give him a leg up. I was told that by a — well, I won’t say who” (U

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8.960). “What’s that bloody freemason doing”, says the Citizen, “prowling up and down outside?” (U 12.300), but that may express contempt rather than inside knowledge. Even Molly appears to think so, “till the jesuits found out he was a freemason” (U 18.381), without putting too much weight on it. We know that there was a freemasons’ meeting on his behalf in connection with the Hungarian Lottery. But Bloom himself never brings it up. From his speculation on Tom Kernan — “Secret eyes: secret searching. Mason, I think: not sure” (U 6.662) — we cannot deduce that Bloom’s is an inside view. When he passes the Freemason’s Hall, he sees Sir Frederick Falkiner entering and thinks of the habit of judges, but without any indication that he has ever been part of the Craft. My doubt is based on the question of whether someone of Bloom’s social standing, always the outsider looked down upon, would ever have been accepted. But above all, Bloom, lonely, excluded, never consoles himself that he is at least a member of a powerful community.

7

Fiddlestrings Snap

Molly Bloom, who is the subject of speculation — “and who was it gave me the wheeze she was doing the other business?” (U 11.486) — in turn perpetuates some of her own. She must have heard of stories surrounding the Prince of Wales’s affair with Lily Langtry: … there was some funny story about the jealous old husband what was it at all and an oyster knife he went no he made her wear a kind of a tin thing round her and the prince of Wales yes he had the oyster knife cant be true a thing like that like some of those books he brings me the works of Master Francois Somebody supposed to be a priest about a child born out of her ear because her bumgut fell out… (U 18.484) She is also motivated by Bloom’s suppositious command to have his breakfast served in bed in the morning: “Yes because he never did a thing like that before …” (U 18.1, et passim). A minority of readers, myself included, doubt that Bloom ever voiced such an order for breakfast served to him by his wife the next morning. Nothing remotely like Bloom changing the subject and taking command occurs in “Ithaca” — which of course does not mean he might not have done it, unrecorded by the deadpan narration that tends to be unaware of the needs of its readers. Superstitions are a subspecies of rumour. Gerty MacDowell thinking

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… when she was dressing that morning she nearly slipped up the old pair on her inside out and that was for luck and lovers’ meeting if you put those things on inside out or if they got untied that he was thinking about you so long as it wasn’t of a Friday (U 13.183) is close to some of Molly Bloom’s views: “I told her over and over again not to leave knives crossed like that …” (U 18.1074); she imagines that fellatio (not her word) “gives the women the moustaches” (U 18.1352–8). This is matched, tit for tat, by Bloom’s thoughts about menstruation: “Turns milk, makes fiddlestrings snap. Something about withering plants” (U 13.825). Popular superstitions are frequent in Molly’s thoughts: “…I oughtnt to have stitched it [a dress] and not on her it brings a parting and the last plumpudding too split in 2 halves …” (U 18.1031).

8

Nascent Rumours

At times, a rumour can be traced to its sources, in statu nascendi. Again in “Cyclops”, Bloom is suspected of winning a sizable amount of money on a bet concerning the Ascot Gold Cup of which he cannot possibly be conscious. It depends on a concatenation of misunderstandings. In the morning, Bloom, not in a sociable mood, tries to get rid of Bantam Lyons, who wants to look up the latest racing news in Bloom’s newspaper, by repeating that he was going to “throw it away”. He is wholly ignorant of the fact that one of the competing horses was named Throwaway, which the betting-prone Lyons mistakes to be a hint. Lyons is then dissuaded from placing the bet by Lenehan, a self-styled authority, whose belief that Bloom actually gave a tip makes him surmise that Bloom is the only man to bet on a rank outsider at substantial odds, while he himself lost a bet as well as his reputation. From then on, Bloom is assumed to have won a considerable sum without, even then, having the decency to stand a round of drinks. For once, we are able to witness the genealogy of a rumour. What is less clear is if Bloom ever realizes what has happened. One of those itemised recapitulations in “Ithaca” lists the whole on a meta-level of customary self-awareness (U 17.327–41), which, however, does not indicate when Bloom would have been informed of the luck wrongly attributed to him.10

10

He might have been told by Cunningham and Power on their unrecorded ride to the Dignams if they were aware of it in the first place.

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51

“Me Too”

In “Circe”, Bloom is naturally subjected to multiple accusations: youthful sins, molesting a domestic servant, plagiarism, etc. Three society women charge him with sending them obscene letters, MRS YELVERTON BARRY for one: He wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was in the North Riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James Lovebirch. He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the Theatre Royal at a command performance of La Cigale. I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made improper overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on the following Thursday. (U 15.1013) This looks like an exaggerated accusation of what he did in his (off stage) letter to Martha Clifford, who pretends indignation at a risqué word which he used; she even mistypes it: “I called you naughty boy because I did not like that other world. Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word” (U 5.249). In “Circe”, this results in a series of “Me too” accusations by three society women (U 15.1074–7). In this episode, almost nothing can be taken at face value; everything seems distorted, magnified, perverted.

10

Eumaean Facts and Variants

Misinformation is general all over “Eumaeus”, the episode perhaps most suffused with doubt. A returning sailor is full of adventure stories and stories of remote voyages, including one in Trieste, where he reports of a local “tryon between two smugglers”, one of them stabbed to death (U 16.580). In melodramatic fashion, the murderer exclaims “Prepare to meet your god” (U 16.581) in unlikely English, and if perhaps the sailor obligingly translates for the benefit of his bystanders, the phrase remains extremely stagy. It is not certain if the sailor and second-rate Odysseus ever made it past Gibraltar, which he describes as “one of them rocks in the sea” (U 16.622). He vividly impersonates a circus act executed by one Simon Dedalus in Stockholm (the equivalent of Odysseus at the trial of the bow, Od. Book 21); this is definitely not the Simon Dedalus we know, and the chances of anyone else in Ireland carrying the mythological name Dedalus are zero, so the attribution remains a mystery. In pointed contrast to Odysseus, Bloom in general is truthful and prone to uncovering the sailor’s tall tales as spurious, internally commenting that he

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“could spin those yarns for hours on end all night long and lie like old boots”, but then immediately conceding that one can never be certain, in a reflection of amazing tolerance:11 … 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 spoofs he got off his chest being strictly accurate gospel. (U 16.822) Identities remain dubious in “Eumaeus”. It is all the more ironic that the episode usurps more than half of all occurrences of “fact” (34 out of a total of 66 = 51%), with alone four “in point of fact”. “Fact” may well be a word that becomes increasingly funny, especially in a great statement: “Their conversation accordingly became general and all agreed that that was a fact” with its intriguingly dangling “that” (U 16.993). In contrast, is Corley right when he claims he saw Bloom “a few times in the Bleeding Horse in Camden street with Boylan, the billsticker” (U 16.198)? It would throw a different light on Bloom’s relation with Boylan and might indicate more collusion between them than can be otherwise induced. Rumours can be projected into the future and become unverifiable. Great figures are often claimed to become resurrected: One morning you would open the paper, the cabman affirmed, and read: Return of Parnell. He bet them what they liked. A Dublin fusilier was in that shelter one night and said he saw him in South Africa. […] Dead he wasn’t. Simply absconded somewhere. The coffin they brought over was full of stones. He changed his name to De Wet, the Boer general. […] And so forth and so on. (U 16.1297) A bet on what will happen in the future is particularly unrealistic.

11

Aeolian Twists

Although newspapers distribute information and facts, “Aeolus” is a fertile ground for undocumented claims. The less than truthful report of Dignam’s 11

The locution “lie like old boots” in itself is an illustrative and autonomous expression, and, in view of him “Sherlockholmsing” the sailor “up”, typically askew, for in some of the Sherlock Holmes stories the detective can deduce a lot precisely from the look of old boots.

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funeral, as it surfaces in “Eumaeus”, was confected in the newspaper’s offices. It has to be taken on trust that O’Molloy, who quotes a “polished period” by Seymour Bushe (U 7.768), or professor MacHugh, who recites an elaborate speech, a model of oratory by Taylor verbatim (U 7.828–69), have perfectly reliable memories. Naturally, a decisive event like the Phoenix Park Murders of May 1882 (though the editor gets it wrong, “1881”) must have spawned a number of rumours once it hit the news since no one had any idea at the time of who the “Invincibles”, as the murderers called themselves, were. From Crawford’s account, “The New York World cabled for a special”, which reads as though it happened soon after the first news had spread. To convey “where Skin-theGoat drove the car”, an advertisement was ingeniously superimposed on a map of Dublin so that letters in the ad revealed specific places in Dublin (U 7.632–77). “Gave it to them on a hot plate”, as the editor admiringly puts it (U 7.676). I wonder what Joyce had in mind when he made the editor of the Freeman’s Journal ignorant of the achievement of his own newspaper. Right after the assassination, 6 May 1882, no one had a clue as to what had actually taken place. A New York paper is unlikely to have known the name of anyone involved, let alone the driver of a decoy car. It took months of careful police investigation and luck to arrest and convict the actual perpetrators, the great merit of John Mallon of Lower Castle Yard (U 16.1192). When the details of actions became known, months after the assassination, a wholly marginal event like the route of an escape car would never merit a telegram and complex devices. Fitzharris alias Skin-the-Goat played an entirely minor role and was not executed, but imprisoned and pardoned years later, so the story is manifestly bogus, even if Crawford claims that he saw “the whole bloody history” (U 7.676): “— I saw it, the editor said proudly. I was present” (U 7.679). At the same time, something must have happened in connection with a telegram, but what possible real events have been fabled into Gallaher’s exploit seems to elude at least me.

12

“The Whole Bloody History”

History, for practical purposes, is what we have been told, a “story”, because someone put into words what happened and passed it on, first by oral report, but then in written or printed form. Etymologically, “history” is what we know, as Joyce could have found in Skeat’s or, for that matter, any other, etymological dictionary. History, from Greek historia, is learning by enquiry, information; the Greek stem “(h)istor”,

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knowing, learned, derives from Indo-European “*id-tor”, the “id” part is based on a root “*WEID”, originally to see (Lat. videre). The perfect form of “I have seen” in Greek meant to know, the same is true of German “wissen”, related to wit = know. Crawford said “I saw it”,12 “I was present”. So he knows. The Englishman Haines admits that “[w]e feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly”; he also dismisses continuous suppression as an abstract notion: “It seems history is to blame” (U 1.648), a different view of history from what the origin of the term indicates. Stephen conducts a history lesson in a private school, a desultory lesson that drifts into Literature, Milton’s “Lycidas”, a poetic, fictional story. History was traditionally a matter of names, dates and places to be memorised. “Tradition” is what has been passed on, truthful or not, by selection or chance out of an immense number of other possible sources or speculations. In this history lesson, Stephen is aware that something must have happened if not exactly as it was reported: “Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it” (U 2.7). He links history with what is passed on by speaking, “fabled”, what rumour, Fama (see above) has chosen to transmit, irrespective of what actually happened. When a student offers what is still remembered of Pyrrhus — “Another victory like that and we are done for” — Stephen tags it, “That phrase the world had remembered” (U 2.14). History is what books report (what is being said) and, inevitably adapt them to our understanding. Whatever Pyrrhus said has been rephrased in various similar forms, none of which he actually could have articulated (his language was not English, but Greek). If the report of a common funeral already twist facts, History on a grand scale is scarcely immune to distortions, wilful or inadvertent. The director of the school where Stephen teaches his history lesson is practically wrong on almost everything he proclaims,13 whether it is medieval Ireland — “A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman, O’Rourke, prince of Breffni” (U 2.392) — or its present state — “Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews. […] Because they never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly” (U 2.346–447). What this means is that Deasy’s account does not match the historical documents, which again does not imply that any of such documents need be in complete accordance with whatever happened in intricate constellations. 12 13

Walter W. Skeat, Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958, first edition 1879–72), 272. Robert Martin Adams, Surface and Symbol (Oxford University Press, 1962), 21.

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Bloom himself is a reporter of historical circumstances as a witness in a scuffle when the great Parnell tried to regain possession of a newspaper, in the course of which Parnell dropped his hat and Bloom restored it to him. His two accounts of the event differ in details and amplification, but they are still compatible, except that Parnell says “Thank you” the first time, but “Thank you, sir” the second (U 16.1333–8; 1509–23), a minute difference, but given a unique occasion of Bloom rubbing elbows with a real historical figure, it may make a difference whether Bloom was sirred or not.

13

Gospel Truth

Religions are based on divine revelations beyond the reach of verification, but subject to multiple interpretations. In Christianity, views considered wrong were called and dismissed as heretical. Stephen Dedalus must have been occupied with a number of them: 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. (U 1.656) Heretics, and those who rule them (“heresiarchs”), proclaim different views from the orthodox truths, alternative rejected rumours. Stephen’s knowledge is surprisingly detailed, the result of protracted reflections. He is also well aware of “poor dear Arius”: Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred heresiarch. In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mire and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts. (U 3.50) Heretics don’t deserve dignified deaths and had to be humiliated. There is agreement that Arius has been maligned: The death of Arius, as is well known, took place suddenly (his bowels, it is said, coming out) when he was about to make his triumphal entry into the Cathedral of Constantinopolis. The death (though possibly nat-

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ural) never seems to have been regarded as such, but it was a matter of controversy whether it was a miracle or a murder.14 Rumours can be misleading. Even someone versed in the history of philosophy is unlikely to guess who was meant by “[b]old he was and a millionaire”, assertions that can only be found in recondite, unreliable sources. Only the sequel, “maestro di color che sanno” (U 3.6) indirectly identifies Aristotle. Dante’s phrase, without a name, clarifies the identity via a quotation from Inferno (4.131), “the master of those who know”, but even that is a matter of opinion, not fact. Also potentially misleading is the Italian “color”, which might be mistaken to mean “colour” echoed from a closely preceding phrase, but is simple a demonstrative pronoun. “Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured” — which for the cognoscenti would characterise Aristotle, but it is a merely associative or psychological echo. Such possible confusions are typical of “Proteus”.

14

Genuine Forgeries

A theological issue in “Eumaeus” concerns the existence of an incorporeal soul: — O, that, Stephen expostulated, has been proved conclusively by several of the best known passages in Holy Writ, apart from circumstantial evidence. … — Has been? the more experienced of the two objected, sticking to his original point with a smile of unbelief. I’m not so sure about that. That’s a matter of every man’s opinion and, without dragging in the sectarian side of the business, I beg to differ with you in toto there. My belief is, to tell you the candid truth, that those bits were genuine forgeries all of them put in by monks most probably … (U 16.774) Bloom also misunderstands Stephen’s theological disquisition about the soul: “They tell me on the best authority it is a simple substance and therefore incorruptible”, which he innocently combines into a “simple soul” that one might

14

William E.H. Lecky, History of European Morals Augustus to Charlemagne (London: Longmas, Green and Co., 1869), 196.

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“knock across … once in a blue moon” (U 16.750–62). The disagreement goes on: On this knotty point however the views of the pair, poles apart as they were both in schooling and everything else with the marked difference in their respective ages, clashed.15 (U 16.774) The paternity — a legal fiction anyway, as Stephen claims (U 9.844) — of Jesus has been a source of speculative rumour. As Stephen approaches the Pigeonhouse on Sandymount strand, he calls up a dialogue in a French travesty of the Gospels: — Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position? — C’est le pigeon, Joseph. This fragment is from a book Stephen saw in Paris, La Vie de Jésus by M. Leo Taxil (U 3.161). It vulgarises the events of gospels with coarse humour. A picture shows a stupefied Joseph confronting his pregnant wife, who says “C’est le pigeon, Joseph”. Mulligan was on the same track in his ballad of Joking Jesus: “My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird” (U 1.585). The same constellation, Mary and a pigeon, finds grim and realistic expression in “Circe” as an overtone: And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn’t swallow and was smothered with the convulsions in the mattress and we all subscribed for the funeral. (U 15.2578) Virag adds his own quota: Verfluchte Goim! He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig God! He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchia, a Libyan eunuch, the pope’s bastard. (he leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid, his eye agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world) A son of a whore. Apocalypse. (U 15.2571) Another apocryphal story is that Jesus was a child fathered by a Roman centurion named Panther(us), as is proclaimed by Virag in “Circe”: “She sold 15

In typically Eumaean fashion, the word “views” is some twenty other words apart from “clashed” while clashing depends on immediate contact.

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lovephiltres, whitewax, orangeflower. Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories” (U 15.2955). An intricate entry in “Ithaca” asks: “What were Stephen’s and Bloom’s quasisimultaneous volitional quasisensations of concealed identities?” The answer cryptically states that Stephen saw in Bloom the “traditional figure of hypostasis, depicted by Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as leucodermic, with winedark hair” (U 17.783). Hypostasis here means the union of God the Father and Jesus Christ. In the absence of contemporary descriptions of Jesus, the three authors cited depict him in approximately such terms. But the Church itself rejects these characterisations as spurious, for example a Catholic Dictionary: … great influence was exercised (1) by a description to be found in St. John Damascene … and which is as follows: “Christ was of imposing stature, with eyebrows nearly meeting, beautiful eyes, crisp hair, somewhat stooping, in the bloom of youth, with black beard and yellow complexion, like his mother;” (2) by a forged letter of “Publius Lentulus”, a friend of Pilate, addressed to the Roman Senate, which contains the following description: “He is a man of slender figure, dignified, of a venerable countenance, which inspires love and fear in those who see him. His hair is curled and crisp, dark and glossy, falling over his shoulders and parted in the middle, after the fashion of the Nazarenes (? Nazarites). The brow is very clear, the face without wrinkle or spot, pleasing by its moderately red colour. Nose and mouth are faultless; the beard strong and reddish, like the colour of the hair, not long, but parted; the eyes of distinct colour and clear”. We cannot determine the date of the forgery …16 From such doubtful sources, “leucodermic”, sounding like a medical diagnosis, means white-skinned; “winedark”, the colour of hair, is reminiscent of the Homeric “winedark sea” (U 3.394, “oinopa ponton”, U 1.78). The intriguing term is “sesquipedalian”, which aims at an old superstition that Jesus was exactly six feet tall;17 however, “sesquipedalian” does not mean six feet, but one and a 16 17

William E. Addis & Thomas Arnold, A Catholic Dictionary, London: Kegan Paul, 1903 [first ed. 1893], 175). Stephen with his mother: — I don’t believe, for example, that Jesus was the only man that ever had pure auburn hair. — Well? — Nor that he was the only man that was exactly six feet high, neither more nor less. — Well? — Well, you believe that. (Stephen Hero, 134)

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half.18 The term is lifted from a famous quote by Horace, who says that actors on certain occasions abstain from words of that inordinate length (Horace, Ars poetica 97), so it does not refer to persons, but to words. As it happens, “Ithaca” is a chapter containing such sesquipedalian words of scientific aspect. So the “quasisensations” are very quasi.

15

Taylor’s Speech

There is little doubt that Joyce’s contemporaries had better memories than we have, as learning by rote was part of their education. Even so, is it plausible that Professor MacHugh would remember Taylor’s speech verbatim and in detail, full of rhetorical tropes, a famous speech of which, however, there was no written or printed record? “That he had prepared his speech I do not believe for there was not even one shorthandwriter in the hall. […] Briefly, as well as I can bring them to mind, his words were these” (U 7.815–4), followed by an elaborate well-wrought speech which Joyce singled out for reading aloud. “Aeolus” features hearing and reading, mishearing, misremembering. Similarly, Stephen in the Library speaks by far the longest sentences, perfect allusive periods, without ever faltering, while a rhymed short vampire poem of four lines that occurs to him has to be fixed on the fragment of a letter (U 3.397–400).

16

Akasic Records

A corrective to inherent vagaries of reporting, an imaginary True and Complete Record of All Things is posited by Theosophy, the Akasic (or Akashic) Records. More than just a reservoir of events, they contain every deed, word, feeling, thought, and intent that has ever occurred at any time in the history of the world. In the chapter of news, “Aeolus”, Stephen brings it to mind: “Akasic records of all that ever anywhere wherever was” (U 7.882). Such a complete universal database would keep track of every minute incident, perhaps even a brief sordid sexual encounter in a slummy location like Fumbally’s lane. … Damp night reeking of hungry dough. Against the wall. Face glistering tallow under her fustian shawl. Frantic hearts. Akasic records. Quicker, darlint! (U 7.924–9) 18

The Readers Edition rectifies this to a non-existent Latin “sexipedalian” (RE 602).

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Ulysses gestures towards such all-comprehension, irrespective of significance or importance, though on a very reduced scale, focussing on less than one full day in a circumscribed location. It documents “a dangling button of [Dollard’s] coat wagging brightbacked from its thread” (U 10.940), Bloom smelling the fragment of a lacerated toenail (U 17.489), or a “fly walking over” the eye of Master Dignam’s father (U 10.1161), seemingly marginal trivia if put alongside a momentous disaster like that of the General Slocum in New York, or nothing less than the universe: “Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet” (U 17.1046).19 The Akasic Records in their nature would include whatever happened as well as all rumours that ever circulated, in other words, whatever the Muses revealed or chose to invent.20

17

The Partly Spurious Precision of “Ithaca”

“Ithaca”, with its manifest bent on facts and objectivity, specifically mentions “the propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity” (U 17.845), but in general does not try to verify statements but just lists them in deadpan fashion, often without regard to relevance. The Bay of Naples, for example, is characterised as “to see which is to die”, which naively transposes a common saying (U 17.1990); an association is taken at face value. The episode deviates from factuality early on, when divergent views of Bloom and Stephen are compared: Bloom assented covertly to Stephen’s rectification of the anachronism involved in assigning the date of the conversion of the Irish nation to christianity from druidism by Patrick son of Calpornus, son of Potitus, son of Odyssus, sent by pope Celestine I in the year 432 in the reign of Leary to the year 260 or thereabouts in the reign of Cormac MacArt († 266 A.D.), suffocated by imperfect deglutition of aliment at Sletty and interred at Rossnaree. (U 17.30) Saint Patrick’s pedigree is one of the least attested facts based on doubtful and divergent sources.21 It is not clear, in a chapter that aims at precise know19

20 21

Corrected in the Reader’s Edition: “Sirius (Alpha in Canis Major) 9 light-years (51,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 3,000,000 times the dimension of our planet” (RE 610). Editions are based on different rumours. I owe this idea to Sabrina Alonso, who also helped greatly in mentoring this essay. Don Gifford, with Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 566–7.

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ledge, what caused the rectification. Most likely Bloom, remembering that “last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the schoolpoem choked himself at Sletty southward of the Boyne (U 8.663), introduced the topic for whatever unknown reason with emphasis on a date. As to dates, the comparison of Bloom’s and Stephen’s ages manifestly degenerates into gratuitous or incorrect relations: “if Stephen would continue to live until he would attain that age in the year 3072 A.D. Bloom would have been obliged to have been alive 83,300 years …” (U 17.458).22 The occasional fake precision of “Ithaca” can be noticed in the description of a “double falciform ejection of water vapour from under the kettlelid at both sides simultaneously” (U 17.273). The scientific sounding adjective “falciform”, of Latin origin, indicates the clear outlines of a sickle, but few things are more shapeless than the vapour of water. The form of a sickle can be imagined of course, but the designation is hardly scientific. A list of places Bloom might possibly visit, with parenthetical attributes, start in a straightforward manner: Ceylon (with spicegardens supplying tea to Thomas Kernan, agent for Pulbrook, Robertson and Co, 2 Mincing Lane, London, E. C., 5 Dame street, Dublin), Jerusalem, the holy city (with mosque of Omar and gate of Damascus, goal of aspiration), the straits of Gibraltar (the unique birthplace of Marion Tweedy), … (U 17.1980) Towards the end, the attributes veer from the factual to rumours generated by associations. Niagara (over which no human being had passed with impunity), the land of the Eskimos (eaters of soap), the forbidden country of Thibet (from which no traveller returns), the bay of Naples (to see which was to die), the Dead Sea. (U 17.1968) Often the scientific narrative mind of “Ithaca” loses its grip and many of the catalogues move out of their intended focus. Though one of the tacit aims of the “Ithaca” episode is to exclude vapid speculations and idle embroideries, including rumours, they infiltrate in multiple forms.

22

The Reader’s Edition corrects the relations in dead seriousness, as in “… he would attain that age in the year A.D. 3072, Bloom would have been obliged to have been alive 20,230 years …” (RE 592).

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Confected Rumours

Rumour can be created and circulated for strategic reasons, a skill that Odysseus excelled in. In “Cyclops”, Boylan is credited with the ruse to “let out that Myler was on the beer to run up the odds and he swatting all the time” (U 12.947). A rumour intentionally spread about an alcoholic boxer would affect the betting. According to Alf Bergan in “Cyclops”, “you can cod [the Recorder of Dublin] up to the two eyes … Tell him a tale of woe about arrears of rent and a sick wife and a squad of kids and, faith, he’ll dissolve in tears on the bench” (U 12.1096). Bloom uses defensive tactics to avoid disquieting questions. Some of his acquaintances at least have knowledge about his wife’s impending concert tour and enquire about it. Twice he is asked, “Who is getting it up?” in identical wording, by McCoy and by Nosey Flynn (U 5.153, 8.773). In each instance, the answers are evasive: “It’s a kind of tour, don’t you see, Mr Bloom said thoughtfully. … There’s a committee formed. Part shares and part profits” (U 5.162), and similarly, “Well, it’s like a company idea, you see. Part shares and part profits” (U 8.784), or “Yes, a kind of summer tour” (U 12.99). At the sight of Boylan from the funeral carriage, Mr Power asks, “How is the concert tour getting on, Bloom?” when again he delays a moment before he deviously changes the subject: “You see the idea is to tour the chief towns. What you lose on the one hand you can make up on the other” (U 6.211). There is no further mention of either a committee or a company, and certainly not of performances in other cities, something that might, if true, presumably surface in Molly’s thoughts as well. So Bloom surrounds the affair with divertive manoeuvres, making it far less of the private affair that it seems to be, taking the harm out of a disturbance. With more skill, in “Scylla and Charybdis”, Stephen ingeniously psychoanalyses a Shakespeare working off a trauma caused when an older and more experienced woman seduced him, and on top a Shakespeare who was betrayed by his brothers, another instance of an adulterous triangle. His analysis is based on speculation from flimsy evidence for the sake of a theory. For his argument, he also consciously bends some of the facts, about “a star, a daystar, a firedrake that rose at his birth”, but then reminds himself “Don’t tell them that he was nine years old when it was quenched” (U 9.928). The same Stephen is capable of claiming that the money he carries on him, his school salary received earlier in the day, “glistening coins of the tribute and goldsmith notes the worth of two pound nineteen shilling that he had, he said, for a song which he writ” (U 14.287). The same boast must have been heard by Lenehan, not a reliable witness at the best of times, who relates that Stephen “had

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received the rhino for the labour of his muse” (U 11.264), which indirectly links back to Hesiod’s untruthful Muses. Some untrustworthy Muses seem responsible for extrapolations in “Cyclops”; they take casual statements at surface value and elaborate them to autonomous scenes, most manifestly when a trite habitual “God bless all here is my prayer” is extended into a ceremonial Benediction involving dozens of saints and taking up more than two full pages in any edition (U 12.1673–1750). That someone claimed to have seen Dignam and is told that he “must have seen his ghost” is transformed into a séance report with all the theosophical trappings (U 12.314–73).

19

Queerities No Telling How

“Oxen of the Sun” is composed in styles of historical fabrications, outgrowths of fantasy, where a hospital can become a castle or a court in period transpositions. Here, it is often impossible to determine what is actually spoken. At one point, Lenehan, expert on horse races, though wrong in his tip about the Ascot Gold Cup, offers a report on the actual race: He told them of the race. The flag fell and, huuh! off, scamper, the mare ran out freshly with O’Madden up. She was leading the field. All hearts were beating. Even Phyllis could not contain herself. She waved her scarf and cried: Huzzah! Sceptre wins! But in the straight on the run home when all were in close order the dark horse Throwaway drew level, reached, outstripped her. (U 14.1128) This is more the chapter’s epimorph than a truthful report, quite apart from a doubly fictional Phyllis, who does not appear elsewhere in the novel. Lenehan would have his information from the Evening Telegraph (“tell a graphic lie”), which was distributed between 8 and 9 (U 13.1174), but it has a different account of the race and no mention of Sceptre, the favourite, at all: Throwaway and Zinfandel stood in close order. It was anybody’s race then the rank outsider drew to the fore, got long lead, beating Lord Howard de Walden’s chestnut colt and Mr W Bass’s bay filly Sceptre on a 2 1/2 mile course. (U 16.1282) Gifford’s Annotations present the race report from the Evening Telegraph (435), which again differs from the one given in “Eumaeus”. Reports are likely to

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turn into rumours. Lenehan uses commonplace terms that might apply to any race, and embroiders his tale with a female companion, Phyllis, who may owe something to the paragraph’s style, in the manner of Walter Landor. Chances are that the mysterious Phyllis (of classical overtones) is in part a mishearing, or transformation, of “filly” as it appears in a previous paragraph, where “Huuh!” is also heard (U 14.1088). The two paragraphs, imitating the styles of De Quincey and of Landor, partly overlap in time (U 14.1078–1109/1110–72). As far as “Oxen of the Sun” consists of a sequence of pseudo-historical imitations, it translates actual events back in stylistic times and also transforms reality itself. Bloom becomes “that man that on earth far had fared”, “child Leopold” or “Pubb. Canv.”, the hospital becomes a castle (U 14.72, 160,1230), etc. — all at least at one remove from what actually takes place. Even within the displacements and trans-actions, some alleged events are presented as doubtful: those in ken say after wind and water fire shall come for a prognostication of Malachi’s almanac […] to have three things in all but this a mere fetch without bottom of reason for old crones and bairns yet sometimes they are found in the right guess with their queerities no telling how. (U 14.523) Statements cannot be trusted. It is unlikely that agnostic Bloom, who is genuinely relieved at the delivery of Mrs Purefoy’s baby, would actually think like a good Christian: To conclude, while from the sister’s words he had reckoned upon a speedy delivery he was, however, it must be owned, not a little alleviated by the intelligence that the issue so auspicated after an ordeal of such duress now testified once more to the mercy as well as to the bounty of the Supreme Being. (U 14 .875) In terms of realism, it would be incongruous for the Bloom we know to believe in the mercy, or even existence, of a Supreme Being. This seems to be a case parody or mimicry usurping the narration.

20

“Who could know the truth?”

The generally factual “Wandering Rocks” chapter still has its own quota of rumours. Father Conmee remembers a historical scandal surrounding Mary Rochfort, daughter of Lord Molesworth:

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A listless lady, no more young, walked alone the shore of lough Ennel, Mary, first countess of Belvedere, listlessly walking in the evening, not startled when an otter plunged. Who could know the truth? Not the jealous lord Belvedere and not her confessor if she had not committed adultery fully, eiaculatio seminis inter vas naturale mulieris, with her husband’s 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. (U 10.164) For a moment, Conmee creates a fiction, with scenic adornment, almost a sketch of a historical novel, around another “French triangle” as it was unfolded in the previous episode (U 9.1060), with the implication that even confessions are not automatically truthful. The Jesuit’s curiosity extends to physical details, and one of the most intimate acts is phrased in clinical, distancing Latin: “eiaculatio seminis inter vas naturale mulieris” (U 10.168); it is echoed and translated in “Ithaca”: “carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ” (U 17.2283). Following the Library chapter in which the old suspicion is raised that Shakespeare is not the author of the plays attributed to him (“Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name”, U 9.866), “Wandering Rocks” features its own false authorship when Bloom looks at “Aristotle’s Masterpiece” (U 10.585), a popular book in its time, which is definitely not written by Aristotle. The Socratic “Who could know the truth?” suffuses all of Ulysses and certainly Finnegans Wake.

21

False Leads

The “Coda” of “Oxen of the Sun” moves from written style imitations to recording a welter of spoken, but unattributed voices full of odd twists where almost every utterance tries to avoid straightforward communication. It naturally contains false leads and fake appearances like “Where the Henry Nevil’s …” (U 14.1442), which conjures up a name that may or may not be pertinent, but is basically rhyming slang for “where the devil’s”. “Lapland” suggests a country U 14.1482) but circumscribes the maternity hospital where mothers’ laps are taken care of. What kind of story lies behind “The Leith police dismisseth us” (U 14.1565), and why of all places, in Leith — a potential rumour? Only by way of Joyce explaining the phrase to his German translator do we know, straight from the stable, and by a lucky accident, that “the police sergeant asks drunks

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to repeat [this phrase] in order to test their sobriety”;23 if you can pronounce this quick succession of sibilants (s, ss, th) you will hardly be intoxicated. Since such a text is asked by the police, this part of the sentence is not as irrelevant as “Leith” is. That it all may be a matter of pronunciation, or phonetics, may appear in the distortion immediately following: “The least tholice”, which again may call up association like chalice, solace or simply be a dead end.

22

Idiomatic Small Scale Rumours

Aspersions may take the form of humorous embroidery as when erratic Denis Breen in pursuit of a libel action is ridiculed: “— Do you know that he is balmy? Look at his head. Do you know that some mornings he has to get his hat on with a shoehorn?” (U 12.1045). No one takes this at face value, but the claim is in the nature of a rumour, irrespective of plausibility. Many idioms are imagined thumbnails of rumours: “Cyclops” is bristling with such jocular assertions: “Cruelty to animals so it is to let that bloody povertystricken Breen out on grass with his beard out tripping him, bringing down the rain” (U 12.1062). The same is true of many current idioms: in a boxing match “Myler dusted the floor with him” (U 12.955) with the implied understanding that no floor is being dusted. “Eumaeus” is equally rich in idioms that have become stereotypes: Some policemen, Bloom exaggerates, are “admittedly unscrupulous in the service of the Crown and, […] prepared to swear a hole through a ten gallon pot” (U 16.150). The literal and the figurative tend to get in each other’s way: “… but it’s a horse of quite another colour to say you believe in the existence of a supernatural God” (U 16.770). Young Dignam reflects on a boxing fight: “One puck in the wind from that fellow would knock you in the middle of next week” (U 10.1146). Bloom imagines Simon Dedalus taking off the pub keeper O’Rourke: “The Russians, they’d only be an eight o’clock breakfast for the Japanese” (U 4.114). It is enough to visualize such rhetorical gems. Bloom’s thoughts on Mozart’s Twelfth Mass takes strange forms: “the Gloria in that being, to his mind, the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat” (U 16.1738). It is not easy to imagine how a piece of music (or is it an “acme”?) could “knock” anything “into a cocked hat” — and this “literally” — and even less so in view of Bloom once dealing in used clothes and offering any “God’s quantity of cocked hats”, as wearable garments, along with “boleros and trunkhose” (U 11.494). 23

Alan Cohn, ed., “Joyce’s Notes on the End of ‘Oxen of the Sun’”, James Joyce Quarterly 4.3 (Spring 1967): 198.

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Whatever Ulysses is, it is also the work of an author who once instructed students to learn English words and their different and occasionally precarious uses, literally or figuratively. In “Nausicaa”, both Gerty MacDowell and two “girl friends were seated on the rocks” (U 13.9), and so is Bloom at the end of the chapter, a “foreign gentleman that was sitting on the rocks” (U 13.1302), an actual space on the seaside. The figurative use of the phrase is in marked contrast to Bloom’s recall: “Ten bob I got for Molly’s combings when we were on the rocks in Holles street” (U 13.840), and the identical phrase is used by Father Cowley in “Sirens”: “I knew he was on the rocks” (U 11.485) — semantically wandering rocks. Joyce sometimes pits a figurative use against the literal meaning. One of Lenehan’s favourite phrases that something “takes the biscuit” is reiterated in “Two Gallants”, he elaborates the phrase: “That takes the biscuit” to “That takes the solitary, unique, and, if I may call it, recherché biscuit” (D 50). He uses it again in Ulysses: “Throwaway, says he. Takes the biscuit…”. This is closely followed by “So he went over to the biscuit tin Bob Doran left to see if there was anything he could lift on the nod” — and the great scrounger of beer or cigarettes finds it empty (U 12.1226); in reality no biscuits are taken. Rumours, ubiquitous in life, news, social media, biography and Ulysses, are even more prevalent in omnirumorous Finnegans Wake. Its opening paragraphs already assume that we have heard something of Adam & Eve, Jacob & Esau, Tristram from Armorica, Peter’s qualification to become a successor of Christ — by a play on words — of St. Patrick, etc. — none of which occurrences are accurately documented, but have become part of a live tradition. Early on in the Wake, the most laconic historian, “Taciturn pretells, our wrongstoryshortener, he dumptied the wholeborrow of rubbages on to soil here” (FW 17.3). Historians usually don’t predict, but look back and sometimes pretend to know something, or invent different turns. Reports tend to make short stories long while Tacitus reverses the effect, but the stories are wrong or rubbish, or borrowed and possibly soiled — “rumour” in a nutshell.

Chapter 4

Joyce’s Malleable Time His jymes is out of job (FW 181.29)

∵ Psychologically, Time is subjective and relative in our everyday experience, long or short, as the mood may be, and this is naturally reflected in fiction. Beyond that commonplace, Fiction’s temporal omnipotence is easy to overlook; it can compress or expand at will, far beyond reality, since language can take nonchalant control: it is as convenient to formulate “It took me three seconds” as “It took me 36 years”. “Eternity” is one short word. Narrative magic has long ceased to surprise us. “Sleight of word” has always been at the disposal of storytellers, with no restrictions imposed. The duration of events need not — and could not possibly — correspond to its verbal expenditure. Ulysses is a case in point, a long book that in actual plot encompasses less than twenty-four hours, which was once fairly unique for a novel, yet — “at the same time” — it spans without effort, for example, “… immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity” (U 17.1053).1 The techniques are traditional and taken for granted, with Homer as an early master. In Book nine, early in the series of adventures, Odysseus has found an ideally safe harbour for eleven ships on the shores of the Lestrygonians, but he anchors his own outside of it for reasons not stated, but possibly with foresight. When the native cannibals attack his crew from surrounding steep hills and spear the crews all the eleven ships, out of twelve, are destroyed, but Odysseus alone escapes with his men. The destruction of a whole fleet with all men on board, the most momentous loss in the whole epic, is compressed into less than one full hexameter:

1 The word “infinitesimal” is already a contradiction in terms: it takes immensely longer to enunciate or write than what it expresses.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_005

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[my ship sped on]; but all others were destroyed there altogether (Od. 10.132) It is not necessary to know Greek to feel the impact of the line: … autar hai allai aollees autoth’ olonto. Eleven ships huddled together are disposed of in 14 quick alliterative syllables with clustered consonants, mainly l’s and t’s, while the vowels are almost reduced to a and o, in one succinct swoop. In pointed exemplary contrast, in the adventure immediately following, on the isle of Kirke, the killing of one single stag takes up ten full lines of emphatic details (Od. 10.155–67).2 Another lesson in contrasting narrative speeds occurs in the climactic scene when Odysseus is finally in possession of his bow and faces more than a hundred unarmed and unsuspecting suitors. Quick action is called for and verbally enacted. He tersely and pithily addresses his enemies, and then takes the first shot. ê kai ep’ Antinoôi ithyneto pikron oïston and at Antinoos he aimed the bitter arrow. (Od. 22.8) The very quick line is appropriate for the celerity of an arrow, the object of utmost possible speed at the time. At this crucial point however, the focus changes to the target, the leader of the suitors, Antinoos, who is sitting at meal. The rhythm instantly slows down to a leisurely, contemplative pace: Now he was about raising to his lips a fair twy-eared chalice of gold, and behold, he was handling it to drink of the wine, and death was far from his thoughts … (Od. 22.9–11) The moment is prolonged by a meditative digression: For who among men at feast would deem that one man amongst so many, how hardy soever he were, would bring on him foul death and black fate? (Od. 22.12–14)

2 Fritz Senn, “Remodeling Homer”, Light Rays: James Joyce and Modernism, ed. Hayward Ehrlich (New York: Horizon Press Publishers, 1984), 70–92.

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During all that drawn-out moment, the arrow is on its swift way, and Homer returns to the other end in near repetition: But Odysseus aimed and smote him with the arrow in the throat. (Od. 22.15)3 Two different speeds concur in blatant opposition: one quick moment is first imitated in a few deft words, and then spread out in lingering elaboration. As always, Joyce can outdo such effects. It is possible to see the “Sirens” episode as twice told, first by quick summary notation in the so-called “Overture” (U 11.1–63), and then again at unhurried length in rich amplification. Operatic types of repetitions draw out the action even more, as in a sequence that seems to turn upon itself: Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a hair. Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a curving ear. (U 11.81) A short movement is elongated in echoing repetition: the action may be a brief sequence, or one single turn is told in triplicate, orchestrated variation. In “Circe” real, clock time significantly clashes with the duration of the reading. The most glaring example is when Bloom has been stopped by the prostitute Zoe and is about to engage in flirtatious banter with her, but she, intent on business rather than profitless pleasantry, impatiently stops him by an ironic “Go on. Make a stump speech out of it” (U 15.1353).4 Bloom does just that: he launches on a political speech that first takes on the manners of a socialist workman; he then rises to city ranks and in rapid succession is crowned king, emperor, Messiah; he proclaims the new Bloomusalem, works miracles, is attacked, brought to trial, accused, bears eight children and is charged in court again, then reviled and finally burned.5 We tend to be so carried away by new unexpected events that the return to external reality comes as a shock when Zoe intrudes by an impatient: “Talk away until you are black in the face” (U 15.1957).

3 This Homeric scene may well be the origin of the proverbial “There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip”. 4 One irony is also that “stump” often designates something short. 5 The erection of a “colossal edifice with crystal roof, built in the shape of a kidney, containing forty thousand rooms” (U 15.1549) appears to take next to no time. Bloom’s eight sons at birth have instant careers and become managers within a few lines (U 15.1821–32).

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No fewer than 4,560 words have intervened, some eight hundred lines in a chapter of almost 5,000 (U 15.1154–1957), in what cannot have taken more than a few moments. A prostitute expecting quick action would not have waited patiently for more than a few moments. It is conceivable that Zoe’s “black in the face” is the stimulus of Bloom’s phantasy of being burnt and “carbonised” (U 15.1955), which would amount to one more instance where a cause is preceded by its effect. The “Circe” episode grossly exaggerates what has been prepared on a much smaller scale, though possibly unnoticed, and raises the question of the speed and duration of thoughts and fantasies. How much time does the interior monologue take up? How fast is thought? In an early occurrence, Haines has questioned Stephen about his views and displayed facile understanding for the plight of an Irishman: — We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame. (U 1.648) Stephen, not listening, is engaged with his own convoluted thoughts about the Church: The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen’s memory the triumph of their brazen bells: et unam sanctam 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 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 a 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. Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. Zut! Nom de Dieu! (U 1.650) The so far longest stretch of Stephen’s meditations, with recondite reflections, is full of theological niceties about the Holy Trinity and specific names of Church fathers, not just quick bursts. After it, Haines’s voice breaks in again:

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— Of course I’m a Britisher, Haines’s voice said, and I feel as one. (U 1.666) In all probability, during all the time of our reading — and a fairly attentive, slow reading at that — he has not been lingering placidly so that only a few seconds may have passed. The whole unspoken monologue comprises 192 words, in excess of a short pause. The interior monologue, whether direct or, as in this instance refracted, is in part extra-temporal. Stephen’s theological disquisition may make us forget that he is still in conversation with Haines standing next to him. As readers in the “Circe” passage above, we may become so engrossed in Bloom’s multifaceted rise and fall that we lose sight of its starting point, the ironic demand for a stump speech, and simply get carried away. Many of Joyce’s extended catalogues seem to become unaware of their anchorage. A small-scale instance of (possibly) being swept away is the syntactic confection of an illusion. In “Nausicaa”, the episode of substitute satisfactions, Gerty MacDowell again and again is carried away in her musings. In one instance, we may become involved in her illusion: Yes, she had known from the very first that her daydream of a marriage … The fantasy glides into an actual wedding ceremony: … has been arranged and the weddingbells ringing … Explicative details of naming usages are added parenthetically: … weddingbells ringing for Mrs Reggy Wylie T. C. D. (because the one who married the elder brother would be Mrs Wylie) Naturally, the newspapers would report on the occasion: … and in the fashionable intelligence Mrs Gertrude Wylie was wearing a sumptuous confection of grey trimmed with expensive blue fox … Abruptly, with no warning, not even punctuation, we drop out of the illusion with a curt, down to earth prosaic bump: … was not to be. (U 13.194–9)

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That all is just a daydream has been announced right at the outset, yet we may well become so involved in Gerty’s own reverie that we emerge from the sumptuous confection with a minor shock. The syntax echoes the experience.

1

Suspense

Lengthy digressions before an expected climax increase tension and are a traditional narrative device. Homer, as seen above, excels at it. Odysseus, still in disguise as a beggar, is in long conversation with his wife, Penelope, in Book nineteen of the Odyssey. She tells one of her servants, actually Odysseus’ old nurse, to wash the stranger’s feet, and as she is about to do so Odysseus suddenly fears she might recognise him by the scar on his thigh. At this tense moment (will the secret come out and spoil everything?), the tale goes out of its way and interposes a detailed account of how the wound came about. It was when the cunning grandfather Autolykos came to visit right after the birth of the baby and he suggested the eponymous name Odysseus, linked to “odyssamenos” (“angered”, “of wrath”), and he invited his grandson, when grown up, to his place for a hunt. This hunt, years later, is vividly depicted: Odysseus was injured by a wild boar which left the scar above his knee which is a sure sign of identification. The whole digression, which is full of fascinating and in part highly significant information, takes up more than sixty lines (Od. 19.394–466). All the while, Odysseus’ feet are being washed and the scar is revealed, but, in the nick of time, the danger is averted and the old nurse is silenced. The suspense is resolved. A spate of the adolescent biography of Odysseus has been grafted into a few tense moments. Joyce did not need any prompt from Homer or Laurence Sterne for such a conventional device. At the memorable Christmas Dinner scene in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Mr Casey tells “that story of a famous spit” (P 34). He fills it with details, until the expected climax is tauntingly withheld: Well there was one old lady, and a drunken old harridan she was surely, that paid all her attention to me. She kept dancing along beside me in the mud bawling and screaming into my face: Priesthunter! The Paris Funds! Mr Fox! Kitty O’Shea! — And what did you do, John? asked Mr Dedalus. — I let her bawl away, said Mr Casey. It was a cold day and to keep up my heart I had (saving your presence, ma’am) a quid of Tullamore in my mouth and sure I couldn’t say a word in any case because my mouth was full of tobacco juice.

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— Well, John? — Well. I let her bawl away, to her heart’s content, Kitty O’Shea and the rest of it till at last she called that lady a name that I won’t sully the Christmas board nor your ears, ma’am, nor my own lips by repeating. He paused. Mr Dedalus, lifting his head from the bone, asked: — And what did you do, John? — Do! said Mr Casey. She stuck her ugly old face up at me when she said it and I had my mouth full of tobacco juice. I bent down to her and Phth! says I to her like that. He turned aside and made the act of spitting. — Phth! says I to her like that, right into her eye. He clapped a hand to his eye and gave a hoarse scream of pain. (P 36–7) Mr Dedalus, who most likely has heard the story before, with his questions, helps to prolong the suspense. In the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses, Bloom’s non-compliant behaviour causes the tension to rise and moves towards its culmination with possible physical damage. Martin Cunningham, sensing trouble, hustles Bloom out of the pub, “as quick as he could”, onto a waiting car. — Off with you, says Martin to the jarvey. (U 12.1768) But no move is made. Instead one of those Cyclopean interpolations transports the action to a valedictory launching of a ship with all the mythological paraphernalia of a “milkwhite dolphin” and “comely nymphs” who serve as a kind of Nereids in honour of a parting guests, until “the bark clave the waves” (U 12.1772–82). The car outside the pub is still at a halt, while the Citizen from the door is becoming more and more offensively hostile, especially after Bloom provokingly though fumblingly enumerates famous Jews and then tops his list with “Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.” The Citizen threatens: “By Jesus … I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will.” Joe Hynes intervenes with a cautious “Stop! Stop” (U 121783–1813). This also seems to stop the reporting itself, and again we are taken elsewhere, again, to another leisurely naval farewell ceremony in which Irish and Hungarian customs honour the parting guest, in, incidentally, one of the (intentionally?) least thrilling interpolations of the whole chapter, taking up 324 words, some of them in remote Hungarian (U 12.1814–42). After this digression, we return to the Citizen, who is finally taking aim with the biscuit box and anticlimactically missing Bloom as his target, though the

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clattering noise evokes a disastrous earthquake in a further exhaustive interpolation. The (puny) climax has been serially retarded by slow-moving inserts. Narrative speed is at the mercy of the author. We cannot estimate the duration of the interior monologue, nor, in actual time, of the longest of all Ithacan catalogues which may well take up next to no time in the progressive action: What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? It’s universality […] stagnant pools in the waning moon. (U 17.185–228) The aquatic list, all in all 492 words, many of them polysyllabic, of pedantically registered admiration, is not verbally in Bloom’s mind. It represents more what might potentially be assembled in extended, haphazard and highly incongruous compilation. The list, continuously expanded in its genetic process, also serves as a comment on the scientific mind’s aspiration towards categorising and administering all reality and its vain attempt to be all-inclusive, which is evident in the omission of one item in Bloom’s “admiration”: the pleasure of “[enjoying] a bath now … the gentle tepid stream … in a womb of warmth” (U 5.565). The accumulation of aquatic properties, becoming more and more selfpropelling, may well result in overlooking that the water’s “noxiousness … in pestilential fens” can hardly be accounted as worthy of admiration, quite apart from the irrelevance of whether a moon shining upon the scene is “waning” or increasing. Catalogues tend to move out of their initial focus. Disparity is a common feature of the episode. The reading takes disproportionally longer than the time that would have actually passed. The length of Ithacan answers is often disproportional to the acts or reflections described. In pointed contrast, the brief entry “catechetical interrogation” (U 17.2249), that is to say Molly Bloom’s demand for an account of Bloom’s day, is not even followed by concrete enumeration and so conceals a textual gap.6 What is not expressed in words would comprise Molly’s inquiries and her husband’s strategically defective account of a long day. As it happens, the only things listed are Bloom’s “modifications” (U 17.2251–66), consisting of omissions, strategic additions and acts that in fact did take place. Another “blank period of time” (U 17.2051) has intervened.

6 Some of Bloom’s report can be gathered from Molly’s memories: “… and the hotel story he made up a pack of lies to hide it planning it Hynes kept me who did I meet yes I met do you remember Menton and who else let me see …” (U 18.37). There is no trace of Bloom’s possibly extended but carefully censored version in “Ithaca”.

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Most of the interpolations in the “Cyclops” episode are tangential elaborations which take up no action time at all, while others, like the serving of drinks and the corresponding payment (U 12.280–99), carry the story forward. But even in the oral account, the action need not correspond to the duration of the telling. The walk from Arbor Hill to Little Britain Street is fairly long (at least 15 minutes), yet it is covered by a single sentence: “So we went around by the Linenhall barracks and the back of the courthouse talking of one thing or another” (U 12.64). The time taken up by the walking is textually filled by long interpolations reminiscent of Irish legends (U 12.68–117).

2

Time is, time was, but time shall be no more (P 113)

Joyce’s Portrait proceeds by fits and starts and foregrounds certain key events. It highlights short crucial moments drawn out in detail, like the scene where Stephen is unjustly punished in the classroom, as against summary accounts of intervening periods (“He returned to his wanderings” (P 99). The mixture of close-ups and synopses may well have seemed random when the novel first came out. The opening section lists a series of the jumbled memories of a child, in chronological order, in accordance with a widening of mental awareness: a fairy tale heard and commented on, a song, a bed-wetting experience, a dance, Dante’s brushes, and the Vances as neighbours, which culminates in the phonetic matching of “Pull out his eyes” with “Apologize” in a first poem, all in all in little more than a page (P 8–9). In the development of Stephen Dedalus, this may encompass a fairly long compressed period.7 The child has not yet developed a sense of time. Within the whole span of about twenty years, certain events are detailed at disproportionate length. Edward Garnett, in a reader’s report of 1915, complained: “There are many ‘longueurs’. Passages which … will be tedious to the ordinary man among the reading public. … Unless the author will use restraint and proportion he will not gain readers” (P 320). This also refers to Father Arnall’s extended sermon on the last things and in particular on hell, which would have taken a few hours within a few days, but it is spread out over many pages (P 108–35), something like 11 percent out of the sum total (about 250 pages). Emphasis on the duration of hell through all eternity, painfully drawn out by the priest, where it is dinned into the boys that “at the end of all those

7 The first section moves lexically from simple, concrete words to the final foreign, opaque “Apologize”.

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billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun” (P 132). The inordinate length of the sermon in itself is a gesture towards the imagination of eternity. One of the inherent ironies is that one single instant may cause such disproportionate punishment, and “every instance is … in itself an eternity” (P 133). Time can be contracted or extended at need. So can sounds. At one point the Portrait devotes itself to miniature time, the length of syllables in poetry: He had learnt what little he knew of the laws of Latin verse from a ragged book written by a Portuguese priest. Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates. (P 179) The instructive line from a schoolbook8 has Joycean potential, as the various translations evince, for it can be taken at general surface value and come to mean something like “the orator summarizes, the poet amplifies/elaborates/transforms in song”. The rule actually concerns the length of syllables that end in the sequence of “mutae” (the consonants d, t, b, p, c, g) followed by “liquidae” (l, r), which can be long or short, with the poets enjoying the license of either; so it is a matter of duration, that is time.9 Authors are in charge; poets can lengthen or shorten. Both contraction and variation, again taken out of their original contexts, could well describe some of Joyce’s temporal orchestrations. “Tempora mutantur” indeed, and so does narrative economy. The Portrait includes the question “whether it was correct to say: Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis or Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis” (P 94). That time change is a platitude and that we — in this case Stephen Dedalus — change in them is one of the themes of the book. In Latin, the word order, “et nos” or “nos et”, does not matter, but the question of the order of words in a sentence is another problem that Joyce pays attention to. Joyce’s arrangement of speed is manifest in one sentence that hovers between the temptation to enter the priesthood and opting for a secular career: From the door of Byron’s publichouse to the gate of Clontarf Chapel, from the gate of Clontarf Chapel to the door of Byron’s publichouse, and

8 The quotation is taken from The Latin Prosody of Emanuel Alvarez, S.T.P., with the Explanation in English by the Rv. E. J. Geoghegan (Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son, 1864). This is most likely Joyce’s and Stephen’s actual source. 9 As it happens, baby Stephen imitating a song cannot deal with either “bl-” or “gr-” and shortens “green” to “geen” and “blossoms” to “botheth” (P 7).

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then back again to the chapel and then back again to the publichouse he had paced slowly at first, planting his steps scrupulously in the spaces of the patchwork of the footpath, then timing their fall to the fall of verses. (P 164) Impatience, a temporal unease, is conveyed, but not stated. The two poles are Clontarf Chapel, with historical echoes, at one end and a public house at the other; the pub happens to be named “Byron’s”, which has no relation to — but cannot help calling up — the poet that Stephen has defiantly championed, “a heretic and immoral too” (P 81). The prose seems to gather speed as it proceeds, from “slowly at first” to a quicker rhythm. Space turns into Time. The “spaces of the patchwork” reiterate that the beginning of Book IV devoted to Stephen’s conversion where Stephen is caught in a stasis, even the days of the week are fixed into compartments: “Sunday was dedicated to the mystery of the Holy Spirit, Monday to the Holy Ghost …” (P 147). The sentence ends with time, but appropriately as motion in the form of a fluctuant verb — “timing”. Stephen’s imminent Luciferan decision is already foreshadowed, — “to live, to err, to fall”, the sentence, full of turning, ends with “verses”. There is an analogy with spatial Shaun against temporal Shem in Finnegans Wake.

3

Mini-condensation: The Long and the Short of It

In the realistic parts of Dubliners, Portrait and Ulysses, language tries to be as close as possible to what happens, almost creating the illusion of an inherent union. Once critics referred to the now unfashionable term “expressive form”, which suggests a close correspondence between how something is said and what is said. Speed is acted out in the words employed for it. Fast actions demand or provoke quick expressions. In “Sirens”, Blazes Boylan, who just stopped for a brief meeting with Lenehan and a quick drink, abruptly leaves before Lenehan can even state his purpose: — I’m off, said Boylan, with impatience. He slid his chalice brisk away, grasped his change. — Wait a shake, said Lenehan, drinking quickly. I wanted to tell you. (U 11.426) In the hurried prose, the adverb “briskly” loses its ending and accelerates the sentence which probably could not be more condensed and swift. The inferred

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haste becomes more obvious by comparison with a French translation where the sequence of four short i-sounds (“drinking quickly”) is replaced by a dragging relative clause: “… qui se dépêchait de finir son verre”, which summons ten syllables and elongates the act.10 Boylan’s abrupt departure is condensed in possibly the nimblest sentence, a terse: Lenehan gulped to go. (U 11.431) It mimics a hasty start, the precipitate effort to start moving while finishing a glass of bitter — all of this is abridged in three words, in a slightly unusual and awkward construction (in “gulped to” phonetically the sounds “l-p-d-t” are crammed into one hurried gulp). It may express the skill necessary to drink and move at the same time. (The effort of the descriptive previous sentence, just above, is in itself a translation of a fast act into cumbersome circumlocution.)11 Rapid action can be simulated by short and especially high-pitched vowels: Mr Bloom pointed quickly. (U 4.171) They lay, were read quickly and quickly slid, disc by disc, into the till. (U 4.183) Impressions of fast movement are reinforced by an assonant series of short isounds. English with its numerous monosyllabic words can achieve the effect much more echoingly than other languages, especially inflected ones. The excitement of voyeuristic anticipation is rendered in a staccato rhythm: Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch! Yet the palpable excitement is thwarted by a sentence of slow, ponderous syllables that characterize cumbersome, annoying visual obstruction: A heavy tramcar honking its gong slewed between. (U 5.130) 10 11

Ulysse, trans. Jacques Aubert et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 385. A glance at some translations shows Joyce’s comparative deftness: “Lenehan ingollò d’un fiato per andare”, (Ulisse. trans. Enrico Terrinoni [Roma: Newton Compton, 2012], 274); “Lenehan dut avaler d’un trait pour le suivre” (Ulysse, trans. Jacques Aubert et al. 385). “Er schluckte, zu gehen, gierig” (Ulysses, trans. Hans Wollschlager [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975], 370, with two pauses). The effect is not acted out but reported, the verbiage is in excess of the act. Instant showing is replaced by protracted telling.

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One economic device is synesthetic implication. As Bloom leaves the chemist’s shop, he is addressed: At his armpit Bantam Lyons’ voice and hand said: — Hello, Bloom. What’s the best news? Is that today’s? (U 5.319) Hands don’t “say”, but they do communicate, and a compound impression is illogically but aptly condensed. This is also achieved when Bloom hears “a warm heavy sigh” (U 4.58). Concision is achieved by implied synesthesia: Bloom heard “a warm heavy sigh, softer, as she turned over” (U 4.58). Warmth cannot be heard, but morning warmth in a bed is part of everyone’s experience, or, to put it differently, Bloom hears a sigh and knows his wife feels warm. Similar condensations occur when Stephen thinks of Buck Mulligan’s “wellfed voice” (U 1.107), where acoustic perception is transposed to interior monologue, or, analogously, “shouts of moneyed voices” (U 1.167), a phrase that crams associations of voices of rich parents into a single word. Music is also a structuring in time and so the “Sirens” episode exposes multiple samples. Some are playful, artificial arrangements (music is artifice). A conventional paragraph is tampered with: Richie, admiring, descanted on that man’s glorious voice. He remembered one night long ago. Never forget that night. Si sang ’Twas rank and fame: in Ned Lambert’s ’twas. The elements are then reassembled with jarring dyschronic shifts that break up the expected order: Goulding, a flush struggling in his pale, told Mr Bloom, face of the night, Si in Ned Lambert’s, Dedalus house, sang ’Twas rank and fame: in Ned Lambert’s ’twas. (U 11.778, bold for emphasis) The paragraph is pedantically restructured: He, Mr Bloom, listened while he, Richie Goulding, told him, Mr Bloom, of the night he, Richie, heard him, Si Dedalus, sing ’Twas rank and fame in his, Ned Lambert’s, house. (U 11.786) Two words, “face” and “Dedalus” are out of step, not keeping time or, in musical terms, missing their cue: “… his pale, told Mr Bloom, face …” invite the reader to retrace the text. Time is fragmentally reassembled.

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81

Temporal Disparity

Later episodes of Ulysses — where surface realism gives way to parody, imitation, style in cheek — tend to forgo immediate showing or acting out in favour of elaborate articulation, where the diction often goes counter to what is being told. This is one of many reasons why the two first “Nostos” chapters of Ulysses are longer than the early, crisp realistic ones. The rambling prose of “Eumaeus” flaunts embroideries and redundancies: His hat (Parnell’s) a silk one was inadvertently knocked off and, as a matter of strict history, Bloom was the man who picked it up in the crush after witnessing the occurrence meaning to return it to him (and return it to him he did with the utmost celerity) who panting and hatless and whose thoughts were miles away … (U 16.1513) The “utmost celerity” refers to the action itself and certainly not to the manner of its reporting. The event is, moreover, told twice, in alternative arrangement with different elaboration: He saw him once on the auspicious occasion when they broke up the type in the Insuppressible or was it United Ireland, a privilege he keenly appreciated, and, in point of fact, handed him his silk hat when it was knocked off and he said Thank you, excited as he undoubtedly was under his frigid exterior notwithstanding the little misadventure mentioned between the cup and the lip: what’s bred in the bone. (U 16.1333) The scientifically precise and objective manner of “Ithaca” in particular widens the distance between an event and its verbal presentation even more, perhaps most drastically in the scene where Bloom enters his front room. The question — “What suddenly arrested his ingress?” — implies a quick moment (“suddenly”), which the lengthy answer then counteracts by methodical postponement: The right temporal lobe of the hollow sphere of his cranium came into contact with a solid timber angle where an infinitesimal but sensible fraction of a second later, a painful sensation was located in consequence of antecedent sensations transmitted and registered. (U 17.1275) A quick bang is drawn out into a scientific explanation. There is nothing more immediate than the experience of pain, which is not only softened to “painful

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sensation” but also paradoxically postponed. What is experienced immediately is narrated last. It takes some, perhaps minute, reading time to figure out what is actually happening. The description “an infinitesimal but sensible fraction of a second later”, whose formulation exceeds what it tries to convey, is in itself a contradiction in terms, in fact the six-syllable adjective is already its own parody. Intriguingly, the adjective “temporal” may well mislead on a first reading, the subsequent “lobe” determines it as anatomical, relating to the temple, and clarifies it, yet in Joycean circuitous fashion it happens to describe the paragraph as a temporal event. The empirical order is reversed: pain (which could be expressed in a simple “Ow!”) has to be concluded retrospectively. The temporal inversion is signalled in “antecedent sensations”: the pain that starts the whole sequence is correctly termed “antecedent” but its mention is deferred. In reading, it is not immediately “registered”.12

5

Echo before Report

Stories are memories brought alive. Bloom’s and Stephen’s day are full of them; the past is rolled into the present. But we can only remember what we have learned before. Narratively, the process can be reversed, later information can explain what was not known or understood the first time. Joyce is not given to supply clarifying expositions. Understanding depends on retrospective arrangement of circumstantial and partial evidence. It takes some reading until a simple but cryptic internal remark — “Potato I have” (U 4.73) — can be put in context. As in real life, understanding trails behind, and mysteries may or may not be revealed. It takes some time to realize that Bloom is about to attend a funeral in his first chapter. Ulysses is full of obscure references that cannot be resolved on the spot, as in a passage in “Oxen of the Sun” that describes Bloom in prose of the eighteenth century: … and that vigilant wanderer, soiled by the dust of travel and combat and stained by the mire of an indelible dishonour, but from whose steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril or threat or degradation could ever efface the image of that voluptuous loveliness which the inspired pencil of Lafayette has limned for ages yet to come. (U 14.1217) 12

A shorter version of an analogous event has been offered in “Proteus” when Stephen asks himself philosophically: “How? [did Aristotle, presumably, know about the physical presence of objects]” and answers it “By knocking his sconce against it, sure” (U 3.5). The pattern, question–answer, is similar.

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Understanding is linking back. Readers will recognize wandering Bloom within the period style distortions (“combat” is a figurative exaggeration, due to the style at hand); a “steadfast and constant heart” is also a characteristic formula in the epic (Odysseus also had his wife constantly in mind). But what is one to make of the “inspired pencil of Lafayette”? The name of a historical person may come to mind; however, that person is hardly known for portrait painting. Clarification is delayed until “Eumaeus” when Bloom is showing Stephen a photograph of Molly, expressed in the prevalent verbosity: a “photo showing a large sized lady with her fleshy charms on evidence in an open fashion as she was in the full bloom of womanhood in evening dress cut ostentatiously low for the occasion to give a liberal display of bosom… standing near, ostensibly with gravity, a piano on the rest of which was In Old Madrid, a ballad …”. Finally, its origin is revealed: “Her (the lady’s) eyes, dark, large, looked at Stephen, about to smile about something to be admired, Lafayette of Westmoreland street, Dublin’s premier photographic artist, being responsible for the esthetic execution” (U 16.1427). The shady historical figure now turns out to be a local photographer named Lafayette whose studio was in fact in Westmoreland Street. That the establishment has meanwhile disappeared indicates that before long even Dublin residents would no longer be able to recall it and the reference will become more cryptic in time. With a little bit of license, we can now, in retrospect, see potential hidden clues. Lafayette has “limned” Molly’s loveliness: the choice word “limn” drives ultimately from “luminare, illuminate”, so that its etymological anchorage combines Latin light, lumen, or phos in Greek, with “pencil” so that photo-graph (= “light-drawing”) has been indirectly foreshadowed. The phrase “for ages yet to come” is secondarily also a meta-reflection: “for pages yet to come”.13

6

Do You Follow Me?

The mourners on the way to the funeral in “Hades” complain about the dirt on the seats of the cheap carriage: — Corney might have given us a more commodious yoke, Mr Power said. — He might, Mr Dedalus said, if he hadn’t that squint troubling him. Do you follow me? He closed his left eye. (U 6.92) 13

An added grace note is that Dublin’s “premier” photographic artist is not mentioned at first.

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It is easy to notice that Dedalus mocks Corney Kelleher, the manager of the funeral establishment, and his characteristic squint, which is both remarked on and imitated. But it is only towards the end of the “Circe” chapter that we hear Kelleher, with a “drawling” or “lacklustre eye”, repeat what obviously must be his favourite phrase, on three occasions: (to the watch, with drawling eye) That’s all right. I know him. Won a bit on the races. Gold cup. Throwaway. (he laughs) Twenty to one. Do you follow me? (U 15.4813) (nudges the second watch) Come and wipe your name off the slate. (he lilts, wagging his head) With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom. What, eh, do you follow me? (U 15.4826) (laughs) Sure he wanted me to join in with the mots. No, by God, says I. Not for old stagers like myself and yourself. (he laughs again and leers with lacklustre eye) Thanks be to God we have it in the house, what eh, do you follow me? Hah, hah, hah! (U 15.4868) It becomes clear now — and only now — that Simon Dedalus was imitating Kelleher both by closing his eye and by mimicking his voice. The earlier occurrence is now transformed, not something just said but something quoted. Ironically, we were not following Simon Dedalus though we probably thought we did. In the same vein, no reader can know how to pronounce that mysterious sequence of five “thn”s in “Imperthnthn thnthnthn” in the “Sirens” “Overture”, until we see its origin a few pages later, when the hotel bootsboy is mimicking the barmaid’s arrogant “your impertinent insolence” as “Imperthnthn thnthnthn” (U 11.2, 99); “thnthnthn” translates into “insolence” by hindsight. The “Overture” is understood backwards; from “Full tup. Full throb” (U 11.25), it would not be possible to deduce “Throb, a throb … Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup … Tup … Tup … tupthrob” (U 11.701–9). It is an anticipatory condensation, a stab into the narrative future, the tip, or “tup”, of a submerged iceberg yet to come. “Sirens” is told twice: once unfolded in detail, but first in puzzling anticipatory fragments.

7

“adumbrace a pattern of somebody else or other”? (FW 220.16)

It is well known that Bloom tries to suppress any thought of Boylan, and he dreads the name being called up, a name which surfaces first in Molly’s casu-

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ally staged dismissive remark “O, Boylan, … He’s bringing the programme”, and again in Milly’s letter: “he sings Boylan’s (I was on the pop of writing Blazes Boylan’s) song about those seaside girls” (U 4.312, 408). Bloom has already seen the letter written by his rival, “Bold hand. Mrs Marion”; it made “his quickened heart” slow “at once” (U 4.244). After he delivers the letter to his wife, she tucks it under her pillow and manifestly wants him to get out of her way for the privacy of reading it: — Hurry up with that tea, she said. I’m parched. — The kettle is boiling, he said. But he delayed to clear the chair: her striped petticoat, tossed soiled linen: and lifted all in an armful on to the foot of the bed. As he went down the kitchen stairs she called: — Poldy! — What? — Scald the teapot. On the boil sure enough: a plume of steam from the spout. (U 4.263) It appears — by hindsight — that “is boiling”, reinforced by “on the boil”, already sketches the name that has not been read before, as though in Bloom’s not quite conscious mind it were on the pop of turning up. As it happens, “boiling” is a jocular feeble quip later by Tom Rochford: “Tell him I’m Boylan with impatience” (U 10.482), which then becomes a motif in “Sirens”: “With patience Lenehan waited for Bloom with impatience”; “I’m off said Boylan with impatience”; “Boylan impatience”; “Too slow for Boylan, blazes Boylan, impatience Boylan” (U 11.289, 426, 526, 765). How much the suppressed name remains on Bloom’s mind is in evidence when he glances at the evening’s newspaper: “First he got a bit of a start but it turned out to be only something about somebody named H. du Boyes, agent for typewriters” (U 16.1238). Coincidental echoes like “boiling” or “Boyes” tend to result in a bit of a start or, put differently, Bloom’s rival is on the boil before his narrative entrance into the book. Coming events cast their shadows before, as Bloom remembers and the Wake confirms: “the coming offence can send our shudders before” (FW 238.6).14

14

See also Fritz Senn, “AnaCalypso”, Ulysses à l’article: Joyce aux marges du roman, eds. Daniel Ferrer, Claude Jacquet, and André Topia (Tusson: Du Lérot, 1992), 83–108.

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Chapter 4

Finnegans Wake

Among the many rules that Finnegans Wake does not obey, the one about orderly sequences may be most prominent. Understanding too often depends on hindsight even in lexical minutiae. A structure like “Het wis if ee newt. Lissom! lissom!” (FW 21.2) is, prima facie, puzzling. A newcomer may suspect something Dutch going on, then “newt” followed by “lissom” is a possible association. One might hear “if he knew it”, reinforced by “was” as German “wissen”, etc. In this case, the text obligingly offers a translation right afterwards: “It was of a night” which — potentially — we might have heard (“Lissom! lissom!”) but most likely did not, except from now on. The echo precedes the report, the copy the original. In is cyclical time, the Wake is “plumply pudding the carp before doevre hors”: the cart is put before the horse or the fish and pudding before the hors d’œuvre (FW 164.17). The on-going circular progress that could be entered at any point and is not subject to an orderly sequence is stated early on, in the second paragraph which spells out events that have “not yet” happened: “passencore … nor … nor … not yet … had … not yet” (FW 3.4–14). Before the tale begins, events are told that have not happened yet, that are dynamically and disturbingly out of order. In Finnegans Wake, an adaptation may precede its original source. Since the bouts of Hebear and Hairyman the cornflowers have been staying at Ballymun, the duskrose has choosed out Goatstown’s hedges, twolips have pressed togatherthem by sweet Rush, townland of twinedlights, the whitethorn and the redthorn have fairygeyed the mayvalleys of Knockmaroon, and, though for rings round them, during a chiliad of perihelygangs, the Formoreans have brittled the tooath of the Danes and the Oxman has been pestered by the Firebugs and the Joynts have thrown up jerrybuilding to the Kevanses and Little on the Green is childsfather to the City (Year! Year! And laughtears!), these paxsealing buttonholes have quadrilled across the centuries and whiff now whafft to us, fresh and made-of-all-smiles as, on the eve of Killallwho. (FW 14.35) It is possible to discern dispersed Irish geography, country and town, and a scrambled thumbnail of history, with the various mostly legendary invaders, a story of wars and settlements from early ages to the present, while all along peaceful flowers have survived the downfall of civilisations. But hardly could a reader guess this to be a Wakese pretranslation of Roman into Irish history, taken from a sentence by Edgar Quinet, which Joyce took over verbatim, undis-

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torted (with almost no changes of the original French), it follows pages later when the early sentence is most likely forgotten: Aujourd’hui comme aux temps de Pline et de Columelle la jacinthe se plaît dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance et pendant qu’autour d’elles les villes ont changé de maîtres et de noms, que plusieurs sont entrées dans le néant, que les civilisations se sont choquées et brisées, leurs paisibles générations ont traversé les âges et sont arrivées jusqu’à nous, fraîches et riantes comme aux jours des batailles. (FW 281.4) It is now possible to compare the original with the Wake version, in retrospect only. Locations, events and even flowers have changed. We see that “these paxsealing buttonholes have quadrilled across the centuries” have adumbrated “leurs paisibles générations ont traversé les âges” in free recreation. The present of the earlier passage will be illuminated by its future deviant re-occurrence, by hindsight. Time is being reversed. From now on further echoes can be detected in “bright pinnyflowers in Calomell’s cool bowerss …” (FW 354.22), or “since the days of Plooney and Columcellas when Giacinta, Pervenche and Margaret swayed over the all-too-ghoulish and illyrical and innumantic …” (FW 615.2). But another antecedent and extensively embroidered one, like Since the days of Roamaloose and Rehmoose the pavanos have been strident through their struts of Chapelldiseut, the vaulsies have meed and youdled through the purly ooze of Ballybough, many a mismy cloudy has tripped taintily along that hercourt strayed reelway and the rigadoons have held ragtimed revels on the platauplain of Grangegorman … (FW 236.19) could not yet be recognized. That the Wake, as we all know and perpetuate, is circular by nature is perhaps not quite exact, for in the reading experience, it proceeds, having no other choice, sequentially from “riverrun”, without any respect for chronology, until we come to the end — with its dangling “the” (which as an article can never stand alone without a noun in its immediate wake) — when in fact we reenter the not so “commodius vicus of recirculation”. At this point, the book becomes, and then forever remains, circular. It is instruction or annotation, both capable of foreseeing the future, that introduce circuarity into a first run-through.

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An “article” (articulus) is originally a joint, cognate with art and artist, (an artist is one who joins — words, paint, notes, wood, stone, etc.); so it may be fitting that the last word is grammatically an article, this in a work where time is consistently out of joint (“His jymes is out of job”, FW 181.30). It so happens that an “articulus” is also a point of time, a juncture, see “in articulo mortis” (U 12.487). The final unostentatious word “the” may be a late and latent mot juste. One might speculate on how a novice reader would mentally process a Wake passage as it unfolds: Harik! Harik! Harik! The rose is white in the darik! And Sunfella’s nose has got rhinoceritis from haunting the roes in the parik! All rogues lean to rhyme. (FW 96.1) There seems to be a white rose in a dark park, where someone’s big nose has been haunting (smelling?) deer in the park. One might be struck by the echoes “Harik … darik … parik” or “rose … nose … roes … rogues”, with the odd deviant form “-arik” (which may or may not somewhere have been explained). When we come to the last sentence of “So all rogues lean to rhyme”, which seems to focus on Shem as a poet and scoundrel, a semantic click will occur, once — if — the proverbial “All roads lead to Rome” is called up. The point elaborated here is that it is the final “rhyme”, understood as “Rome” that changes “rogues” into “roads” — in a re-bound. A later word reshapes an earlier one. FW is retroactive. Analogously, in a run, “… coming nown from the asphalt to the concrete …” (FW 481.12), where both “asphalt” and “concrete” are undistorted, a first impression is likely one of road pavement, but, in opposition to “concrete” the term “abstract” may be evoked, and at one point we find ourselves in grammar, which distinguishes concrete and abstract “common nouns” in a typical Wakean effect of bouncing forwards and backwards. Reading Finnegans Wake is characterized by retracing, that is a later clue may lead to a revision of preceding passages; faint, mainly disregarded shadows may turn into sharper contours. This may happen in a Wakean catalogue: For korps, for streamfish, for confects, for bullyoungs, for smearsassage, for patates, for steaked pig, for men, for limericks, … (FW 595.10) Edibles seem to dominate the foreground: fish, confect, bouillon, sausage, potatoes, pig, perhaps Limerick ham. But Limerick is also a county, and more are to follow:

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for limericks, for waterfowls, for wagsfools, for louts, for cold airs, for late trams, for curries, for curlews, for leekses, for orphalines, for tunnygulls, for clear goldways, for lungfortes, for moonyhaunts, for fairmoneys, for coffins, for tantrums, for armaurs, for waglugs, for rogues comings, for sly goings, for larksmathes, for homdsmeethes, for quailsmeathes, kilalooly. (FW 595.12) The pattern takes shape at the point when Limerick is followed by what is much more easily recognised as Waterford, Wexford, Louth etc. Once Irish counties emerge, something like “fairmoneys”, which might stand on its own, Fermanagh becomes contextually plausible, and an autonomous looking “coffins” can be brought in line with a phonetically fairly distant Cavan. In retrospect, all these approximate names of counties transform an otherwise unlikely “korps” into Cork. In other words, “korps” is not “Cork”, but it turns into Cork from behind. The present is affected by the future. At some stage, we may notice, we are within a pattern whose outlines could not be guessed before. When a paragraph begins with “Ukalepe”, hardly anyone would associate “Calypso”, it is only the sequel … Loathers’ leave. Had Days. Nemo in Patria. The Luncher Out. Skilly and Carubdish. A Wondering Wreck. From the Mermaids’ Tavern. Bullyfamous. Naughtsycalves. Mother of Misery. Walpurgas Nackt. (FW 229.13) reveals the Homeric episode titles of Ulysses beyond any doubt. The phonetically aberrant first item, “Ukalepe”, is forced into the subsequent emergent pattern. Once the pattern is recognized, deviating elements can be accommodated by Procrustean twists. The list contains phonetic aproximations of the Homeric titles (… Loathers’ leave … Had Days … Skilly and Carubdish. A Wondering Wreck …) as well as thumbnail evocations of the some episodes: “The Luncher Out … From the Mermaids’ Tavern. … Mother of Misery. Walpurgas Nackt”; while “Bullyfamous” and “Naughtsycalves” both spell out the Odyssean names Polyphemos and Nausikaa and on top hint at their properties, the “Circe” episode, for example, has often been compared to the “Walpurgisnacht”, the witches’ sabbath in Goethe’s Faust.15 On her emergence

15

Note that those episode labels were never even part of any publication of Ulysses, they essentially belong to the scholia surrounding the book. That is to say, they are outside any temporal line of Joyce’s actual texts. “Nemo in Patria” does not even fit too well; by its

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Kalypso, the Concealer, is appropriately hidden in a phonetically remote “Ukalepe”. The question of what the other ingredients of the word units might suggest is still left open. Is it necessary, or worth while, to follow up the life of Saint Walpurga, or Walburga who is manifestly there — much more than the “Circe” episode? In practice, Wake scholars in pursuit of a specific topic tend to show supreme disregard for semantic debris and, even more, disturbing opaque elements. At our present stage of ignorance, we do not seem to know the primary meaning of “Ukalepe”, but at least it is comforting to find it has a place in a series.

9

“In the becoming was the weard” (FW 487.20)

The stress is on becoming, as opposed to being, an essential difference; it reverberates in the Wake: “like being or becoming out of patience” (FW 108.9); “haunted by a convulsionary sense of not having been or being all that I might have been or you mean to becoming” (FW 193.36); “… but this being becoming n z doer” (FW 333.3); “I’m not myself at all … when I realise bimiselves how becomingly I to be going to become” (FW 487.18); “A being again in becomings again” (FW 491.23), etc. Reading and understanding unfold in time, progressively, and also by looking back into the textual past. This becomes a dilemma for annotators who must put their glosses where they occur. “Korps”, for example, has to be glossed as Cork right away, “rogues” is explained before “rhymes” has been reached. Notes tend to be premature and remove time from the incubation process. Roland McHugh’s immensely indispensable Annotations to Finnegans Wake is practically obliged to gloss “vicus” (“Latin for street, village”) as Giambattista Vico, the Italian philosopher and stage manager of the Wake’s choreography, on its first page. Is he actually present, especially when a curving Vico road in Dalkey, south of Dublin, is a factual presence? He is not, and he is — circuitously. A Latin word ending in — us generally becomes one ending in — o in Italian. Vico moreover used Latin etymologies in support of his view on Roman history, and more circuitous evidence of this sort could be advanced. The problem becomes, at what opportune time should information be provided. There is no right time.

position, it must represent the Aeolus episode, but the Latin “Nemo” for Noman or Outis (Od. 9.366) is not specific to the newspaper chapter and would seem more appropriate for “Cyclops”. A refracted link to “Aeolus” has still to be discovered.

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Nor any right procedure. The beginning of Gifford & Seidman’s Ulysses Annotated demonstrates the problem.16 The first two words glossed are “bowl” (of lather) and razor, two prominent objects, the bowl as chalice and the razor as “sign of the slaughterer”. Readers are being misled: bowl and razor are simple shaving utensils. But the bowl will become a mock chalice the moment Mulligan holds it aloft and quotes the Latin of the Mass. When annotations refer to the textual future, that is to say anticipate what has not been read, but will occur later on, they may provide a useful service, but they reverse the temporal order of apprehension as well as the author’s calculated arrangement. “His jymes is out of job”, as Finnegans Wake has it (181.29). Time is out of joint, and Joyce has his own capricious ways to rejoin it. 16

Don Gifford and Robert Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).

Chapter 5

Joyce’s Different Conjugials But this was altogether different from a thing like that because there was all the difference. (U 13.706)

∵ All authors are different, but Joyce even more so. He cultivated this difference not only because of his conceit. Differences just seemed to develop naturally under his hands in the course of rapid evolution. Evidence is abundant. Joyce makes more demands on us and keeps us busier than most other writers do, or want to do, as the mere proliferation of studies on him alone would show: hundreds of books and at least three periodicals are devoted to his work. His digital presence alone seems to grow exponentially. Regular conferences are held in his name; some have come to be part of a cosmic order. A specific day that he created has become a fixture on the global calendar, a festival even for celebrants who hardly ever go near a book. Joyce is a godsend for Irish tourism; he probably raised the price of lemon soap in Dublin. His devoted readers or followers, often self-styled “Joyceans”, tend to be hyperactive. And, surprisingly, his stock on the literary market has never declined when a slump in academic attention might well have been expected. It has not declined probably because of a continuous new theoretical input. Joyce is both venerated and feared and has been turned into a cultural obligation, he is present on many bookshelves, referred to more often than read, but also studied intensely in numerous groups, academic or amateur. There must be reasons for all these effects. In random fashion, I am holding up for inspection some specific Joycean features, outstanding extravagances and compound complexities, though no single one is necessarily unique. Joyce does not quite fit into any categories, least of all academic ones. He is far too significant to be neglected, but also too overpowering to be accommodated within any university curriculum, even if we leave aside Finnegans Wake. No single work of his can represent all his writings, few as they are, or would give an overall idea of his achievement, the way it may suffice to study

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_006

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a few of Shakespeare’s plays or of Conrad’s novels to get some basic sense of the authors. Each of Joyce’s four major prose works seems to encroach on new territory, so that from his Portrait, which is a kind of midway point and still manageable, we could never extrapolate what was yet to come. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake exceed normal limits and take up proportionally too much effort and time; Joyce was both ambitious and arrogant in his commanding, “arrogating”, such an immense amount of concentration. Joyce lost followers and admirers all along his literary journey. Typically, none of his books or even short stories can be summarized pertinently. What exactly is “The Sisters” about and how could it be synthesized into a few sentences? With most authors, when a new novel is reviewed, the emphasis is usually on themes, issues, human conditions, suppression, political tensions, questions of identity, etc. All of this is amply present in Ulysses too, but even a complete thematic list would fall short; plot summaries are ludicrously inadequate. Take the “Sirens” episode, one of the most inventive, unprecedented pieces of writing ever. What is so stupendous about it that it alienated even as open-minded an innovator as Ezra Pound? Not the plot, certainly: a few people congregate in a hotel bar, several songs are sung or struck up briefly, Bloom has a meal and perfunctorily writes a letter while his rival is on the way to his home. It is not the content, the action of Ulysses even though Joyce offers a great deal in his work which is an archetypal close-up of a whole modern city, a compact version of Irish history and of European culture, complete with endless echoes of literature and music, popular culture, psychology, and so on. Attention increasingly focuses on what at first constitute reading obstacles: unexpected turns, perspective, modulations of register, mood, style, texture and vague overtones. Language itself takes on an autonomous and possibly distracting function. A keynote is variety, a sudden change of implicit game rules, the need for constant new adaptation, or, in Odyssean terms, new reading adventures. Joyce seems to offer more What (substance), but hardy allows us ever to lose sight of How (method, technique, incongruities, above all complexities). And then Joyce keeps altering the rules of the game.

1

Paradox Lust

One feature in Joyce’s evolution is the reduction of scope accompanied by excessive extension. The narrowing is more immediately obvious. A Portrait spans some 20 years; it ends with diary entries, covering a series of days in April and May of an unspecified year. Its sequel, Ulysses, is also a “journal” or diary covering less than one single day in a highly specified year. It takes

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up several hundred densely packed pages, in pointed contrast to a story like “A Painful Case” of about a dozen pages which extends over four years. In its time, Ulysses with its uniquely narrow scope may well have seemed the most limited and parochial novel ever. At the same time, there is an increasing expansion toward all-inclusion or universality, by implication it calls up original sources — like an imaginary umbilical telephone to “Edenville” (U 3.37) — or expands to, for example, “Sirius, 10 lightyears… distant” (U 17.1046), while still taking note of a crumpled piece of paper floating down the river or two flies stuck on a windowpane (U 10.294, 8.896). A young Stephen Dedalus had already put himself concentrically far beyond Ireland and Europe into “The Universe” (P 15). Perhaps appropriately it was when he lived at “Universitätstrasse” in Zürich in 1918 that Joyce resumed work on Ulysses, which had started out as an idea for a short story and ended up becoming an epic of the twentieth century. Studying one parochial day takes us far beyond its local and temporal confines. By (grammatically) declining or conjugating Leopold Bloom — who is among much else also an exemplary paradigm — Joyce provides a key towards analyzing humanity. In Ulysses, a whole epic, and much else, is compressed into one “allembracing” day (U 16.1237). Finnegans Wake can be extrapolated from a short ballad of almost the same name, with the potent absence of merely an apostrophe. If indeed it is a dream, it is based on the least substantial interior event and again limited to a single tightly stuffed night. The Austrian writer Herman Broch (1936) ingeniously called Ulysses a “Weltalltag der Epoche”; he cleverly combined the German “Alltag”, everyday, with “Weltall”, cosmos.1 Even more cosmic, Finnegans Wake (in which the Ondt is a “weltall fellow”, FW 416.3) contains the nucleus of a tiny cast who can act out all possible roles; it literally spans the globe — “Putting Allspace in a Notshall”, or in another variant, “touring the no place like no timelike absolent” (FW 455.29, 609.2). The narrowing at the microscopic end of the spectrum serves as justification for readers like myself who mainly draw out minutiae in pedantic close-ups, of which examples are offered in these pages. In 1927, the German critic Kurt Tucholsky reviewed the first German translation of Ulysses and freely admitted his failure to come to terms with the book — a rare occurrence in German criticism! — but in grudging admiration, he devised a formula for it: “Liebigs Fleischextrakt. Man kann es nicht

1 Herman Broch, James Joyce und die Gegenwart: Rede zu Joyce’s 50. Geburtstag (Vienna: Herbert Reichner Verlag, 1936).

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essen. Aber es werden noch viele Suppen damit zubereitet werden” (“Liebig’s meat extract. You cannot eat it, but many a soup will be prepared out of it”).2 He was wrong in his first claim; by now readers find Ulysses accessible (or even palatable), but he did predict its literary impact, its influence, the imitations and dilutions, and the mass of secondary studies. Joyce had actually anticipated him in one of those self-reflexive flashes, “Bovril, by James” (U 14.1547), using Bovril, the English equivalent of Liebig, which peripherally characterizes the “Oxen of the Sun” episode as a bovine extract. With “And of course all chimed din width the eatmost boviality”, the Wake is on a similar track (FW 58.14).

2

Affecting in the Extreme

In Joyce, extremes tend to meet: Ulysses and the Wake have the narrowest as well as the widest scope. They also combine confusion and order: “the Chaosmos of Alle” sums it up most succinctly (FW 118.21), and in accordance with reading experience, the chaos partly occludes the cosmos and so is noticed right away while order often trails behind in our understanding. The macrocosm can be reflected in an epiphanic phrase. There is little new in this but Joyce acted it out in numerous details, which is an incitement for nit-picking close readers like myself. In particular, Joyce shows the present as the accumulation and outcome of a long and involved past. This is carried into language. Words, too, have their evolution and their history, even karma; they develop, change form and meaning and so become archaeological exhibits worth studying. “Proteus”, to which episode Joyce attributed “Philology” in his Schema, sets in vigorously with “Ineluctable modality of the visible” (U 3.1). The modality is not just something that figuratively cannot be avoided: “ineluctable” is much more drastically visual — what one cannot (in-) be wrestled (Lat. luctari) out (ex-) of. Wrestling, struggling is appropriate for what happens in the tussle with the changeable god Proteus, who is hard to get hold of and changes shape continuously. Reading “Proteus” involves mental wrestling (frequently abandoned because of its complexities). The word moreover has historical reverberations that are potentially active. Virgil used it for the exact moment when Troy was falling: “venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus” (“the final day and ineluctable time has come”, Aeneis 2.324). A ten-year struggle has been in vain. Elsewhere Virgil talks forcefully of “Fortuna omni-

2 Kurt Tucholsky, “Ulysses”, Die Weltbühne 47, 22 November 1927, 788.

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potens et ineluctabile fatum” (“almighty fortune and unavoidable fate”, Aeneis 8.333). Some words carry their karma along. One of the perennial concerns of the episode is the relation between what is perceived and what can be known, and it begins with the visible, what is seen. Chances are that Joyce was aware that etymology, in its enthusiastic run of discoveries, had demonstrated that the Indo-European word for “seeing”, often represented as a root “WEID”, and prominent in Latin “videre”, in its perfect form “I have seen” came to mean “know” in Greek, “(w)oida”, and equally in German.3 The verb “wissen” is derived the same way: we think we know what we have seen. In such ways, etymology turns words into historical exhibits; “historical” in turn is what has been seen (and recorded): “[…] the whole bloody history […] I saw it” (U 7.676). We know that Joyce was fascinated by Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary. Joyce favours calling up dormant meanings and ghosts of words that have not survived the struggle. “Agenbite of Inwit” (U 1.444) was a Middle English loan translation and hereby a new term for Latin “remorsus” (biting again) of “conscienciae”: an inner (“with”) knowledge. Latin “corpus” has become “corpse” in English but it is limited to a dead one, as Bloom seems to sense: “Corpus: body. Corpse” (U 5.350). The old meanings can still be enlisted. Annoyed about his unresponsive wife, Gabriel in “The Dead” wonders “Why did she seem so abstracted?” (D 217). Gretta not only seems but is, and etymologically so, emotionally “drawn away” (Lat. abs-trahere), to a youth that once was close to her. Often verbs that have become figurative are brought back to their concrete origins. In “Wandering Rocks”, which features actions in space, two heavyweight boxers “proposed gently each to other his bulbous fists” (U 10.834). Evidently, they are not making suggestions to each other: they put (ponere) their fists forward (pro). In the same vein “John Howard Parnell translated a white bishop quietly” (U 10.1050), where “translate” reverts to a concrete meaning of carrying something, a chess piece, somewhere else. “Wandering Rocks” is about motion in space. As it happens, real bishops can be translated in just this sense, when they are moved to another see.4 In “Proteus”, which is full of seeing and hearing, we also find a “widowed see”, a word deriving from “sedes”, a bishop’s seat, and entirely

3 Walter W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–82, first published 1879). There he would have found that “his-tory” drives from the same root WEID that also spawned “videre” or “wissen”. 4 One of the effects of “Proteus” is an awareness that words of identical shape — “see”, “lap”, “bay”, “bark”, etc. — can represent different entities, which is simply the philological side of a dominant theme, the opposition of appearance and reality, or of accidentals and substance.

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different from the common English verb. Visible shapes, words included, are deceptive. The device is translated into “Sirens”, where “Miss Kennedy with manners transposed a teatray down to an upturned lithia crate” (U 11.92): she puts (trans-ponere) it elsewhere, but the word of course does secondary duty as a musical term.

3

“Different”

The virus etymologicus, an insistence on examining the evolution of words, is one of Joyce’s constitutional afflictions (from which readers like me are not immune), but it may serve as yet another, a philological, means of access. One example is the topic at hand: the word “different” itself. In Latin differre (assimilated from dis-ferre) meant to “carry in different directions”. This fits Joyce perfectly, as our diverse approaches, our hundreds of books and thousands of articles or notes amply testify. Joyce allows us to set off in many separate ways; the danger is of going in a wrong direction, or going too far. Correspondingly, an almost unique lunatic fringe surrounds Joyce studies. The verb differre could also signify to spread abroad or publish. It may or may not be coincidence that in Ulysses the first occurrence of “different” is in the “Aeolus” episode, the one that features trams running to the city’s outskirts, the postal service, including the telephone, and mainly the newspapers of general distribution. There, two elderly women, from the top of Nelson’s pillar facing the southern side of Dublin in a semicircle, “see the roofs and argue about where the different churches are” (U 7.1010). The “Aeolus” episode is, as it happens, the one in which the book takes on another form and multiple perspectives, or lines of vision, in other words, changes its direction. A further meaning of the Latin verb is “to confuse, bewilder”; Joyce may not have been familiar with it (Skeat does not list it), but it might easily be applied to the heady disorientation of Finnegans Wake. And then “different” is one syllable away from “difficult”. The sense “differre” is similar to “dimittere” (from dis-mittere), which Joyce put in front of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man: “Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes” from Ovid’s famous Metamorphoses (8.188): “[The inventor Daedalus] disperses his mind in all directions towards combinations or arts not yet known”. It describes Joyce’s own and often tentative evolution. To let the mind roam everywhere is the basis of thinking, researching and progress. The interior monologue is one particular instance, proceeding as it does by associative, seemingly random, unpredictable leaps.

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Wakean distortions of a word or conflations may yield sporadic insights. The etymological sense of “different” reappears when someone “takes a dipperend direction” (FW 342.35), with a dip towards other meanings, possibly a “deeper end”, while the Big Dipper was the Big Bear, a constellation that traditionally provided orientation for sailors. An intrusion like “dipper” — potentially — leads elsewhere: it might suggest a bird or someone baptizing, but to go in this direction is to risk going astray, a danger that, for better or worse, has been instigated by Joyce himself. Almost any item in the Wake may serve as a starting point for numerous tangents leading to revelations or dead ends. A familiar sonorous passage in Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP) (“And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry” 215.16) is echoed in one of several variants: “every article lathering leaving several rinsings so as each rinse results with a dapperent rolle, cuffs for meek and chokers for sheek and a kink in the pacts for namby” (FW 614.4). The avatar “dapperent” appears in the context of washing, but the words play different roles: “dapper” may refer to a smart appearance due to proper attire like “choker” for a tie, and “pacts” for “pants”, the German “Rolle”, a roll, may call up a laundry mangle. Another change rung on “different” is embedded in one of the Wake’s formulaic, quintessential passages: “The sehm asnuh. Two breeder as doffered as nors in soun” (FW 620.16). It contains one more variation of the reiterated “The seim anew” (FW 215.23), which is here applied to the anagrammatical twin brothers, Shem and Shaun, who are as different as North and South. The divergent spellings confirm or muddle the issues; according to McHugh’s Annotations, “nors” means “surly” in Dutch and “soun” sounds like a Dutch word for a kiss, so that negative and positive affections may be adumbrated. Norwegian “breeder” adds the meaning “riverbanks”, and the two brothers are in fact “rivals” sitting on each side of a river. How “doffer”, a Dutch pigeon, can be accommodated in the context does not emerge clearly, possibly someone is raising a hat, as usual semantic waste matter may suggest other speculative directions and an aura of haze — there are too many different directions for semantic complacency.5 The point in each case is merely that potential meanings disperse in odd tangents, some pertinent and plausible, while others turn out to be blind alleys. The Wake appears to act out some of the implications of “dif-ferent”; its typical items point in several directions. In “A butcheler artsed out of Cullage Trainity” (FW 315.1), we can look towards a bachelor of arts from Trinity College, or a butcher, or more prosaically towards the human backside. 5 Whoever tried to quote parts of Finnegans Wake against the officious obstinacy of a spelling checker can tell from experience how Joyce diverts from linguistic norms.

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The Book Reading Itself

Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake seem to be reading themselves as books just as they internally keep translating and permutating their own substance. In one of its many concerns with its own being, Ulysses tangentially designates itself as a “chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle” (U 14.1412), a mixed dish whose sheer compactness sets it apart. To first readers, it all seems obscure, a chaotic overload with no regard for any possible audience, and no respect for conventional boundaries. Some early reviews evince genuine revulsion, shock, and outrage; the hodgepodge was felt to be a crime against common decency. The Wake in turn mocks at its own excesses in self-descriptive thumbnail sketches like a “farced epistol to the hibruws” (FW 228.32), something that is stuffed, farced (a farce was originally a comedy into which jests were stuffed), for highbrows and full of quotes, as from the First Epistle to the Hebrews. This echo of a passage in Ulysses offers itself paradigmatically as an example of how any trifling detail may be picked up to illuminate the twisted dynamics of the whole. In “Eumaeus”, Stephen asks whether “that first epistle to the Hebrews” is in the Evening Telegraph (U 16.1268). He is cryptically referring to Mr Deasy’s letter that he brought to the newspapers in the morning — strictly speaking, it was not a letter “to” any Hebrew, but a twisted remark on Mr Deasy’s comment on the Jews — that Ireland “never let them in” (U 2.442). Stephen Dedalus often shows even less regard for his listeners than his creator at times seems to have. As it happens, there is no “First” Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament as there is only one, but nevertheless we may be directed towards it. For what it is worth, the Gospel letter begins with the adverbs “Polymerôs kai polytropôs […]”: “In sundry times and diverse manners […]” God spoke to us through the prophets (but now through Jesus Christ, Heb. 1:1); “polytropôs” occurs only once in the Bible, its corresponding adjective, “polytropos”, is prominent in the first line of the Odyssey, whose as yet unnamed hero is characterized as “versatile, cunning, resourceful, sagacious” etc., according to translation. It is my belief that the artifact Ulysses is above all polytropic, literally turning (trop) in many ways, versatile — or “dif-ferent”, quite apart from the abundance of rhetorical tropes. The polytropic density makes unprecedented demand on the readers who ought, Joyce is reported to have said, to devote nothing less than their whole lives to his works while professors would be kept busy with them for centuries. In all likelihood, these jokes were made with a serious tongue in a frivolous cheek.

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Within decades of their appearance, Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, outwardly novels — stories told in prose, and as novels supposed to entertain without too much mental effort — have been subjected to the meticulous examination that so far was due only to classical works far removed in time, by Sophocles, Dante or Shakespeare, or poetry which is not just read but “interpreted” in depth. Ulysses was furnished with annotation a few years after its publication, the Wake even before it became known in its entirety. Annotation and glosses, like classical scholia (“Five lines of text and ten pages of notes”, U 1.368), became necessary right from the start; they are by nature indispensable, inadequate, problematic as well as inevitably misleading.

5

Kinetics

Ulysses begins with “Stately” but is everything but static, and even “plump” Buck Mulligan will soon be mercurially agile. The text does not keep still and takes unexpected turns: a trite shaving bowl becomes a chalice by mimetic transubstantiation. The book transforms itself continually. Once we seem to get used to its procedure, it takes another shape and pace. Bloom, with the fairly modern profession of advertising (to “ad-vert” is to turn towards something), is observing the “plastered board” of a rowboat placed in the river Liffey: Kino’s 11/Trousers (U 8.88) Approving of the visible placement of the ad Bloom wonders if the Dublin corporation charges for the use of public space and then goes on to reflect: How can you own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream. (U 8.93) Hardly conscious of it, he comes very close to a familiar quote attributed to Heraclitus: “Panta rhei” — everything flows, nothing is stable. This memorable phrase (in the manner of punchy advertisements) has a bearing on Ulysses, and so does the other well-known piece of wisdom that says that you cannot step into the same river twice because it has changed and we have changed. We cannot read any item within the book a second time in quite the same

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way. In its recurrence, it becomes in part something else, a new experience in a changed context. Readers cannot step into the same Ulysses twice, yet Finnegans Wake invites us to do just that by its reflow into “riverrun”. In fact, a change has already occurred in Bloom’s memory: “which in the stream of life we trace” echoes a former thought which however relates not to water, but to a current “heatwave”: “Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer thaaan them all” (U 5.563). The “stream of life” in turn is twisted from an aria in Maritana, a once popular opera by W.V. Wallace: “Some thoughts none other can replace / Remembrance will recall / Which in the flight of years we trace / Is dearer than them all”. Ironically, in Bloom’s recall, some thoughts have been replaced by others, and remembrance, of all things, is already faulty, the subject has changed as well as the wording, “flight of years” has turned into the “stream of life”, and the stream of life keeps changing. The pattern remains, some words have been altered, and the meaning is no longer determined by the original anchorage. Quotations by nature are recurrences and in their new context take on a new life. We do not step into the same quotation twice. In Finnegans Wake, most quotations are distorted. Male stability (city, mountain) is often paired with female flux. Its opening paragraph after all moves from a fluent “riverrun” to a solid “Howth Castle and Environs”. A particularly dense cluster features a “pantaloonade” — “Oropos Roxy and Pantharhea” (FW 513.22). The woman’s name, Pantharhea, is obviously based on Heraklitus’ “Panta rhei”. It prominently includes a venerated classical Ur-mother, Rhea, one of the Titans, daughter of Uranos and Gaia. As the wife of Kronos, she gave birth to Zeus, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon.6 Such perpetual flux is contrasted with the seeming solidity of an ancient city, Oropos, and “oros”, Greek for mountain, with rocks contained in “Roxy” (also the name of many theatres and cinemas). If read backwards, the mighty king may be asleep (“sopor”, the verb “soporo” in Latin would mean “I send to sleep”). A feline panther seems to be present as well. A marital balance may be disturbed by Pantherus, the Roman soldier and alleged progenitor of Jesus in the Apocrypha, as it surfaces in “Circe”: “Pantherus, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories” (U 15.2599). All of this leads to ask how one can really “own” meaning. The starting point of a long classical digression — Joyce’s texts are multiply digressive — was

6 See Iliad 14.203, 15.187, and Hesiod, “Theogony”, Hesiod: The Poems and Fragments, trans. Alexander William Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1908), 453.

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tailor Kino’s advertisement. We cannot tell why Joyce chose this particular firm among numerous available Dublin tailors. Originally he used another one, “Hyam’s”, and then replaced it by “Kino’s” on the placards (JJA 18:98), chosen with a purpose we can only guess at. In “Circe”, Bloom’s tailor George R. Mesias takes over and presents a respective bill: “To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings” (U 15.1908). J.C. Kino was a London clothier with an office in Dublin. It so happens that “kinô” in Greek (which it is not) would mean “I move”. Perhaps the single word specifically conjures up a classical ghost, the famous challenge of Archimedes, which has also become part of our cultural heritage: “Give me somewhere to stand and I will move [kinô] the earth”.7 The terse statement in Greek consists of all monosyllables in which only “kinô” stands out; the quote has also been rendered (or pedantically explained) as “Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum strong enough, and single-handed I can move the world”.8 Joyceans often use a fixed part as leverage to throw light on, not the world, but a few passages (as is done here). If we had a reliable starting point, or first premise, we could do wonders and achieve certainty. Some Joyce scholars really believe they have discovered such a lever that would achieve ultimate enlightenment. Archimedes surfaces in Bloom’s lagging memory, “the wise man what’s his name” with the delayed recognition: “Archimedes. I have it!” (U 13.1138, 1142). “I have it!” of course translates the well-known “heurêka”: I have found it (“[…] it’s a law something like that”, U 5.41). Archimedes and Heraclitus have handed down phrases “the world has remembered” (U 2.15), whether they ever actually used them or not. A fixed, stable place (to allow purchase for a lever) contrasts with movement. A rowboat at anchor has a fixed place in the midst of running water; it sways nevertheless and thereby moves an advertisement. The rowboat sentence grammatically illustrates a change in the cognitive progression of reading. That Bloom’s “eyes saw a rowboat rock at anchor…” at first glance suggests a boat that is rocking on the waves, but the sequel “rock […] its plastered board” transforms the seemingly intransitive verb “rock” into an active one with an object (U 8.88). The word “rock” in itself is a confluence of opposites: it accidentally combines the solidity of a noun “rock” with the motion of a verb of quite different origin.

7 “Dos moi pô stô kai kinô tês gês” (possibly already in Greek, powerful, common short words, that could have great power). 8 Burton Stevenson, Stevenson’s Book of Quotations (London: Cassell, 1967), 1573.

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103

Revisionary Joyce

Everything flows or moves, according to Heraclitus, including texts. Joyce was an inveterate reviser, a metamorphoser, also an author in the original sense: auctor — one who increases, augments (“ye aucthor”, FW 148.17). A rapid, almost instantaneous evolution is characteristic, again true to the Heraclitean motto. At no point could Joyce’s next endeavour ever have been predicted, not even by himself. The still rather diffuse prose of Stephen Hero was transposed into the orchestrated texture of A Portrait, and Dubliners changed in mode and resonance by the addition of “The Dead”. An aborted short story prematurely entitled “Ulysses in Dublin” was taken up later and expanded into what first looked like a novel but, in its slow gestation, became something novel and mutated into a combination of an epic and a cultural cross section. It changed under the hands of the author who originally had planned 22 episodes, before eventually streamlining them into the 18 we now have. Joyce conspicuously recast the “Aeolus” episode with headlines, brought “Sirens” close to a musical composition, gave one chapter the appearance of a play, and turned another into the format of an exam paper. All along the way, readers and even staunch supporters could not keep pace or they just discontinued. Today, many readers still drop out at the stage of Finnegans Wake. Changes and revisions are documented in the more than sixty volumes of notes, drafts, and proofs of the James Joyce Archive (JJA). Contrary to the expectations of two decades ago, an amazing lot of new material has come to light, which is a significant incitement to engage in genetic studies. Just how powerful final, last minute touches are can be seen in miniature at the end of “Eumaeus”. On page proofs dated “25.1.22” (that is 8 days before publication!) Joyce added some lines in the last paragraph (here shown in bold): The driver never said a word, good, bad or indifferent, but merely watched the two figures, as he sat on his lowbacked car, both black — one full, one lean — walk towards the railway bridge, to be married by Father Maher. As they walked, they at times stopped and walked again continuing their tête à tête (which, of course, he was well > utterly out of) about sirens enemies of man’s reason, and > mingled with a number of other topics of the same category, usurpers, historical cases of the kind while the man in the sweeper car* who in any case couldn’t possibly hear because they were too far simply sat in his seat near the

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end of lower Gardiner street and looked after their lowbacked car. (JJA 27:136–7, see U 16.1585, with changes).9 This overlay does not just add more quantitative material; it involves a major narrative shift to a meta-level. The perspective has already changed towards the end from Bloom’s outlook to that of the driver of the sweeper car: he now in turn watches Bloom and Stephen as they are walking away into the distance. But now abruptly the shade of a personified narrator emerges (for once), a narrative consciousness that at the mention of a real “lowbacked car” is deflected into Samuel Lover’s song of that name, “The Low-Backed Car”, so the lines of its final stanza infiltrate the text. They call up a spectral priest, Father Maher, a mere rhyme to go with “car” in the song, who now miraculously seems to meddle with the characters. These narrative associations, obligingly italicized by Joyce, are likely to confuse uninformed readers who may wonder why Bloom and Stephen should be intertextually “married”. A secondary elaboration moreover adds a feeble joke to “sweeper car” as though it were part of the interior monologue of the ghostly narrator. A final lick of meta-paint has been added at the last moment, and fiction is shown to be in fact an inventive fabrication. (See also page 121.) The aside “who in any case couldn’t possibly hear” is analogous to the end of “Sirens” where an explicit and basically unnecessary point is made that the blind stripling entering the Ormond bar “[…] saw not bronze. He saw not gold. Nor Ben nor Bob nor Tom nor George nor tank nor Richie nor Pat. Hee hee hee hee. He did not see” (U 11.1281). The narrative modality of the inaudible of “Eumaeus” has been prepared for by the modality of the invisible in “Sirens”, which contains the first ostensibly self-reflective divarication. It also flaunts a similar wedding of characters by a merely textual, not factual, constellation: “Married to Bloom, to greaseabloom” (U 11.180). Joyce’s emendation from “well” to “utterly out of” is stronger than “well out of”, and also more Eumaean, as it adds another “utterly” to the three already there (U 16.295, 855, 1054, a total of 4 out of 5 in the whole book.) Etymologically “utterly out”, true to style, has a pleonastic ring.

7

“Metandmorefussed” (FW 513.31)

In the Library episode, Stephen in his ad hoc performance proceeds almost as Joyce does in his revisions. The arguments have most likely been men9 Even the additions were expanded: after “sweeper car” Joyce inserted “or you might as well call it in the sleeper car”.

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tally rehearsed beforehand, but even so his amazingly articulate and allusive skill may strain plausibility. Are we supposed to take his long, never fumbling expositions at face value, or is there a parodic undercurrent of artificiality? Stephen dexterously adapts what he picked up earlier in the morning to a new context. The mention of “Penelope stay-at-home” is a telling example of his gift for instant reconfiguration: — Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty from Kyrios Menelaus’ brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope (U 9.621). Airing his own cleverness seems to motivate Stephen more than lucid information for the benefit of his few erudite listeners, and it would remain fairly cryptic for us readers if we did not remember that Stephen is recirculating professor MacHugh’s remarks about him in the newspaper chapter: — You remind me of Antisthenes, the professor said, a disciple of Gorgias, the sophist […] And he wrote a book in which he took away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope. (U 7.1035) Such an adjustment of something gleaned earlier in the day demonstrates the volatile nature of Joyce’s textures. Stephen embroiders what he has heard by adding, for example, “Kyrios Menelaus”, Helen’s cuckolded husband, to emphasize his own thesis of Shakespeare’s betrayal. “Kyrios”, the biblical word for “Lord”, never occurs in Homer, but it would be a normal appellation in modern Greek (in translations, for example, “Mr Bloom” becomes “kyrios Mploom”). It echoes the discussion on the vocative “kyrie” in “Kyrie eleison” and the subsequent comparison of Hebrew, Greek, and English words and vowels (U 7.562). Several centuries and cultures are intermingled. Stephen’s misogyny surfaces in calling Helen, the most beautiful woman in antiquity (and incidentally “prix de Paris” U 2.302), a “brooddam”; breeding is not what she was renowned for. The disparaging animal comparison (“dam”) is repeated in Stephen’s impromptu addition10 — “the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept”. It recalls the story of Helen who tempted the hidden Greek task force inside the famous horse and taunted them to reveal themselves (Od. 4.241–64). Now she herself has become a mare. In “Nestor”, the 10

Joyce inserted “the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept” in the placards, the galley proofs (JJA 13:182). What Stephen in rapid speech calls up on the spur of the moment was a matter of careful revision for Joyce.

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“nightmare” of history from which Stephen wants to wake undergoes a similar transformation: that nightmare might give him “a back kick” (U 2.377). But naturally most readers will mentally translate the phrasing to a score of heroes with whom she slept.11 All in all, Stephen Dedalus, 22 years of age, precociously produces an amazing hybrid of allusions, side-thrusts and incongruities.

8

Parallax Stalks behind and Goads

Although the device is naturally not new in literature, Joyce made “Parallax” pivotal in Ulysses. Parallax consists of different, individual views and changing perspectives, with the inevitable possibility of subjective error. Empathy is one of Bloom’s virtues; he tries to imagine the other person’s view: what it would be like, for example, to give birth. At the very outset, in his dialogue with the cat, this trait is emphasized: “Wonder what I look like to her” (U 4.28). Everything speaks in its own way (U 7.177), and everyone in his or her way. Most readers are probably able to distinguish the specific voices of the characters and never confuse a line spoken or thought by Bloom with one by Stephen. Mulligan is recognizable by compulsively turning every statement into a jocular event: “Lend us a loan of your noserag” (U 1.69). Nor would a chancer like Lenehan ever say something ordinary: “He had received the rhino for the labour of his muse” (U 11.264). Martin Cunningham tends to pontificate: “That’s the maxim of the law” (U 6.473), Blazes Boylan is brash and nonchalant: “That’ll do, game ball”, “Why don’t you grow?” (U 10.305, 11.365), and Richie Goulding prefers superlatives: “Grandest number in the whole opera” (U 11.828). Best the librarian is consistently deferential: “Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating” (U 9.328). Most prominent is the unique diction of the narrator in “Cyclops”. Their interior cadences too are markedly different. A Portrait in its narrow scope remains restricted to the view of Stephen Dedalus, while Ulysses offers a variety of perspectives, and the principle is applied to the idiosyncratic episodes. Parallax by definition is the same object viewed from different points of view. The “bloody mangy mongrel” warily kept at distance by the narrator in “Cyclops” is identical with, and at the opposite end from, “Giltrap’s lovely dog Garryowen” in the eyes of Gerty MacDowell (U 12.119, 13.232; the adjectives

11

That “tenors”, or perhaps heroes, get “women by the score” (U 11.686) is yet another tangent.

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“bloody” and “lovely” would also characterize, respectively, the “Cyclops” and “Nausicaa” episodes). Bloom noted how “Denis Breen in skimpy frock coat and blue canvas shoes shuffled out of Harrison’s” (U 8.310). In the distorting mirrors of “Cyclops” he is exalted to epic grandeur — “an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred scrolls of law” — and ridiculed in the vernacular: “that bloody old pantaloon Denis Breen in his bathslippers with two bloody big books tucked under his oxter” (U 12.246, 253). Parallactic views are integrated correctives. Bloom fondly remembers how at one point in the theatre he told Molly “what Spinoza [said] in that book of poor papa’s” and that she was “Hypnotized, listening” (U 11.1058, see also page 31), but in her own memory what occupied her at the time was the onset of menstruation, which “came on me like that one and only time we were in the box […] and him on the other side of me talking about Spinoza and his soul thats dead I suppose millions of years ago I smiled the best I could leaning forward as if I was interested” (U 18.1110–17). Philosophy at one end of the spectrum and the human body at the other comprise the scope of Ulysses. Depending on the observer, objects change their nature. The inverse is that different directions are possible from any given point. Passing one particular spot in Dublin, Beresford place, in “Eumaeus”, Stephen’s associations turn towards literature (he “thought to think of Ibsen”), as they did already in A Portrait (P 176), while Bloom, equally true to type, near a baker’s shop thinks of “Bread, the staff of life, earn your bread” (U 16.51–9). These are differences in the original meaning of going in other directions. Perhaps Joyce gives us an early instructive lesson when Buck Mulligan holds forth on the sea: — God! he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look. (U 1.77) The same object, the sea, is nothing uniform but can be split up into various aspects or put into different contexts. Seen in the context of poetical myth, it can become, in the words of “Algy” Swinburne, “a great sweet mother”, or it can be described by a visual or tactile impression, affecting eyes or a part of the body, each expressed by a salient compound. In the Odyssey, it is evoked in the formula “wine-faced” (Gr. oin-ops) or “winedark”. In Xenophon’s Anabasis, a text suitable for learning Greek about an expeditionary force, the returning troops exclaimed “Thalatta! Thalatta!” at the sight of the Black Sea. An altern-

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ative Greek noun is used in another dialect (Homer uses the form “thalassa”). The respective attitudes towards the sea vary significantly: for Odysseus sailing out “on to” (epi) it, was an adventure fraught with dangers, but for the Greeks returning from danger it was a relief to come near to the sea that was close to their home. Different views or aspects or starting points for alternative interpretations are offered very early in the book. Parallax is expressly underlined as it occupies and intrigues Bloom: “Parallax. I never exactly understood” (U 8.110). The term actually means “change” and is used in astronomy for the apparent displacement of an object seen from different positions. It is a matter of perspectives pervading Ulysses. In the episode in which the events are described in variant distorting points of view and styles, it is even personified: “Parallax stalks behind and goads” (U 14.1089). In this light, “Oxen of the Sun” is a historical series of parallactic distortions. Parallax indeed “goads”, prods, stimulates, Ulysses, and in particular goads the “Oxen” chapter. “Parallax stalks behind and goads…” a mixed troop of animals (U 14.1089). The metaphor occurs in a “region” of “grey twilight”, with De Quincey behind the scenes, where “a mare leading a fillyfoal” soon seems to assume the shape of “Millicent”, Bloom’s daughter. The misty scene appears to be part of a daydream. At the same time, probably, but told subsequently in the manner of Landor, the conversation turns around the Gold Cup horse race of the afternoon. It becomes possible to imagine, retroactively, that snippets of the conversation have led to the phantoms of the previous paragraph: “The flag fell and, huuh!, off scamper, the mare ran out” (U 14.1128) may well coincide with “the mare leading her fillyfoal”, as does the “Huuh! Hark! Huuh!” in the preceding paragraph (U 14.1088). This in turn is an echo of what was heard in the morning from the funeral carriage: “Huuuh! the drover’s voice cried […] Huuuh! out of that!” (U 6.390). In twisted narrative sequence, “fillyfoal” might conceivably be a poetic transformation of Lenehan’s expert comment on “Sceptre […] She is not the filly that she was” (U 14.1140), and as sound, it may well chime with “Phyllis”, the bucolic name of a girl attending the merely imagined race (U 14.1130, 33). The same elements are distributed in two successive passages and adapted to the style at hand. In the “myriad metamorphoses of symbol”, “Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus” (U 14.1108) has all the appearance of an occult mystery, but it turns out to be — on top of whatever else — a red triangle on a bottle of Bass beer (U 14.1181). It so happens that Sceptre, the horse, is also “Bass’s mare” (U 14.1161). The point is merely that several items are distributed over successive paragraphs, typically Joycean parallax within parallaxes. It also points to an anomaly in the episode: several sequential paragraphs, and styles, are in part overlapping and therefore simultaneous (U 14.1078–1298).

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109

Incongruity and Disproportion (U 17.2213)

Ulysses as we know is carefully structured and meticulously planned as a crossreferential universe: “See? It all works out”; “Wonderful organisation really, goes like clockwork”; “Very large and wonderful and keeps famous time” (U 8.126, 5.424, 10.828). By contrast, it contains uncertainties, gaps and faults and incongruities (Bloom’s “waterworks were out of order”, U 13.551), blurred edges, transient tips of narrative icebergs, abundant errors and, especially in “Eumaeus”, misleading articulations. The “Ithaca” episode strains to get relations right and accurate with obsessive pedantry, irrespective of verbal elegance. Arguably “Ithaca” is all about differences, and similarities, especially between Bloom and Stephen, as shown in an encapsulation: “In other respects were their differences similar?” (U 17.893). Here my emphasis is on internal inconsistencies: how “Ithaca” diverts from its own assumed aims. One early instance, parading Bloom’s and Stephen’s “views on some points diverging”, shows how parallactic events are dealt with and how incompatibilities may interfere: The collapse which Bloom ascribed to gastric inanition and certain chemical compounds of varying degrees of adulteration and alcoholic strength, accelerated by mental exertion and the velocity of rapid circular motion in a relaxing atmosphere, Stephen attributed to the reapparition of a matutinal cloud (perceived by both from two different points of observation, Sandycove and Dublin) at first no bigger than a woman’s hand. (U 17.36) Typically, again Bloom thinks of physical causes, inanition, while Stephen moves away from reality towards superstition. The cloud in question was signalled by identical wording for both: “A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly” (U 1.248, 4.218). The effect was similar, Stephen pondered about his mother’s death and his own guilt while Bloom experienced “Desolation. Grey horror seared his flesh” (U 4.229). Stephen is much more affected and may well remember the moment, but Bloom is unlikely to recall that particular one which he noticed only transiently, given the ever-changeable Irish sky. Naturally neither of course would know of the other’s observation, but in “Ithaca”, the author keeps track of them by narrative omniscience, and in this case, he offers a bird’s eye view for the benefit of the readers; the simultaneous perception is a matter of a meta-perspective, one of many in the chapter. Even so, it remains unclear what Stephen actually communicated to Bloom, if he did indeed, nor can we guess why that cloud still should be haunting

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him long after midnight. There was, as far as we can tell, no “reappearance” of that cloud in the first place, and what on earth would make Stephen associate a cloud, “covering the sun… wholly”, with one in the Old Testament, and why on top of it should he change its size to that of “a woman’s hand”?12 Whatever Stephen said aloud it is hardly anything Bloom could have followed. This particular answer to a specific question leads to new complexities and more confusion. If clarification is the episode’s manifest aim, it is getting off on an exemplary bad start. More “diverging” points loom into disturbing view.

10

Subsequently Thrown Away

In a mixture of realism and meta-panoramic views, it is not easy, or in fact possible, to extricate what the characters in “Ithaca” know and what is due to a collusion between the author and his readers. “Ithaca” supplies a lot of information (and withholds even more). One of its items summarises Bloom’s belated understanding of the Throwaway conundrum, the erroneous attribution circulated by Lenehan in “Cyclops” that he tipped off Bantam Lyons about the Gold Cup race. Where had previous intimations of the result, effected or projected, been received by him? In Bernard Kiernan’s licensed premises 8, 9 and 10 little Britain street: in David Byrne’s licensed premises, 14 Duke street: in O’Connell street lower, outside Graham Lemon’s when a dark man had placed in his hand a throwaway (subsequently thrown away), advertising Elijah, restorer of the church in Zion: in Lincoln place outside the premises of F.W. Sweny and Co (Limited), dispensing chemists, when, when Frederick M. (Bantam) Lyons had rapidly and successively requested, perused and restituted the copy of the current issue of the Freeman’s Journal and National Press which he had been about to throw away (subsequently thrown away), he had proceeded towards the oriental edifice of the Turkish and Warm Baths, 11 Leinster street, with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction. (U 17.327) A first blush impression is that Bloom now retrospectively combines all the parts of a puzzle of which he has become a victim. The list inverts the chrono12

“Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand […]” (1 Kings 18:44). That little cloud already mysteriously gave its name to Joyce’s short story “A Little Cloud”.

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logical order in a comprehensive backward look. In actual sequence the origin of the confusion is Bloom’s encounter in “Lincoln place outside the premises of F.W. Sweny and Co […] when Frederick M. (Bantam) Lyons had rapidly and successively requested, perused and restituted the copy of the current issue of the Freeman’s Journal and National Press which he had been about to throw away (subsequently thrown away)”. Clearly at that stage Bloom had as little an idea of what was going on as any reader could possibly have. The second occurrence, “outside Graham Lemon’s when a dark man had placed in his hand a throwaway (subsequently thrown away), advertising Elijah …” is again hardly something that Bloom would keep in mind. That a handbill is called a “throwaway” is a link within Ulysses as an artifact and not something Bloom would possibly be conscious of. The next “intimation” of the result of the horse race was in “Bernard Kiernan’s licensed premises”, in the “Cyclops” episode. There Lenehan, misled by Bantam Lyons, charges Bloom with duplicity, but the allegation was discussed in his absence and was not brought up during his re-entry and his precipitate exit (U 12.1751–70). Conceivably his companions, Cunningham and Power, on the long car drive to Sandymount might have informed him, but there is no indication that they were ever informed of it in the relatively short time between their arrival and the hasty departure (U 12.1621–1771; lines 1676–1750 are taken up by the extra-temporal interpolation of a ceremonial blessing). It may well be that Bloom never heard of the charge at all. The only “intimation” Bloom could have received would be the citizen’s hostile remark on his return, “Don’t tell anyone” (U 12.1782), the implication of which he could hardly have understood. Potentially, but somewhat implausibly, he might have pieced various but basically trivial memories of his day together (it is always possible to argue that the report we are reading in “Cyclops” is not necessarily complete.) All in all the book itself gives no clear intimation that Bloom ever became aware of the rumour of the tip attributed to him. That he had “proceeded towards the oriental edifice […] with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction” (U 17.338–341) is entirely outside his mind anyway. It is a metatextual carry-over from Taylor’s speech on Moses in the newspaper office, and moreover based on the ambiguity of the word “race”.13 It turns Bloom, on whose face no light shone, into an incidental Moses, in profound or facetious

13

“He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw” (U 7.866).

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symbolism, far above his own possible recollection. The Ithacan expansion has all the air of a meta-comment or an explicative note. Realism and textuality are entwined, and Joyce moves freely between a psychological and an omniscient level. Bloom could only know of such connections if he were to read the book in which he is the main character. “Ithaca” wants to get things right and usually does but is not above playful confusion and reflections on the medium itself. That a report does not match the facts may also be a hint at newspapers. What characters can know within the fiction they are in is thematically embedded and brought up by Stephen, who wonders how dead King Hamlet ever knew how he was killed by poison: “By the way how did he find that out? He died in his sleep” (U 7.751). The question is resumed in the Library: “But those who are done to death cannot know the manner of their quell unless the Creator endow their souls with knowledge in the life to come” (U 9.467). The question — who knows what when? — is already inscribed in the Odyssey, where, in the second half, it is important to keep in view which person is informed about the movement of others (Telemachos, the suitors, Penelope, the servants, etc.). At one point when Odysseus relates his adventures, he moves beyond his range of knowledge, informing his audience that Helios, the Sun, was told of the slaughter of his sacred oxen (cows, actually); Helios in turn told Zeus, who then destroyed the ship. How could Odysseus hear of events high on Olympos? He makes a specific point to explain: “This I heard from Calypso of the fair hair; and she said that she heard it from Hermes the messenger” (Od. 12.374–90).14 But that particular conversation between Calypso and Hermes during his very brief visit is not reported in Book 5; in fact, many Homeric scholars have dismissed the lines as later insertions and they do indeed look like a narrative patch hastily added.

11

Excerptability

What has always struck me about Joyce is how many items can be extracted from his works and put into a new context beyond their original anchorage. This is true of many writers, Shakespeare beyond all others. In Joyce, such autonomous quotes are not limited to content or theme (“There’s music everywhere”, U 11.946) but often apply to the artistic composition. Phrases seen in 14

The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Samuel Henry Butcher and Andrew Lang (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1897).

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isolation can potentially overspill beyond their immediate context as though they were labels of the unit in which they occur. “Bovril by James” as a thumbnail characterization of “Oxen of the Sun” has already been mentioned. A librarian saying “All sides of life must be represented” (U 9.505) unwittingly but accommodatingly summarizes the book he is in, just as “OMNIUM GATHERUM” (U 7.604) is a feature of the “Aeolus” chapter, where more persons are gathered than in any preceding one, and it represents the whole book. Bloom in “Lestrygonians” observes a dog lapping food he has just choked up food and internally — and inexactly — comments: “Ruminants” (U 8.1054). Canines do not ruminate, but cattle do; figuratively rumination has been transferred to mental activities and so serves as shorthand for the interior monologue in “Lestrygonians”. Bloom, on his way to lunch, philosophizes: “Never know whose thoughts you’re chewing” (U 8.718). The analogy is easily extended to the whole book, which freely plagiarizes and consists of quotes, echoes, all the way down to clichés. Even more so, Finnegans Wake is a universal digest (“painful digests”, FW 183.21). Gerty MacDowell has her pretty head “in a profusion of luxuriant clusters” (U 13.118), an incidental label for the prose that is her make-up. In “Sirens”, “voices” are indeed “blended” throughout, and similarly in “Oxen of the Sun” the “voices blend and fuse” (U 11.158, 14.1078) but of course this is a narrative technique present from the very start. In the National Library episode, George Russell, in his role as editor of the Irish Homestead, points out that “[we] have so much correspondence” (U 9.318), which is apposite in an episode that is bristling with echoes, quotations, and cross-references. When Bloom is nearly run over by a sandstrewer, he thinks of (probably his own) “stiff walk” as one of many impediments and cramped movements in “Circe”. The episode is full of ghosts and phantasms and, it so happens, the stiff, the dead, do indeed walk (U 15.207). It is at least my own reading experience that even casual remarks or lowkey asides may move centre stage with new latent applications. There is hardly anything less remarkable than Haines’ embarrassed answer to Stephen’s brusque question (if he could make any money out of a collection of his sayings): “I don’t know, I’m sure” (U 1.493). Few readers will ever remember this vacuity, and yet it has all the potential of a valid Socratic certainty underlying Ulysses. We don’t ever know or understand everything — even if some critics and scholars, including the Joycean variety, feel exempt from this rule. The game of semantic dislocation initiated by Joyce lends itself to being universally applied far beyond perhaps his intention or responsibility. Joyce naturally has no control over the dynamics he unleashed. Finnegans Wake, the culmination of all traits, is officiously narcissistic, engaged with, or apo-

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logetic for, its own being.15 It may describe itself transparently as “the book of Doublends Jined” (FW 20.14); this encapsulates its content, the main figure HCE as Dublin’s Giant, at the same time it pinpoints its formal uniqueness by joining both end and beginning. By itself “Doublends Jined” does what it says: it joins theme and technique, which is almost gratuitously reinforced by an isolated element “blends”.

12

“A Mingling of Different Little Conjugials”

In his imagined flirtation with Mrs Breen in “Circe”, Bloom excuses himself: “I only meant a square party, a mixed marriage mingling of our different little conjugials” (U 15.433), and he appears to mean a mutual exchange of (conjoint) spouses. The deviant form “conjugial” may be a jocular slangy ad hoc formation. Bloom is unlikely to be familiar with the exclusively Swedenborgian adjective “conjugial” — with its intrusive “i” that makes it an easy victim of proofreaders. Stephen has paraded the term during the library discussion: “Twenty years [Shakespeare] dallied there between conjugial love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures” (U 9.631).16 In the scortatory episode “Circe” (relating to prostitutes), thoughts are freely transferred textually beyond the mental range of the characters. There is furthermore an echo of “another than her conjugial had been the man in the gap” (U 14.894), where the purely Swedenborgian word may actually be spoken, but in all likelihood, is part of the episode’s literary colouring. Within the plot of Blazes Boylan, maybe Bloom is cast in the role of an extra-conjugial. Out of the immediate context, however, “different little conjugials” is here deflected to label Joyce’s different and idiosyncratic handling of all kinds of conjunctions. 15

16

The Wake has already proved an endless quarry for titles: Joyce’s Moraculous Sindbook, Joyce’s Book of the Dead, Eternal Geomater, Dreamscape, Grand Operoar, Tour of the Darkling Plain, etc. Based on Emanuel Swedenborg’s The Delights of Wisdom Concerning Conjugial Love: after which follows The Pleasures of Insanity Concerning Scortatory Love (London, 1794).

Chapter 6

Mercurial Interpolations in Ulysses This is a preliminary probe into Joyce’s interpolations in Ulysses as they are part of a complex stratification, characterised, like everything else, by “infinite variety”. The focus is on “interpolations”, i.e., what is “put in”, “inserted”, or whatever interrupts the prevalent flow of narrative. Interpolations are often framed, set apart, and bring in disparate heterogeneous elements that, conceivably, could be omitted or bypassed. They are excursive, outside the main run or course of the story. Read aloud, they would entail a change of voice, not that the distinction between basic text and interpolation would be selfevident; as will be shown, it becomes more and more problematic and confusing, even arbitrary — a common experience in Joyce. Some of the interpolations are glaringly manifest and typographically distinct (like the headlines in “Aeolus”), others differ stylistically, while some are not marked at all. The following essay aligns exemplary passages; it could easily be expanded into a larger coverage, or possibly a book-length thesis. Genetically, of course, everything Joyce added after a first draft in his incremental procedure is, technically, inserted or interpolated, in the sense of added, but when it just extends the prevailing story, it does not qualify for the thematic approach adopted here. Strictly speaking, there are only a few clear, graphic, interpolations in Ulysses: the two extra-textual pictures of music, the “Gloria” in “Scylla and Charybdis” (U 9.500) and the stanzas of the “Little Harry Hughes” song in “Ithaca” (U 17.806, 829). They are not typeset, letter by letter, but were inserted as illustrations using printing plates. Then there is the notorious oversized black dot at the end of “Ithaca” (U 17.2332), which in some editions has been replaced by a typographical one. Bloom’s “Budget”, set in type, but with a columnar layout (U 17.1451), is a borderline case. Some interpolations are so common or habitual that they are no longer perceived, like the references to the speaker within a speech: “a woful lunatic! Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?” (U 1.9).1 This becomes more noticeable when the inquit formulae become more flagrant, as in the Library episode: “Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought …” (U 9.731). This convention is naturally outside the scope of this probe.

1 For the sake of demonstration, interpolations are marked in bold.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_007

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Obvious Candidates

Points of departure are the familiar and recognizable, though not all that wellresearched, interpolations: the blatant Aeolian Headlines, the tangential insets (other terms have been used) in “Cyclops”, the “Sirens” “Overture” and the dislocations in “Wandering Rocks”. They all need and deserve separate treatment but will be examined in the following only in terms of their visibility. The “Headlines” (or “Captions”, or “Sub-Heads”, etc.) in “Aeolus” are the most striking cases as they are set off in different type, generally in capital letters, and surrounded by empty space. As it happens, they were inserted relatively late in the composition of Ulysses. They are wholly conventional in newspapers and were wholly unconventional in a novel. They vary in kind; the earlier ones are informative but then tend to become more ostentatiously autonomous and at times grotesque, as when they almost take up as much space as the text they anticipate. Occasionally, they can be intriguingly cryptic and are clarified only in retrospect by what follows beneath them. In “Cyclops”, the interpolations are not visibly distinct but they manifestly differ in tone, diction and style. Within the ongoing oral narrative, they interfere as thematic tangents, and, by nature, they imitate written documents. The very first one interrupts a stridently spoken jocular and partly mimetic report: Jesus, I had to laugh at the little jewy getting his shirt out. He eat me my sugars. Because he no pay me my moneys? For nonperishable goods bought of Moses Herzog, of 13 Saint Kevin’s parade in the city of Dublin, Wood quay ward, merchant, hereinafter called the vendor, and sold and delivered to Michael E. Geraghty, esquire, of 29 Arbour hill in the city of Dublin, Arran quay ward, gentleman, hereinafter called the purchaser … (U 12.30) In this prominent first case, the register changes to factual, deadpan, monotonous legalese that emphatically avoids idiomatic or metaphorical embroidery and inherent distraction. Subsequently, each insert moves from the spoken racy report to a tangential imitation of an idiosyncratic style, suited to the occasion. A suburban site can expand into a heroic legendary landscape; a casual almost meaningless blessing may initiate an ecclesiastical and ceremonial Benediction. A claim that the defunct Patrick Dignam has been seen in the street leads to a formal seance in which his ghost is conjured up. As it happens, Cyclopian interpolations are in some respect thematic textual ghosts. The point made here is that these asides are not outwardly distinct. Joyce could have treated them separately, for example by indentation, ital-

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ics or other signals, but on the whole, he is reticent in underlining differences, which shows in his almost consistent disregard of quotation marks to provide guidance. To avoid potential confusion, at least one edition of Ulysses (“remastered” by Robert Gogan) helpfully uses typographical signposts, like quotation marks, for distinction and more clarity; it separates the main narrative from the interpolations by additional space in between a tilde ( ˜ ). The asides are thereby visibly framed.2 In “Wandering Rocks”, the interpolations consist of displaced scenes that indicate which actions are going on elsewhere at the same time. In this instance, there is not even a stylistic change, the dislocations have the same deadpan diction as the rest, and in some cases they use identical wording. When a scene close to the river, “the metal bridge”, is followed by “A card, Unfurnished Apartments reappeared on the windowsash of number 7 Eccles street” (U 10.542), most readers will note the local shift. But some of the less jarring irruptions may easily be missed, as in Father Conmee’s itinerary: Master Brunny Lynam ran across the road and put Father Conmee’s letter to father provincial into the mouth of the bright red letterbox. Father Conmee smiled and nodded and smiled and walked along Mountjoy square east. Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c, in silk hat, slate frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender trousers canary gloves and pointed patent boots, walking with grave deportment most respectfully took the curbstone as he passed lady Maxwell at the corner of Dignam’s court. Was that not Mrs M’Guinness? (U 10.52) Only someone familiar with Dublin, or consulting a street map, would know that Maginni could not possibly be seen by Father Conmee as Dignam’s court is in a different part of the city (even Dublin residents may not know of such an out of the way detail). Again, Robert Gogan comes to our rescue by separating the Denis J Maginni paragraph from its surroundings by space and tilde (186). Readers of Ulysses might legitimately be confused or, to put it in other words, Joyce pays them a dubious compliment by treating them as equals. Distinctions are a matter of discernment or accidental knowledge and so relegated to the eye of the beholder, which shows their chancy nature and the hazards of the approach taken here. 2 James Joyce, Ulysses by James Joyce Remastered, ed. Robert Gogan (Straheens: Musical Ireland Publications, 2012), 254–300.

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Joyce does not highlight early major interpolations that are the first changes of perspective in the realistic manner of the opening chapters. They occur in “Hades”, first at the moment when the funeral party steps off the carriage, when the narrative switches — but without any outward sign — from its so far consistent point of view: “Martin Cunningham whispered: / — I was in mortal agony with you talking of suicide before Bloom” (U 6.527). For a few moments, Bloom becomes the object of observation.3

2

(Parenthetically)4

There is a classical Greek term for “interpolation” (“parenthesis”), which means literally something put (thesis) in (en) sideways (para). A “side input”, it became part of a rhetorical arsenal and is explained by Quintilian, the authority on oratory, in his Ars rhetorica: … it is called interpositio or interclusio by us, and parenthesis or paremptosis by the Greeks, and consists of the interruption of the continuous flow of our languages by the insertion of some remark.5 Another definition is supplied by a book on prosody that is mentioned in A Portrait, “the laws of Latin verse from a ragged book by a Portuguese priest” (P 179): Parenthesis is independent sense Clos’d in a sentence ( ) by this double fence. Here is an example: “I believe indeed (nor is my faith vain) that he is the Offspring of the Gods”.6 The reference is both to the rhetorical device and its typographical mark (“double fences”). In fact, interpolations are enclosed

3 It happens again when Menton comments on Bloom, once again out of his hearing (U 6.690–707). 4 A sketchy discussion can be found in: Fritz Senn, “Errant Commas and Stray Parentheses”, Doubtful Points: Joyce and Punctuation, eds. Elizabeth M. Bonapfel and Tim Conley, European Joyce Studies 23 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 11–32. 5 The Institutio Oratorio of Quintilian, trans. H.E. Butler (London: William Heinemann Ltd. 1977), III: 459. 6 Emanuel Alverez, The Latin Prosody of Emanuel Alvarez, S.T.P., with the Explanation in English by the Rv. E. J. Geoghegan (Dublin: M.H. Gills & Stephen, 1864), 106.

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within an imaginary or graphic fence. Parentheses, like most refined punctuation, entered writing relatively late. By now, typographical parentheses are (often mini-) interpolations, the smallest unit, within a sentence. Joyce’s use of parentheses would be a study in itself (not attempted here). FW is studded with disruptive parentheses as one further obstacle to easy understanding. It appears that in Ulysses Joyce used them sparingly in the early “realistic” passages, and above all rarely in interior monologue. They could have been applied for variations within thought processes as when Bloom thinks about heat in relation to colour: “Black conducts reflects (refracts is it?) the heat” (U 4.80), or in Church: “The priest … stopped at each [communicant], took out a communion, shook a drop or two (are they in water?) off it and put it neatly in her mouth” (U 5.345). But obviously, he did not develop the device. Punctuation is essentially a device of control, suited to writing and editing. So, it occurs in the literary passages, and parodies, or in conscious oratorical performances, appropriate to “Aeolus”: “… he looked (though he was not) a dying man” (U 7.818). Parentheses are wholly suitable for “Ithaca”, which is governed by order and categorisation and so the section foregrounds distinctive labels that signal pedantic structure, as when the past day’s events are supplied with bombastic Biblical tags in a final recapitulation: The preparation of breakfast (burnt offering): intestinal congestion and premeditative defecation (holy of holies): the bath (rite of John): the funeral (rite of Samuel): the advertisement of Alexander Keyes (Urim and Thummim): the unsubstantial lunch (rite of Melchisedek): […] Butt Bridge (atonement). (U 17.2044) The parentheses introduce tangential, entirely new dimensions, whether applicable or not, serious or jocular, interpolation in an obtrusive sense; they suggest different co-ordinations and so supplement the much better known Homeric ones. Supervisory order and categories are seen as a dominantly male concern (as against the fluidity of “Penelope”), and it may or may not be coincidental that the last parenthesis in the book is “the birth on 27 November 1893 of second (and only male) issue, deceased 9 January 1894 …” (U 17.2280); perhaps parentheses are a dominantly male issue. One can hardly imagine parentheses in Molly’s monologue and yet one might discover virtual ones in her silent exclamations (which are interpolations by definition), surrounded by pauses and characterised by a different tone, of course unpunctuated, but implicitly present: “… and Mrs Opisso in Government street O what a name Id go and drown myself in the first river if

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I had a name like her O my” (U 18.1466). The aside is bracketed between “O” and “O my”.7 The most famous meta-exclamation is her internal sigh “O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh” (U 18.1128), which is equally framed between the exclamations “O” and “pooh”. Parentheses are a device in writing and printing, and a particularly intrusive one occurs in an Aeolian headline, consisting of an interpolation within an interpolation: HOUSE OF KEY(E)S (U 7.141) — But wait, Mr Bloom said. He wants it changed. Keyes, you see. He wants two keys at the top. (U 7.126) The spoken voice cannot pronounce the enclosure of a superfluous letter in a phonemic coincidence, the parenthesis serves to fuse a name “Keyes” with the object “keys” at least visibly, and it also illustrates an inherent dichotomy, which is foregrounded in “Aeolus”: that language is either a sequence of vibrating air shaped by vocal organs or an arrangement of historically determined graphic symbols. “Aeolus” deals with the printing press, newspapers and books, yet it also abounds in dialogue and it is devoted to Rhetorics. One headline consists of just three question marks — “? ? ?” (U 7.512) — something to be seen but impossible to hear. Parentheses are not the only device for minor interpolations: dashes, or more commonly commas, are conventional alternatives. Grammatical appositions are not necessarily experienced as interposed. Note how the second sentence in Ulysses — “A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air” (U 1.3) — is different in tone, pause, focus, emphasis, perception from what “A yellow ungirdled dressinggown …” would be. Interpolations tend to fine-tune orchestration. In the same vein, every quotation could be subsumed under the general heading. A quotation consists of foreign matter plugged in. Buck Mulligan’s blasphemous intonation of “Introibo ad altare Dei” (U 1.5) is no interpolation narratively, but part of the action. Textually it is nevertheless an intrusion of Church Latin imported from an imagined external service; it takes us somewhere else and is — secondarily — a tangent or dislocation alongside the main drift of the story, in some cases a gratuitous overtone or a literary ghost. Mulligan’s information about the Martello towers to the Englishman

7 One latent overtone is that the name Opisso frames something between two O’s.

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Haines, that “Billy Pitt had them built … when the French were on the sea” (U 1.544), contains a plug-in from an Irish song, “The Shan Van Vocht” (“Oh the French are on the sea”), which may or may not be noticed or relegated to a note. Such infiltrations are ubiquitous in Joyce, especially in the Stephen Dedalus passages, as in the Library episode. Some of them may deserve extra attention.

3

Infiltrations

Joyce occasionally does mark latent quotations or infiltrations, but more often he does not. One mark of distinction is the use of italics (in Joyce’s practice they are used for foreign expressions and for conscious quotations).8 They are essential in the final and puzzling paragraph of “Eumaeus”: And humanely his driver waited till he (or she) had ended, patient in his scythed car. […] The driver never said a word, good, bad or indifferent, but merely watched the two figures, as he sat on his lowbacked car, both black, one full, one lean, walk towards the railway bridge, to be married by Father Maher. As they walked they at times stopped and walked again continuing their tête a tête (which, of course, he was utterly out of) about sirens enemies of man’s reason, mingled with a number of other topics of the same category, usurpers, historical cases of the kind while the man in the sweeper car or you might as well call it in the sleeper car who in any case couldn’t possibly hear because they were too far simply sat in his seat near the end of lower Gardiner street and looked after their lowbacked car. (U 16.1878) There are strange narrative shifts. For one, the perspective moves away from what it has been all along, mainly, but not exclusively, Bloom’s point of view. Now Bloom and Stephen are observed from the driver’s seat on a “lowbacked car”. It also looks as though a narrator who comments on the obvious fact that the driver cannot hear what is being said were taking over, and the spectral narrator is also engaging in playful associations. So far, so odd, but what about Bloom and Stephen being “married by Father Maher”, a clergyman of unknown derivation? This has opened the door to strange speculations.

8 Gogan obligingly uses them, when recognized, for clarification.

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Once we trust the italicised phrases, they point to a quotation, a song by Samuel Lover, “The Low-backed Car”. It seems the hypothetical narrator notices a car with a low back and is associatively sidetracked into the song of which he remembers snatches and weaves them into the tale: When first I saw sweet Peggy, ‘Twas on a market day; A low-back’d car she drove, and sat … As she sat in the low-back’d car, The man at the turnpike bar Never ask’d for the toll, But just rubb’d his owld poll And looked after the low-backed car. While we drove in the low-back’d car To be married by Father Maher; Oh, my heart would beat high At her glance and her sigh, Though it beat in a low-back’d car.9 Once the song is called up, it explains the otherwise incomprehensible intrusions, underlined in bold: The driver never said a word, good, bad or indifferent, but merely watched the two figures, as he sat on his lowbacked car, both black, one full, one lean, walk towards the railway bridge, to be married by Father Maher. […] while the man in the sweeper […] simply sat in his seat near the end of lower Gardiner street and looked after their lowbacked car.10 With his italics, Joyce at least provides a hint of an external source, though it remains questionable whether readers unequipped with annotations will follow the multiple distortions, let alone whether these could ever be recreated in translation. (See also the genetic aspect on page 104.)

9 10

Samuel Lover, “The Low-Backed Car”, The Lyrics of Ireland (London: Houlston and Wright, 1867), 137–8. Again, Robert Gogan puts the song’s fragments between quotation marks (Ulysses Remastered, 510–1).

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123

No Light from a Lamp

Benevolent guidance of his readers is not a Joycean trademark. In the same “Eumaeus” chapter, readers might be potentially confused. Bloom is thinking about returning husbands who might well not find their wives patiently waiting at home like Penelope: Suppose she was gone when he? I looked for the lamp which she told me came into his mind but merely as a passing fancy of his because he then recollected the morning littered bed etcetera and the book about Ruby with met him pike hoses … (U 16.1470) The crux is “the lamp which she told me”. Why would Bloom have looked for a lamp which presumably Molly told him something about?11 These might be the guesses or questions of an innocent reader. Elucidation depends on the recognition of a memory fragment from a poem — but not italicized this time — by Thomas Moore. “The Song of O’Ruark” deals with another return when the wife has in fact gone: The valley lay smiling before me, Where lately I left her behind; Yet I trembled, and something hung o er me. That saddened the joy of my mind. I looked for the lamp which, she told me, Should shine when her pilgrim returned; But, though darkness began to infold me, No lamp from the battlements burned!12 It now turns out that “the lamp which she told me” is an interpolation within the quotation; so that “she” is not Molly but the faithless wife who deserted O’Ruark, who is not named but has been insinuated. Confusion is augmented by the omission of a comma that in the original clarifies the construction: “I looked for the lamp which, she told me, / Should shine …”.

11 12

Let us not forget that later on, in “Ithaca”, the reflection of Molly’s lamp in a window upstairs commands pointed attention (U 17.1170). Thomas Moore, “The Song of O’Ruark, Prince of Breffni”, Irish Melodies: Poetical Works (London: Routledge. 1885), 150. The fragmentary quotation takes up the theme that Mr Deasy expatiated on in “Nestor”: “A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman, O’Rourke, prince of Breffni” (U 2.392).

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Tooralooming

A salient motif or refrain may indicate the presence of an interpolation as happens towards the end of “Circe” when Corny Kelleher, the funeral undertaker and possible police spy, turns up opportunely and rescues Stephen from being arrested. When he was introduced, Bloom immediately associated a lilt with him: “Corny Kelleher … Police tout. … Singing with his eyes shut. … With my tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom” (U 5.12). That refrain reappears when Kelleher is either mumbling it again, or is just associated with it; it infiltrates a strange stage direction: With thumb and palm Corny Kelleher reassures that the two bobbies will allow the sleep to continue for what else is to be done. With a slow nod Bloom conveys his gratitude as that is exactly what Stephen needs. The car jingles tooraloom round the corner of the tooraloom lane. Corny Kelleher again reassuralooms with his hand. Bloom with his hand assuralooms Corny Kelleher that he is reassuraloomtay. The tinkling hoofs and jingling harness grow fainter with their tooralooloo looloo lay. (U 15.4913) A melody is superimposed or, put differently, the looming echo is woven into the text as though on a (toora)loom, conspicuous enough to be recognized. The technique is similar to the intrusion of the “Low-backed Car” song in “Eumaeus”.

6

Single Word (Not Known to All Men)

The first (unmarked) interpolation occurs on the book’s opening page: He [Buck Mulligan] peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm. (U 1.24) The oddity in a continuous tale is an abrupt departure from the use of sentences. “Chrysostomos” stops the action: a single word, and a foreign one to boot.13 It transforms the visual impression of an open — and for once, 13

Within the interior monologue, a single word is very common and appropriate.

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silent — mouth showing gold teeth and translates this into a Greek compound, “golden” (chrysos) “mouth” (stoma). Such compounds, as it happens, occur in Homer. In antiquity, great orators were metaphorically called Chrysostomos (Mulligan is certainly adept at speaking). The most plausible account of the one word non-sentence is that it suggests Stephen’s associations, in other words, the first instance of an interior monologue technique which will be inserted some pages later and will encroach on the text before long, and even usurp it in several episodes. As such, it is a pristine interpolation, indicating, among other things, that the book is shaped under its own autonomous rules and will contain many strange and unexpected turns. (Odysseus is the man “of many turns”, “polytropos” in the first line of the Odyssey.)

7

Sirens, Enemies of Man’s Reasons (U 16.1890)

The “Sirens” episode, an intricate multi-layered composition, may well contain the greatest variety of interpolations. First of all, there is the initial separate unit, from “Bronze …” (already a varied echo of U 10.962, 1197) to “Begin” (U 11.1–63), before yet another variant “Bronze by gold”. This turns out to be an arrangement of text fragments which has been termed, musically, “Overture”, and which anticipates motifs that will be developed in the chapter. It is a unique and autonomous interpolation, preceding and therefore outside the continuous tale; it could be skipped with little loss, or treated as a separate unit, as musicians do. In some ways, “Sirens” continues the technique of translocation that was introduced in “Wandering Rocks”. The scene within the Ormond Hotel bar can move to Bloom (walking on the other side of the river) in abrupt short paragraphs: “A man. / Bloowho went by Moulang’s pipes”, “Bloom”, “But Bloom”, etc. (U 11.85, 102, 133); these are spatial interpolations continued from the previous episode. Then “Sirens” is the first episode that is patently self-reflective, pointing to its nature as an artificial composition, aware of itself. This probably becomes manifest for most readers with even a minimum of attention: Pat served, uncovered dishes. Leopold cut liverslices. As said before he ate with relish the inner organs, nutty gizzards, fried cod’s roes while Richie Goulding, Collis, Ward, ate steaks and kidney … (U 11.519) We are within a verbal artefact in which we were told earlier on that “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked

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thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes” (U 4.1). The scope has widened to a selfconscious meta-level. “As said before” is a major interpolation, to be followed by analogous instances. From now on, the book will flaunt memories of itself. It continues the transversal links in “Wandering Rocks” to indicate simultaneous events, but goes beyond them, irrespective of time. In the previous chapter, the blind stripling tapping his way along is buffeted by an errant pedestrian, and he vents his anger: — God’s curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You’re blinder nor I am, you bitch’s bastard! (U 10.1115) When a barmaid sympathetically comments on the same blind man, a piano tuner: “— So sad to look at his face, Miss Douce condoled”, an echo is activated: “God’s curse on bitch’s bastard” (U 11.284). This is not attributed to anyone in the novel itself, but is a purely textual memory. First, it is linked to the blind tuner, but later on, the word “curse” serves as a trigger, as when it is linked to a verse from the song of the “Croppy Boy”: “Since Easter time he had cursed three times. You bitch’s bastard” (U 11.1040). The various verbal items occur rearranged in another internal reminiscence: “With hoarse rude fury the yeoman cursed, swelling in apoplectic bitch’s bastard” (U 11.1098). A minor free-wheeling motif has been created. Above the mental range of its characters, textual transfers take place. They can intrude into Bloom’s thoughts: Instruments. A blade of grass, shell of her hands, then blow. Even comb and tissuepaper you can knock a tune out of. Molly in her shift in Lombard street west, hair down. I suppose each kind of trade made its own, don’t you see? Hunter with a horn. Haw. Have you the? Cloche. Sonnez la. Shepherd his pipe. Pwee little wee. Policeman a whistle … (U 11.12370) Bloom cannot possibly remember “Haw. Have you the? Cloche. Sonnez la”, for he was not present when Lenehan asked the precipitately leaving Boylan: “— Got the horn or what?” (U 11.432), which is embroidered later on: “Horn. Have you the? Horn. Have you the? Haw haw horn” (U 11.526). Nor did he witness the erotic performance done for the benefit of Boylan that Lenehan asked for: “— Now, now, urged Lenehan Sonnez la cloche! O do! There’s no-one” (U 11.404). It was Bloom’s thought “Horn” that called up the textual associations.

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Foreign matter also intrudes into Bloom’s ruminations about someone exposed to the noise of an organ: Organ in Gardiner street. Old Glynn fifty quid a year. Queer up there in the cockloft, alone, with stops and locks and keys. Seated all day at the organ. Maunder on for hours, talking to himself or the other fellow blowing the bellows. Growl angry, then shriek cursing (want to have wadding or something in his no don’t she cried), then all of a soft sudden wee little wee little pipy wind. (U 11.1196) The oddity occurs in the parenthesis, a rare occurrence within interior monologue: “(want to have wadding or something in his …)”. Where a noun is expected, an abrupt syntactical change occurs: “… no don’t she cried”. It turns out to be the echo of an earlier passage when the barmaids seem to touch on a delicate subject: — But wait till I tell you, miss Douce entreated. Sweet tea miss Kennedy having poured with milk plugged both two ears with little fingers. — No don’t, she cried. — I won’t listen, she cried. (U 11.128) Through refracted bypaths, the object “ears” is enlisted to complete, not surprisingly, Bloom’s “want to have wadding or something in his …”. Stopping one’s ears, of course, recalls the Homeric motif of the Sirens as well as the overall theme of hearing. (See also page 175.) The most prominent meta-transfer is a paragraph that interrupts Bloom’s comments on the letter to Martha Clifford which he has just written, a paragraph that has no anchorage within the “Sirens” episode itself: Quotations every time in the year. To be or not to be. Wisdom while you wait. In Gerard’s rosery of Fetter lane he walks, greyedauburn. One life is all. One body. Do. But do. Done anyhow. (U 11.905) Extraneous motifs are introduced, and the identity of “he” is uncertain. Again a textual echo provides a link to Stephen’s musings in the Library:

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Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist, he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of Juno’s eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do. (U 9.651) The Shakespeare trigger is probably “To be or not to be” in Bloom’s mind, but he could not possibly be aware of what Stephen thought in the Library. It is again a remote textual memory (that readers would be unlikely to share), or a thematic one which may reinforce similarities between Stephen’s view on Shakespeare and the “French triangle” (U 9.1065) of Bloom’s situation. At any rate, the Fetter lane insertion is the most blatant instance of authorial interference, as is the transition from “Do. But do” to Bloom’s “Done anyhow” and the return to the “Sirens” setting. Some of the meta-interpolations in the episode occur with parentheses. In some instances, they amount to authorial comments or nudges. Upholding the lid he (who?) gazed in the coffin (coffin?) at the oblique triple (piano!) wires. He pressed (the same who pressed indulgently her hand), soft pedalling, a triple of keys to see the thicknesses of felt advancing, to hear the muffled hammerfall in action. (U 11.291) Since the action moves from place to place within and outside the Ormond Hotel, it is not clear who “he” is in a new paragraph. The question is asked in a parenthesis “(who?)” and the odd out-of-place word is also noted: “(coffin?)” but immediately explained in the next comment “(piano!)” — a lexical note that “coffin” also means the bulk of a piano. In the sequence, it becomes obvious that Simon Dedalus is exploring the inside of the instrument. A lexical note — with perhaps a self-reflexive glance at the homophonous nature of the episode — clarifies a potential misunderstanding: Scaring eavesdropping boots croppy bootsboy Bloom in the Ormond hallway heard growls and roars of bravo, fat backslapping, their boots all treading, boots not the boots the boy. (U 11.1142) The internal comment clarifies that the first mention of “boots” refers to the bootsboy, the second to the footwear; one could imagine the insertion being put between square brackets for editorial interference. It simply (simply?) indicates that the English word “boots” also serves for the “bootsboy” who cleans the boots in a hotel, the lowest in rank, as the one who turns up prominently in the earlier part of the episode. One irony is that the note only makes sense in English and would be unnecessary in any other language.

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129

Incantation

The 14th episode, “Oxen of the Sun”, begins with a heterogeneous threefold “Deshil Holles Eamus”, consisting of three times three odd words, followed by two more triadic paragraphs (U 14.1–6). “Deshil Holles Eamus” is cryptic at first blush and would probably remain so at further blushes without annotation: A Gaelic word “deshil” for sunward or south, an Anglo-Saxon name indicating Holles Street, and a Latin imperative, Eamus = “let us go”, combine to a formula that we are now proceeding to the Holles Street Maternity Hospital. The emerging accumulated threes, suggesting the nine months of pregnancy, the invocation of a Latin fertility poem (Carmen arvale),14 anticipate the theme of the chapter; furthermore, a link is provided with the ninefold “Cuckoo” at the end of the previous episode (U 13.1289–1306). An erratic block, all in all, something wholly unexpected though not visibly prominent, can be subsumed under the heading interpolation, and it is in fact treated as such where editorial orientation is provided, in Danis Rose’s Reader’s Edition15 and Gogan’s Remastered Ulysses (332), where the opening is surrounded by empty space and thereby separated from the main text. Indeed, it is simply wedged, arbitrarily, into the narrative; it is not in anyone’s thoughts and it amounts to a separate unit, remotely analogous perhaps to the “Overture” of “Sirens”. It could also be likened to epigraphs or mottos as found in traditional novels.

… Whether or not such features should be subsumed under the term Interpolation was certainly no concern of the author. But it becomes a concern as soon as one undertakes the task of distinguishing types of inserts from the main narrative drift. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that no clear line can be drawn. As far as we can tell, consistency or compliance, or even self-imposed rules, were hardly ever Joyce’s intention, especially in his increasingly impulsive procedure. 14 15

Carmen arvale, a fertility rite based on triadic words and phrases, is one of the oldest extant texts of Latin literature. See Wikipedia. Reader’s Edition of Ulysses, ed. Danis Rose (London: Picador, Macmillan, 1997), 365.

Chapter 7

Coincidental Joyce Though they never are, things can be imagined to have been different. We do it all the time by engaging in all kinds of fictions, daydreams, or at least we regret decisions taken or not taken. Could things have been otherwise? Stephen meditates on events in history: They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind. (U 2.49) Joyce’s own life, like ours, is open to the same questions. To judge from a letter at Cornell University, Joyce may have toyed with an idea of finding a position in South Africa.1 Suppose for a moment he had tried his luck there: would we still have Portrait, Exiles, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as we have them now? Most likely not, or not identical with the shapes they took. With his ambitions and perseverance Joyce would probably have achieved something momentous (unless he had opted for a career like singing). Weaving the wind! Under other circumstances Joyce might well not have been what he became on the literary landscape. Imagine that what is now Ulysses had not gone further than a bundle of manuscripts or typescripts to be discovered somewhere in an attic, perhaps to be edited with footnotes and an academic introduction. Was there some governing ineluctability about what in fact did take place? In an obituary address to James Joyce by his Zurich friend Carola Giedion Welcker, we find a casual aside that “for him there was no such thing as chance” (“Zufall”).2 Whether this was his consistent world view or a passing remark, his life, like everybody else’s, may have been determined more by chance than by planning — unless we believe in predestination or in some omnipotent Zeitgeist that decreed Joyce permanently into the culture of the 20th century — which now, in retrospect, is hard to visualize without his impact (nor would Irish tourism be what it is).

1 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 262. 2 Carola Giedion-Welcker, ed., In Memoriam James Joyce (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1941), 19.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_008

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What might have happened if a young man had not approached a girl from Galway in Nassau Street (as the biography has it), no doubt by chance, and had not linked the rest of his life with Nora Barnacle? If, furthermore, a young Joyce, intent on leaving Ireland, had not enlisted an English agency which then in a telegramme directed him to Zurich where a post at the Berlitz Schools was promised, things would have taken a different turn somewhere else. Without a decade of his life spent in Trieste, Pula, and Rome, his writing, based on different experiences, would have developed in ways we can only guess at. It is also idle to speculate what would have become of him without the fortuitous support of Stanislaus Joyce, Ezra Pound, Harriet Weaver, Sylvia Beach, or Paul Léon and many others who came generously to his aid. Once these had come forward, however, Joyce ingeniously helped Fate along and tended to manipulate his fortunes with abandon and was not above resorting to downright exploitation.

1

Just a Chance (U 6.77)

Chance, or that things do not proceed according to plans, is reflected in fiction. Plots depend on chance. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus’ and Leopold Bloom’s days do not evolve as they were planned at the outset. It is Mr Deasy’s letter that brings Stephen to the newspaper office and then to the National Library; we do not know, however, what brings him to the Maternity Hospital. Almost as an exception, Molly Bloom’s and Hugh Boylan’s plans do come off, but Boylan is less lucky in his bet on Sceptre for the Gold Cup, a “dead cert”. In life and fiction, many certs are dead. Gambling as a thematic thread makes sense in the present context: it is a matter of chance with an uncertain outcome. The race of the day seems to make everybody a loser, and that Bloom is assumed to be the only one to have cashed in will actually count against him. Bloom had clearly planned to pick up a letter in the post office, then to attend Dignam’s funeral and to pursue some professional business in the newspaper office. It appears that he also thought of a dinner away from home and possibly a visit to the theatre. But he is soon deflected from his intended course. The Keyes advertisement necessitates a trip to the Library, where the sudden sight of Boylan diverts him into the Museum (where a minor incidental nascent plan, to verify anatomical accuracies of naked statues, will be foiled). A later sighting of Blazes Boylan sidetracks Bloom into the Ormond Hotel and enables the “Sirens” episode. One unforeseen result of the funeral is the errand of mercy to the Dignam family, into which Bloom is enlisted. It leads him first to Kiernan’s pub for one extended episode. It then takes him

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to Sandymount, at the greatest distance from his home, and determines the rest of his day and in fact the second half of Ulysses far into the small hours of the next day. The conversation with Mrs Breen around noon furthermore gives Bloom the idea of looking in at the Maternity Hospital. “If I hadn’t heard about Mrs Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn’t have gone and wouldn’t have met. Kismet” (U 15.640). Kismet is an Islamic form of Fate or Chance. (It sounds as though “Kismet” had something to do with whom you “met”.) In the Hospital episode, Bloom comes into contact with Stephen and his parental protective instincts are raised. If they had not been thrown together, Bloom would never have ventured into Nighttown nor stopped at the Cabman’s shelter or have been able to engage in conversation with an author and professor. Bloom’s plans of further meetings with Stephen Dedalus are not likely to come off. In short, all episodes after “Wandering Rocks” are the result of chance encounters and unplanned developments. The paths of Bloom and Stephen cross four times, those of Bloom and Boylan three. Bloom recurrently wonders about such instances: “Third time. Coincidence” (U 11.303). It is one of his concerns throughout the day, so when, soon after a thought of Parnell, he sees the great dead man’s brother: “Now that’s a coincidence. Course hundreds of times you think of a person and don’t meet him” (U 8.502). Shortly after he overhears the poet AE, George Russell, who was named in Martha Clifford’s letter, Bloom is struck by the chance occurrence: “And there he is too. Now that’s really a coincidence: second time” (U 8.525). Some puzzling coincidences stand out. That a not excessively trustworthy sailor should have seen a circus artist in Stockholm by the name of Simon Dedalus does not chime in with what we know of Stephen’s father; someone with the unique name of Simon Dedalus, with mythological overtones, is unlikely to have namesakes. “Curious coincidence, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen unobtrusively” (U 16.414). He is also astonished, along probably with the book’s readers, that Stephen in his sketch of a hotel scene should call it “Queen’s Hotel, Queen’s Hotel, Queen’s Hotel, Queen’s Ho …” (U 17.619), the very place in Ennis where Bloom’s father committed suicide. Again Bloom attributes it to “Coincidence”, not “information” (U 17.633). In “Sirens”, just as Bloom is writing a letter to Martha Clifford, he overhears Simon Dedalus singing an aria from Martha, the opera. “Martha it is. Coincidence. Just going to write. Lionel’s song. Lovely name you have” (U 11.713). The opera features disguises and assumed names, similar to Henry Flower, the lovely name that Bloom does not have. By some chance, a few cronies remember an occasion when the Blooms supplied tight fitting trousers for opulent Ben Dollard, and in an instance of

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parallax a few minutes later Bloom, sitting (unnoticed by them) in the adjacent dining room, hearing their music, though not the conversation, recalls the same episode. The correspondences are underlined by similar wording. The conversation around “tight trousers … — Is she alive? / — And kicking …the old drummajor” (U 11.481–508) is echoed by Bloom’s version: “Trousers tight as a drum on him … Molly screaming, kicking” (U 11.555–7). In contrast, some coincidences are not signalled. Two of them occur in the context of the Throwaway scenario, which in itself is a chain of chancy misunderstandings. Bantam Lyons misconstrues Bloom’s offhand remark, that he is going to throw away the newspaper, misled by the verbal proximity of such an act with the name of a horse named Throwaway in the Gold Cup race. It will have reverberations, all the more so when a handbill, referred to as a “throwaway”, is also drawn into the thematic network. Bloom’s supposed tip caused comment, once in Davy Byrnes, when Bloom was off stage, and then again by Lenehan. In each instance, Bloom turns on to the scene just when the topic surfaces in conversation. In Davy Byrne’s pub at the moment when Lyons evasively talks about his bet, Bloom happens to pass on the way out: “— That’s the man now who gave it to me” (U 8.1023). A second time, in “Wandering Rocks”, Lenehan, enquiring about “Sceptre’s starting price”, has had news of Lyons’ hazardous bet (and dissuades him from acting on it), and when he confers this to his companion at this very moment Bloom is seen looking at a bookstall. Lenehan’s “— There he is” (U 10.522) does not seem to mark any surprise and will hardly be noticed by readers as a coincidence. That the originator of the unconscious hint, whose name is not even uttered, should propitiously burst on the scene on two separate occasions, as on cue, is carrying the Speak-of-the-Devil Principle to extremes. What is the probability of people meeting each other in a bustling city of some 300,000 inhabitants within one single given day? Lenehan is a case in point: his reoccurrence may well strain probability. He turns up professionally in the newspaper office and then is featured with so many others in “Wandering Rocks”, where his appointment with Boylan in the Ormond hotel accounts for his presence there later on. But it is not manifest within the plot of Ulysses what causes him to join the relatively small group assembled in Barney Kiernan’s where his reappearance seems uncalled for. The story of course needs him there to report on the result of the Gold Cup race and to perpetuate the rumour that Bloom was drawing money from it. It is even less easy to speculate why in addition he should be part of the company of students in the Holles Street Hospital. Physically present in five episodes, he looks intrusively ubiquitous. Of course, he makes a living out of turning up in propitious places with the prospect of free drinks.

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The Bannon Syndrome

An instance of strained coincidence turns around Milly Bloom’s relationship. In her letter, she mentions a young student in Mullingar: I am getting on swimming in the photo business now. Mr Coghlan took one of me and Mrs. Will send when developed. We did great biz yesterday. Fair day and all the beef to the heels were in. … There is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his cousins or something are big swells and he sings Boylan’s (I was on the pop of writing Blazes Boylan’s) song about those seaside girls. Tell him silly Milly sends my best respects. (U 4.405) First time readers will hardly be aware of a low-key cross-reference. Buck Mulligan before his swim in the men’s bathing place engaged in some gossip with an acquaintance: — Is the brother with you, Malachi? — Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons. — Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her. — Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure. (U 1.682) So Milly Bloom, as yet unidentified, has already made an unmarked entrance into the novel. The two scenes are also tied together by the grace note that Milly is getting on “swimming in the photo business now” (U 4.400). Such re-occurrences are commonplace enough. But that the self-same Bannon (in the letter a “young student” with apparently no plans of moving away) on the same day will arrive in Dublin and bump into Mulligan, on his way to the Maternity hospital, is probably not expected: “Mal. Mulligan … chanced against Alec Bannon in a cut bob … that was new got to town from Mullingar with the stage where his coz and Mal M’s brother will stay a month … but would tell him of a skittish heifer, big of her age and beef to the heel…” (U 14.495). More ties have been knit — “chanced against” is correct. Milly, who is proud of her shapely legs, as is her father, probably picked up the proverbial and locally appropriate saying, “She’s all beef to the heels like a Mullingar heifer” (a dismissive description of unsightly country girls) from the natives and possibly even from Bannon himself. Bannon is boasting of his new conquest, if that’s what it is; as proof he displays a locket with her picture and is looking out for contraceptive devices (U 14.747–78). At the same time, and with some

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inconsistency, he seems bound to join the army: “it being his intention to buy a colour or a cornetcy in the fencibles and list for the wars” (U 14.654). Bannon’s appearance is patently contrived. The point is merely the statistical unlikelihood that a character living in Mullingar turns up in Dublin, “chances” into Buck Mulligan, and finally even spots the girl’s father, who only earlier that day first learned of his existence. Any plot of a story demands that the same characters regroup themselves beyond mere realistic plausibility. Fiction, even in so dispersive a tale as Ulysses, needs a relatively compact containable cast that can be kept track of and does not overtax its readers’ attention and memories. Some species, light comedies in particular, hinge on contrived coincidences. Ulysses is such a small world on a grand and highly complex scale, and yet narrative economy keeps it paradoxically contained and still seduces its readers to a suspension of a disbelief they may not even be aware of. It is just conceivable that Joyce also parodies this particular convention, plot in cheek, so that not only styles but also plot structures can be caricatured.

3

Omnium Gatherum: Falling Together

The issue is inscribed into the works where alternatives not taken, whether they were ever possible or not, are continually sketched. Stephen Dedalus imagines commonplace but decisive occurrences in a passage that looks like a parody of how a novel or autobiography might treat them: “I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives” (U 7.763). “Trivial” is apt, in its original sense of the meeting of three roads. The thought occurs in a lull before Moses moves into focus. If Moses, so the gist of Taylor’s speech (U 7.838–69), had given in to the blandishments of an Egyptian high priest, History and Religion would have been substantially altered. There is great imaginative power in “if”, both in Ulysses and in Life. What might have happened, but did not, is sometimes “a big if” (U 16.955). So far “coincidence” has been treated as a more abstract term for events without apparent causal connection that seem to be invested with significance, possible parts of perhaps some hidden grand design. Fate or Destiny may play some mysterious games. But originally the term, along with its cognate “chance”, merely meant an accidental (another relative) coming together.

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The notion is of falling, Latin “cadere”, the noun cadentia became “chance”; “co-in-cidence” is a “falling together”. Germanic equivalents like “Zufall” are loan translations from the Latin. Coincidence means being in the same place at the same time. Assemblies, interviews, conferences, and lectures are devised coincidences, or chance encounters. People or events have to “fall together” for some common purpose, or they just happen to be close. Collisions are a subspecies. Bloom’s temple at one painful moment coincides with a piece of furniture: “The right temporal lobe of the hollow sphere of his cranium came into contact with a solid time angle …” (U 17.1275). By “knocking [one’s] sconce against” objects one can reasonably, though not logically, infer their material existence, by the coincidence of impact, as Stephen reflected at the beginning of “Proteus” (U 3.5). “Wandering Rocks” consists of people bumping into each other or, conversely, missing each other. It is a chapter of crossings, most of them without inherent or immediate significance: “I knocked against Bantam Lyons in there …”; “Outside la maison Claire Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney’s brotherin-law” (U 10.517, 984). In one incidence, the sway of Cashel Boyle’s “dustcoat brushed rudely from its angle a slender tapping cane and swept onwards, having buffeted a thewless body” (U 10.1115). In a physical coincidence, dustcoat and cane happen to collide — if the blind strippling, so bumped into, had turned out to be the other’s long lost son it would have been a coincidence in the figurative, prevalent sense and would have been worth registering. An instance of failed coincidences is the City Hall: “Where was the marshal … to keep order in the council chamber. And old Barlow the mace bearer laid up with asthma, no mace on the table, nothing in order, no quorum even, and Hutchinson, lord mayor, in Llandludno, and little Lorcan Sherlock doing locum tenens for him” (U 10.1007). Denis Breen is singularly unlucky in finding a lawyer for his libel action, and Milly Dedalus has to wait an inordinately long time to meet her father, as must have been arranged (U 10.657). Such are the hit-or-miss mechanics of “Wandering Rocks”. The interpolations or dislocations that characterize the episode and give it coherence look like ordinary nearby events, but are patently not. Within the talk in the Dedalus kitchen the “lacquey [ringing] his bell. / — Barang!” (U 10.281) is not physically present but somewhere else; the coincidence is merely temporal and depends on a narrative spatial transfer. Fiction, imitating life, is a series of such banal or exciting coincidences. “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” (U 9.1045). Fiction tends to accumulate more such encounters that are worth telling about than everyday life.

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137

Thematic and Lexical Cohabitation

Literature makes everything happen in language (literae, letters) and in Joyce the platitude is hard to overlook. Many of his conspicuous techniques could be subsumed under the heading of Narrative and Lexical Coincidence. At its lowest, mechanical, level coincidence simply means that [A] connects with [B]. In such a more technical, descriptive but comprehensive sense it is so ubiquitous and varied that it escapes attention. Illustrations as they now follow could almost be picked at random. If a chronicle about Dublin is named “Ulysses”, it allows mythological shadows to fall on everyday events. Singing in a hotel coincides with, or contains echoes or analogies of, Homeric Sirens. Everything, so at least an impression, is also something else. Literary ghosts haunt the prose; there are allusions, echoes, resonances. Joyce hardly ever wastes a stone on simply one bird. We talk of multiple layers or overtones or submerged patterns. For a time, symbol hunting was all the rage in criticism; symbols are of course two or more items “thrown together”. Gallaher’s exploit in “Aeolus”, for example, as related by the editor Myles Crawford, from what can be deduced, consists of the superimposition of an advertisement on a map of Dublin, so that the letters in the ad (“B”, “T”, “C”, etc.) spatially coincide with locations on the map (U 7.630–73). It is another matter that the event is doubtful. At the time of the murder, 6 May 1882, and the days following no one had a clue as to what had happened; months after, when the facts came out in court, there was no longer any need for instant information about a wholly peripheral feature. In other words, the dates do not coincide. The principle is reduced to a small scale. That the first sentence in Ulysses begins with “Stately” and ends on “crossed” need not call for a comment. And yet it so happens that two of Stephen’s masters, the “imperial British state … and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church” (U 1.643) have already been conjoined; later on “Wandering Rocks” is sandwiched between Father Conmee and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Authorial intention apart, State and Cross have descended into the opening sentence. The Keyes-keys syndrome can illustrate this concisely. It depends on the name of a publican (a real one, as it happens) which is phonetically identical with the object “key”, but not literally so that an unpronounceable form “HOUSE OF KEY(E)S” has to be resorted to (U 7.141). The coincidence that the House of Keys is also the name of the Manx Parliament adds political vibrations to those of crossed keys as insignia of the Vatican — somehow Homerule and Rome Rule are combined. The “Aeolus” episode is one of multiple cross-

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ings, as of Bloom and Stephen — both without their keys. The design of the advertisement seems to be prefigured in the opening sentence of the book, a mirror and a razor crossed on a round shaving bowl. All in all, a chapter of accidents. Sound and sense are often in collusion, as particularly in the thickly layered prose of “Scylla and Charybdis”. Joyce makes adverbs chime in a heated dialogue: “— Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes”, he is countered and echoed: “A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of discovery” (U 9.228). The assembled words “rudely”, a Shakespearean “shrew” and “shrewdly” have been huddled together for effect that also brings out the tension between two speakers. The fatuous solution of a riddle, “What opera resembles a railway line?” splits into two component parts: “The Rose of Castile” and a trite “rows of cast steel” (U 7.591), in phonetic proximity. On something ordinary, a piece of modern civilization, the dignity of a work of art is conferred (in facetious analogy to the book at hand). Lexically, the chance of the English vocabulary allows the intertwining. In the same vein, the fact that “goal” can be a general aim but also the score in a game like hockey allows God, in Stephen’s ad hoc definition, to become “[a] shout in the street” or “a noise in the street” (U 2.386, 14.408). Because of the confluence of two different words into the same shape Bloom can be said to be “bearing in his arms the outcome of the race” (U 17.340), so that Mosaic echoes chime with an unintended tip, Mount Sinai and Ascot are rolled into one. It is an opportunistic, Odyssean verbal, serendipity made universal.

5

All in One

Items can be run together: “Davy Byrne smiledyawnednodded all in one” (U 8.970). The near-simultaneity has to be serially blended, one after the other, but can be fused more intimately in a single unit, “Siopold” in “Sirens” (where “voices blend”). It telescopes the names of Lionel (in the opera), Simon the singer and Leopold the listener, in the tightest possible space. “All in One” cannot easily be achieved, except with homophones, but “Sirens” resorts to a device of intertwining or intercalation: the words of the song “All is Lost Now” are woven into other elements, “All most too new call is lost in all” (U 11.634). It does not take two or more words of different provenance to achieve a double impact. In “The Boarding House”, Mrs Mooney is introduced as “a determined woman” (D 60). She is indeed resolute and takes full control over the affairs in her domain. At the end, however, Mr Doran may turn out to

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become like her former husband, and Polly might share her mother’s fate with an inefficient drunken husband. In retrospect, “determined” acquires a subsidiary and ambiguous meaning: she too is the victim of circumstances that seem to be perpetuated. Nothing new is being said in all these examples; the exhibits are merely characterized in terms of compositions, meeting points — very old wine in newly labelled bottles. Many items do additional duty as typical thematic overlays, secondary coincidental meanings that lend topical colour; in “Lestrygonians”, as above, food overtones are dominant, in “Hades” death (“I was in mortal agony”, etc.), in “Sirens” music (“descanted on”, etc). Joyce gets a lot of mileage out of the homophones “eye”, “I” and “aye” in “Cyclops”. Since such effects are dependent on the particular conditions of one language, they automatically present problems that cannot be recreated in translation, where it is often not possible to bring together similar disparate items. “Life with hard labour” (U 8.378) encapsulates the fate of mothers, Irish ones in particular, a life full of birth pangs, which may well amount to a prison sentence of being condemned for life with hard labour. In other languages, the equivalent for “labour” just does not combine the same semantic reach. Mistakes are often accidents. Molly Bloom’s “when the priest was going by with his bell bringing the vatican” offers the wrong word (U 18.761), the appropriate vaguely resembling term “viaticum” is supplied by an erudite reader, and one less informed would at least feel that Molly is not on target. Any such mistake conjures up its correction. The same effect is achieved by word play, whether it is poignantly witty or pathetically inept. In “I beg your nasturtiums” (U 12.1040), the misplaced term jostles “aspersions”. Molly, not of a philological bent, asks herself why a poison is called “Arsenic” (U 18.240). The word is based on the Greek “arsenikos” meaning male, virile, potent, but it captures Molly’s attention because its initial four letters coincide with something in plain and direct English.

6

One Word Borrowing Another

The interior monologue proceeds by chance connections such as, when Bloom is choosing his lunch in a pub: Sandwich? Ham and his descendants musterred and bred there. Potted 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.

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Dignam’s potted meat. Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too salty. Like pickled pork. (U 8.741) Ham sandwiches bring to mind a (presumably) current joke based on the verbal identity of “ham” and Ham, the son of Noah. The sight of potted meat calls up the advertisement Bloom has seen in his newspaper. Its location under the obituary notices leads almost mechanically to the deceased Dignam and then on to cannibalism (already foreshadowed in the “ham/Ham” connection), which was often associated with missionaries. Plumtree’s name fuses with the expression “all up a tree”, and so on, step by coincidental step. In “Circe”, such associations take on an autonomous life on a supposed stage. One way of seeing the episode is as a volatile rearrangement of the book’s themes and events. It even appears as though the text itself had its own internal memory or subconscious. A subsection in all of Joyce is where a form on the page coincides with a cognitive blank. The twisted Gaelic phrase that Eveline remembers her mother uttering, “Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!” (“Eveline”, D 40) induces curiosity since the phrase must have a meaningful derivation which so far has escaped compelling solutions and so makes the phrase all the more haunting. Similarly, a lot of guesswork has been devoted to what exactly the wording “U.p: up” in a postcard makes it libelous and what its valid implications might be (8.258, et passim).

7

Must Be Some

The issue of rhymes in poetry occupies Stephen in relation to his own effort, the vampire poem conceived in the morning and then surfacing in “Aeolus”: RHYMES AND REASONS Mouth, south. Is the mouth south someway? Or the south a mouth?” Must be some. South, pout, out, shout, drouth. (U 7. 713) Similar sounds must be paired; rhymes are analogous to “two men dressed the same, looking the same, two by two”. Italian poetry, like Dante’s, favours “female” rhymes like “pace … piace … tace …”, visualized as “three by three, approaching girls, in rose, in green, in russet, entwining …” Stephen’s aborted speculation, “Must be some” (7.715), probably asks whether there is a meaningful connection between identical sounds brought together. If there is nothing

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but rhyme, just an audible similarity, chance is at work, if there is a reason, fortuitous significance would come into play. Bloom in turn has produced rhymes in a juvenile acrostic, a form of verse in which the first letters of the lines produce a word, in this case “POLDY”. The verse form has to be carefully constructed, even more so when it is rhymed: Poets oft have sung in rhyme Of music sweet their praise divine. Let them hymn it nine times nine. Dearer far than song or wine. You are mine. The world is mine. (U 17.413) In the present context it is intriguing to note that the one word that does not rhyme neatly is the word “rhyme” itself. When senses coincide, as they usually do, synesthetically, it may suffice to mention only the dominant one and let it take care of the others by empirical implication. Joyce uses the device and the result may on occasion look like faulty or sloppy writing. When Bloom “… heard then a warm heavy sigh” (U 4.58) “warm” is adducing contextual memories. Similarly Stephen could hear “warm running sunlight” (U 1.282) or even “hear … all kinds of words changing colour like those crabs about Ringsend”(U 16.1142). Voices can be perceived as “moneyed” or “wellfed” by association (U 1.107, 165), elsewhere they combine with smells: “full voice of perfume” (U 11.730). In the darkness of a vaulted council chamber, a voice can reply, “groping for foothold” (U 10.400), an instance of perceptional shorthand. In “Lestrygonians”, taste mingles with other sensations: “Touched his sense moistened remembered” (U 8.898). In “With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore” (8.638), sensation and imagination can hardly be disentangled.

8

Coincidancing

There would be no Finnegans Wake without verbal coincidences. The missing apostrophe in its title alone constitutes one as it pits an imagined genitive against a noun-verb phrase, a semantic doubling. Reading Wake passages consists very much in dissecting the conflated elements and the glued approximations: “mourning” is both itself and “morning” (FW 6.14). Languages multiply possibilities: “hell” is a fictional region in English but a light colour in German; the Wake is constructed out of such semantic toys.

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A sequence like “only abfalltree in auld the land” (FW 88.2) aims at “apple tree”, but substitutes a distorted but audible German “Apfel”. Bilingually original sin (apple for fruit) combines with the law of gravity attributed to Newton who, tradition has it, was inspired from an apple falling from a tree. But German “Abfall” turns the fruit into a falling off, or falling away, from the true faith, an apostasy or a secession. The first apostasy from divine commands was the forbidden fruit. But then “Abfall” also means waste, garbage or rubbish, what is thrown away. Joyce’s works are based on recycling. Ecologically, out of rubbish trees can grow. All of Finnegans Wake is civilisatory garbage, Abfall. The emerging intricate cluster hinges on words like “apple”, “Apfel”, “Abfall” (in several meanings), all coming, or falling, together cohabiting in one single word. Spelling out meanings is a process of taking asunder what the author hath joined. It is not that we always, or often enough, manage to recognize the component parts, and finding them is often not to be disentangled from inventing them, in other words the coincidences may be innate or imposed. Impositions are coincidences. Within the overall context of a geometry lesson, a not quite syntactical structure contains a few salient features that can serve as starting points in a process of unravelling. Such decoding is of necessity subjective, and any item can become a point of departure. One of the most murmurable loose carollaries ever Ellis threw his cookingclass … (FW 294.7) The non-word “murmurable” clearly aims at memorable, what we remember is often due to murmurs and is perhaps indistinct, “mur-mur” is a reduplication. Instead of “carollaries” an inverted “corollaries” would make more immediate sense, logical consequences, however, should not be loose. Most readers will discern, perhaps before anything else, a core of references to Lewis Caroll and his Alice (in Wonderland) and even more to Alice Through the Looking-Glass. That Lewis Caroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson fits the multiple personalities of the Wake: he was a professor of mathematics (and probably dealing with corollaries). As Lewis Caroll he played word games, and made Humpty Dumpty the originator of Jabberwocky, a language that by definition consists of coincidence: “slithy”, he explains to Alice, conflates “slimy” and “lithe”. These are “portmanteau” words, stuffed with at least two familiar ones. No new insights are paraded here about one of the best known passages of Finnegans Wake, other than subsuming the items separated under the heading

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of falling or putting together. Ellis has been identified as the author of a book on geometry. Another association would be to the controversial sexologist Havelock Ellis (who might have had some inklings of Lewis Caroll’s predilection for young girls). There is, or can be, a vague suspicion that some loose or lewd talk is being murmured secretly. As usual there remain unanchored leftovers, like “carol”, and it is not self-evident how a cooking class fits into the intricate tangle, loose threads that may trigger further departures. A well-analysed sentence in Finnegans Wake that looks like a summary of Life, a sententious one, suitably combines the idea of chance with its verbal implementation: We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we’re presurely destined to be odd’s without ends. (455.16) It fuses uncertainties with certainties (as indicated in “presurely”, which hints at a pre-ordained certainty). Human affairs are chancy: we live, meet and depart. Life is also “touch and go”. Events may be random, like atoms that attract or repel each other; the result is seeming disorder, odds and ends, things perhaps are at odds with each other, infinite and without goals. To make sense out of it all, we recur to speculations, propositions, logical attempts — hypothetical “ifs”. In contrast, there is a shadow of “predestination”, at least destination. In a religious context “odds without ends” echoes “world without end”, which is heard at the conclusion of a service: “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, whorld without end [in saecula saeculorum]”. From this angle “odd’s” may well both abbreviate “God’s” and be at odds with it. The Church knows of our origin, Adam and Eve (hidden, and perhaps not at first sight visible, as they were also hiding in Paradise when they were caught out?). Two conflicting views merge: From a materialistic point of view, everything might be arbitrary, a play of forces and collisions; if the Church is right, there is Destiny in all of this, a divine grand design. The amalgamation works because of verbal coincidence: “odds with ends” conflates “odds and ends” with “world without end” and, possibly, “God’s”. The contiguities are phonetic or literal, so that the unpredictable vagaries of atoms or the speculative nature of “ifs” happen to approximate “Adam” and “Eve”, one particular view of the origin of human beings. The sounds nearly coincide. Order and conflict interact. Churches also disagree among each other. Predestination does not fit into the catholic scheme of things. What was called “atom” was conceived as the smallest part, what is “indivisible” (cannot be “cut”), in Joyce’s time was prominently being split and lost its original meaning. Nothing can be pinned down.

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Reading Finnegans Wake is very much to discern what collocation of letters are due to authorial design or readerly chance associations. The Wake offers a semantic choreography of “coincidances of their contraries” that “reamalgamerge in that indentity of undicernibles” (FW 49.36). The resulting identities seem to be damaged by indents. In this case the master of the ballet is Nicholas de Cusa, whose coincidentia oppositorum is responsible for one of the underlying dynamics. As to “undiscernibles”: it so happens that “coincidances” can be split into “coin” and “dances” — can sense be made out of it? Is there any pertinent fruitful connection with the “dancing coins” that bring the “Nestor” episode to a close (U 2.449)? Joyce may have put in an antidote to all the foregoing. Possibly the one extreme instance of a purely accidental jumble is the “line of bitched type” in “Eumaeus” that got into a newspaper report: “.)eatondph 1/8 ador dorador douradora” (U 16.1557). It is a typographical hazard, the result of a typesetter filling a miscast line with random characters before throwing it out, and then forgetting to do so, a frequent accident in old letterpress composition. But even so, for all we know, a designing Joyce might have embedded a cryptic message into the muddle that an eager interpreter might ferret out (or invent). As it is, the sequence is a throwaway that by accident was not thrown away. We cannot tell whether such genuinely accidental jumbles are not to be found in the Wake where, in the nature of things, they would not stand out.

9

Done Half by Design

Bloom thinks he got the better of John Henry Menton at bowls not because of superior skills: “I sailed inside him. Pure fluke of mine, the bias” (U 6.1011). An accidental result makes him wonder: “He flung his wooden pen away. The stick fell in silted sand, stuck. Now if you were trying to do that for a week on end you couldn’t. Chance” (U 13.1268). This is preceded by a fleeting thought: “Done half by design”. That effects seem to come about half by design is a continual experience reading Joyce. To call some readings “far-fetched” implies that they may not coincide closely enough to be convincing. Joyce evokes multiple associations, especially in the Wake, and in general, we try to make them connect with the theme at hand (if such can be discerned). As any collective reading will testify how hazardous it is to find, and even more so, to exclude meanings. In order to be meaningful, any given passage has potentially more meanings, infinite possibilities, than can reasonably apply, even within an inner circle of languages and cultures (mainly European). The English negation “not” happens to be

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identical with the German noun “Not” for a desperate situation, adversity, or need, but “not” does not automatically introduce such an emergency; in fact, probably none of them do. Or is there perhaps a German goose, “Gans”, in “Finnegans Wake”? It is literally present but probably, to judge from commentaries, not functional. Which brings up the problem of how Joyce could guard against unwanted, purely coindcidental meanings that inevitably sneak into the verbal conglomerates. In the Wake the letters H, C, E or A, L, P, at the beginning of words impinge everywhere as aids to murky identification. Is it pure gratuitous chance, as has been pointed out, that the last letter in “Ulysses” is also the first in “Stately”? Or that even all three letters of Y-E-S are contained in “Stately” — and as it happens also in “Ulysses”? And they can furthermore be detected in “Keyes” and “Hely’s”, or “metempsychosis” — and no doubt dozens of other words or names that cannot all have been consciously mustered for the purpose by a scheming author. The question is ultimately more a matter of mathematical probability than valid significance. After all, all writing consists of the arrangement of a fixed and limited number of traditional symbols, called letters. As Finnegans Wake throws off in passing, “letters play”, with the emphasis of a prayer (257.19). One thumbnail characterization of Joyce would be that he is more coincidental than most other writers, more dense, with reverberations or overlays. This is already true of Dubliners, where the game of tracing resonances has not yet been completed, certainly of A Portrait with its motifs and mythological resonances. The singular exception is the one play, Exiles, which, as it consists of dialogue, appears to be less haunted by lexical ghosts or overtones. This may be one reason why it has been relatively neglected. What otherwise would have been coincidental effects have possibly been tucked away into Joyce’s “Notes by the Author” that are appended to most editions. Joyce at any rate seems to make his readers hyper-coincidentally vigilant and to bring out their explorative urges. He initiated a game (of unstated rules) that we tend to carry beyond manifest limits. There is something “synaptic” about his works — in the literal sense of joining (apt-) one thing with (syn) another. It results in a hypertextual network, where everything looks connected both within the works and outside, involving potentially the whole tradition. A term like “synaptic” would inevitably call up stray medical associations and irrelevant claims. Still it is conceivable that something like Finnegans Wake emulates the intricate workings of our brains. It certainly taxes them to an unusual degree, which explains some of our proliferating exegetical antics. We are in fact almost forced to attach something to the words on

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the page. Comments, annotations, interpretations are coincidental. Inexistent, unknown or eccentric configurations are unsettling but in the Wake they look like the norm. All of them seem to entail an imperative to find out more, they become coincidental “imps” that tickle the brain (as in U 3.124).

Chapter 8

Active Silences The focus of this probe is, unassumingly, on the kinds of silences in Joyce’s works, on some distinctions, and above all on how Joyce verbally acts them out. For the present purpose, “silence” is used in two main meanings or aspects: (1) the absence of noise, as for example the end of “A Painful Case” (“He could hear nothing: night was perfectly silent”, D 117); or, more narrowly, (2) the absence of speech when speech is expected, or as a lull in conversation (“Nothing was said”, U 6.21). A non-acoustic subsection is when particular subjects are avoided in an ongoing dialogue. There is an inherent paradox in discussing silences since by definition they tend to be absences. In fiction, silences generally are worth mentioning when they are framed, that is to say, atmospherically felt or experienced, often in socially awkward situations. Conceivably, the various stories in Dubliners or the parts of A Portrait and Ulysses could be categorized according to their noise and speech levels. How “loud” are the stories? On the one hand, “Counterparts”, “Ivy Day”, or “Grace” are full of conversations while “Eveline” or “A Painful Case”, with only one single spoken sentence (D 109), are relatively silent. In Ulysses, the wide-angle episodes like “Aeolus” or “Wandering Rocks” are naturally full of noise and talk. There is music in “Sirens” and vivid, even violent talk in “Cyclops”, while “Circe” both in its realistic setting and its imaginative expansion, is full of clamour and tumult. At the other end of the spectrum, the monologue chapters like “Proteus” and “Penelope” are quiet by their nature. But distinctions are precarious and partly artificial. An episode like “Oxen of the Sun” is full of agitated conversation, with “there nighed them a mickle noise”, “tumultuary discussions”, “the noise of voices” (U 14.124, 848, 1126). Yet the indirect presentation in parodic reports tends to mute the sound, even a volley of deprecations at one point — “whiles they all chode with him, a murrain seize the dolt, … thou chuff, thou puny, thou got in peasestraw, thou losel …” (U 14.326) — because of their historical refraction are not felt to be loud, all the less so since readers know the words quoted are not those actually spoken. An onomatopoeic imitation, “A black crack of noise in the street ere, alack, bawled back” with an echoing impact (U 14.408), looks like an exception. The end, the so-called Coda, changes from basically written reports to an apparent rendering of partly loud and unassigned utterances as though a device not yet invented like a tape recorder had registered them. It ends in the resonant vituperations of an American evangelist, Alexander J. Dowie,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_009

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caused by the sight of a poster that announces his appearance. It indicates a sonorous voice from a pulpit: “Come on, you winefizzling, ginsizzling, beetlebrowed … fourflushers, … Just you try it on” (U 14.1580). But it is not clear whether this is actually voiced in joking imitation by someone present on the spur of an original moment, or only textually imagined in a chapter of literary phantasms. Is, in other words, the “Oxen” episode silent or loud? The “voices” do indeed “blend in clouded silence” (U 14.1078). Blurred distinction between reality and imagination also characterize the chapter immediately following: “Circe”. The distant, emotionless style of “Ithaca” practically stifles whatever discussions take place in Bloom’s kitchen and even more so later in bed. Whatever is spoken is transposed into an indirect distant report and, if it is recited aloud, a low-level voice with minimal emphases will be most appropriate. Fittingly, the night of Ulysses ends in a protracted silence, which is interrupted merely by “the chime of the bells of Saint George”, footsteps, “the double vibration of a jew’s harp in the resonant lane” (U 17.1226, 1239), or the “brief sharp unforeseen heard loud lone crack” of a timber table (U 17.2061). In “Penelope”, few sounds intrude, as of a distant train or the noise of Molly on the chamber pot: “O Lord how noisy … Lord what a row youre making like the jersey lily easy O how the waters come down at Lahore” (U 18.1142–8). Paradoxically, the most silent part of the whole book is the one that is most often turned into audible speech on a stage. Charting Ulysses according to its presumed decibels would be a tricky but not necessarily futile endeavour.

1

Circean Amplitudes

Seen in very rough outlines, Ulysses begins in relative quiet in the early singletrack episodes, while the collective ones, “Aeolus” and “Wandering Rocks”, considerably increase the noises and the speech levels. “Circe” is a climax — realistically with shouts and whistles and songs, a blaring gramophone, the gong of a fire engine, and on the imaginary plane with cannon shots, a “choir of six hundred voices” singing “Allelujah …” (U 15.1953), and so on, but such external noises as well as speech diminishes towards the end. The last two episodes, as already indicated, are practically silent. The overall pattern is echoed on a smaller scale in “Circe”. After all the bustle and excitement with a multitude of persons, the cast is finally reduced to just Bloom and Stephen along with Cornelius Kelleher, who manages to appease the guards. The abatement of noise sets in with Kelleher’s departure, when

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mute but precisely meaningful gestures take over in parodic dumb show (and in practical implausibility): The car and horse back slowly, awkwardly, and turn. Corny Kelleher on the sideseat sways his head to and fro in sign of mirth at Bloom’s plight. The jarvey joins in the mute pantomimic merriment nodding from the farther seat. Bloom shakes his head in mute mirthful reply. With thumb and palm Corny Kelleher reassures that the two bobbies will allow the sleep to continue for what else is to be done. With a slow nod Bloom conveys his gratitude as that is exactly what Stephen needs. (U 15.4908) After meaningful gestures replace the sound of words the stage direction is infiltrated by a melody, the refrain of a song. The lingering echo may be something actually heard or else a textual carry-over, referring back to “Corny Kelleher … Singing with his eyes shut … With my tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom”, Bloom’s first association of him (U 5.12). The car jingles tooraloom round the corner of the tooraloom lane. Corny Kelleher again reassuralooms with his hand. Bloom with his hand assuralooms Corny Kelleher that he is reassuraloomtay. The tinkling hoofs and jingling harness grow fainter with their tooralooloo looloo lay. (U 15.4916) After the final light tingling and jingling an unstated silence takes over: Bloom, holding in his hand Stephen’s hat, festooned with shavings, and ashplant, stands irresolute. Then he bends to him and shakes him by the shoulder. (U 15.4921) The rest of the episode is silence or muffled, softened speech. Bloom begins timidly in what must be a low voice: “Eh! Ho! … Mr Dedalus” and then, bringing his mouth nearer, probably somewhat louder, “Stephen!” Stephen then wakes up with Yeats’s poem from the early morning on his lips: … (frowns) Who? Black panther. Vampire. (He sighs and stretches himself, then murmurs thickly with prolonged vowels) Who … drive … Fergus now And pierce … wood’s woven shade …? (U 15.4930) He speaks so low and indistinctly that Bloom hardly understands; he notably misinterprets “Fergus” as the name of a romantic companion, such as would

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spring to the lips of a young man waking up. (For more details see page 30.) Almost complete absence of sound is not stated, but affectingly implied: He stretches out his arms, sighs again and curls his body. Bloom, holding the hat and ashplant, stands erect. A dog barks in the distance … (U 15.4944) A dog heard in the distance emphasizes the quietness just as a donkey braying far away does in “Hades” (U 6.837, see below). The same effect is conveyed when Bloom “communes with the night”1 (U 15.4949) and then “murmurs” an oath, while he stands “Silent, thoughtful, alert … his fingers at his lips”, until a figure, a dark fairy boy of eleven, appears and Bloom, “wonderstruck”, has one more word to utter: “Rudy!” — but “inaudibly”, not heard by anyone. (“Inaudible speech” would be one definition of the interior monologue.) No further sound is heard at the vision of Bloom’s dead son. The last scene is enveloped in silence. In Dubliners, “The Dead” has an analogous sound curve. After the bustle, the music, dancing and the speech of a crowded party, the number of guests decreases before departure; at the end, only Gabriel and Gretta in the Gresham hotel late at night are left. There is little light and almost less noise impinging. … their feet falling in soft thuds on the thickly carpeted stairs […] In the silence Gabriel could hear the falling of the molten wax into the tray and the thumping of his own heart against his ribs. (D 19) The conversation in the room takes a different turn from what Gabriel expected and turns towards the past, a memory called up by a few bars of a song heard off stage. In the end, Gabriel is all alone with his thoughts; even the snow on the window pane emits, or is imagined to do so, “a few light taps”, and in the end, the snow in widening perspective enfolds all of Ireland in a profound silence.

2

“The [silent] Sisters”

In Joyce’s very first short story, silences are most prominent and so have deservedly attracted a lot of critical attention. Lacunae set in right at the beginning, the first spoken words in Joyce’s prose canon: 1 There may be a faint echo of “commune with your own heart” (of Psalm 4:4), which at any rate suggests wordless communication.

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— No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly … but there was something queer … there was something uncanny about him. I’ll tell you my opinion … (D 9) It would be hard to squeeze less information and more suggestion into an utterance full of halts, hesitancy, groping for words and internal censorship. The note is struck right away: things that are not said, and certainly not “exactly”, are associated with being queer and uncanny, something outside a respectable order of things. The opinion also will never be told, nor the “theory” in the next non-statement. Joyce begins with something he was extremely adroit at, a constrained atmosphere. In such a predicament, smoking may bridge an uneasy gap: “He began to puff at his pipe”. The story fittingly ends with something unsaid: “… that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him …” (D 18), so that it is bracketed with gaps that range from “queer” to “something wrong”. Joyce incidentally offers a technique of interpretation — to “extract meaning from … unfinished sentences” (D 11). Silences can be explicitly named and even emphasized. The presence of the dead priest in a room imposes customary constraints: A silence took possession of the little room and, under cover of it, I approached the table and tasted my sherry and then returned quietly to my chair in the corner. Eliza seemed to have fallen into a deep revery. We waited respectfully for her to break the silence: and after a long pause she said slowly … (D 17). Silences do in fact “take possession” of most of the story, and so do pauses. The tension becomes oppressive and affects people’s behaviour. The somewhat formal diction, that the boy “approached the table”, indicates selfconsciousness. The silence has to be “broken”, and the purely figurative breaking is immediately followed by the incident of a broken chalice (most likely an inaccurate sense of “breaking” in a colloquial meaning of a mere dropping). — It was that chalice he broke … That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still … They say it was the boy’s fault. (D 17) Silences, indicated by ellipses or not, “contain nothing”, they are gaps in speech or actions — empty parts. Emptiness is a motif in the story, as it emerges in “vacation time”; an “idle chalice” on the priest’s breast contains nothing. Even words can be “idle”, in contrast to those that are “true”. Emptiness is paired with “filling”: “The word paralysis … filled me with fear” (D 9).

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When nothing is spoken, the resulting protracted discomfort is conveyed in minute focusing on insignificant details and acts in what appears like slow motion. But something, after all, has to be said, and any commonplace will serve: Nannie went to the sideboard and brought out a decanter of sherry and some wineglasses. She set these on the table and invited us to take a little glass of wine. Then, at her sister’s bidding, she filled out the sherry into the glasses and passed them to us. She pressed me to take some cream crackers also, but I declined because I thought I would make too much noise eating them. She seemed to be somewhat disappointed at my refusal and went over quietly to the sofa, where she sat down behind her sister. No one spoke: we all gazed at the empty fireplace.2 My aunt waited until Eliza sighed and then said: — Ah, well, he’s gone to a better world. (D 15) Perhaps the most poignant silence in the story occurs towards the end when the almost expected ghost of Father Flynn does not turn up and yet, unnamed, seems to haunt the scene: She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened; but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast. (D 17)3 The odd word is “idle”, echoing the “idle” words of the opening paragraph. The biblical adjective renders Greek “argos”, contracted from “a-ergos”,4 the negation of something active, as in “idle”, not “working”.5 In fact English “work”

2 Note again that sherry glasses are “filled out” and that a fireplace is “empty”. 3 “I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin” circularly corresponds to “I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse” in the opening paragraph (D 9). 4 Translations do not easily cope with the “idle chalice”: it becomes “vide”, “vain”, “insignificant” in French, “vuoto”, “inutile”, “inerte”, “abbandonato” in Italian, “inútil”, “vacio” or “desmayado” in Spanish, and “leer” or “nutzlos” in German. There is similar doubt about “lying still in his coffin”; is “still” an adjective for not moving or speaking, or else, less likely, a temporal adverb? Translators go both ways and use “immobile” in French or Italian, “still” in German, but others settle for the adverbial meaning, “toujours”, “ancora” or “noch”. 5 “But I say unto you, That every idle word [rhema argon, verbum otiosum] that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgement” (Mat. 12:36). Conceivably, Joyce conceals an early hint that words are active and significant.

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is a cognate of Greek “ergos”. At the end of the first paragraph, the boy longs “to be nearer to it [the word “paralysis”] and to look upon its deadly work” (D 9). It may be Joyce’s subtle hint that words have the potential to be active, energetic. Silences, seemingly empty, have dynamics of their own.

3

Funereal

Silence is appropriate for death, which is one reason for its predominance in “The Sisters” as well as in the “Hades” episode of Ulysses. The first impression of the cemetery contains “white shapes …, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures on the air” (U 6.487). Many statues are passed; by their nature, they are silent and reduced to gestures.6 Voices in the chapter are lowered, whispering is dominant (“Whispering round you”, U 6.846), and Haines speaks “below his breath” (U 6.880). The men carrying the coffin are called “mutes” (U 6.52, 1.579). The “Hades” episode shows silences of both major kinds: the absence of noise and the temporary suspension of speech. They do not have to be spelled out, in particular at the quiet graveside scene before the actual burial: The coffin dived out of sight, eased down by the men straddled on the gravetrestles. They struggled up and out: and all uncovered. Twenty. (U 6.833) Pauses are filled by close observation (“gravetrestles”) and reflection. “Twenty” may indicate Bloom’s counting the attendant persons, but it almost seems as though he or the readers were measuring the silent moments of the pause. It finds expression as a single word that again makes up a whole paragraph: Pause. Standing alone, “Pause” is surrounded by pauses. The device is continued in Bloom’s reflection, which also fills a ponderous paragraph of its own.7 If we were all suddenly somebody else. 6 The one of Moses is a “stony effigy in frozen music” (U 7.768). 7 The device of turning one or two words into a separate paragraph is typical for “Sirens”, where it effectively punctuates the musical arrangement and underlines its elaborate rhythm. One or two word paragraphs, abundant in “Sirens”, are particularly weighty by stressing intervals.

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The silence needs no mention: Far away a donkey brayed. Rain. No such ass. Never see a dead one. Shame of death. They hide. Also poor papa went away. (U 6.837) A noise heard from a distance marks the prevailing quietude. During a long passage of silent monologue, nothing is spoken or heard until the journalist Hynes, speaking “below his breath” (U 6.839–880), approaches Bloom. “Hades” also foregrounds silence in the form of the disruption of speech in company, especially when gaps in conversation cause a feeling of uneasiness, as when a group of four men have just entered a narrow funeral carriage and the decorum of the occasion excludes habitual levity, at least initially, before the constraint will be relaxed. All waited. Nothing was said. (U 6.21) One of the paradoxes in narrative is that “Nothing was said” has to be stated and cannot be conveyed by stating nothing.8 Social silences often induce uncomfortable awareness. Bloom generally withdraws into his thoughts: “Stowing in the wreaths probably…”, or, in this case, attending to the soap in his hip pocket. The next paragraph again begins with “All waited”. When the carriage begins to move the pattern is repeated: “They waited still, their knees jogging” (U 6.29). In the absence of speech, physical contact can be felt all the more. The first words finally uttered, “— Which way is he taking us?”, are caused less by topographical curiosity than the need to break the constrained silence. The conversation then gets haltingly under way. Silence of course is a normal occurrence and deserves mention only when it is consciously experienced. A lull in conversation can also be caused by (what is considered) a wrong move. After some jocular remarks in the funeral carriage, the occupants are reminded of the seriousness of the occasion. The subject is then changed to commonplaces on the subject of Dignam’s death: “As decent a little man as ever wore a hat” (U 6.303). The cause of the death is brought up both in the public version, “Breakdown … heart”, and in Bloom’s internal “Too much John Barleycorn” (U 6.305). A known fact is naturally excluded by tacit agreement. The trite lament “He had a sudden death, poor fellow” leads Bloom to what looks like a spontaneous remark: “— The best

8 Stage directions can take over this function, as in “Circe” “Immediate silence” (U 15.1500).

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death” (U 6.312). His companions’ reaction, the sudden hiatus in conversation, is presented visibly: “Their wideopen eyes looked at him” (U 6.313). In his discernible embarrassment, Bloom explains what for him is self-evident: “— No suffering, he said. A moment and all is over. Like dying in sleep” (U 6.314). The justification only increases the tension; a short but weighty sentence, again comprising a whole paragraph, is all the more effective: No-one spoke. (U 6.315) Bloom’s humane view of the best death, without suffering pain, has clashed with the religious notion of a good death, one accompanied by the proper ecclesiastical rites. For a few extended moments, the conversation has stopped. In this instance, silence is the temporary death of speech. Bloom, probably by now aware of his social gaffe, is thrown back on his own thoughts. They appropriately set in with “Dead side of the street …” (U 6.316).

4

Rhetorical

After “Hades”, with its generally muted utterances, the newspapers episode “Aeolus” is full of street noises and an abundance of talk. Complementarily it also emphasizes writing and print. Language is first a matter of air shaped by vocal organs, transient vibrations that can be heard, often against concomitant noises, and are understood or not, remembered or forgotten. Against realistic plausibility, complex speeches are remembered verbatim. But visually, language consists of culturally determined graphic symbols in a certain alignment. In the composing room, movable letters are arranged and again distributed, to be read from left to right or, as in Hebrew, in reverse. The special case of palindromes (“Madam, I’m Adam”, U 7.683) allows for both directions. Spelling is a tricky issue since identical sounds can be differently presented (“amusing” and “view” both contain a long u of changed appearance), which makes spelling bees possible (“ORTHOGRAPHICAL”, U 7.165). Hearing and Seeing9 (reading) are in agreement or at variance. Letter combinations can be pronounced differently, but other typographical signs defy articulation: how is “HOUSE OF KEY(E)S” spoken aloud? The voice cannot articulate a parenthesis, and even less three question marks: “???” (U

9 The question “Is the editor to be seen?” is answered “Very much so … To be seen and heard” (U 7.298).

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7.512). These question marks announce Lenehan’s riddle, for which he expressively commands “Silence! What opera resembles a railway line?” (U 7.514). His earlier stab, “Silence for my brandnew riddle!” has fallen on deaf ears (U 7.477). Because of his compulsive jocularity, he is generally disregarded so he needs to call for attention. He is the one to enjoin silence emphatically. “Aeolus” highlights rhetorical exploits. Skilled orators not only handle words but also use strategic pauses for emphasis. J.J. O’Molloy is about to recite one “of the most polished periods”, but by stalling first creates suspense. It is again Lenehan, true to type, who steps in gratuitously and intrusively: — A few wellchosen words, Lenehan prefaced. Silence! Pause. J.J. O’Molloy took out his cigarettecase. False lull. Something quite ordinary. (U 7.759) The speaker’s tactical silence is filled with, first, Lenehan’s gratuitous intervention, then a weighty pause, similar to the one at the gravesite in the cemetery, and an act, and finally with Stephen’s internal thoughts in which he translates the event into what looks like an imagined passage in a novel or biography: Messenger took out his matchbox thoughtfully and lit his cigar. I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives.10 (U 7.762) In literature, and conspicuously in films, lighting a cigarette is one of the time-proved standard devices for creating suspense or detracting from a tense situation. This happens in “Telemachus” when Haines, probably put off by one of Stephen’s brusque responses, “stopped and took out a smooth silver case”, offers it to Stephen and in elaborate slow motion lights the cigarettes before he resumes the conversation (U 1.615–21). The second speech held up as a model in the chapter also turns around Moses.11 It too is carefully staged by J.J. O’Molloy, obviously an ear witness, who reports how

10 11

In a chapter devoted to rhetoric, it might be interesting to count the number of “that’s” in the sentence: no less than six out of 35 words. Moses by his own admission was not a good speaker: “I am not eloquent … I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue” (Ex. 4:10).

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… John F. Taylor rose to reply. Briefly, as well as I can bring them to mind, his words were these. (U 7.824) But the words have to wait, and so do the listeners. For a few moments, attention is focused on the not-yet speaker. “He raised his head firmly. His eyes bethought themselves once more” (U 7.825). The pause leads to a close-up in Stephen’s imagination: “Witless shellfish swam in the gross lenses to and fro, seeking outlet” (U 7.826). Only then are the words resumed: He began[.] Halts during the speech itself are again filled with attention to cigarette smoke and Stephen’s reflections, a “dumb belch of hunger” prepares for the peroration (U 7.860). Silence precedes the prominent speech, interrupts and then also ends it. “He ceased and looked at them, enjoying a silence” (U 7.870). Aeolian speeches are carefully framed.

5

Silentium! (U 14.1457)

The first silence in Ulysses is part of Buck Mulligan’s parody, a mock silence, and a purely imaginary one since he is the only one who so far has said, or declaimed, anything in an otherwise quiet morning scene. He of all people, who vocally dominates the episode, commands: “Silence, all!” (U 1.23). The scene he calls up is of a transubstantiation debased into a music hall performance. His mouth, open for a whistle, reveals gold points as though to indicate that silence is proverbially golden. The view is then translated, internally, probably by Stephen, into a Greek epithet “Chrysostomos”, golden-mouthed, a classical epithet that was attributed to excellent speakers. Mulligan’s histrionics contrast with Stephen, who has said nothing so far until he asks, “quietly”, “Tell me, Mulligan” (no exclamation mark), and changes the subject to a noise made by the visitor Haines, “raving about a black panther” in the stillness of the night (U 1.47–58). It is probably also Buck Mulligan who at the end of “Oxen of the Sun”, when the group of men make a precipitate rush to a nearby pub, enjoins “Silentium!” (U 14.1457). He and Lenehan, the obstinate talkers and jokers, have a monopoly of imposing silences on others. Silences can be commanded, stopped, or “broken”, with equal chances of success. It happens by tacit consent as in “The Dead”, when Mr Brown has tactlessly taken over the conversation:

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As the subject had grown lugubrious it was buried in a silence of the table during which Mrs Malins could be heard saying to her neighbour in an indistinct undertone: — They are very good men, the monks, very pious men. (D 201) In a story called “The Dead”, where the dispute turns about monks sleeping in their coffins, it is in tune that a silence is “buried” (D 201).

6

Orchestrated Silence

Gaps in conversation also occur when there is nothing to communicate, as it does in desultory talk between Simon Dedalus and the barmaids of the Ormond hotel in “Sirens”. To keep the talk going, he expands on a place, Rostrevor, where Miss Douce spent a holiday, and he is neither informative nor entertaining. Pure talk: — By Jove, he mused, I often wanted to see the Mourne mountains. Must be a great tonic in the air down there. But a long threatening comes at last, they say. Yes. Yes. (U 11.219) A trailing “Yes. Yes” often fills a gap, almost a reflex, a muted exclamation; it comes close to a sigh. (As such, it contrasts drastically with other, significant powerful Yeses in the book.) It is immediately taken up in a typical tonal link: Yes. He fingered shreds of hair, her maidenhair, her mermaid’s, into the bowl. Chips. Shreds. Musing. Mute. (U 11.222) This “Yes” may simply carry on the preceding ones, but it also looks like a narrative stocktaking of a moment when nothing is said and attention focuses on trivia like, again, the preparation for a smoke. The one-word series “Chips. Shreds. Musing. Mute” may express groping for something to say, but it equally serves as a narrative repetition, a common meta-feature in “Sirens”. The sequence “hair, her maidenhair, her mermaid’s”, possibly representing associations among those present, also has the air of a musical embroidery.12

12

Bloom later on, eying “a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves” and reading, “Smoke mermaids coolest whiff of all”, will also remark on “Hair streaming: lovelorn” (U 11.300), another Sirens motif.

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One of the themes of the episode is that awkward or painful gaps are filled with the distractions of conversation and, dominantly, with music. Whatever the exact nature of the paragraph (probably impossible to determine with certainty), it does mark a lull emphasized by a triple negation in the next line: None nought said nothing. Yes. (U 11.224) Silence is framed by nothing. At that point, it is audibly broken by music: Gaily miss Douce polished a tumbler, trilling: — O, Idolores, queen of the eastern seas! (U 11.225–26)

7

Silence Reigns Supreme

An analogous situation occurs in the cabman’s shelter in “Eumaeus”, where a random group of nocturnal creatures are sitting in relative proximity and where, apart from adventures recounted by a loquacious sailor, casual talk is kept going in the face of general boredom, fatigue, and the discomfort setting in when nothing is spoken. Any pointless remark may serve to dispel it, and at times, even Bloom steps into the breach with a brave but futile effort: A silence ensued till Mr Bloom for agreeableness’ sake just felt like asking him whether it was for a marksmanship competition like the Bisley. (U 16.406) The sailor’s subsequent blunt “Beg pardon?” shows that the atmosphere has not been relieved. Even less successful is the contribution of a cabman, no doubt well intended yet devoid of any interest: The cabby read out of the paper he had got hold of that the former viceroy, earl Cadogan, had presided at the cabdrivers’ association dinner in London somewhere. (U 16.1661) The remark unsurprisingly falls flat and actually leads to increased awkwardness: Silence with a yawn or two accompanied this thrilling announcement. (U 16.1664)

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Such social silences lend themselves to strained or lumbering Eumaean articulation: Silence all round marked the termination of his finale. (U 16.1010) There ensued a somewhat lengthy pause. (U 16.601) The awkwardness of the situation affects the heavy-handed expression of a silence or a pause “ensuing”. But then it is in the nature of intrusive silences to just “follow” or “take place”. It is fitting that in Eumaean parlance, silences or pauses ponderously “ensue”, or they “mark” a “termination”. Some marked silences thereby become active grammatical subjects (which is not normal usage);13 they cause at least a sense of being ill at ease. In “The Sisters”, already “[a] silence [actively] took possession of the little room” (D 17, see above). Silence really comes into its own when in the general prevailing boredom even a minor event is pedantically observed with seemingly full attention to pointless details: Some person or persons invisible directed him to the male urinal erected by the cleansing committee all over the place for the purpose but after a brief space of time during which silence reigned supreme14 the sailor … eased himself closer at hand… (U 16.937) The “brief space of time” lends particular glamour to the supreme moment, but after a short pause it is bathetically ended by “the noise of his bilgewater … splashing on the ground” (U 16.939).

8

Tactics of Evasion

Certain topics or issues may not be spoken of, either by internal strategy or by tacit collusion. When Bloom is asked about his wife’s impending concert tour he is, for understandable reasons, at visible, though often futile, pains not to give away any details in conversation. On two occasions, he replies to a

13

14

In general usage and in Ulysses, “silences” occur mainly with prepositions (often “in”) or as grammatical objects, but in “Eumaeus” some of them emerge to be the subjects of active verbs. “Supreme reign” is rarely granted except in parodic use, as in a the execution scene of “Cyclops” where “general harmony reigned supreme” (U 12.1291).

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very specific question about the tour — “Who’s getting it up?” — by evasion. To M’Coy he explains: “It’s a kind of tour, don’t you see? There’s a committee formed …” (U 5.153–63), and in the same vein to Nosey Flynn: “Getting it up? … Well, it’s like a company idea, you see. Part shares and part profits” (U 8.773–85). In each case, Bloom answers after a short pause and he elides his rival by vague pluralities. As it happens, there will be no other mention of either a company or a committee. The second bedroom scene in “Calypso” is vibrant with issues unstated and tacit agreement while some conversation has to be kept going. When Bloom brings the tea and toast to Molly’s bed, he pretends not to know the sender of the letter that has noticeably troubled him when he picked it up: “His quickened heart slowed at once. Bold hand. Mrs Marion” (U 4.244). The letter is now conspicuously half hidden, peeping from “under the dimpled pillow”. Collusion by definition is something partly concealed. Homerically, the episode is under the aegis of Kalypso, the goddess of hiding. Not to refer to the letter might be more embarrassing for both than an offhand question: “— Who was the letter from?, he asked”, while remembering “Bold hand. Marion”. The answer is a quick and dismissive, almost overly casual “O,15 Boylan, she said. He’s bringing the programme” (U 4.508). Bloom’s next question, “— What are you singing?”, poses some problems. How could he not know about Molly’s repertoire? Given that she has been long without singing engagements and moreover that the Ulster Hall in Belfast is a highly renowned venue, it seems unlikely that the couple did not discuss the upcoming event before. As we will read later, he knows that “all the topnobbers” will take part, “J.C. Doyle and John MacCormack”, so the topic must have come up before (U 6.222). If Bloom’s question makes sense at all, it could only refer to which particular arias the duo might be rehearsing during the visit. Otherwise, it appears to be a vacuous attempt to feign normal curiosity. The programme, which consists of “La ci darem …” and “Love’s Old Sweet Song”, must be familiar to Bloom, as he instantly associates “Voglio e non vorrei”, which he may well have heard his wife singing before. It is intriguing that he knows enough of the aria in Italian to insert a wrong indicative which significantly occurs elsewhere in Don Giovanni, “voglio” (for an actual “vorrei”). The potential mispronunciation of a foreign word is clearly not Bloom’s uppermost worry, but it concerns itself with his wife’s will or want, and as it happens the plain English translation closes the book, “yes I will Yes”, where it is framed between two Yeses. 15

The register and pitch of the various O’s or Ah’s in Ulysses might be worth a separate study.

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After a pause, Molly abruptly changes the subject that is hovering over the whole scene and diverts attention by enquiring about the funeral. Her next move brings up the book she has been reading, where her remark “There’s a word I wanted to ask you” may be less due to semantic curiosity than by her knowledge of how much her husband likes to hold forth and to instruct, with hardly anyone ever ready to listen. She baits Bloom with a difficult word, “Metempsychosis”, and, true to form, he rises to the occasion with didactic persistence though there is little indication of her evincing any interest in his elaborate explication. The trick is so successful that even readers may be deceived. The passage, at any rate, is tense of what is left out and what, moreover, is a main plot of the novel. The story “The Boarding House” hinges around a similar collusion, this time between mother and daughter against a trapped victim, but, different from Ulysses, the situation is overtly stated: “Polly knew that she was being watched, but still her mother’s persistent silence could not be misunderstood” (D 63). An elaborate scene of a thematic silence is acted out in perhaps the most contorted passage of all Dubliners stories: Both had been somewhat awkward, of course. She had been made awkward by her not wishing to receive the news in too cavalier a fashion or to seem to have connived, and Polly had been made awkward not merely because allusions of that kind always made her awkward, but also because she did not wish it to be thought that in her wise innocence she had divined the intention behind her mother’s tolerance. (D 64) The awkwardness, also of its articulation, is much more conspicuous than the alleged frankness.

9

Lacunae

A special case of textual silence occurs when something is said but not clearly heard or attended to, or not understood, and therefore not recorded verbatim, but results in a blank. In “Telemachus”, Stephen, resentful that the milkwoman speaks to Mulligan and not to him, listens “in scornful silence” and hears “the loud voice that now bids her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes” (U 1.418). Readers are not told what the loud voice says and what makes Stephen interrupt his otherwise aloof reticence in order to put her to a test by asking: — Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her. (U 1.424)

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Did Haines really want to “bid her be silent” at a moment when he wants to practice his no doubt somewhat elementary Gaelic on the presumed native speaker? Whatever is not spelled out becomes all the more intriguing. But the conversation instantly diverts into the question of what language the statement we did not hear is spoken in and the conversation turns on the complicated historical relationship between Ireland, England, and France and their respective languages. Ironically, the English usurper is the only one in the group who speaks some Irish and it is mistaken for French by an Irish woman. Stephen appears to have some notion of what Haines has been articulating. In contrast, Bloom talking to Molly in a vaguely similar situation does not accurately hear what word his wife is actually pronouncing, as his question about “the word” indicates, “— Met him what? he said” (U 4.335), referring back to sounds made that are not part of the text, another blank. Once the word is seen in print, “Metempsychosis”, it becomes clear that Bloom apprehended a garbled phonetic version, or Wake-like approximation, which is later rendered as “Met him pike hoses” of multiple suggestiveness (U 8.112).16 The point here is that something voiced that is not correctly absorbed is presented not as it was intended and spoken, but as a lacuna, and therefore only inspected in the sequel. The momentary absence and then garbled reproduction gives the word all the more weight. “Metempsychosis” becomes a companion to the renowned “word known to all men”17 that haunts the book.

10

Servile Letters

Silences could extend to such trivia as written letters doing duty for phonetic absences, written letters that are not pronounced, or wherever the visual 16

17

The word “metempsychosis” in Molly’s ignorant adaptation, “Met him pike hoses” (U 4.336, 8.112), has overtones of suggestive female clothing, “hoses”, while “Met him” may well anticipate the imminent meeting. Surprisingly, Bloom is familiar with the theosophical term, while an astronomical one, “Parallax”, gives him pause (U 8.110). Bloom’s correct definition, “That means the transmigration of souls”, could have been taken straight out of Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language (London: Longman & Co, 1860), which Gerty MacDowell once consulted (U 13.342): “The transmigration of the soul into the bodies of other animals as taught by Pythagoras …and still believed in some parts of the East”; see B.H. Smart (1860), 379. Bloom goes on to explain: “Some people believe … that we go on living in another body … They used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for instance”, at which point he unwittingly diverts into metamorphosis, a similar Greek word (U 4.362–77). Many scholars, but not the present writer, know what “that word known to all men” (U 3.435, 9.429, 15.4192) is. Not known, it would be all the more tantalizingly powerful.

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sign does not harmonize with its sound. They occur in both Hebrew and Irish, as “epenthetic and servile letters” (U 17.747). Such letters may lead to misspellings: “I have a special nack of putting the noose” (U 12.427), “acute neumonia” (U 18.727). Inversely they can be inserted by jocular analogy: “Do ptake some ptarmigan” (U 8.887).

11

Epiphanic

The most efficient and incisive silences are where the word itself does not occur, nor any references to the absence of sound or speech. A prime instance is the Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait, which sets out quietly, though full of tension all along, in a dispute gradually gaining force and acerbity and, no doubt, in volume. It reaches its climax in a furious and loud outbreak: “— God and religion before anything! Dante cried. God and religion before the world!” It is noisily countered by her opponent: Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash. — Very well then, he shouted hoarsely, if it comes to that, no God for Ireland. […] Uncle Charles and Mr Dedalus pulled Mr Casey back into his chair again, talking to him from both sides reasonably. He stared before him out of his dark flaming eyes, repeating: — Away with God, I say! (P 39) It is then that a tense, almost vibrant silence is evoked by mere implication: Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her napkinring which rolled slowly across the carpet and came to rest against the foot of an easychair. (P 39) In tense situations, or “upsetting” ones (the base import of the word is mechanical, and only secondarily emotional), attention focuses on a tangential detail of perception, often a visual one. A wholly insignificant napkinring is watched, breathlessly, in its slow noiseless move across a soft carpet until it comes to a standstill. The seconds seem drawn out. The slow motion (it is here maintained) affects the speed of reading. That the motion ends with an “easy” chair contrasts oddly with the overall markedly uneasy tension, just as “upsetting”

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clashes with “rest”. The hovering silence is experienced, not told. It is abruptly broken by violence and shouting: “Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheek flushed and quivering with rage” (P 39). The silence is immediate and effective and needs no explicit telling.

Chapter 9

Transmutation in Digress This essay examines a few inherent probabilities in a work of translation: the odds are that the micro-structures of such a work as Ulysses will be regularized and that, conversely, in the overall structure, not all the potential internal links — even if they are identified in the first place — can be preserved.1 Translations are fated to fall short with little blame allotted to anyone. The instances discussed in the following probe focus on what happens to the texts’ processes and inherent animation in the process of translation. In its evocation of a world seen through a particular city, Ulysses characterizes mental processes with uncanny precision. Minds tend to twist reality while blending perceptions and reasoning with wayward associations. Joyce attempts to be as close to his characters’ muddled minds as language allows through such verbalization, but this is a chancy process at best. I will draw attention here, first, to the imprecise articulation of faulty constructions. They do not travel well across linguistic borders because rules of grammar impose themselves, because normative reflexes take over, and because a natural inclination towards consonance is always at work. Apparent flaws are ironed out in translations; arrangements become more orderly. Joyce exemplifies how things — acts, thoughts, words — go wrong and how these abundant features have a way of going wrong by being put right. Errors are prone to being inertly rectified. One obvious reason for this is that anything looking like an imperfection or error might be attributed to a translator’s incompetence. Joyce’s works have been subject to corrective intervention and conformist reflexes on a continual basis. The opening of A Portrait is a case in point. An infantile utterance — “O, the geen wothe botheth” — derives from an insufficiently sophisticated stab at a more complex quotation: “O, the wild rose blossoms/On the little green place” (P 7). This empirical phonetic incompetence evaporated when all editions before Hans Walter Gabler’s text of 1993, in an act of intentional editorial translation, amended “geen” to an orthodox “green”.2 The word “geen” suggests the difficulty in enunciating liquid-sounding letters

1 “Transmutation in Digress” originally appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 47, Number 4 (Summer 2010), pp. 537–552. 2 See, for instance, James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 7, and see the edition of Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche (New York: Garland Publishers 1993).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_010

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like “r” or “l” after a consonant (“blossoms” turns into “botheth”); “green” is what the dictionary dictates. The literary device called the interior monologue tries to transcribe the emergence of jumbled associations, often in statu nascendi. Because of its pliability and loose structure, English may be particularly suited to this semblance of mental notation. Many of its words can serve as a noun, an adjective, or even a verb. Very few inflexions narrow their range, and their users may engage in free combinations. All of these factors make English a better language for Joyce’s “shortmindedness” than others, for the delicate balance of such a state of mind can be easily upset by officious efforts at improvement by translators.3

1

Curious Mice?

One of my favorite lines in Ulysses is Bloom’s reflection that “[c]urious mice never squeal” (U 4.28).4 It is potentially misleading, although, by the time they reach the fourth episode of Ulysses, few readers will be confused. What do mice do when they are curious? Compare this with a pattern like “brave soldiers never flinch”. A minimum of mental adaptation comes into play even though, at this stage, we may no longer be aware of how we have already learned to process apparent oddities. Such turbulence, however, does not affect the translations. Conjunctions help to clarify the underlying syntax: “Drôle que les souris ne gémissent pas”; “Curieux que les souris ne couinent jamais”; “Curioso che i topi non stridono mai”; and “Vreemd dat muizen nooit piepen”.5 The sentence can be formally completed: “Es claro que las lauchas nunca chillan”, and “Es curioso que los ratones no guañen nunca”.6 The Hun3 I use the word “shortmindedness” here to indicate what goes on in a person’s mind, including impressions, thoughts, and associations — states preceding neat grammatical articulation. 4 A computer translation of Bloom’s statement offers “neugieriges Mäuse nie Pfeifen”; “de souris cri aigu curieux jamais”; and “de los ratones chillido curioso nunca”. 5 See Joyce, Ulysse, trans. Auguste Morel with Stuart Gilbert (Paris: La Maison des Amis des Livres, 1929), 55; Ulysse, trans. Jacques Aubert et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 74; Ulisse: Romanzo, trans. Giulio De Angelis (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1960), 78; and Ulysses, trans. Paul Claes and Mon Nys (Amsterdam: Uitgeveri De Bezige Bij, 1994), 61. Further references to these translations will be cited parenthetically in the text. Italics here and in following passages are mine and are intended to highlight the issues at hand, including areas where translations deviate from the original or links are not preserved and the like. 6 See Ulises, trans. J. Salas Subirat (Buenos Aires: S. Rueda, 1945), 86, and Ulises, trans. Francisco Garcia Tortosa and Maris Luisa Venegas (Madrid: Catedra, 2004), 62. Further references to both translations will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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garian and the Romanian renderings also resort to “it is curious …”.7 The implicit pause between “[c]urious” and “mice” can be signaled by punctuation, as in these German versions: “Seltsam, Mäuse quieken nie” and “Komisch, die Mäuse quieken nie”.8 One consequence is that the translation may increase the number of words from Joyce’s four up to seven. These translations are no longer quite as short or concise as Joyce’s originals but are more patently logical.

2

“what construction to put on” (U 16.1173)

Jostling thoughts in interior monologues present new challenges for readers, as the early reviews of Ulysses demonstrate abundantly. Bloom’s musings on female intuition may lead to a double-take: “Women never meet one like that Wilkins in the high school drawing a picture of Venus with all his belongings on show” (U 13.909). “Women never meet one” needs untangling (as does the momentary collocation of “a high school drawing”). One might assume, in a hasty reading, that women (the subject) never meet someone like Wilkins (the object). This is the view taken in the Georg Goyert German translation of 1927: Frauen begegnen nie jemandem wie jenem Wilkins” (419). What is more likely is the following sort of thought process: “Women — [mental pause] — you never meet one like Wilkins”, which is then contracted to “[w]omen never meet one like Wilkins”.9 This reading manifests itself in most translations under scrutiny here, including Auguste Morel’s “Les femmes n’en voient pas souvent un comme ce Wilkins” (365). The Guilio De Angelis rendering follows suit — “Le donne non lo trovano tutti i giomi uno come quel Wilkins” (501) — as does that of Hans Wollschläger: “Nie trifft man so eine wie dieser Wilkins” (519). Even an interpretive nod can be added, like Jacques Aubert’s: “Les femmes ne tombent jamais sur un individu comme ce Wilkins en terminale qui dessinait

7 See Ulysses, trans. Miklos Szentkuthy (Budapest: Europa, 1974), 68, and Ulise, trans. Mircea Ivanescu (Bucharest: Editura Univers, 1996), 58. Further references to both translations will be cited parenthetically in the text. 8 Ulysses, trans. Georg Goyert (Basel: privately printed, 1927), 65, and Ulysses, trans. Hans Wollschlager (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 78. Further references to both translations will be cited parenthetically in the text. 9 In his typescript, Joyce’s one-word sentence “[w]omen” was separated from “[n]ever met one” (JJA 13:260). This shows the drift of Bloom’s reasoning. Joyce later merged the two units with the attendant momentary confusion. Again, there is an unmarked pause between the first two words.

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une Vénus avec tous ses bijoux de famille à lui en sus” (460). Here the uncertainty of an emergent thought is rectified by a distinct grammar, and troubling ambiguities are removed. Women also become the subject in Romanian — “Women never meet one like that Wilkins” — according to Mircea Ivănescu (338), though Miklós Szentkuthy’s Hungarian translation seems to go astray: “Among the women there is never such a one as Wilkins [female!] who in high school drew Venus with all the belongings she [Venus] had” (461). Here, Wilkins refers to a woman, and the “belongings” seem to belong to the Venus of the drawing and not the artist who draws Venus. This example shows how Joyce’s condensation of thoughts is potentially baffling.10 Aloys Skoumal’s Czech translation neatly recomposes the sentence structure, which does not allow for possible confusion.11 In a word-by-word transposition, we read, “With such Wilkins, who while at high school, drew Venus while exposing all his accessories, women hardly ever meet” (339).12 We conclude from these examples that translation can either take a different direction from the one (probably) intended or that a more regularized syntax smooths over irregularities in comprehending the text.

3

“confused mucking it up” (U 12.770)

Speech can be both confused and confusing as we note when Bloom waylays a newspaper editor about the advertisement for Alexander Keyes. He does not express himself succinctly to the as-yet uninformed editor, who could hardly follow him even if he were interested (he is not). This is what Bloom, breathless and in haste, wants to put across: “And [Keyes] wants it copied if it’s not too late I told councillor Nannetti from the Kilkenny People” (U 7.974). Readers of “Aeolus” can sort out Bloom’s muddle, but an outsider would be baffled. It is characteristic of translations that messy utterances are straightened out, Goyert’s German one by tidy rearrangement and ample punctuation: “Sie [the advertisement] soll sein wie in dem Kilkenny People, wenn es nicht zu spät ist; ich habe schon mit Stadtrat Nannetti gesprochen” (167). Wollschläger offers a simple, but well-constructed, period: “Und er will die Sache, wenn’s noch nicht zu spät dafür ist, wie ich Stadtrat Nannetti schon gesagt habe, so wie 10 11 12

I am indebted to Erika Mihálycsa for all Romanian and Hungarian glosses. Odysseus, trans. Aloys Skoumal (Prague: Odeon, 1976), 339. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. I owe all interlinear glosses and comments on the Czech translation to David Vichnar.

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im Kilkenny People” (204). Morel’s exposition is also less of a jumble: “Et il voudrait, si ce n’est pas trop tard, je l’avais dit au Conseiller Nannetti que ce soit d’après Le Progrès de Kilkenny” (143). That minor, and not so minor, fumbles are one of Bloom’s trademarks may have guided later translators, like the 2004 French team who preserve Aubert’s tangle: “Et il le veut copié si ce n’est pas trop tard je l’ai dit au conseiller Nannetti du Kilkenny People” (186). Bloom’s jumbled utterance surfaces differently in Szentkuthy’s Hungarian sentence: “And he would like, if it’s not too late [yet], that I spoke to councillor Nannetti from the Kilkenny People” (179).

4

“or Crawford”? (U 12.1591)

At one point, the narrator of “Cyclops” is groping for the name of a newcomer: “Sure enough the castle car drove up with Martin on it and Jack Power with him and a fellow named Crofter or Crofton, pensioner out of the collector general’s, an orangeman Blackburn does have on the registration and he drawing his pay or Crawford gallivanting around the country at the king’s expense” (U 12.1588). The alternative names, Crofter and Crofton, are supplemented by a third variant, “or Crawford”, as an afterthought. This may have misled Goyert in his interpretation of the phrase: “ein Orangist, der in Blackburn beim Zoll war, und er bekommt sein Geld oder Crawford, weil er” (379). Since subordinate clauses are set off by commas (but not before “Crawford”), this version makes it seem as though either a Crofter or a Crofton would draw his salary or, if not, a Crawford. No such misidentification affects De Angelis’s Italian version where “o si chiama Crawford?” is preceded by a comma — “or is he called Crawford?” (453). Morel introduces parentheses into the translation — “(ou c’est-il Crawford, qu’il s’appelle?)” (329) — while Aubert’s 2004 Ulysse resorts to a sentence — “ou bien c’est Crawford” (41) — with Crawford clearly designated as an afterthought. An earlier Spanish translation of 1976, which interposes “ — ¿o Crawford?”13 can be contrasted with the more recent one by Francisco García Tortosa whose unmarked sequence, “se saca la paga o Crawford correteando” (385), leaves the interpretation to its readers. Skoumal’s Czech rendering also uses explanatory parentheses. Oddly enough, it additionally substitutes actual Czech names for Crofter-CroftonCrawford: “Śmukýr”, “Śenkýr”, and “Fortnýr”, where the similarity moves to the ending (“ýr”). These are old names drawn from professions: jeweler, innkeeper,

13

Ulises, trans. José María Valverde (Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1976), 315.

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and porter, respectively. The justification for Skoumal’s decision regarding the names is most likely the emphasis in “Cyclops” on naming itself. Skoumal inclines towards translating the eponymous part of names — “Blazes” Boylan, for instance, becomes “Bivoj Boylan”, a virile mythical Czech national hero.

5

“with apologies to Lindley Murray” (U 16.1474)

Free stylistic indirection may also lead to ungrammatical conflations: “And Cissy and Edy shouted after [the twins] to come back because they were afraid the tide might come in on them and be drowned” (U 13.470). Naturally, it is not the tide that might be drowned but the twins in the tide, which is implied but not spelled out in the exaggerated and drastic warning. The hasty amalgamation is not emulated in Aubert’s translation where the French wording is precise: “dans la crainte que la marée ne les surprenne et qu’ils ne se retrouvent sous l’eau” (444). Aubert even has recourse to a stringent subjunctive here. In German, Goyert’s separate clauses improve the logic of the original — “weil sie fürchteten, die Flut könne kommen und sie könnten dann ertrinken” (404) — as do Wollschläger’s — “weil sie Angst hatten, die Flut könne sie erreichen, und dann ertranken sie” (500). In Latin-derived languages, verb endings may automatically determine the subjects: see De Angelis’s “perché avevano paura che salisse la marea e affogassero” (484), Subirat’s “porque tenían miedo que los agarrara la marea y se ahogaran” (398), and Tortosa’s “porque les daba miedo que pudiera cogerles la marea y se ahogaran” (412), where the inflexion makes it clear that it is the twins who might drown. The looser construction of Morel’s old-French Ulysse, though grammatically correct, seems closest to the English and appears to be more suitably colloquial: “parce qu’elles avaient peur que la mer monte et les voilà noyés” (352).

6

“fixing the links” (U 5.495)

So far, the examples adduced fall under the heading of rectification within a narrow context, but different conditions affect the macrostructure. Most units in Ulysses recur as motifs or repetitions and thus serve as bracketing devices holding together a seemingly erratic verbal artifact. Ideally, significant recurrences should be rendered identically in translation to preserve the intricate linguistic and symbolic network. Only then can they function as the hyperlinks they are. Substantial differences in lexis or the semantic fields in

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other languages, however, militate against the reconstruction of ubiquitous interlacings, even if the connections are apprehended — and no single reader could be aware of all the cross-references. For earlier translators without the benefit of concordances or digital searches, it would have been natural to overlook, for example, a wholly peripheral joke about Miss Dubedat that has three appearances and should resurface in similar wording: “Yes, do bedad”, “The lady Gwendolen Dubedat”, and “Miss Dubedatandshedidbedad” (U 8.889, 15.1586, 4354). Major motifs, like the elaborate cluster of references to “Throwaway” (horse), “throwaway” (handbill), and “throw it away” (U 14.1132, 8.06, 5.534) or “met him pike hoses” (U 8.112, 1148), ramify beyond the reach of adequate reconstruction. Salient words or phrases like “consubstantial” or “retrospective arrangement” may be more manageable (U 3.50, 62, 10.783, 14.1044), but inherent dilemmas saddle translators with additional challenges and impossibilities. A few recurrences will be examined here, ranging from the blatantly conspicuous to marginal ones that may often escape attention. Homerule is a political and historical theme. Some translators leave it as it is, a term that was internationally understood in its time. A “homerule sun rising up in the northwest” (U 4.102) is often unchanged, as in Morel’s “un soleil homerule se levant au nord-ouest” (57), while both Goyert and Wollschläger retain “homerule”, using it in passing. Mogens Boisen settles for “en homerulesol”.14 Not all contemporary readers are familiar with nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Irish politics, and thus paraphrases are substituted, which, by their nature, are far less specifically Irish. De Angelis, for example, opts for “il sole dell’autonomia” (81, 222, 508), Tortosa for “autonomía” (64), and John Vandenbergh15 and Paul Claes and Mon Nys all settle for “zelf-bestuur” (63). In any case, the English word “homerule” or any native, but transparent, replacement for it do not allow for an implicit link with the potent key term “home”. But home figures in Stephen’s list of words that are different on an Englishman’s lips (P 189), and it is pervasive in Ulysses: “Are you not happy in your home you poor little naughty boy?”; “What is home without Plumtree’s potted meat?”; “Who’s he when he’s at home?”; and “home sweet home” (U 8.612, 742, 4.340, 11.1051). Bloom, who dubs himself “Henry” (from the German Heinrich, a “ruler of the home” or “heim”) in his flirtatious correspondence, is anything but a ruler in his own home and is hardly aware of the irony implicit in his pseudonymous name. Most languages do not have an adequate word

14 15

Ulysses, trans. Mogens Boisen (Copenhagen: Martins Forlag, 1949), 76. Ulysses, trans. John Vandenbergh (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1969), 68.

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that covers all the multiple (and emotional) connotations of “home” — thus there are certain links that simply cannot be forged. There is no “homecoming” or neutral replacement for “homerule”. Rigid consistency in translation, of course, cannot be an overriding aim since varying contexts prevent mechanical repetition. Aubert’s Ulysse begins with an explicative “un soleil de l’autonomie qui se lève au nord-ouest” but, after that, switches to “home rule”, “Home Rule”, or “homerule” (76, 156, 207, 466, 891). He proceeds in a similar way with the theme of “foot and mouth disease” (U 2.321). In Mr. Deasy’s letter to the press, Aubert renders it as “[m]al du pied et de museau” (47), and this is consonant with Morel’s 1929 translation of the phrase (35). Subsequently, Aubert uses the more exact technical term “[f]ièvre aphteuse” and recirculates it (169, 170, 183, 194); he even makes the phrase a joke when Myles Crawford changes it to “la fièvre affreuse” (170). When Stephen Dedalus elaborates on the theme with “open thy mouth and put thy foot in it” (U 16.1269), the title in the newspaper is rendered again as “[f]ièvre [a]phteuse”, but the stale joke demands a mouth and a foot — “ouvre ton museau et prends-toi les pieds dedans” (804) — just as Morel’s version does — “Ouvre ton museau et mets ton pied dedans” (573). The French Ulysse commemorating Bloomsday 2004 was composed of parts originally distributed to eight different translators. These separate versions contributed to the idiosyncratic tone and style of the episodes, but forging the thematic links became a matter of extravagant, time-consuming, internal coordination that led to an immense number of modifications — and, presumably, critical arguments. Earlier I focused on the linguistic tangle concerning Wilkins, who, in drawing a picture of Venus, had “all his belongings on show” (U 11.557, 1027, 1056, 13.910). Aubert’s collective French translation offers “avec tous ses bijoux de famille à lui en sus” (460), but this does not match the rendering “avec tous ses avantages en devanture”, which occurs earlier with slight variations (338, 355, 356). It is hard for any one translator to remember every phrase in a long book, and such a project becomes much more complex for a team in dispersed locations. The procedure used in portioning out this polytropic book to numerous specialists does justice to its stylistic variety but inevitably entails the hazard wherein the right hand does not know what all the other left hands may have decided. This makes it possible, and even understandable, that Martha Clifford’s question to Bloom, “Are you not happy in your home?” (U 5.246), is consistently repeated in this version as “[n]’êtes-vous pas heureux en ménage mon pauvre petit polisson?” (102, 329, 347). The appellation is expanded once, in the French translation, to “mon pauvre petit méchant garçon”, and eventu-

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ally the more personal “tu” replaces the polite vous: “N’es-tu donc pas heureux dans ton? Vilain chéri?” (212, 467). The risk is a calculated one as is shown by the decision to reproduce the original version of “Oxen of the Sun”, lock, stock, and barrel, from Morel’s classical translation of 1929. In part, it must be a tribute to the earlier momentous achievement. Connections that may be deemed vital, however, are inevitably severed: Haines’s “history is to blame” (U 1.649), which is generally rendered as “la faute en revienne à l’histoire”, is turned into “la faute est sans doute à l’histoire” in Aubert (32, 510), so that a basic similarity is still audible. Yet no reader would recognize Aubert’s “pource que lors brûlait on la chandelle par les deux bouts” as Stephen’s conscious echo of “la vie ne manquait pas de sel en ce temps-là” heard in the library (488, 257): “life ran very high in those days” (U 9.733, 14.359). The disparity affects possible trivia when Bloom’s thought “[m]urderer’s ground” is echoed verbatim in “Malachias’s tale” in “Oxen of the Sun” (U 6.476, 14.1037) but changes in Aubert from “[l]a propriété de l’assassin” to “propriété du meurtrier” (130, 511). The Shakespearean echo, “[f]or this relief much thanks”, which Bloom applies to his physical release and which then is quoted again (U 13.939,14.1034), mutates from “[p]our ce service grand merci” to “[p]our ce bon office, grand merci” in Aubert (461, 511). Though the source of the quotation is acknowledged in the text (“In Hamlet, that is” — U 13.940) and the oddity of “much thanks” may alert readers, its duplication has often been overlooked. Translators simply cannot have all resources they need at their erudite fingertips. Goyert uses “[f]ür diese Erlösung vielen Dank” in “Nausicaa” and also “[f]ür diesen Dienst vielen Dank” (421, 466). Similarly, there is no repetition in the Romanian and Hungarian translations. Perhaps the not very salient “grand merci” in the French renderings might still ring a bell, but the key resonance of Milly’s letter to Bloom is lost. “[A]ll the beef to the heels were in”, she writes, which Bloom remembers as “[b]eef to the heel” and which resurfaces through Milly’s new friend, “a skittish heifer, big of her age and beef to the heel” (U 4.402, 13.931, 14.502).16 Aubert’s translation renders it as “et toutes les bouseuses étaient là”, then repeats it as “[l]es poteaux des bouseuse”, but in the episode it has become “une capricieuse génisse, à pattes d’éléphant” (87, 461, 493). There is some irony in the procedural necessity that reduces the passage’s connective vessels and automatically dissects vital “strandentwining cable[s]” in the most biological of the episodes (U 3.37). Internal consistency is not a feature of all translations, especially the earlier ones when recognition of recurrent elements depended on memory alone. 16

The phrase is an Irish saying referring to the ungainly legs of country girls.

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Even major recurrences could be missed, as in “Circe” where Bloom is first seen in distorting mirrors, surrounded by the images of “gallant Nelson”, “Grave Gladstone”, and “truculent Wellington” (U 15.145, 146, 147). Three identical descriptions of him reappear later on in the shape of “Virag truculent”, “Grave Bloom”, and “Henry gallant” (U 15.2491, 2492). These correspondences are preserved by Wollschläger (608, 683), Tortosa (500, 592), and others, and by close attention or chance De Angelis repeats “prode” and “truculento” but inadvertently substitutes “serio” for “grave” (587, 684). Goyert does not preserve them (488, 491), nor does Morel, whose “galant” does not echo “l’héroïque” (426, 482), nor does Claes and Nys’s translation, where not a single adjective is repeated (462, 545). Aubert’s French version has “valeureux” Nelson yet “gallant” Henry, “terrible” Wellington but “truculent” Virag (537, 643). As a result, Ulysses in translation becomes a less self-consciously interrelated artifact.

7

“received, reverbed” (U 9.1026)

There is no guarantee that even the most attentive reader (or professional scholar) could discern every possible internal echo in Ulysses. Moreover, readers might disagree about their significance. Consider, for example, the moment when Bloom imagines what it would mean to be exposed all day to the noise of an organ: the “fellow blowing the bellows” would “want to have wadding or something in his no don’t she cried” (U 11.1200, 1200). The unexpected “no don’t she cried” intrudes on the even flow of an otherwise straightforward sentence. Within the compositional orchestration of “Sirens”, the disruption has echoes of an earlier occurrence: “miss Kennedy … plugged both two ears with little fingers. — No, don’t, she cried” (U 11.129). Almost as expected, “no don’t she cried” replaces “ears” in one more hint about the ruse of Odysseus, who plugged the ears of his companions with wax so that they would not succumb to the Sirens’ charms. It appears that even the syntactic misfit of the interjected item did not put all translators on alert. (For more details see page 127.) This undoubtedly existing but hidden correspondence is often ignored, as in “muss Watte oder sonst was in seinen nein, nein, nicht schrie sie”, which does not, apart from an inevitable “[n]ein”, recall the earlier “[n]ein, nein, rief sie” in Goyert’s translation (324, 291). The doubled negation (“No, no”) was translated almost automatically but not the rest of the phrase by Morel — “il faudrait de l’ouate ou autre chose dans son je ne veux pas cria-t-elle nom de nom d’organon”/“Non, non, pas ça! crie-t-elle” (282, 252) — or Subirat — “debe de tener algodón o algo en su no no lo haga ella gritó”/“No, no me cuentes —

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gritó” (326, 296). De Angelis’s Italian passages are reasonably close — “voleva dei tamponi o qualcosa nel suo no non gridò lei”/“No, oh no, gridò” (390, 349) — but not exact enough to count as a conscious echo. This omission results in an erratic block of text lacking its previous anchorage. Later translators with more organized annotations at their disposal were better able to trace minor correspondences. This shows in Wollschläger’s German — “braucht Watte oder sonst was in seine nein, bloß nicht, schrie sie”, which retains the exact wording of “[n]ein, bloß nicht, schrie sie” (399, 359) — and Tortosa’s Spanish — “necesita ponerse guata o algo en su no no lo haga exclamó ella”/“no no lo hagas exclamó” (331, 297). Skoumal too echoes a preceding “[p]restaň, křikla” with a nearly identical “prestaň, vikřikla” (240, 269). In partial awareness of these issues, Aubert’s “faudrait de la cire ou quelque chose dans ses non je ne veux pas cria-t-elle” goes out of its way to reinforce the Homeric slant by substituting “wax” for a more accurate term “wadding” — “Il faudrait de la cire ou quelque chose dans ses” — but he does not reproduce an echo of “[n]on, fais pas ça cria-t-elle” and instead uses “non je ne veux pas cria-t-elle” (416, 374).

8

Lineage

Some links are gratuitous yet still add to the crossways nature of Joyce’s writing. In the characteristic parallax of “Cyclops”, Mrs. Breen is first described in elevated epic diction — “and with him his lady wife a dame of peerless lineage, fairest of her race” — and then in disparaging caricature: “and the wife hotfoot after him, … trotting like a poodle” (U 12.247, 254). The two parallactic versions clash crudely, a tactic affording inspired scope to translators who, in their own fashion, imaginatively rise to the occasion: Morel with “et le suivait dame son épouse, fleur illustre de sa lignée et parangon de sa race”/“et sa femme sur ses talons, pauvre infortunée créature qui trottait comme un caniche” (292); Aubert with “avec à ses côtés sa femme, une dame du plus haut lignage, la plus belle de sa race”/ “et sa femme sur les talons, cette pauvre infortunée qui le suivait comme un caniche” (372); De Angelis with “e con lui la sua sposa e signora, dama di impareggiabile lignaggio, la piú bella della sua schiatta”/“e la moglie piè veloce dietro a lui, disgraziata lei, a trottare come un cagnolino” (403); Subirat with “y con él su señora eposa, una dama de incomparable linaje, la más hermosa de su raza”/“y la mujer a la carrera detrás de él, desgraciada mujer infortunada trotando como un perro de lanas” (337); Goyert with “und mit ihm war sein Weib, eine Dame von edelster Abstammung, die Schönste war sie ihres Geschlechts”/“und die

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Frau rannte heissfüssig hinter ihm her, unglückliches, elendes Weib, wie ein Pudel rannte sie” (335); Wollschläger with “und mit ihm sein Weib, eine Dame von unvergleichlicher Abstammung, die Schönste ihres Geschlechtes”/“und die Frau gleich haste was kannste hinter ihm, so ein unglückliches jämmerliches Weibsbild, watschelt wie n Dackel” (413); and Claes and Nys with “en hem vergezelde zijne edele vrouwe, een dame van hoogverheven afkomst, de schoonste van haar geslacht”/“en zijn vrouw, die zielige sloor, op een drafje achter hem aan” (317). Idiomatic resourcefulness is given free rein in these passages. Singling out two peripheral echoes, “lineage” and “fairest”, may be overly pedagogical but will illustrate a point. In an earlier view of Mrs. Breen, Bloom noted her shabby appearance and the “[l]ines round her mouth” (U 8.268). The translators do not have much choice: “lines” are “rughe” for De Angelis (214); “rides” for Morel (155); “ridules” for Aubert (200); “arrugas” for Subirat (197); “Falten” for Goyert and Wollschläger (180, 220, respectively); and “rimpels” for Claes and Nys (170). None of these words can possibly link with “lineage” in the sense of descent. Similarly, Bloom notices that a passing woman gave Mrs. Breen “the eye”, and he thinks it “[c]ruel. The unfair sex” (U 8.269). In all the versions — Goyert’s “Das unfaire Geschlecht” (180), Wollschläger’s “Das unschöne Geschlecht” (221), Morel’s “Ce sexe est sans pitié” (155), Aubert’s “Le beau sexe n’est pas toujours joli-joli” (200), De Angelis’s “Sesso non gentile” (214), Subirat’s “El sexo injusto” (197), and Claes and Nys’s “Het niet zo fraaje geslacht” (170) — the “unfair sex” does not inversely foreshadow “fairest of her race”. It would be unjust to insist pedantically on such tenuous correspondences in translations. In languages other than English, lines in the face do not resemble genealogical ones, and there is no equivalent for the semantic spread of “fair”. Minimal damage is done by these limitations, but a few peripheral titillations fall by the wayside. Among these fringe pleasures, so easily lost is the introduction of Mrs. Breen in the epic manner and in the vernacular followed by the malicious laughter of Alf Bergan in two vivid illustrations: “I thought Alf would split” and “And he doubled up” (U 12.255, 259). There is a wide idiomatic range for such physical expressions of laughter in translations: Morel’s “Je pensais qu’Alfred allait crever./Et il se tord de plus belle” (292); Aubert’s “J’ai cru qu’Alf allait en crever./Et le voilà reparti de plus belle” (372); Goyert’s “Ich dachte, Alf würde platzen/Und er lauchte laut auf” (335); Wollschläger’s “Ich denke, Alf geht mir gleich aus den Fugen/Und er krümmte sich vor Lachen” (413); De Angelis’s “Credevo che Alf schiantasse dal ridere./E si piegò in due” (403); Subirat’s “Yo creí que Alf iba a reventar/Y se doblaba en dos” (338); and Claes and Nys’s “Ik dacht dat Alf zich zou bescheuren/En hij lag weer in een deuk” (318).

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A distinct splitting of the two phrases only occurs in the Italian “E si piegò in due”, whether or not the translators noted that Alf Bergan (who is analogous to Denis and Mrs. Breen) does, in fact, split into two: he is “a godlike messenger … radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth” and simple “Little Alf Bergan” (U 12.244, 249). If Alf Bergan did write the libelous postcard with the presumed insult, “U. p: up” (and he is certainly a suspect — U 12.258), he has indeed doubled “up” (“U. p” and “up”). Only Subirat’s Spanish translation can preserve this bit of wordplay in “[y] se doblaba en dos” (338), but there is neither an “up” nor a duplication in the message on the postcard (“ESTAS LISTO” — 192, shortened to “E.L” — 338). Joyce’s writing presents translators with almost insuperable difficulties. How “U. p: up” can be adequately rendered is yet another intricate question. The message itself is not understood by most readers and it has spawned a lot of critical discussion.17 Apart from suggestions of madness, it has sexual and urinal overtones and a cryptic origin. How is something so multiply suggestive, yet so unclear, to be conjured in another language? Often translators must decide on something more specific: Goyert renders “U. p: up” as “PLEM PLEM”, which unmistakably denotes madness (180). Aubert’s French “H.S.: Hors service” is equally clear (200, 398). In either case, “an action would lie” (U 12.1043).

9

“expatiating upon his design” (U 14.667)

Often the only way out of the translator’s difficulties lies in a recourse to footnotes, as in the Italian translation that often appends the explanation of a “gioco di parole”. On occasion, comments can be integrated into the text, often in apposition, which is a common and accepted, sometimes necessary, strategy, especially in translations of nonfiction. Parodic metatextual comments aside, Joyce abstains from narrative glosses. They may, however, help to establish a requisite link and can serve as a last resort in the face of lexical barriers. Consider this difficulty: only in English is “blood” one letter away from “Bloom”, which allows a momentary misidentification: “Bloo …. Me? No. Blood of the Lamb” (U 8.08). It is possible for Aubert to substitute a different

17

In “Cyclops”, a legal expert merely “implies that [Breen] is not compos mentis” (U 12.1043). Critics who have examined the quotation “U. p: up” include William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce (London: Thames and Hudson, 1959), 172, and Robert Martin Adams, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), 192–93.

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misreading — “Sans …. Moi? Non. Sang de l’Agneau” (191) — where the plausible switch depends on the proximity of “[s]ans” to “[s]ang” and the theme at hand is deflected to the religious framework and away from a name and an identity. The price is a heavy one: Bloom does not and cannot possibly read himself into the text. Perceiving our tacit assumptions in a book happens unconsciously and even more so in an intricate network like Ulysses, which we assimilate in our own image. “Blood-Bloom” underscores a readerly parallax, but no translator would reinvent the name of the book’s protagonist by basing it on the native word for “blood” simply in order to drive home one significant, though indirect, point. In a makeshift substitution, Skoumal’s rendering uses a transition from “Bio …. Ja” to “Blooudící obmyje Beránkova krev” where “the wandering one” is washed in the blood of the lamb (142). One might, of course, object that “Bloo …. Me? No. Blood of the Lamb” highlights a subjective interpretation and thus need not be a dominant concern for all translators who may set different priorities. Nevertheless, it is at least a possible implicit meaning of a particular, perhaps crucial, passage. This may be why some translators were understandably reluctant to sacrifice their metalectoral truisms and, therefore, inserted an explanatory note (or a reference to the original): Morel in “Bloo … Moi? Non. Blood, sang. Sang de L’Agneau” (147); De Angelis in “Bloo … Me? No. Blood, sangue dell’Agnello” (204); and Valverde in “Bloo …. Yo? No. Blood of the Lamb, sangre del Cordero” (267).18 Similar difficulties emerge with the last sound heard of Stephen’s departure in “Ithaca”: on “the resonant lane” is a mysterious “double vibration of a jew’s harp” (U 17.1244). There may be a thematic connection to a “HARP EOLIAN” in the newspaper episode (U 7.370), a Greek harp balancing a Jewish one. In “Aeolus”, a piece of dental floss is analogously elevated to classical dimensions, and resonance itself is highlighted (“resonant unwashed teeth” — U 7.372). The instrument’s name, “jew’s harp”, seems to be exclusively English (a derivation from “jaw’s harp” has been suggested). In German, the instrument is known as a “Maultrommel”, in French, a “jumelles de guimbarde”, as used by Morel (629), and, in Italian, a “scacciapensieri”. The coincidental Jewish element is likely to evaporate in translation, but a literal one can preserve it, such as Boisen’s “en jødeharpes toner” (631) or De Angelis’s “un ‘arpa ebraica’” (916). The three Spanish translations settle for, in Subirat and Tortosa, “arpa de un judío” (727, 809, respectively) and, in Valverde, “arpa de judío” (354). Clearly, an important motif like the word “jew” was not to be relinquished. Such a consideration may have induced the second French Ulysse to use an embedded 18

Some Japanese translations feature explanatory parentheses within (and are thereby part of) the text.

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footnote: Aubert’s “la double vibration d’une gimbarde, dit aussi harpe juive” (872). This spells out a semantic double reverberation. Such explanatory notes are a last resort, however, and are applied rarely and with discretion. Beneficial nudges, after all, may border on interpretation. In the “Hades” episode, Bloom walks among gravestones and reads the inscriptions. A simple, concise “Old Dr Murren’s” (U 6.942) seems to denote Bloom reading a name on a grave that he passes, but it could also mean — though it is less likely — that for some reason he remembers the doctor or, as Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman’s Annotations suggest, that the preceding comment, “[e]ntered into rest [as] the protestants put it” (U 6.942), is attributed to Dr. Murren.19 A translation may decide this for us with supplementary emphasis: Aubert’s “[l]à, c’est la tombe du vieux Dr Murren” (146). Translators’ (inevitable) decisions thus often conceal potential alternatives of meaning from their readers. In “Nausicaa”, Gerty MacDowell “was about to retort but something checked the words on her tongue” (U 13.123). By an extension, the vague “something” can be given a specific meaning: Aubert uses, “Elle avait été sur le point de répliquer mais un ultime réflexe de prudence avait retenu les mots au bord de ses lèvres” (432). In a similar vein, a relatively simple sentence — “Cissy … wanted [the baby] to sit up properly and say pa pa pa” (U 13.393) — is internally explained. “Sitting up” is understood by Aubert as being conducive to better articulation: “Cissy … s’apprêta à l’asseoir correctement pour lui permettre de mieux articuler les syllables” (442).

10

“The difficulties of interpretation” (U 17.343)

Translation is inevitably based on preliminary interpretation: one must determine beforehand what a passage “means” even if “meaning” can never be defined. The question then becomes: which one of multiple interpretations is to be preferred? The difficulty frequently is in flaws of articulation, but for many translators these may not be considered important enough to warrant extra (and often forced) exertions. The opportunity of finding yet another neglected aspect of a text that should ideally be recreated in translation is all too inviting (and cheap). Take, for instance, the length of the words, the consistency, the exact word order, specific local references, and remote nuances, in infinite regress. Decisions in translation have to be based on priorities: what is considered of greater significance and what may legitimately be passed by. 19

See Don Gifford, with Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, rev. ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 123.

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Since subjective opinions guide any selection of priorities, the tables may be turned, and translations can be used to discern underlying interpretations. Any departure from an original — a different emphasis, a missed allusion, or a downright misunderstanding — may serve as a subsidiary portal of discovery. It points towards features in the text that we might otherwise not have sensed. In this light, some of my preceding comparisons were attempts to unveil marginal shades of meanings. In comparing the compact phrase “Gerty smiled assent and bit her lip” (U 13.360) to Morel’s “Gertie eut un sourire d’assentiment et se mordit la lèvre” (349), Aubert’s “Gerty acquiesça avec un sourire et se mordilla la lèvre” (441), De Angelis’s “Gerty sorrise assentendo e si morse un labbro” (480), Tortosa’s “Gerty asintió con una sonrisa y se mordió el labio” (408), Antônio Houaiss’s “Gerty sorriu assentindo e mordiscou o próprio làbio”,20 Goyert’s “Gerty lächelte zustimmend und biss sich auf die Lippe” (400), and Claes and Nys’s “Gerty glimlachte instemmend en beet zich op de lippen” (377), one may be vaguely dissatisfied with the correct near-equivalents and then perhaps appreciate more fully the specific qualities of Joyce’s sentence whether they can be articulated or not. Is the original more tightly constructed? Closed syllables or unvoiced dental and labial plosives (the words “bit … lip” are almost phonetic inversions) seem to imitate the act described — language simulating what it expresses, an effect that terminal vowels in many languages prevent. Is it the unusual transitive use of “smile” that is replaced by participles or adverbials?21 Seen against the available translations, the whatness of Joyce’s own wording can be inspected in a more distinct profile: “You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing”, as Stephen Dedalus puts it in his aesthetic sermon (P 213). Translations may polish observant lenses and sharpen our view precisely through their intrinsic shortcomings. 20 21

Ulisses, trans. Antonio Houaiss (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilizagao Brasileira, 1966), 404. One famous predecessor of the phrase is the “[s]ardonic smile” in the Odyssey that also appears in a strange and unique construction. When a footstool is thrown at Odysseus and he dodges it, “he smiled a grim and bitter smile” (“meidese … sardanian …” Od. 20.301–02). This forced and ominous smile has attracted a great deal of comment. The adjective “sardo- nios” (turned into a noun) has been connected to a verb meaning “to grin” and also with an acrid herb that produces a convulsive grimace. Gerty’s smile is even more complex because she puts on a show of assenting. The common expression “to bite one’s lips” derives from a phrase in the Odyssey, “odax [biting with the teeth] en cheilesi [lips]”, which occurs several times (1.381, 20.268, and in passing).

Chapter 10

The Joyce of Side Effects One convenient way of accounting for Joycean idiosyncrasies or departures from supposed norms would be to apply a mandatory warning from the pharmaceutical industry about “side effects”. According to dictionaries, a “side effect” is “a secondary and sometimes adverse effect”, or “an effect of a drug other than the one it was administered to evoke”. By definition, it is something unwanted but almost inevitable, a collateral hazard. Joyce’s works go in the opposite direction — side effects are not a hazard or a danger, but a gain, often another dimension, and definitely part of the design. Some such effects may well annoy readers (as in arguments against the dizzying confusion of Finnegans Wake) — possibly Joyce was overdoing it — but on the whole the fringe resonances are experienced as invigorating and, in fact, can document what sets Joyce off from other writers in quality and in degree. The shortest and tritest formula is simply that there is always something more, and often something unforeseen, in Joyce.1 Many Joycean peculiarities can therefore be subsumed under the comprehensive term “side effect” — a new term, without new original insights, for familiar features. Joyce will be illustrated in terms of side effects, as a common denominator from a particular angle. The almost self-evident point could be made by a simple bow to symbols or Symbolism, with which Joyce has always been connected. For a while, reading Joyce seemed to consist in indiscriminate symbol-hunting; interpretation was finding and explaining them. Unavoidably, Joyce is symbolic and, as usual, more so than other writers. He raised the issue and initiated the game in “The Dead” when Gabriel looks at his wife: “There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something”, and he asks himself: “what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of?” (D 210). Everything can be a symbol of something else, a cracked lookingglass “a symbol of Irish art” (U 1.146). What is X — the snow in “The Dead”, a shaving bowl, or Macintosh in Ulysses, etc., ad infinitum — a symbol of has been a constant question that led to insightful as well as singularly fatuous answers. A symbol is something thrown (“bol-”) together (“syn-”); it adds something else. Finnegans Wake

1 Not always. Some of the works — Chamber Music, Stephen Hero, or Exiles — seem relatively devoid of the features that will be paraded.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_011

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is the book that throws most meanings together. Symbols or side effects are instances of something-else-ness thrown in for free, to take or leave. The angle used here for partly familiar features can serve as a general introduction to Joyce, or as a repetition course; it is nothing but yet another parallactic term considered useful. Some extravagancies2 are external and seem to be unique to Joyce, quite apart from the disproportionate attention his work attracts academically, in the number of studies, classes, dissertations, conferences, symposia, summer schools. Such lateral effects reach beyond the confines of Literature. Countless humans who may rarely touch a book have been exposed to rituals like the “Bloomsday” antics as they are engaged in all over the globe to celebrate a day that an author has invented, with events which never took place, and in one way they are nothing other than a combination of letters in words — a calendar side effect or a joco-serious carnival. Not every author, no matter how renowned, has increased the sale, perhaps also the price, of soap, as in Dublin’s artificially surviving chemist shop, Sweny’s in Lincoln Place, where souvenir lemon soaps are sold on the tenuous basis that Leopold Bloom — an entirely fictitious person who never lived — bought some, and not even the self-same brand (the one in the novel is no longer available). These are side actions.

1

Titles and Schemas

Some of Joyce’s titles depart from conventions. One book — novel, epic? — is called “Ulysses” but it does not contain anyone active of this name.3 The name of the Greek mythological hero — or rather, one of his several names — directs attention to classical antiquity; it is a marginal impact that may be felt as energizing, resonant, superfluous, overelaborated, or irritating. The optional guide-post potentially turns the book into a cultural translation. The title of a collection of poems, “Pomes Penyeach”, consists of two entities that are not, but come suggestively close to, English words and deprive the title of stability.

2 An “overload of your extravagance” is attributed to Shem as an implied co-author of Ulysses in Finnegans Wake (193.1). 3 Is the title name “Ulysses” simply the common English form for the mythological hero Odysseus, or is it perhaps already functioning as one stage of transformation in a transformative epic? The Greek name was Odys(s)eus, the Latin one Ulixes, and the hybrid form Ulysses is one of several transitional variants. W.H. Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1897–1902), “Odysseus”, 646–51.

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The oddity of the combination “Finnegans Wake” manifests itself in the frequent insertion of an officious apostrophe that is generally added by an almost mechanical reflex. Its lack offers an alternative syntactic structure, a noun or name followed by an inflected verb, quite apart from a gratuitous meaning of “wake” as water stirred. Side effects are stirring or blurring. Then there are the spectral Homeric episode titles in Ulysses that are not and never were part of the book itself. They now belong to its aura. Joyce used them privately in his conversation and correspondence and they have since accompanied the book as opportune signposts that highlight the striking individuality of the episodes. That famous “Schema” that Joyce supplied to a few select readers and that are included in the paraphernalia of various editions are also not part of the book. It consists of eighteen rows for each episode, and in its columns, it lists those extraneous titles, the place and time of the actions, but also — and these are literally and spatially side by side effects — headings like “Organ”, “Art”, “Colour”, “Symbol”, and “Technic”, as well as Homeric correspondences. They are marginal enlightening expansions of unequal pertinence, optional extras. Scholars have naturally proposed different categorizations, alongside the authoritative ones in the classical tradition. In his Ulysses for Us, Declan Kiberd supplies different thumbnail titles, live experiences, and emphatically nonacademic headings in an effort to stress the humane aspects of the book: “Waking, Learning, Thinking, Walking, Praying, Dying, Reporting, Eating, Reading, Wandering, Singing, Drinking, Ogling, Birthing, Dreaming, Parenting, Teaching, Loving”.4 It is a strange oddity that the Homeric tags are transplanted into Finnegans Wake, where they take up a separate paragraph: Ukalepe. Loathers’ leave. Had days. Nemo in Patria. The Luncher Out. Skilly and Carubdish. A Wondering Wreck. From the Mermaids’ Tavern. Bullyfamous. Naughtsycalves. Mother of Misery. Walpurgas Nackt. (FW 228.12). It is worth considering that those are Wakean approximations of titles that are not to be found in Ulysses but are retrieved from its scholarly environs. The structure is a hybrid accumulation forced into a pattern. The links to the Homeric chapter titles vary — some are phonetic, others thematic, a few

4 Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (New York, London: Norton, 2009), vii.

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cunningly unite both: “Bullyfamous” combines the Greek name Polyphemos with a characteristic of the Kyklops who was a bully of some reputation; “Naughtsycalves” illustrates Nausikaa with her equivalent Gerty MacDowell naughtily revealing her calves. “Walpurgas Nackt” takes a far more circuitous route: Joyce’s “Circe” chapter was compared to Goethe’s equally fantastic “Walpurgisnacht” in his drama Faust, a kind of witches’ night in German folklore. Against such direct or refracted correspondences, some items are less obvious to accommodate. “Ukalepe” will not immediately be seen as a distortion of “Calypso”, but only in hindsight, and it still leaves a lot unaccounted for; “Nemo in Patria” might be more appropriate for “Cyclops”, but its relevance to “Aeolus” needs considerable elaboration. Some items are patently off centre, with side effects that have not yet been revealed. On many occasions, and increasingly so, Ulysses comments on itself and flaunts its own internal composition. Towards the end of the “Ithaca” section, it supplies parenthetical labels and notable side effects of its twelve central episodes, taken predominantly from the Old Testament (emphasized in bold for the sake of demonstration): What past consecutive causes, before rising preapprehended, of accumulated fatigue did Bloom, before rising, silently recapitulate? The preparation of breakfast (burnt offering): intestinal congestion and premeditative defecation (holy of holies): the bath (rite of John): the funeral (rite of Samuel): the advertisement of Alexander Keyes (Urim and Thummim): the unsubstantial lunch (rite of Melchisedek): the visit to museum and national library (holy place): the bookhunt along Bedford row, Merchants’ Arch, Wellington Quay (Simchath Torah): the music in the Ormond Hotel (Shira Shirim): the altercation with a truculent troglodyte in Bernard Kiernan’s premises (holocaust): a blank period of time including a car drive, a visit to a house of mourning, a leavetaking (wilderness): the eroticism produced by feminine exhibitionism (rite of Onan): the prolonged delivery of Mrs Mina Purefoy (heave offering): the visit to the disorderly house of Mrs Bella Cohen, 82 Tyrone street, lower and subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver street (Armageddon): nocturnal perambulation to and from the cabman’s shelter, Butt Bridge (atonement). (U 17.2041, emphasis added) Joyce inserted the parentheses fairly late on the page proofs, on 27 January 1922, that is, one week before publication (JJA 27:203), and so added an alternative schema, in terms of Biblical, not Homeric, resonance, as though to indicate other possible layers of coordination. The list even contains a meta-

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comment: “a blank period of time…” refers beyond the book’s events to its structure — one major occurrence, Bloom’s visit to the Dignam family, is not part of the narrative, resulting in a time gap between “Cyclops” (between 5 and 6 p.m.) and “Nausicaa”, which sets off around 8 p.m. Some side effects are visually present, as in chapter II.2 of Finnegans Wake, where the main central text is flanked by marginalia (side areas by definition) in respectively frivolous italics, on the left, and pompous capitals, on the right, with erratic footnotes at the bottom. How entirely spatial the arrangement is becomes manifest at the moment when the text is being read aloud. What should be read first, the main text, but then which one of the marginalia? How do side effects fit into the main stream?5

2

Minute Tangents / Stumbling Blocks

At almost every step, Joyce invites and at times almost compels us to move sideways, away from the main direction. This happens illustratively at the very beginning of the first paragraph of the first story in Dubliners, “The Sisters”, where attention is turned away from things or acts toward the words that express them: Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. (D 9) Strange words move into focus: they are of foreign origin, not generally known, and marked by italics; they are paired with such odd collocations as “the Euclid”. The first name in the book is preceded by an article which can be explained as a school usage when classical books were referred to in this manner.6 What readers may be ignorant of becomes a matter for annotations, which by definition takes care of extra features. Few readers would know, off

5 It might make sense to treat the right-hand marginal words — in capital letters and always at the beginning of a paragraph — as titles and read them first. But at what point exactly should the left-hand comments be voiced? Forward and sideways progressing has to be coordinated. The horizontal arrangement must be transformed into some sequence. The footnotes would logically come last. 6 The geometer’s Greek name “Eukleides” in itself would combine “good” (“eu”) with “kleis, kleid-” with potential ironic reverberations for an author who tends to withhold keys and leaves their inventions to critics.

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hand, that Euclid’s Elements of Geometry defines a “gnomon” as “the part of a parallelogram which remains when a similar parallelogram is taken away from one of its corners” (Scholes 463). This description of a defect (something is missing) has been fruitful for characterizing the story (a brother priest has died, his two sisters are left behind), the whole collection, and Joyce in general, for his works expose variant deficiencies (Finnegans Wake is full of incomplete passages and spelling mistakes).7 According to the purposes or whims of an annotator, things can be carried even further sideways. The Greek “gnomon” is based on a root for knowing, “gnô-”, first meaning someone who knows or judges. Later, it acquired many subsidiary meanings, including the geometrical one. It may be significant — or the idle concern of a commentator — that a highlighted word right at the outset suggests defective knowledge, a very human state of mind that is perpetually in focus and, beyond that, affects us as Joyce’s readers. More tangential meanings occur in the story when the boy narrator refers to Mr Cotter: Tiresome old fool! When we knew him first he used to be rather interesting, talking of faints and worms; but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories about the distillery. (D 10) Here the words in question are not outstandingly foreign but homely common ones in appearance, but they in turn require clarification since few readers will recognize them as technical distillery terms: “faints” are impure spirits which arise during distillation and “worms” long spiral tubes in which vapor is condensed. In this case, the side effects reside in the almost inevitable associations of those words in their everyday meanings: in a story about a death, overtones of worms are appropriate, as is the notion of fainting. Every ambiguity, play on words, or mistake supplements something to the main drift: the well-known example “rheumatic wheels” (D 17) contains its tacit correction. When one of the sisters remarks, “And then his life was, you might say, crossed” (D 17), an implicit Christian shadow hovers hauntingly over the innocent statement.

7 It may be overlooked that a gnomon could equally be constructed by adding a smaller parallelogram to a bigger one and that Joyce could equally well be characterized by additions, augmentation, expansion (as genetic studies document ad libitum). In fact, the three foreign terms (paralysis, gnomon, simony) were added by Joyce in a revision.

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Chapter 10

Outgrowths

Some lateral extensions are visually prominent, like the titles in “Aeolus” that lend a semblance to newspaper headlines and are the first strident departure from the initial stylistic representation of the previous episodes. They protrude as separate entities and are set off from the rest of the text, generally in capital letters. Joyce inserted them in the course of revisions and they significantly change the range of the episode by transcending into new territory: they are outside the consciousness of the characters. Moreover, they undergo an evolution from relative straight information to increasing playfulness and autonomous frolicking. Some are puzzling, true to the nature of headlines to arouse curiosity but, not to give the story away, they become more perplexing in their relation to the text they introduce. What is a first-time reader to make of the so far longest headline? SOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP. (U 7.1035) In this hybrid cluster, there is a diversion into classical Greece and an incongruous mixture of registers; learned diction clashes with the zoological “proboscis” (which some readers have to look up: the mobile long nose of mammals like elephants or monkeys, not complimentary when applied to a woman), a Biblical gnashing of teeth (Matt. 8:12, etc.) has shifted to dentistry; literary diction is interspersed with an abbreviation like “champ”. At a first go, “PEN” — following after “pen behind his ear” (U 7.34), “That was a pen” (U 7.63), and in particular “THE CROZIER AND THE PEN” (U 7.61) — is not automatically determinable.8 There are, at a basic level, plenty of additional disturbances. Clarification lags behind. The headline twists the remarks of the classical scholar MacHugh: “— You remind me of Antisthenes … a disciple of Gorgias, the sophist. … he wrote a book in which he took away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope” (U 7.1035). Haughty Helen, the most beautiful woman in antiquity, receives a colloquial but figurative beating. In classical Greek, Penelope would never have been shortened to “Pen”. The rivalry is treated as a primeval beauty contest between Sparta (Helen’s home) and

8 Apart from readers on record who see significance in the closeness of “PEN” and “IS”.

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Ithaca, where aging Penelope waited patiently, with nationalist identifications. (Of course, there was such a beauty contest in Greek myth, when Paris of Troy had to award the palm of beauty to Hera, Athene, or Aphrodite, and was bribed with Argive Helen, who thus became the “prix de Paris”, U 5.302, 3.483). All in all, an omnium gatherum of unruly deviousness. Robert Martin Adams has found out that there is no evidence that Antisthenes preferred Penelope to Helen in a book of which only the title is known (“Helena and Penelope”),9 which adds another side effect. The most elaborate and ornate headline is based on nothing more than individual speculation. Stephen will later select this bit of misinformation in yet another distortion: “— Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty from Kyrios Menelaus’ brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope” (U 9.621). Animal side effects have proliferated, Helen, not famous for breeding, has become a “brooddam” as well as a mare — the Trojan horse is conflated with her implied promiscuity.

4

Interpolations

In contrast to the typographically distinct headlines in “Aeolus”, the spatial interpolations in “Wandering Rocks” do not visibly differ from their context and so may remain unnoticed. This particular feature consists of passages lifted from one location into another so as to signal simultaneous occurrences. They are geographical and spatial side effects; readers are taken elsewhere. Many such inserts are manifest. A remark by Haines on Stephen Dedalus that “Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance” is juxtaposed, without any explicit mark, with The onelegged sailor growled at area of 14 Nelson street: — England expects … (U 10.1061) With only one leg and crutches, it is harder for the sailor to keep his balance. An additional connection is supplied by Buck Mulligan: “— You should see him [Stephen Dedalus] when his body loses its balance” — mental recalls physical balance. That the sailor’s song happens to be “The Death of Nelson” and is momentarily heard in Nelson Street is yet another, albeit minor, twist. 9 Robert Martin Adams, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 37.

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On the other hand, a reader unfamiliar with Dublin cannot tell whether the paragraph Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c, in silk hat, slate frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots, walking with grave deportment most respectfully took the curbstone as he passed lady Maxwell at the corner of Dignam’s court. (U 10.55) is within the range of Father Conmee’s perception, as all encounters or observations so far have been. As any map can tell, Dignam’s Court is in another place, some distance away, so that the paragraph suggests a scene elsewhere at the same time and is in fact an interpolation. But “H. E. L. Y’S filed before him [Boylan], tallwhitehatted, past Tangier lane …” (U 10.310) is not because the lane can be seen from Thornton’s fruit shop (U 10.299). Knowledge of Dublin is a side requirement. Interpolations that indicate “elsewhereness” are carried into the next chapter, “Sirens”, where a sad remark made in the Ormond Hotel (“— It’s them has the fine times”) is followed by a sweep to the other side of the river, to Bloom, unseen by the barmaids in the Ormond Hotel: A man. Bloowho went by Moulang’s pipes bearing in his breast the sweets of sin, by Wine’s antiques, in memory bearing sweet sinful words, by Carroll’s dusky battered plate, for Raoul. (U 11.85) The “Sirens” episode in its own way keeps track of what the various persons do, mainly within the relatively narrow range of locations within the hotel, the bar, the saloon, and the dining room, but also extending to the streets outside. The interpolations in “Cyclops”, also referred to as “Asides”, are less spatial or temporal than thematic. They interrupt the main personal narration and imaginatively distort scene or action into a travesty, with a complete change of tone and style, often in mock-elevation. Cyclopean interpolations vary in scope, mood, register, and in their relation to the main text. Some are pure imaginative digressions, while others also carry the action forward, as when drinks are ordered and paid for (U 12.279). Some are brief asides: Who comes through Michan’s land, bedight in sable armor? O’Bloom, the son of Rory: it is he. Impervious to fear is Rory: he of the prudent soul. (U 12.215)

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At the first mention of Bloom, he is described in an Irish transposition, he is Hibernicized patronymically to O’Bloom, his father’s name Rudolph in turn becomes “Rory” (analogous to “Rory of the hill”, U 12.134). Bloom (“Ireland. I was born here”, U 12.1431) will later be maligned and threatened as an unwanted foreigner. There seems to be a slip from son to father as well: Rory, not Bloom, is said to be impervious to fear, but Bloom has just been called “the prudent member” (U 12.211). Incongruity prevails, and “prudent” is misapplied anyway: in his “Cyclops” adventure, Bloom deviates from his customary cautious and non-partisan attitude and is untypically provocative, in fact almost asking for trouble.10 Some Cyclopean interpolations seem to take casual words at face value and enlarge them into gigantic fabrications. A remark that someone who claims to have met the late Patrick Dignam must have seen a ghost results in a tangential evocation of an imagined séance where the ghost of the defunct is interrogated with appropriate occult paraphernalia (U 12.338–74). Purified spirits, already higher on a rising scale, are described as enjoying “every modern home comfort such as tâlâfânâ, âlâvâtâr, hâtâkâldâ, wâtâklâsât” (U 12.384). The spelling with long Sanskrit “â”s in the manner of the mainly Indian theosophical terminology adds another ironic twist. Sanskrit, the oldest recorded Indo-European language, is applied to the latest technical achievements, to “modern” home comfort (this is the first use of “modern” in an archetypal “Modernist” text). Similarly, a remark that merely accompanies the arrival of some drinks (“God bless all here is my prayer”) is taken up in all seriousness and it initiates a ceremonial ecclesiastical Benediction involving a gigantic catalogue of saints and their accoutrements, ending in Latin: “And at the sound of the sacring bell … per Christum Dominum nostrum” — all in all 472 words, the second longest insertion in the episode, out of all realistic proportion (U 12.1673–1751). Some real saints, “… S. Martin of Todi and S. Martin of Tours and S. Alfred and S. Joseph and S. Denis S. Cornelius and S. Leopold and S. Bernard and S. Terence and S. Edward”, double with patrons of the pub; S. Martin of Tours — who shares his place of origin with Bloom, Szombathely in Hungary — then retrospectively includes Martin Cunningham. Even the fierce dog Garryowen is elevated to “S. Owen Caniculus”. In a multiplication of side effects, some fictional characters bless themselves. In an episode where odd, wrong, or

10

This is in accordance with Odysseus who, against his self-control, blurts out his name to the blind Polyphemos and thereby incites the potent wrath of Poseidon, father of the Kyklops (Od. 9.502ff).

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hidden names are thematically suggestive, the acts of naming are sanctified: “S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S. Synonymous”. Lateral proliferation is carried to strange limits. As it happens, the name of Odysseus itself is literally “eponymous”. His grandfather Autolykos advocates it: “toi d’Odysseus onom’ estô epônymon”: “therefore let the name by which the child is named [epônymos] be Odysseus” (Od. 19.409). The term “epônymos” has been defined as “a name given on account of some particular circumstance”. The “Cyclops” episode is manifestly eponymous, as well as partly anonymous; it abounds in false names (“Pseudonymous”); it plays with homonyms (above all “I”, “eye”, and “aye”) and paronyms, literally “side-names”. The episode reflects on its own thematic concerns. All in all, “Cyclops” in its own manner features variant departures from the main narrative direction.

5

Not Thrown Away

If ever a side effect was instituted, it is the well-known and potent “Throwaway” entanglement, based on the misconception of a horse racing fanatic who suspects a tip behind Bloom’s casual remark, that he was going to “throw away” a newspaper. The error will seriously affect Bloom and worsen his situation in a pub later on when he is imagined to have won a substantial sum by betting on a horse named Throwaway, whose existence he was as unaware of, and the readers along with him, until the misunderstanding is clarified only in retrospect — if at all. When Bloom later remembers how “… that half-baked Lyons ran off at a tangent in his impetuosity to get left” (U 16.1290), he cannot know that the whole Throwaway complex does in fact amount to a “tangent” — something diverging from a main line that takes on a separate significance. The issue is further complicated by a handbill put into Bloom’s hands that is also called a “throwaway”; it announces the advent of the prophet Elijah (U 8.6–15) and saddles Bloom with yet another figurative role. That an actual horse named Throwaway (descended from “RightawayThrale”, U 16.1278) won the Ascot Gold Cup of 16 June 1904, against a favourite named “Sceptre” plays into the ecological concerns of Ulysses where nothing is ever thrown away for good. Finnegans Wake is even more based on the recycling of themes and cultural debris. Like so much in Joyce, the “Throwaway” ramifications could be subsumed under the heading of “Parallax”. It demonstrates the divergent view of a

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racing fanatic who assimilates everything to his narrow perspective, along with the assumption of a biased Lenehan that Bloom is cagey and secretive. “Parallax”, an apparent dislocation, is literally an alteration (allaxis) alongside (para-). Most Greek composites based on “para-” stress side effects and could be enlisted in the present arguments: a “Parable” (like the Parable of the Plums, U 7.1057) invites interpretation in accordance with the New Testament; a “paradox” (“side-opinion”) indicates something contradictory, often to common sense (“Wilde and his paradoxes”), “paraheliotropic” (U 17.14, 45), “paranymphs” (U 14.354), “the initial paraphenomena” of early morning are noises and sights (U 17.1264), etc., and especially “parody”. Most of Joyce is somehow para. Every parody, from Buck Mulligan’s irreverent playacting to whole sections or episodes, is based on something pre-existing that happens alongside the text at hand. A “parody” is literally a song (ôidê) sung beside (para) and so a side effect by definition; it adds a variation to an original. In this light, “Oxen of the Sun” becomes the most side-effectual part in Ulysses, it moves on two time scales and doubles as an anthology of literary styles and periods. The What of the story is at times nearly occluded by the How of its presentation. Much of the “Oxen” chapter demands back translations into contemporary English, “levin” into “lightning”, “welkin” into “sky”, or “rood” into “cross”. The actual events or dialogues have to be extricated from the prevalent period disguise. The process is reversed in the so-called Coda, the final paragraphs that change from written imitations to an apparent record of spoken impromptu utterances of inspired speakers who meticulously abstain from direct statements in favour of jocular circumlocutions. In its own way, the Coda is based on secondary effects where understanding often amounts to guesswork. “Where the Henry Nevil’s sawbones and ole clo?” (U 14.1442) remains opaque until “sawbones” is glossed as a term for a doctor and readers remember — or commentators tell them — that Leopold Bloom once hawked old clothes. Irrespective of whether there ever was someone named Henry Nevil(le) or not, the main drift of “Where the Henry Nevil’s” has been recognized a rhyming slang for “where the devil”. Nothing is quite what it seems on the surface. Understanding amounts to transforming.

6

“All Intents and Purposes”

The prose of the “Eumaeus” episode — “sinewless and wobbly” (U 16.1724) — presents a special case of insidious effects almost in the pharmacological

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sense: its persuasive unpremeditated gaucheness appears like the result of misguided ambitions, by aiming narratively too high and constantly missing some vague mark. It manifests itself in jarring discordant associations and the nicely calibrated wrongness of its minutiae. Lingering repetitions are characteristic — “… observing that the point was the least conspicuous point about it” (U 16.819); “a levelheaded individual who could give points to not a few in point of shrewd observation” (U 16.219); “as it struck him, the two identical names, as a striking coincidence” (U 16.1775). It abounds in tautologies like “repeated again” (U 16.279) and uneasy clashes like “put a good face on the matter and foot it” (U 16.32), “… following in the footsteps of the head of state” (U 16.1200), “landed in deep water” (U 16.1191), and “genuine forgeries” (U 16.781). Above all, it concocts inappropriately extended metaphors: “the acme of first class music literally knocking everything into a cocked hat” (U 16.1739), where the inherent absurdity is underlined by a characteristic “literally”. A phrase like “for/to all intents and purposes”, which occurs three times, and only in “Eumaeus” (U 16.214, 931, 1721), looks particularly devoid of either semantic intent or purpose. The old joke — “open thy mouth and put thy foot in it” (U 16.1269) — is elevated to a stylistic code that leads to inadvertent unsettling vibrations. They add to the nervous capricious energy of the episode or, as Vike Plock puts it from a different perspective: “it is precisely this stylistic incompetence” (which may have neurological causes) “that creates a self-conscious script, which, in turn, establishes new synaptic connections between the text and the reader”.11 Its stylistic anticipation in “Oxen of the Sun” is a side effect in the context of imitations of literary precedents. It is interposed between the manners of Landor (U 14.1110–73) and Macaulay (U 14.1198–1222) and discordantly outside the sequence of the established English prose styles characteristic of the episode, and therefore a narrative disruption: However, as a matter of fact though, the preposterous surmise about him being in some description of a doldrums or other or mesmerised which was entirely due to a misconception of the shallowest character, was not the case at all … (U 14.1174).

11

Vike Martina Plock, “‘Nerves Overstrung’: Neuroscience and Ergography in ‘Eumaeus.’” Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity, Florida James Joyce Series (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 109. The article offers its own characterization of “the mosaic of lexical dissonances” (106–7).

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There is the same discomfiture, unbalanced clumsiness, and a sense of phrases not being downright wrong, but certainly not impeccably right.12 The paragraph stands outside, or alongside, the main direction of the chapter.

7

Quotations

Every quotation is something external, plugged in as a tangential link. In the congested Library episode — which gives the impression of being all déjà vu — Buck Mulligan and Stephen walk down the stairs: “The curving balustrade: smoothsliding Mincius” (U 9.1124) is probably Stephen’s association. The library’s smooth curving balustrades were presumably used by students for sliding down, and those steeped in the literary tradition might well have jokingly paraded Milton’s reference to “smooth-sliding Mincius”, an ancient river, from “Lycidas” (line 86), a poem surfacing already in “Nestor” and elsewhere. Behind a Buck Mulligan type of student joke, a concatenation of echoes leads to Milton and ultimately to Virgil, who describes the river Mincius in his Eclogues (VII.12). Apart from that, the quote is also a comment on the semantic reach of the verb “slide”. Some quotations are distorted. Stephen Dedalus in his conjectures on Shakespeare in the Library is ostentatiously allusive: — A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not for nothing was he a butcher’s son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palms. (U 9.131) On scanty evidence, he makes Shakespeare a butcher’s son, “wielding” a tool of the trade that Bloom has been thinking of in sympathy for the “[w]retched brutes there at the cattle market waiting for the poleaxe to split their skulls open” (U 8.723). But Stephen has cleverly alienated the word from a line describing the dead King Hamlet’s ghost, as it is recognized by Horatio who observes: So frowned he once when in an angry parle He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice. (Hamlet 1.11.62) The Polacks were attacking on sleds, and one variant in the spelling of the nationality is “poleaxe” (an orthographical side effect). Stephen cunningly 12

One may wonder for example if “a surmise” may be “not the case at all”, and what exactly is “in some description of a doldrums”.

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deflects the textual variant — in seeming disregard of whether his small audience would pick up the hidden echo and irrespective of whether “the sledded poleaxe” makes autonomous sense. The sleight of voice is resumed when the Polish representative of a foreign delegation in one of the Cyclopean interpolations is named “Pan Poleaxe Paddyrisky”13 of hybrid descent (U 12. 565).

8

Eutrapelia

The substitution of words in familiar dicta is an old device. It can happen inadvertently and by failing memory, as when Bloom misquotes “Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit / Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth” for “a certain term to walk the night” (U 8.63, Hamlet 1.5. 9–10). In Finnegans Wake, there is the trace of an Irish actor who botched Shakespeare’s famous line from Othello (3.3.165) to read: “O! beware of jealousy, my lord, it is the green-eyed lobster” (in place of “monster”).14 This may have survived in Dublin memory for Joyce to conjure up: “he’d be the greeneyed lobster”, with a further echo in “the greeneyed mister” (FW 249.2, 88.15). But most comic or deflating effects are intentional witticisms. The device is as old as tradition, and even goes back to how Homer’s epics were already treated irreverently. There is nothing new under the literary sun. Already in antiquity, the famous first line of the Odyssey Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polytropon, … (Od. 1.1) [The] man tell me, Muse, [who is] “much-turned” was given a culinary twist by a change of two words: Deipna moi ennepe, Mousa, polytropha, … “Man” is turned into “deipna” (meals), and “much-turned” into “polytropha” (“of much food”). As it happens, Liddell and Scott render the meaning of the adjective as also “plump and well-fed”,15 which Joyce may never have known

13 14 15

This faintly reverberates in Finnegans Wake where “Puddyrick” and “it would poleaxe your sonson’s grandson utterly” appear in proximity (FW 53.30–33). Samuel A. Ossory Fitzpatrick, Dublin: A Historical and Topographical Account of the City (London: Methuen, 1907) 249. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940).

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of when he supplied “plump” Buck Mulligan with a “wellfed voice” (U 1. 107). Some side effects are naturally due to coincidences. In Ulysses, Buck Mulligan introduces such humorous twists (and so does, almost compulsively, the ubiquitous Lenehan), many of which have the air of previous recirculation. A man of many turns, he readapts a Biblical quotation by declaiming, “wellnigh with sorrow”: “And going forth he met Butterly” (U 1.527), when no person of such name is within sight. The phrase, as readers of long ago would have identified at once, is patterned on the Biblical quote when Peter, having denied Jesus three times, is caught out: “Going forth, he wept bitterly” (Matt. 26:75). Through a few adjustments, an act is replaced by a wholly different one (alongside) and an adverb changed into a person; a serious event is mockingly trivialized. The twist adds pertinent vibrations since Peter was the apostle who became the successor of Jesus, as Joyce is reported to have said, based on “a pun” — “Thou art Peter (Petrus) and upon this rock (petram) will I build my church … And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 16:18). Mulligan follows his (probably not original) witticism immediately with a question about the key of the tower, which Stephen will soon reluctantly hand over, so that key of the tower acquires Biblical overtones. The familiarity of the Bible or of Shakespeare, once taken for granted, allows for ample scope for sly twists: “Greater love than this … no man hath that a man lay down his wife for his friend” (U 14.360). The more familiar a quotation is, the more it lends itself to adroit, or heavy-handed, elaboration. Proverbial wisdom is often given a different meaning: “Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today” (U 15.2333). Classical Greek had a term for such tweaks, “eutrapelia”,16 literally a good or fortunate (eu-) turn (trap-); it was applied to lively wit, especially in repartee, or pleasantry, and considered a positive quality, as such it was praised by Aristotle as a skill of especially young men (Aristotle, Rhetorics, 1389b).17 Buck Mulligan and other eloquent characters in Ulysses can be seen in this tradition. Religions, however, have a low tolerance for meddling with matters holy. Saint Paul lists such irreverent joking amid related transgressions: “But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints. Neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting (eutrapelia), which are not convenient …” (Eph. 5:3–4). In the eyes of the Church, such verbal deviations would count as disturbing or abominable side effects. The 16 17

Fritz Senn, “From Efficacious Words to Eutrapelia”. Ulyssean Close-ups. Piccola Biblioteca Joyciana 2 (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 2007), 47–80. Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann; and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1975), 250–1.

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term, borrowed from Aristotle and Saint Paul, conveniently and characteristically describes a pervasive device.18 It is above all one of the motive forces of Finnegans Wake. In its second paragraph, the Biblical “Tu es Petrus / Thou art Peter” is converted to a richly layered “thuartpeatrick” of considerable radiation. The Lord’s Prayer is a particularly rich quarry: “That they shall not gomeet madhowlatrees”, or “Lust, thou shalt not commix idolatry” (259.5, 433.23) are easily detected. Among other devices, a network of eutrapelian variants lends coherence to the eminently dispersive chaos of Finnegans Wake; it offers moments of partial recognition and counteracts prevalent disorientation.19 A line in Percy French’s song “Phil the Fluter’s Ball”, about a tumultuous party, “And they all joined in with the utmost joviality”, is deflected with latitude into different areas. The emphasis may be on shouting and congestion: “And the all gianed in with the shoutmost shoviality” (FW 6.18); on noise and food: “And of course all chimed din width the eatmost boviality”20 (FW 58.14). Elsewhere it is put into a context of radio and news: “And we all tuned in to hear the topmast noviality” (FW 351.14).

9

Trans-context

But for the sake of aberrant significance, quotations need not be verbally tampered with. Unaltered, they can be transplanted into a different situation. Knowingly or not, Bloom transfers the Biblical question, “And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29) to his present surroundings in a church: “Nice discreet place to be next some girl. Who is my neighbour?” (U 5.40). The effect hinges on a modified context. Some examples need not express great originality, as when Cunningham, who is trying to raise a collection on behalf of the Dignam family, refers to one possible but unlikely contributor: “Touch me not” (U

18 19

20

Even a tepid joke like “Frailty thy name is Sceptre” (U 12.1227) sends out some vibrations. It frequently happens that a sequence that is not adequately understood reminds its readers of a similar occurrence elsewhere that was also not quite understood there, but the sense of having heard it before affords some partial comfort, the elementary joy of recognition. Clive Hart has put together a long list of recurrent phrases (“Index of Motifs”), like “all roads lead to Rome”, in different approximations. They are bracketing supports in an essentially dispersive verbal artifact: Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), 212–47. The variant that substitutes “boviality” for the original “joviality” might call up the Latin saying “Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi” (“what is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to an ox”).

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10.967); the words of Jesus, “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my father” (John 20:17), are overlaid with a common idiom for borrowing. Misappropriation of familiar quotes, by re-framing them, is a long-standing practice which is continued by Bloom, who misapplies the words of a guard in Hamlet to his onanistic response to exhibitionism: “Did me good all the same … For this relief much thanks. From Hamlet that is” (U 13.939). It is recontexted in a scene conjured up in “Oxen”, where a Gothic avatar of the Englishman Haines who “drank drugs to obliterate. For this relief much thanks” (U 14.1034). One side effect for Joyce readers is that classical passages may lose some of their innocence ever after.

10

Minuscule Effects

Interpretation hovers precariously between finding and inventing, and in Joyce, as usual, even more so. We are prone to project our favourite readings into a text beyond the author’s intention or even knowledge and ferret out complexities where none may be. One such debatable feature is a phrase in the musings of Gerty MacDowell: Over and over had she told herself that as she mused by the dying embers in a brown study without the lamp because she hated two lights or oftentimes gazing out of the window dreamily by the hour at the rain falling on the rusty bucket, thinking. (U 13.292) Not every erudite reader today is conversant with the obsolete expression “in a brown study” in the sense of deep thought, in a sombre mood, or reverie; and Gerty MacDowell herself is unlikely to ever use it, and yet it occurs in her indirectly presented thoughts. So it is just possible that she — in so far as it is her own wording — would take it to be the description of a homely interior in its context: “… dying embers in a brown study without the lamp …” Some translators have in fact understood it in this sense and, as an enquiry has shown, so do present day sophisticated readers. It is one of Joyce’s achievements to demonstrate to what contortions minds are capable of. Bloom reads “Gathering figs” into the name Figather (U 8.150). Molly Bloom remembers the case of a Mrs Maybrick, who had murdered her husband and was recently released from prison: “… 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” (U 18.240). Why would

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she wonder about the Greek name of a poison? As it happens, she would do it only in English, where the first part of “arsenic” happens to contain one of the four cardinal points of the episode that Joyce explained out to Frank Budgen, “… being the female breasts, arse, womb and [cunt]” (16 August 1921).21 Apart from such a lexical coincidence, Molly’s interest would be seen as untypically philological. If Bloom were to say “its from the Greek”, he would be right, for “arsenic” does in fact derive from a word meaning “manly” (which would fit “Penelope” as well). Molly Bloom of course recalls her question of the morning as to the meaning of “Metempsychosis”, which she has turned into a phonetic and vernacular likeness: “Met him [pike hoses]” (U 4.339, 8.112). In this case, Bloom rose to the occasion, and after some brief stalling — “It’s Greek: from the Greek” — accurately explained that “it means the transmigration of souls”. She dismisses the explanation with a demand for “plain words” (not of Latin origin, presumably). Undeterred, Bloom persistently offers an alternative, “reincarnation”, but she shows little interest in his persistent efforts and turns her attention to the smell of burning kidneys (U 4.380). Her initial enquiry about a foreign word may be less due to philological curiosity but seems to be a trick to turn her husband’s questions away from the impending visit in the afternoon. As it happens, when the incident reoccurs in her monologue, she turns the unfamiliar theosophical term “reincarnation” into a term she knows from her Catholic upbringing: “he came out with some jawbreakers about the incarnation …” (U 18.566). All in all, a concatenation of side effects that take us far afield. Verbal near misses are intriguing side effects. A conversation in the cabman’s shelter turns around England as in the words of its proprietor: The Boers were the beginning of the end. Brummagem England was toppling already and her downfall would be Ireland, her Achilles heel, which he explained to them about the vulnerable point of Achilles, the Greek hero, a point his auditors at once seized as he completely gripped their attention by showing the tendon referred to on his boot. (U 16.1002) Since the “Achilles heel” may be out of everybody’s range, the “tendon” is explicitly supplied for linguistic and anatomical clarification.22 Ironically then, it is

21 22

James Joyce, Letters, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1957 & 1966), I.170. The act is paralleled by Bloom, who also provides anatomical instruction when he points out why “Aztecs … couldn’t straighten their legs … by indicating on his companion the brief outline of sinews or whatever you like to call them behind the right knee” (U 16.851). The characterization “sinewless and wobbly”, referring to Bloom’s “strange kind of flesh” and following close upon “tender Achilles” (U 16.1716, 1724), has already been taken to

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just this explicative gloss that leads to a misunderstanding, or perhaps merely a distortion, when Bloom takes up the metaphor: “The most vulnerable point too of tender Achilles”, and the slip is repeated when Bloom’s “right side” is described “in classical idiom, his tender Achilles” (U 16.1638, 1716). A “tendon” has morphed sideways into “tender”, not perhaps the ideal epithet for the relentlessly savage hero of the Iliad whose wrath is one of the motives of the epic.23 A letter missing, substituted, or added by mistake or intentionally can have an impact. It can turn a telegram saying “Nother dying come home father” into a “curiosity to show” with unwanted but intriguing overtones (U 3.199). A vagrant letter “l” can expand an intended “word” into a whole “world”, as in Martha Clifford’s letter (U 5.245). The erroneous intrusion letter is potent and plays into the hands of an author who creates imaginary worlds out of words. That same letter is missing from Bloom’s name in the Evening Telegraph as a defective “L. Boom” (U 16.1262) — it adds another blow to his ego, and possibly another role. As every dictionary demonstrates, words by nature are ambiguous, often with a wide semantic reach, or else by homonymous coincidence, as in “race”, so that Joyce can somewhat inaccurately have Bloom “bearing in his arms the secret of the race” (U 17.340). It recalls his offer to “throw away” a newspaper that carried news about a horse race, which was mistaken to convey a secret tip on a horse named Throwaway, while the wording is also reminiscent of a speech describing Moses coming down from the mountaintop, “bearing in his arms the tables of the law”, and thereby leading his race, the Jewish one, into freedom (U 7.868). Translators have to decide which meaning is considered dominant. In “Lestrygonians”, the alimentary episode, Bloom remembers Tom Kernan’s skill: “A nice salad, cool as a cucumber, Tom Kernan can dress” (U 8.759). At this point, readers may not yet be aware of Kernan’s sartorial vanity:24

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include the chapter’s slack style. In his Schema, Joyce attributed “Nerves” as “Organ” to the episode; the word “nerve” derived from Latin nervus, where it also meant sinew or tendon, analogous to Greek neuron. See again Vike Martina Plock, “‘Nerves Overstrung’: Neuroscience and Ergography in ‘Eumaeus’”, 88–110. Achilles does have his tender moments, notably at the end in his touching encounter with Priamos in Book 24, and there may be more than mere friendship in his relations to his friend Patroklos — which might interest readers who pursue homoerotic undercurrents in “Eumaeus”. It is foreshadowed in “Grace” where Mr Kernan “… believed in the dignity of its calling. He had never been seen in the city without a silk hat of some decency and a pair of gaiters. By grace of these two articles of clothing, he said, a man could always pass muster” (D 154).

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Mr Kernan halted and preened himself before the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser. Stylish coat, beyond a doubt. Scott of Dawson street. Well worth the half sovereign I gave Neary for it. Never built under three guineas. Fits me down to the ground. … Must dress the character for those fellows. Knight of the road. Gentleman. (U 10.142) Later on, Kernan just misses a close sight of the viceroy and his cavalcade: “At Bloody Bridge Mr Thomas Kernan greeted him vainly from afar” (U 10.1183). Kernan’s greeting is in vain, but “vainly” is double-edged. Given the probable absence of suitable verbal or cultural coincidences, translators grapple above all with side effects no matter of what category. Technically, there is not much difference between the various side benefits of a clever turn (eutrapelia) as implemented above, an error (“rheumatic wheels”, D 17), a slip of the tongue (“the wife’s admirers”, U 12.767), a bona fide pun (“lecturer on French letters”, U 9.1101), or a thematic overtone (“if you don’t conduct yourself”, U 11.104), or all of the other analogous gratuities which have become Joyce’s trademarks. They are all shorthand devices, semantic overloads, and depend on superimposition. What they have in common is their economy: a supplementary meaning is supplied by an attentive reader. Joyce diverts us increasingly to the language as language and away from what it is explicitly pointing to. What happens may disappear behind How it is rendered (in Finnegans Wake the verbal How gets in the way of spelling out the narrative What, Who, When or Where, which tend to get entirely obscured). That is true of the “Ithaca” chapter with its scientific mode, which favours accuracy and is characterized by its mainly Latinate vocabulary. One of its aims is to counteract the preceding loose, jocular, and largely figurative style (“it’s a horse of quite another colour to say you believe in the existence of a supernatural god”, U 16.770); “Ithaca” is manifestly, even compulsively, devoid of distractive metaphorical horses in theological contexts. At the risk of turgidity, it tries to be immune from emotions or misleading overtones and to keep an objective distance. For practical purposes, much of its verbiage is in need of translation into common English: “repristination of juvenile agility” (U 17.518) could be expressed in simpler terms, and so could “alterations effected in the disposition of the articles of furniture” (U 17.1279). Even so “Ithaca” includes, against its manifest grain, its own inadvertent distractions. We may well be entirely caught up in following the meaning of Which example did [Bloom] adduce to induce Stephen to deduce that originality, though producing its own reward, does not invariably conduce to success? (U 17.606)

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Readers of the essay at hand are of course already alerted to lateral ripples and are less likely to overlook that the sentence is also a tongue-in-cheek listing of Latin-derived composite verbs ending in “-duce”, Latin ducere, to lead. Secondarily, the sentence is an example of being led astray. Certain passages that might be considered innocuous are susceptible to a double reading; they might — but do not overtly — refer to something ordinary. Bloom is reading a story in a weekly magazine: “It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and easy” takes on a secondary meaning when we know he is sitting in a primitive outhouse, a “jakes” (U 4.511, 494). The climax of the visual encounter in “Nausicaa” (“And Jackey Caffrey shouted to look … O, so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft”, U 13.71–40) could on its surface be read as an almost harmless description, but readers know what is going on, unstated by the phrasing itself. That particular side effect was so potent that in reality it set the law in motion as it disrupted the publication of the book’s serialization in the Little Review.

11

Immarginability

What is a side as against a presumed main effect? The distinction has so far been taken for granted, but there is something arbitrary about it; marginality is in the eye of the reader. Many cases are obvious. When old Cotter in “The Sisters” in “his endless stories about the distillery” was “talking of faints and worms” (D 10), the distilling terms are primary and the physical fainting and the mortal implication of “worms” are essentially overtones, atmospheric and perhaps thematic, but they can easily be disregarded. But some uncertainties remain, as possible alternative readings of “in a brown study” will have shown. When Bloom imagines a cannibal chief who “consumes the parts of honour” of a missionary, and speculates: “His wives in a row to watch the effect” (U 8.746), the wives could be watching either in an orderly lineup or in less peaceful fashion contend in a row (rhyming with “how”). Behaviour is determined by the sound of a vowel. As it happens, most translators, perhaps unsuspecting, prefer good manners to rowdiness. Is an expression literal or figurative? “Tongue in cheek” suggests irony, or a humorous knowing wink, but Simon Dedalus in “Wandering Rocks” counters his daughter’s guess that he has more money: “ — How do you know that? Mr Dedalus asked, his tongue in his cheek” (U 10.672), where there is little cause for irony, and Dedalus seems really to show his tongue in his cheek, the overtone may still be hovering [nearby]. Finnegans Wake may well have given up a notion of main and subsidiary meanings, beyond the need of any further demonstration. The dichotomy

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of “either/or” is replaced by “both/and”, by approximate semantic accumulation. In continually merged meanings and semantic overloads, distinctions become futile.25 The book is based on many-sided effects, even though some of them may be more aside than others. The Wake proceeds “in the broadest way immarginable” (FW 4.19), and perhaps one glance at any of its pages would have said more than the thousands of words that have been paraded here. The simple upshot is that Joyce offers dynamically more immarginabilities than most writers. Which may justify the expedience to label the new bottles for old wine and to bundle them under the heading of “side effects”. 25

What is the prevailing meaning of a phrase like “Warum night!” (FW 479.36), which is not identical with, but equidistant from, English “warm night” and German “Warum nicht” (“Why not”)?

Chapter 11

Ulysses: Latent Coherence of Deviating Episodes One salient feature of Ulysses is its abrupt metamorphoses; they impede effortless leisurely absorption. The novel (if that is what it is) lives up to its otherwise misleading title: it springs novelties upon its unsuspecting readers and keeps changing its unstated often erratic game rules. A chapter may end with the familiar sounds of a cuckoo clock, while the next one sets off with a cryptic threefold repetition of “Deshil Holles Eamus” (U 13.1304, 14.1). One analogy with the Odyssey remains valid: the episodic adventures are diverse and make renewed demands on one’s adaptability — a book of many turns: “Each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the structural scheme of the whole) should not only condition but also create its own technique” (Joyce to Carlo Linati, 21 September 1920).1 Often, at least from the midpoint, a simple glance at the layout of the page identifies an eccentric episode. All these known facts are far more striking than the underlying continuities, the latent interconnections between capriciously conflicting chapters. The following observations (an elaboration of an earlier sketch) are extracted from a larger project to work out latent narrative nuts and bolts that hold the epic together.2 The emphasis, naturally, is not on the obvious sequence of characters, topics, or plot development, but on technical and structural devices. Often a connection is simple reversal into its opposite, as in the transition from the rude male deprecating noises of “Cyclops” to the female syrupy sentimentality of “Nausicaa”. Three successive episodes are here under inspection, pars pro toto: “Wandering Rocks”, “Sirens”, “Cyclops”. For the present purposes the unintegrated Homeric tags serve to give individual names to seemingly autonomous episodes.

1 James Joyce, Letters, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: The Viking Press, 1957 & 1966), I.147. 2 Fritz Senn, “The Rhythm of Ulysses”, Ulysses: cinquante ans après, ed. Louis Bonnerot, Études anglaises 53 (Paris Didier 1974), 33–42. A condensed run-through of the theme was presented at the Dublin Graduate Conference of 2010.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_012

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From “Wandering Rocks” to “Sirens”

“Sirens” immediately grows out of “Wandering Rocks” in explicit repetition. A motif is struck twice in “Wandering Rocks”: first as an interpolation, “Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head, appeared above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel” (U 10.962), and then, with changes, in the Coda: “Above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel, gold by bronze, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head watched and admired” (U 10.1197). It is resumed in the opening of “Sirens”: “Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing” (U 11.1) Before the two barmaids are seen and in turn are watching, in the acoustic dominance of “Sirens”, the metallic sounds are now heard. When the episode begins properly (after the “Overture”, or tuning up) another, more extended variant, sets the chapter off: Bronze by gold, miss Douce’s head by miss Kennedy’s head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel. (U 11.65) Four occurrences, with later reverberations, serve as conspicuous joints and collectively parade a principle of repetition with variation, which would be one possible thumbnail description of traditional music. “Wandering Rocks” was put together from 19 parts, with more than thirty displaced passages, interpolated from one location into another, to indicate events going on elsewhere at the same time. A sense of simultaneous “elsewhereness” emerges, something that sequential language cannot act out but has to dissolve into a series. The “nebeneinander” of events can only be treated as a successive “nacheinander” (U 3.13–7). Readers are now alerted to unmarked translocations. While we are detained within the Ormond bar, parallel tracks are kept of other characters, mainly Bloom. A dismissive comment on men calls up a short paragraph: “A man” (U 11.85). And a different site is interposed, all in the manner of “Wandering Rocks” with an exact location: “Bloowho went by by Moulang’s pipes bearing in his breast the sweets of sin, by Wine’s antiques, in memory bearing sweet sinful words, by Carroll’s dusky battered plate, for Raoul” (U 11.86). “Bloom”, or a question as to his whereabouts, “But Bloom?” (U 11.101, 133), indicates that other characters, remote from the main scene, are within the narrative range. “Sirens” abounds in one or two word paragraphs that punctuate the episode. “Wandering Rocks” offers exact locations, while “Sirens” is less specific about several adjoining rooms (bar, saloon, dining room) in the

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hotel, but again the perspective moves freely around. Music can be heard, but Bloom in the dining room does not pick up what is being spoken about him in the saloon. Dedalus, Dollard and Cowley collectively remember an event when the Blooms supplied Dollard with a tight pair of trousers (U 11.472–510). Bloom in turn recalls the episode some time later, often in similar phrasing (U 11.554–59). This is a thematic coincidence,3 but not a local “Wandering Rocks” type of simultaneity. Similarly, translocations become a trademark. A sequence like the following would easily fit into “Wandering Rocks” with its move from the bar to Bloom and then back again: Tap. A youth had entered a lonely Ormond bar. Bloom viewed a gallant placard hero in Lionel Mark’s window. Robert Emmet’s last words. Seven last words. Of Meyerbeer that is. — True men like you men. (U 11.1273) A tenuous link could be established between the blind tuner and Bloom “viewing” a placard, or a connection between Emmet and a croppy boy. The narrative later on also reverts to Blazes Boylan on his way, first, to the Ormond Hotel to meet Lenehan, and then on his progress to Eccles Street, whether this progress is factual or just imagined by Bloom.4 “Wandering Rocks”, a composite episode, is put together (com-posed) of various parts. In “Sirens”, this becomes a musical composition, an arrangement. Joyce called it a fuga per canonem, a claim that has been corroborated a well as challenged by commentators. The compositional, musical quality tends to take precedence over semantic economy. In the Odyssey, all the mythological adventures are told retrospectively at the court of the Phaiakians in Books 9 to 12. Odysseus ends his report with his arrival on Kalypso’s island Ogygia, but then he remembers that he reported this already (Book 5) and, at the end of Book 12, practically right in the middle of the epic, he winds up with the well-known remark that he dislikes “to tell an already plain-told tale twice” (Od. 12.452–3). One irony is that 3 Some grace notes add reverberations. In the saloon, Molly is described as “alive … And kicking”; Bloom has a vivid recollection of Molly at this juncture as she threw “herself back across the bed, screaming, kicking” (U 11.504, 556). 4 As it happens, the German opera Martha by von Flotow, from which Simon Dedalus prominently sings an aria, is one into which a foreign element is inserted, or spatchcocked, “The Last Rose of Summer” by Thomas Moore. It has also become parts of “Sirens”: “And The Last Rose of Summer was a lovely song” (U 11.1176) and “Last rose Castille of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone” (U 11.54).

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almost everything in the epic is told at least twice, such as when Kirke informs Odysseus of dangers looming ahead, and after she gives these instructions, the events then take place and thus are retold, with elaborations, one more time. Such narrative doubling holds true of both “Wandering Rocks” and “Sirens”. Some cross-referencing interlocations amount to a retelling. The “Sirens” chapter is detailed twice: first in the assembled fragments in the “Overture” (or “Prelude”), where the events yet to come are anticipated. The opening may look like an introductory sketch, an assembly of notes yet to be developed, or it may function as a distorted table of contents. The episode constantly repeats its own material in recalls which double musical motifs. A theme like “bronze and gold” resonates throughout and serves to hold the otherwise so dispersive episode together. The initial assembly of motifs is an inversion of the “Coda” of “Wandering Rocks”, which recapitulates previous characters and actions and lines them up by their various takes on the viceregal cavalcade. The “Coda” — instancing Tom Kernan’s favourite expression of a “retrospective arrangement” (U 6.150, 10.798) — recalls actions and may serve as an aid to readers’ memory. In an obvious reversal, “Sirens” opens with a prospective arrangement of what is yet to come (and is therefore still unknown), a glance ahead. Most dislocations in “Wandering Rocks” are horizontal: they express simultaneity and “elsewhereness” within a panoramic context. “The lacquey rang his bell. / — Barang!” (U 10.281) intrudes into the scene of the Dedalus kitchen, a household notably devoid of lacqueys. The vignette anticipates what is resumed in a later section (U 10.642, 688). This signals, unmarked, the same event and (in all probability) the same moment of time, distributed over two diverse passages. “Sirens” goes beyond this and introduces diachronic disruptions as a modified device. They are narrative in nature, not the internal memory of a character. Some transfers do not suggest simultaneity but are textual echoes of what happened before. When Miss Douce comments on the piano tuner who left his tuning fork behind, “So sad to look at his face”, an interjection, “God’s curse on bitch’s bastard” (U 11.284), is a step back in time and recalls the same blind man’s choleric exclamation in the previous chapter, where he is knocked into and gives vent to his anger: “God’s curse to you … You’re blinder nor I am, you bitch’s bastard!” (U 10.1119). This took place some half an hour before. The text itself, an arrangement of words, seems to be endowed with a consciousness of its own. It is a textual memory or a compositorial reflex or, put differently, a nod to the reader. The blind stripling’s “God’s curse on you … bitch’s bastard” has become associated with the piano tuner, or to “cursing”: “Since Easter he had cursed three times. You bitch’s bast”; “the yeoman cursed, swelling in apo-

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plectic bitch’s bast” (U 11.285, 1041, 1098). Temporal links in “Wandering Rocks” are supplemented by compositional ones. Perhaps the most striking instance is injected when Bloom sits at meal. “Leopold cut liverslices” leads to “As said before he ate with relish the inner organs, nutty gizzards, fried cods’ roes …” (U 11.519) — a manifest but unprecedented reminder of Bloom’s introduction in “Calypso”: “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs …” (U 4.1), a list of Bloom’s culinary predilections which also features “liverslices” (U 4.3). This cannot be part of Bloom’s thoughts but it functions on another (a meta-) level, and blatantly ushers in the self-reflectiveness of the later episodes. From this point onwards, the book candidly reveals itself as a verbal artifice made up of items held up for occasional display, as though the literary composition were aware of itself and flaunted itself as a composition. For a few moments, author and reader are in collusion. Before long, “as said before” will be said again: “Bloom ate liv as said before” (U 11.569). Blazes Boylan is exposed to the same treatment: Blazes Boylan’s smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor, said before. Jingle by monuments of sir John Gray, Horatio onehandled Nelson, reverend father Theobald Mathew, jaunted, as said before just now. (U 11.761) This recalls “Blazes Boylan’s smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor, where he strode” (U 11.337). As it happens, Blazes Boylan’s progression up O’Connell Street has not been said before, only the verb “jaunted” is echoed, but in a different place: “Ormond quay” (U 11.304). Perhaps not even auctorial hints can be implicitly trusted any more — or, put differently, “Sirens” may be as error prone as “Wandering Rocks”. Narrative cards (and tricks) are put on the table; the initial illusion of subjective realism (though it still continues and can and will be switched any moment) is abandoned. The “Sirens” episode, and by implication all of Ulysses, is composed of parts that can be reassembled. A conspicuous jarring intrusion has elicited a lot of comment. It is transposed from Stephen Dedalus’ silent musings on Shakespeare in the Library: Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist, he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of Juno’s eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do. (U 9.651) Bloom in the Ormond dining room thinks (erroneously), “Music hath charms, Shakespeare said” (U 11.904); then a textual reflex appears to conjure up what

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could not possibly be Bloom’s subjective memory: “In Gerard’s rosery of Fetter lane he walks, greyedauburn. One life is all. One body. Do. But do” (U 11.907). Critical guesses have extended to an inadvertent oblivion: did Joyce simply forget and recycle this passage? Or can a notion of telepathy explain its repetition? As a self-reflexive compositional link, the transfer easily blends into the numerous others, though none of those is quite so puzzlingly prominent. Perspectival changes may operate even within a paragraph or sentence. An early, and perhaps the first, instance occurs in the exchange between Boylan and a shopgirl: “Blazes Boylan looked into the cut of her blouse. A young pullet. He took a red carnation from the tall stemglass” (U 10.327). In a tit for tat sequence, the look is revered: “The blond girl glanced sideways at him, got up regardless, with his tie bit crooked, blushing” (U 10.330). The shift in Boylan’s viewpoint is marked by a separate sentence, but the girl’s “got up regardless, with his tie a bit crooked” within the same sentence reflects her associations (it is here assumed that she herself is “blushing”, and not Boylan). Changing tracks within paragraphs or sentences is common in “Sirens”: “Down the edge of his Freeman baton ranged Bloom’s, your other eye, scanning for where did I see that” (U 11.856). Or “Bloom in the Ormond hallway heard the growls and roars of bravo, fat backslapping, their boots all treading, boots not the boots the boy” (U 11.1142), where an unmarked nudge spells out the ambiguity of “boots”. The switch may be from interior monologue to textual transfers: “I suppose each kind of trade made its own, don’t you see? Hunter with a horn. Haw. Have you the? Cloche. Sonnez la. Shepherd his pipe” (U 11.1239). Bloom was not aware of the Sonnez-la-cloche trick nor did he hear Lenehan’s “Got the horn or what?” or the intermediate link “Horn? Have you the? Haw haw horn” (U 11.432, 527). In musical analogy, various strands are being played simultaneously by different instruments but noted sequentially. Parenthetical elucidation belongs in the same category: “Upholding the lid he (who?) gazed in the coffin (coffin?) at the oblique triple (piano!) wires. He pressed (the same who pressed indulgently her hand), soft pedalling, a triple of keys …” (U 11.291). In what looks like a collusive wink to the potentially disoriented reader (“who?”), a person is identified (Simon Dedalus had pressed miss Douce’s hand indulgently, U 11.201). At a first glance, “coffin”, with overtones of “Hades”, is confusing until it is glossed as a technical term for a part of a piano. Music has been thematically prepared for in songs like “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” or “When the Bloom is on the Rye”, which is shortly struck in the cryptic “Blue bloom is on the” (U 10.524, 11.5). Tom Kernan is reminded of the ballad that Ben Dollard sings so touchingly: “At the siege of Ross did my father fall” (U 10.791), and it will be he who proposes (in the usual sense)

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Dollard trenchant rendering of “The Croppy Boy”. A glimpse of Almidano Artifoni’s sturdy trousers closes “Wandering Rocks” (U 10.1281). The euphonious name, Artifoni (an import from Trieste, a director of the Berlitz school) is not classical; one might split “Artifoni” into “Art” and “phone”, a linguistically inadequate but circuitous evocation of the Art of the Voice — not an inappropriate thumbnail for the subsequent “Sirens” episode. The Scottish band in “Wandering Rocks” plays “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” while “His Excellency drew the attention of his bowing consort to the programme of music which was being discoursed in College park” (U 10.1247). The phrasing faintly sustains the theme of the previous episode, though it does not overtly allude to a passage in Hamlet, but at least remotely echoes it: “Govern these ventages [holes in wind instruments] with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music” (Hamlet 3.2.345–7). Music will, in fact, be discoursed eloquently all through “Sirens” — “discoursed” in an original sense of running in different directions. It so happens that the lines from the play in themselves anticipate the technique of diverting common terms towards music which is so dominant in “Sirens”. Hamlet engages in musical double talk: You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me. (Hamlet 3.2.352–6, italics are added for demonstration). As it happens, “stop, sound, note, organ, pipe, fretted” also occur in “Sirens” in analogous double function.

2

From “Sirens” to “Cyclops”

A striking contrast, an inversion, connects the episodes. Harmonious voices give way to rude ones; the focus is on conflict — Ireland against the oppressor, the Citizen against Bloom, a coarse oral tale is pitted against written, inflated asides. A near collision and an irate male voice with a prospective sprinkling of expletives like “be damned” and “bloody” set the tone and mood (U 12.1). “The Croppy Boy”, woven into the texture of “Sirens”, has anticipated the theme of rebellion, martyrdom and British perfidy. Robert Emmet provides

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another direct link; his final speech from the dock paves the way for the variations of nationalism as they are taken up by the Citizen: “the brothers Shears and Wolf Tone beyond on Arbour Hill and Robert Emmet and die for your country” (U 11.1284, 12.499). Songs of love or seduction are replaced by patriotic ballads — “A Nation Once Again”, “Rory of the Hill”, “The Memory of the Dead” — with emphasis on fighting and heroic sacrifice. Bloom already commented on the subject: “a tear for martyrs that want to, dying to, die” (U 11.1101). Now the songs tend to be devoted to death, battle, execution: “The Night Before Larry was Stretched” (U 12.542). “[T]he York street brass and reed band” which “whiled away the intervening time by admirably rendering on their blackdraped instruments the matchless melody endeared to us from the cradle by Speranza’s plaintive muse” plays in preparation for a public execution (U 12.536). A tinge of death even affects a jocular reference to “the tune the old cow died of” (U 12.692). “Love and War” in “Sirens” sets a lover against a warrior: Venus against Mars. Mars, god of war, is certainly presiding in “Cyclops” in the memory of heroic battles (“Mars and Jupiter were out for mischief”, U 12.359) while “Love” gets short shrift and is mocked when Bloom, cornered, champions it as “the opposite of hatred” and becomes the target of a parody (“Love loves to love love …”, U 12.1485, 1493). “Love and War” in fact predicts the subsequent episodes. War, as said, resides over “Cyclops” and Love will be an unachieved ideal in “Nausicaa”. The letters featured in either episode are also concerned with, Love and Death, respectively. Bloom, admittedly without emotional involvement, writes to an unknown correspondent (“Play on her heartstrings”, U 11.714); in contrast, the one prominent letter in “Cyclops” is a hangman’s application (U 12.635). “Sirens” closes with Bloom’s own but discreetly hidden tonal contribution to accompany Robert Emmet’s last inflated words. “Cyclops” is full of rude, offensive noises. The Citizen’s “starts gassing out of him about the invincibles” (U 12.480) and claims the French “were never worth a roasted fart to Ireland” (U 12.1386). The narrator resorts to the punchy phrase, “loosen her farting strings” (U 12.841). He judges the Citizen: “All wind and piss like a tanyard cat”(U 12.1312), and Queen Victoria is shown as “the flatulent old bitch that’s dead” (U 12.1392). “Cyclops” contains a lot of hot air. After the operatic “Sirens”, one singing performance is staged by the dog Garryowen, who is “letting on to answer” Bob Doran — “like a duet in the opera” (at a time when an opera duet is rehearsed in Bloom’s home). It spawns another interpolation that ends in a curse (U 12.705–77). A “remarkably noteworthy rendering of the immortal Tomas Osborne Davis’ evergreen verses … A Nation Once Again” (U 12.915); this in turn brings up a mention of a famous tenor: “The Irish Caruso-Garibaldi was in superlative form and his stentorian

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notes were heard to the greatest advantage in the timehonoured anthem sung as only our citizen can sing it” (U 12.919). The climax in “Cyclops” is played to contrasting musical underpinning. A loafer starts insulting Bloom by “singing If the man in the moon was a jew, jew, jew” (U 12.1801), but an insert elevates the slur to a ceremonious farewell, where in honour of Bloom’s Irish-Hungarian descent, an orchestra strikes up “the wellknown strains of Come Back to Erin, followed immediately by Rakóczsy’s March” (U 12.1827). Bloom, who in “Sirens” had contemplated the lot of an organist, seated “all day at the organ” (U 11.1198, see above), in the role of “Senhor Enrique Flor” now himself presides “at the organ with his wellknown ability” (U 12.1288). In either episode, “organ” has other than musical overtones: “you’d burst the tympanum of her ear … with an organ like yours … Not to mention another membrane” (U 11.536), “male organ” (U 12.476) and even “That’s the bucko that’ll organise her, take my tip” (U 12.1001). “Sirens” is often a blending of voices and, on occasion, internal comments; textual memories at times are interspersed with Bloom’s interior monologue. “Cyclops” begins again on a single track, the report of an unnamed eyewitness, a subjective and grossly distorted perspective. Yet the alternating interpolations splits “Cyclops” into two parts. In this way, the sense of somewhere-elseness or “allotopy” is continued into “Cyclops” by its narrative alternation. The inserts are free-wheeling parallactic extensions of the theme at hand, often in dead pan seriousness. The mention of Dignam’s ghost results in a spiritualist séance (U 12.338); a casual reference to blessing in a mere toast is magnified into a ceremonious ecclesiastical Benediction (U 12.1676). Changes are predominantly stylistic, in terms of “Sirens” into a different musical key. As a composition, “Cyclops”, like its main narrator, is “of two minds” (U 12.9); many events are rendered twice. Report and parodic insert may complement each other, or overlap on occasion. The bipolar description of the Breens is a case in point. An elevated epic diction “and behind him there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred scrolls of law and with him his lady wife a dame of peerless lineage, fairest of her race” (U 12.245) is brought down to earth in the vernacular: And begob what was it only that bloody old pantaloon Denis Breen in his bathslippers with two bloody big books tucked under his oxter and the wife hotfoot after him, unfortunate wretched woman, trotting like a poodle. I thought Alf would split. (U 12.252) There is a marked drop from a sublime “noble gait and countenance” to a caricature: “in his bathslippers”. Both are grotesque elaborations of what might

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have been reality, as seen by Bloom earlier on where Denis Breen sported “a skimpy frockcoat and canvas shoes” (U 8.310). The different slants may be subsumed under “parallax”, a change of perspective, visual and psychological. The “lady wife … fairest of her race” degenerates into an “unfortunate wretched woman, trotting like a poodle”. Some of her attributes distort features Bloom had observed around noon, more matter-of-factly, when he noticed not a “peerless lineage”, but “[l]ines round her mouth”. When a woman gave her an “eye”, Bloom reflected on “the unfair sex” (U 8.268); “Cyclops” stylizes her as “the fairest of her race”. Transpositions indeed. That “Alf would split” becomes a narrative fact, for Alf Bergan’s entry has been divided into “a godlike messenger came swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven” (as Homer might have put it) and “Little Alf Bergan popped in round the door and hid behind Barney’s snug, squeezed up with the laughing” (U 12.244, 249). Laughing, he moreover “doubled up” (U 12.259). A character has indeed been split into two appearances, or doubled. If Alf Bergan really is the originator of the offensive postcard with “U. p: up”, as Bloom suspects (U 8.320), he has in fact doubled (the word) “up”. Two separate tracks can be entwined in miniature, or in a single paragraph with parenthetical interjections. The best-known instance is when the narrator pays a visit to the “yard” to relieve himself: So I just went round to the back of the yard to pumpship and begob (hundred shillings to five) while I was letting off my (Throwaway twenty to) letting of my load gob says I to myself I knew he was uneasy in his (two pints off of Joe and one in Slattery’s off) in his mind to get off the mark to (hundred shillings is five quid) and when they were in the (dark horse) Pisser Burke was telling me card party and letting on the child was sick (gob, must have done about a gallon) flabbyarse of a wife speaking down the tube she’s better or she’s (ow!) all a plan so he could vamoose with the pool if he won or (Jesus, full up I was) trading without a licence (ow!) Ireland my nation says he (hoik! phthook!) never be up to those bloody (there’s the last of it) Jerusalem (ah!) cuckoos. (U 12.1561) In structural analogy, a “Sirens” paragraph similarly relegates alien matter, in this case authorial comments, into parentheses, as in the passage already shown: “Upholding the lid he (who?) gazed in the coffin (coffin?) at the oblique triple (piano!) wires. He pressed (the same who pressed indulgently her hand), soft pedalling, a triple of keys” (U 11.291). The croppy boy of the song who visits a priest to receive absolution before joining the rebels, asks for a blessing, “Bless me father … Bless me and let me go”,

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but “[w]ith hoarse rude fury the yeoman cursed, swelling in apoplectic bitch’s bastard” (U 11.1074, 1098). “Cyclops” is full of desultory blessing (like a ceremonial Benediction, U 12.1667–1750), as well as cursing. Once potent language has declined to emotional colouring. Drink is “the curse of Ireland” (U 12.684), while the Citizen is described as “cursing the curse of Cromwell” (U 1785). The vocal Garryowen bestows “The curse of my curses”, on Barney Kiernan (U 12.740). Emotions may override logic: “The curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody thicklugged sons of whores’ gets!” (U 12.1198). The negative accumulations overlook the fact that, for a curse to become effective, an omnipotent divinity would serve better than a “goodfornothing” one. The Homeric “Cyclops” (“cycle-eye”) is reflected in numerous single eyes. For all its aural prominence, “Sirens” already featured some of its own: “Will you ever forget his goggle eye?… And your other eye, … Bloowhoe dark eye”; “Bright’s bright eye”, etc. (U 11.146, 159, 615, 647, 856, 1105). In contrast, only one solitary ear finds its way into “Cyclops”, where “Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye” (U 12.1496); thus, the two episodes are one more time conjoined. “Cyclops” (partly in analogy to the Odyssean ruse of naming himself “Outis” = “Nobody”) plays on names throughout; it even canonises various acts of naming in the Benediction parody, where “S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S. Synonymous” keep company with personalized bona fide saints (U 12.1696). Names have been highlighted in “Sirens” already: “Nice name he” echoes Molly Bloom, “Lovely name you have” echoes Martha Clifford (U 11.501, 713). “Woodwind” sounds “like Goodwin’s name” (U 11.1055). “Know the name you know better” (U 11.826) encapsulates the substance of the Homeric adventure with the Kyklops. Nominal license afflicts the integrity of names in either episode. “Sirens” lists distortions or fusions like “Bloowho”, “Bloowhose”, “Bloohimwhom” (U 11.86, 149, 309) and offensive composites like “greaseabloom” and “Seabloom”(U 11.180, 185, 1284). In “Cyclops”, Bloom’s name lends itself to distortions: “Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft” or “Senhor Enrique Flor” (U 12.468, 1288).5 At the very opening, the Cyclopean eyewitness has been “passing the time of day” with an acquaintance, and the same activity extends to most of the cast 5 “Blumenduft” picks on “those jewies does have a sort of queer odour coming off them” (U 11.453), a common prejudice, the so-called “fetor judaicus” (U 15.1796). This naming procedure reflects the often unpleasant or downright offensive names that Jews were given when forced to conform to local rules.

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in the episode, with the main exception of Bloom who has some (unpleasant) business to attend to. In “Sirens”, the patrons of the Ormond Hotel did little else, partly in an attempt to be diverted from their ordinary worries. A similar leisurely occupation is true of “Nausicaa” as well, in a book about modern city life where surprisingly little quotidian work is being done. Come to think of it, all of Bloom’s day, certainly after the visit to the Library, consists of variations of passing the time of a day, a day he does not want to think about.

Chapter 12

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Hell, Purgatory, Heaven in “Wandering Rocks” The tenth episode in Ulysses, commonly referred to as “Wandering Rocks” in the Homeric context, deals with locations, places and space, with the movements of people or of objects, primarily within Dublin. As the focus is on a bustling city as a collective of its citizens, individual characters become marginal. In pointed contrast to the preceding static episode in the National Library, this one does not engage in profound or fanciful interpretation, as when Shakespeare was being discussed. It remains on the surface and specifies locations that can be traced on a map of Dublin — or even verified by walking the streets of Dublin, book in hand, a century later. A modern, though provincial, city of 1904 is presented in nineteen vignettes chosen in various places, in a manner that is largely visual and cinematographic. Joyce captures Dublin in dispersed, seemingly random close-ups but extends it to Buxton or Vienna, to “the African mission” of Jesuits (who were moving about a great deal), to the disaster of the General Slocum, an excursion steamer which sank in the East River the previous day, with a condescending reflection that America is the “sweepings of every country including our own”. Even a hat called “Panama” evokes a distant country. We are afforded a glance at “the stars and the comets in the heavens, … the great star and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot”, including “the milky way” (U 10.567). Significantly, in a game of chess — which depends on prescribed movements of figures within given spaces — a white bishop is “translated” (U 10.1050). Even the vocabulary takes a spatial turn: “translated” is used in the original sense of “carried across, transferred”. Real bishops, as it happens, when “translated” are moved to a different see. So space, displacement, and movement abound. Even those who no longer walk on earth have particular abodes. In the dominant Christian tradition, which pervades Joyce’s works and achieves an impressive climax in the hell fire sermons in chapter 3 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the options are between Heaven and Hell, with Purgatory as a temporary waiting room in between. Those “other worlds” occur in the episode and are worth a brief comment. Outside of the Western tradition, American Indians are thought to have a more cheerful place beyond, the “happy huntinggrounds”, where the pursuit of

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their earthly pleasures continues. Haines, speaking to Buck Mulligan in a cafe, uses the phrase figuratively: “Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance” (U 10.1061). Stephen Dedalus, whose “body” can be seen when he “loses his balance”, has in fact been hunting for sources and motivations in the previous episode, in the National Library, though perhaps not in an overtly happy mood and more under compulsion (which is also Haines’s point). As it happens, “hunting terms” can be found in Shakespeare, as we learn in the Library chapter (U 9.583). Buck Mulligan continues with his remark on Stephen Dedalus and his Catholic education by the Jesuits: “They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell”. The wording could owe something to “Her trouble has put her wits astray” in Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902).1 Readers of the Portrait know how visions of hell have in fact profoundly afflicted Stephen in his adolescence. The sermon on hell occupies a disproportionate, central part of the novel (119–35). It was taken from a classic Jesuit set-piece, Hell Opened to Christians, by Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti. This title, slightly adapted, must have become a catch phrase as it is used for emphasis by the town clerk Jimmy Henry, who complains, “Hell open to christians they were having …” (U 10.1005). He is indignant because members of the City Counsel are largely absent, not where they are expected or should be, which is a recurrent theme in “Wandering Rocks”. In fact, the person who has translated a bishop in chess is one of those absent members missing from a city council meeting. Haines goes on to report on “an interesting point” made by “Professor Pokorny of Vienna”: “— He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth … The moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny, of retribution” (U 10.1005). Julius Pokorny had published such views, and Joyce must have come across one of his articles, “Perlen der irischen Literatur” of 1917, in the Zentralbibliothek in Zürich.2 But he willfully displaced Julius Pokorny in time so as to fit him into Bloomsday. In 1904, Pokorny was a mere seventeen years old, completely unknown, long before he branched out to his later considerable prominence as one of the foremost Celtic philologists. Seen in this light, it is interesting that right after the discussion of Pokorny’s views, Mulligan laughingly reveals one of Stephen’s ambitions, or boasts, that he “is going to write something in ten years” (U 10.1089). This prediction has been applied to the

1 It is said of the Old Woman in Cathleen ni Houlihan. Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1952), 82. 2 Julius Pokorny, “Perlen der irischen Literatur”, Irische Blätter 1 (1917), 343. See Pól Ó Dochartaigh, “The Source of Hell: Professor Pokorny of Vienna in Ulysses”, James Joyce Quarterly 41.4 (Summer 2004), 825–9.

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creator of Stephen Dedalus: Joyce put the beginning of the writing of Ulysses to 1914, a Homeric ten years after 1904, as the last page of any edition displays: “Trieste — Zürich — Paris / 1914–1921”. The intriguing part is that such a possibly embedded prediction is juxtaposed to a blatant anachronism, a manifest authorial sleight of hand. Ulysses, as well as “Wandering Rocks”, with its many errors of perception and speculation in particular, tends to undermine a trust in reliability. Characters (or the author) can be wrong in identifying places. The most obvious example is the mistaken name of one of the two Dublin canals: what is referred to as “the Royal Canal bridge” ought in fact be the “Grand Canal” (U 10.1273). One of the many side issues in Ulysses is how once significant, potent notions have lost their pristine impact. In Homeric and Christian cultures, blessing, cursing, and swearing were decisive acts of gods or humans. Now they have become mere tokens in speech and conversation, mainly for expletive effect and often hardly noticed. This is particularly evident in the twelfth episode (“Cyclops”), where a lot of inefficient cursing and swearing lends colour to the action, with a liberal sprinkling of the once taboo word “bloody”. “Wandering Rocks” has its own share of curses and a few stray occurrences of “bloody”. “Hell” has come down in the world and declined to a mere exclamation (“and there was a hell of a lot of draught …”, U 10.460). It can provide emotional emphasis, and in one instance, when young Patrick Dignam (who uses “blooming” as a milder form of “bloody”), it is connected to punishment: “One of them mots that do be in the packets of fags Stoer smokes that his old fellow welted hell out of him for one time he found out” (U 10.142). At the opposite end of the scale, Lenehan uses “hell” positively in bragging about a minor tactile involvement with Molly Bloom on a nocturnal drive (when Bloom was pointing out heavenly constellations): “Every jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell’s delights! She has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that” (U 10.559). This moves God very close to “Hell’s delights”, a phrase that sounds like a partial distortion of a contrast Stephen had brought up in the Shakespeare discussion when he used Swedenborgian terms and pitted the “chaste delights” of “conjugial love” against “scortatory love and its foul pleasures” (U 9.631). The adjective “foul” occurs more than a dozen times in Chapter 3 of Portrait, most of them connected with the sermon. Elsewhere in “Wandering Rocks”, Stephen Dedalus evokes “foul” in an imagined, infernal scene where a woman “dances in a foul gloom”. With wits still perhaps a trifle askew, he recalls: “Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows” (U 10.806). The prominent archangel, fallen from Heaven, became the Prince of Hell and still tries to wreak havoc on earth.

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In another scene, Master Patrick Dignam knows enough Catholic doctrine to hope that his dead father is “in purgatory now because he went to confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night” (U 10.1174). The location of fathers surfaces elsewhere. Simon Dedalus meets his daughter Dilly outside of an auctioneer’s and provides little financial aid. His daughter Boody at home may be justified in referring to him as “Our father who art not in heaven” (U 10.291), when her mild blasphemy provokes a mild shock in the household. The father is neither at home nor in heaven and, elsewhere, is more liberal with cursing than with supporting his daughters: “Curse your bloody blatant soul” (U 10.690). Father Conmee, the Jesuit Superior, to whom the first section in the chapter is devoted, is concerned about the whereabouts of unfortunate heathens, “the millions of 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” (incidentally lending colour to “souls”): That book by the Belgian jesuit, Le Nombre des Élus, seemed to Father Conmee a reasonable plea. Those were millions of human souls created by God in His Own likeness to whom the faith had not (D. V.) been brought. But they were God’s souls, created by God. It seemed to Father Conmee a pity that they should all be lost, a waste, if one might say. (U 10.145) In Le Nombre des Élus, the Belgian priest Father A. Castelan S.J. held out some hope for unbaptized human souls, but the issue remained controversial, which leads Father Conmee to think of “that tyrannous incontinence, needed however for man’s race on earth, and of the ways of God which were not our ways” (U 10.150). Stephen Dedalus will later refer to corresponding intermediary places, Limbo and Purgatory: “Both babe and parent now glorify their Maker, the one in limbo gloom, the other in purgefire” (U 14.224). He already worked in a Shakespearean reference: “Who is the ghost from limbo patrum, returning to the world that has forgotten him” (U 9.150, Henry VIII 5.4.67). In the play, this jocularly refers to a prison, but the term is derived from Limbus (fringe), “that place on the fringe or outskirts of hell in which the just who died before Christ were detained until our Lord’s resurrection from the dead. It likewise signifies a place (also supposed to be beneath the earth and on the outskirts of hell) inhabited by infants who die in original sin”.3 3 William E. Addis & Thomas Arnold, eds., A Catholic Dictionary (London: Kegan Paul, 1903), 564.

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“Man’s race on earth”, as remembered by Father Conmee, has little to do with what Lenehan, a horse racing expert in residence, reports: “I knocked against Bantam Lyons in there going to back a bloody horse someone gave him that hasn’t an earthly” (U 10.519). A coincidental connection can be made out, or invented. The horse in question, Throwaway, against all expectation in the end did have “an earthly” and won the race against all odds. Joyce linked the name of the (real) horse with a “throwaway”, a handbill, which, thrown away by Bloom, prominently floats through the episode on three separate occurrences, bearing the message that “Elijah is coming” (U 10.294, 754, 1096). There may be circuitous divine assistance after all, for the prophet Elijah ascended to heaven in a chariot (2 Kings 2:11–2), an apotheosis that is almost equalled by Bloom at the end of “Cyclops” when he is beheld “amid clouds of angels” ascending “to the glory of the brightness” but then is brought abruptly down to earth “over Donohoe’s in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel” (U 12.1910). “Wandering Rocks” takes place mainly on the surface. It deals with logistics, itineraries, getting from one place to another or, as has been pointed out, suggesting imaginary locations as part of religious convention. The episode trivializes things. There may be a whiff of the underworld in an exploit attributed to Tom Rochford, the rescue of a man stuck in the sewer: “One of those manholes like a bloody gaspipe and there was the poor devil stuck down in it, half choked with sewer gas. Down went Tom Rochford anyhow, booky’s vest and all, with the rope round him. And be damned but he got the rope round the poor devil and the two were hauled up” (U 10.502). It calls up a municipal nether region, with “damned” and “devil” thrown in for good measure. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven — they are featured among the more mundane, specific locations in “Wandering Rocks”. As it happens, and inevitably, they make up the three parts of the Divina Comedia, as yet a further undercurrent and possible echo.

Chapter 13

In the Arms of Classics: Meta-Morpheus in “Eumaeus” The sixteenth section of Ulysses, usually known as the “Eumaeus” episode, is known for its ambitious, decorative but fumbling presentation. These contrary effects are achieved by an elaborate and artificial style that aims at literary and jovial elegance. The choice phrases and highly figurative mannerisms used are all recurrently undercut by maladroit turns and incongruities. The passage on which I shall concentrate in this essay centres on the figure of a marginal night watchman whose office is simply to keep a vigilant eye on a municipal heap of stones and who, accordingly, sleeps away peacefully, not far from the cabman’s shelter where the main action takes place. At one point, he is briefly roused by the noise of a horse, but after a few moments he “shifted about and shuffled in his box before composing his limbs again into the arms of Morpheus” (U 16.946–7). The examination of the Classical contexts of this passage and specifically its hidden Ovidian allusions is intended to show that any minute component can highlight typical features of Ulysses as a whole, even though the tiny item selected may not seem to have special significance in itself. It merely conveniently serves as an interpretive point of departure, one among many. “In the arms of Morpheus” is a characteristic instance of the episode’s literary décor. In this instance, it is a pretentious trope for sleep, just as “Jupiter Pluvius” (U 16.41) serves as a stereotypical substitute for “rain”. A spurious air of erudition and wit is provided. In this vein, “in the arms of Morpheus” is part of a classical thesaurus that has become stale, a trademark of “Eumaeus”. As it happens, and as will be elaborated at some length, the trope, with its intended implication of mere inertia, is off-target: once stirred into action — the only time when Morpheus is worth any mention at all — he, the son of Somnus (Sleep), is highly active and resourceful. He is the god of dreams through dexterous impersonation. Of course, the watchman in his arms may be dreaming as well as sleeping. The misapplication, of reducing the god to his sleeping state, though common enough, fits very well into the hit or miss mode of “Eumaeus”. More emphasis is put on the phrase in its jocular, but certainly not original, variant later on, when the watchman is vacuously said “to all intents and purposes” to be “wrapped in the arms of Murphy as the adage has it, dreaming of fresh

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fields and pastures new” (U 16.1727), where Morpheus is conflated with the name, true or assumed, of a loquacious sailor. Here Murphy/Morpheus is more appropriately brought into the realm of dreams. The Miltonian “fresh fields and pastures new” are not an instance of narrative omniscience but a vain stab at originality, so far and so humorous (in a forced way) perhaps, and one could leave it at that. Yet, it is just conceivable that latent authorial intents and purposes are at work. It is Ovid who seems to have invented Morpheus ad hoc in his Metamorphoses.1 He is a demiurge god who figures in the story of Ceÿx, a king who was drowned on a sea voyage, and his wife Alcyone, who is pining away for news of him, ignorant of the disaster. She keeps vexing Olympic Juno, and the goddess gradually becomes tired of the perpetual lamentations and decides to send Iris, her messenger, to the Palace of Somnus who is to dispatch a dream to convey the news of her husband’s death to Alcyone. After the long journey to the region of indolence Iris finds Somnus. The scene is pictured in a memorable evocation of affective drowsiness. In this realm, however, there is no watchman on duty, as is explicitly stated: “custos in limine nullus” (“no guardian on the threshold”) (Met. 11.609). Iris manages to wake Somnus and report Juno’s command that he send a dream to the desolate widow, a counterfeit in the shape of her dead husband. It is then that Somnus proceeds to wake one of his thousand sons, Morpheus. What singles him out for the task at hand is his unique skill, which Ovid describes as follows: excitat artificem simulatoremque figurae Morphea: non illo quisdam sollertius alter exprimit incessus vultumque sonumque loquendi; adicit et vestes et consuetissima cuique verba. (Met. 11.634–8) [Somnus] rouses Morpheus … a cunning imitator of human form. No other is more skilled than he in representing the gait, the features, and the speech of men; the clothing also and the accustomed words of each he represents.2 As it happens, “sollertior” is the superlative of the adjective “sollers”, (“cunning”), which Latin writers also apply to Ulixes, that is Odysseus. Morpheus 1 Hereafter referred to parenthetically as Met. followed by the book and line numbers. 2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justius Miller (London: Heinemann, 1916). All subsequent English translations can be found in Miller using book and line numbers.

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specializes in human appearances, while his two equally expert brothers, Phobetor (or Icelus) and Phantasus, are in charge of imitating animals and inanimate objects, respectively. … at alter fit fera, fit volucris, fit longo corpore serpens: hunc Icelon superi, mortale Phobetora vulgus nominat. (Met. 11.640) … another takes the form of beast or bird or the long serpent. Him the gods call Icelos, but mortals name him Phobetor. est etiam diversae tertius artis Phantasos: ille in humum saxumque undamque trabemque quaeque vacant anima, fallaciter omnia transit; (Met. 6.638) A third is Phantasos, versed in different arts. He puts on deceptive shapes of earth, rocks, water, trees, all lifeless things. These three imitators serve only the nobility while unnamed others occupy themselves with common people. Morpheus is then given his instructions to take on the shape of Ceÿx and to apprise the widow that he has drowned. This news is intended to stop her disturbing Juno’s peace. Morpheus promptly assumes the figure and gestures of Ceÿx, dissembling his voice, and so appears to Alcyone in the bedraggled appearance of one drowned. He recounts his tragedy to the desperate widow and then disappears. Alcyone, after elaborate wailing, walks onto the shore and finds the drowned body of her husband.3 Finally, the two are changed into kingfishers (alcyon; alkyon in Greek). All of this fits well into the “Eumaeus” episode, which features deceptive shapes, look-alikes, and similarities. One of the nocturnal group in the cabman’s shelter has the face of the town clerk, Henry Campbell, a similarity that is mentioned no less than four times. Bloom shows Stephen a photograph of Molly: “As for the face it was a speaking likeness in expression but it did not do

3 When Alcyone tries to grasp her husband’s shape, she holds only air in her hands (“movet … lacertos … corpusque petens amplectitur auras”, Met. 11.674–5). This is similar to Odysseus vainly trying to embrace his mother in Hades, but she too is only a shade or a dream (Od. 11.04–8). This may be reflected in the “white shapes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely” in Glasnevin cemetery, “sustaining vain gestures on the air” (U 6.487).

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justice to her figure” (U 16.1444), and right afterwards, he leaves “the likeness there for a very few minutes to speak for itself” (U 16.1457). Morpheus, indeed, is a speaking likeness. The name Ikelos in Greek means like something else, a similarity.4 In Ovid’s poem, Morpheus is the god whose name is part of the title Metamorphoses. When aroused, he can take on any human shape (morphê in Greek). He might be considered the patron saint of the “Eumaeus” episode if Greek gods were permitted such roles. The story of the night watchman Gumley, whose limbs are composed in the arms of Morpheus, is declared right afterwards “a truly amazing piece of hard lines in its most virulent form” (U 16.948). (The word form, Latin forma, has been considered a cognate of morphê.) “Eumaeus” seems to have a high proportion of odd “shapes” and “forms”: Bloom and Stephen “formed an object of marked curiosity”; Bloom talks “about”, and then again “dwells on, “the female form” (U 16.895, 1449); he notices Stephen’s “slim form” (U 16.1572), and for him, music is “a form of art” (U 16.1449) for which he professes great admiration.5 The term “shape” is even more frequent and, at times, it is applied to substances that have none by definition, like “drinkables in the shape of a milk or soda” (U 16.10). More appropriately, Stephen should “sample something in the shape of solid food” (U 16.332). In the divorce trial that led to Parnell’s downfall, Bloom recalls “everybody in the shape of witnesses swearing to having witnessed him”(U 16.375). This assignment suits Morpheus, whose mission it is to tell the truth in the shape of a false witness. A passing prostitute is elevated to a “counterattraction in the shape of a female” (U 16.931). Shape and form are tautologically joined in echoing phrases: criminal propensities had never been an inmate in Bloom’s bosom “in any shape or form”, just as he resents violence “in any shape or form” (U 16.1056, 1099). A different constellation surfaces in a characterization of Parnell: “what’s bred in the bone instilled into him in infancy at his mother’s knee in the shape of knowing what good form was came out at once” (U 16.1520), where a spurious view of the shape of a maternal knee may incongruously intrude. The verbal shape itself of Morpheus is being changed; not even his verbal form remains but it transforms itself into “the arms of Murphy” where he

4 Chances are that the name Icelos is not just the Greek adjective personified but that it echoes specific occurrences in the Odyssey: Hermes speeds over the waves “like a bird” (ikelos, Od. 5.54), and the drowning companions of Odysseus were borne on the waves like sea-crows (ikeloi, 12:418). Not of course that Joyce would have been aware of this. 5 But “the form provided” (U 16.985) is not a shape but something to sit on, therefore a deceptive shape in itself.

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is conflated with the sailor who claims his name is D.B. Murphy (U 16.415). Stephen relates the name Murphy to the greatest creator of characters, or shapes: at one time, “Shakespeares were as common as Murphies” (U 16.364). The sailor in turn changes his narrative designations. He sometimes is referred to in nautical variations: he becomes a “communicative tarpaulin” (U 16.479); “Jacky Tar” (U 16.1455), “old tarpaulin” (U 16.1041), “the old seadog” (U 16.653), a “seafarer” (U 16.1676), an “ancient mariner” (U 16.1669), or “Shipahoy” (U 16.901). He himself is a “doughty narrator” (U 16.570), and once an “exhibitor” (U 16.677), or “friend Sinbad” (U 16.858) and “our mutual friend” (U 16.821), or more generally a “Skibbereen father” (U 16.667), “rough diamond” (U 16.1010). The label “the redoubtable specimen” (U 16.983) is apt. Murphy is a specimen, and a formidable one. The adjective fittingly contains a spurious form: “doubt” is there only by dissembling appearance, not etymologically. Yet, as a fabricator of questionable stories, he is invoking recurrent doubt. The pretentious style of the episode can be characterized as containing verbal shapes, set pieces, rubber stamps, and empty forms. Stereotypes are prefabricated shapes.6 Even the “image tattoo in blue Chinese ink” on the sailor’s chest is variable; a few strokes change it from “there he is cursing the mate” to “laughing at a yarn” (U 16.683). The sailor himself, with a stated name that is conflated with the god of changing shape (“in the arms of Murphy”), is characterized both by his voice and his “incessus”: “He made tracks heavily, slowly with a dumpy sort of gait to the door” (U 16.922). There would be a lot of assignments for Morpheus in the convolutions of “Eumaeus” with its multiple similarities or aliases and thus also doubtful identities. Icelos, the expert in shaping animals, might be responsible for “the head of a horse … suddenly in evidence”, and its description could almost read like a list of specifications: “a different grouping of bones and even flesh … a fourwalker, a hipshaker, a blackbuttocker, a taildangler, a headhanger” (U 16.1781). It is not the animal’s fault “if he was built like the camel, ship of the desert” (U 16.1792). The shape of real animals is often remarked upon, while others have merely metaphorical existence: “but it’s a horse of quite another colour to say you believe in the existence of a supernatural God” (U 16.770), a horse that owes its own existence to mere imagination. Ovid’s Phantasos, the expert for imitating nature and lifeless objects, is clearly based on phantasma and phantasia, that is appearances (from

6 “Aeolus” also abounds in clichés, inflated language, and rhetorical tropes. “Eumaeus” could be characterized as one suffused by the inspiration of second wind after exhaustion. For what it is worth, Alkyone was the daughter of Aiolos.

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phainein, to appear, which also spawned “epiphany”). “Eumaeus” is the area of “fancy bread” (U 16.59), a phrase, most likely a current Dublin joke of the time, about bread (something shaped of dough), which is offered as either plain or fancy, with overtones of the song “Tell me where is fancy bred” performed in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Yet, imitative shapes in the form of words can be found in every part of Ulysses. Phantasos also finds a mundane equivalent in “a Chinese one time … that had little pills like putty and he put them in the water and they opened and every pill was something different. One was a ship, another was a house, another was a flower” (U 16.570). The story of Morpheus impersonating Ceÿx is in tune with the Eumaean themes of disguises, pretences and dubious identification. Bloom recalls the necessity to “produce your credentials, like the claimant in the Tichborne case, Robert Charles Tichborne, Bella was the boat’s name to the best of his recollection, he, the heir, went down in as the evidence went to show and there was a tattoo mark too in Indian ink, lord Bellew was it, as he might very easily have picked up the details from some pal on board ship, when got up to tally with the description given, introduce himself” (U 16.1342). The notorious Tichbourne case hinged around a pretender who claimed to be the heir of a rich man who was supposed to be drowned. Ceÿx is similarly a case of shipwreck and drowning, a prevalent theme in “Eumaeus”. The Tichborne pretender was a real-life imposter who did not have the skills of mythological agents. Relations of fathers and sons, a topic which received much attention in former decades of Joyce criticism, are potentially echoed in Somnus and Morpheus, especially when in later use, as indicated above, Morpheus was conflated with his father and in the thesaurus of classical tags has become the god of sleep. In Ovid, it is Somnus who, after dispatching his son, “in soft drowsiness droops his head and settles it down upon his high couch”, literally “de-posing it” (“deposuitque caput stratoque recondidit alto”, Met. 11.649), whereas Joyce’s Gumley is “composing his limbs again into the arms of Morpheus” (U 16.947, emphasis added). Perhaps Somnus awakened by Iris, “scarce lifting up his eyes heavy with the weight of sleep” (“… tardaque … gravitate iacentes / vis oculos tollens”, Met. 11.618–9) is matched, inversely, in “Nausicaa” by a personified Hill of Howth, who “settled for slumber, tired of long days, … He lay but opened a red eye unsleeping, deep and slowly breathing, slumberous but awake” (U 13.1177). The sailor, as it happens, has “drowsy baggy eyes”, they are “thick with sleep”, and he has “a heavy glance drowsily roaming about” (U 16.375, 825, 583). All in all, he has a Morphean trait of vividly conjuring up events and characters.

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The whole incident in Ovid highlights imitation and similarity and is based on falsehood and deceit. Iris, whose father, Thaumas, is clearly related to “wonder” (Met. 11.647), is the “most faithful messenger of [Juno’s] words” (“fidissima nuntia meae vocis”), and she is to commandeer a dream that tells Alcyone “the truth about the fate” of her husband (“somnia … veros narrantia casus”, Met. 11.585–7). That the most faithful of messengers is appointed to instigate a forgery, a mere likeness, which however does convey the truth by devious means, is one of the ironies Ovid is fond of. In “Eumaeus”, neither messengers with tales or tidings, nor written reports (the newspaper account of the funeral or, for that matter, documents that make up history) are to be trusted. Odysseus is again a prototype. In the fictional accounts that he gives of his presence in Ithaka, the invented causes for his flight and his itinerary are similar to his actual journeys; he is telling lies, but his presence itself is the truth that Odysseus will surely return. “Eumaeus” deals with returns, homecomings, nostoi: a gossipy sailor does actually return from a voyage and with tales of distant nations, but is in no apparent hurry to rejoin his family near Cork. Parnell, who may or may not be dead, may also be hidden away under some disguise. The precedents of Rip Van Winkle, Enoch Arden, Sinbad the Sailor are pointed out. Even Sherlock Holmes, who had died ten years before, was revived by Conan Doyle on public demand: The Return of Sherlock Holmes was published in the spring of 1904. In the Odyssey, the husband may be long dead, or he may return; in fact, he does, against all odds. Bloom imagines, with some trepidation, a returning sailor who finds his unmourning wife in the arms of a new husband (U 16.430–40). The tale of Ceÿx adds another variant. The husband is dead and returns, first in the fallacious shape of a dream masterminded by Morpheus, and then in reality, but as a dead body emerging from the sea to be joined with his still alive wife. When Iris arrives in the Cave of Sleep, she sees lots of “empty dream-shapes” (“somnia vana”) lying around that are “mimicking many forms” (“varias imitantia formas”), as many as there are ears of grain, and she has to brush them away to enter (Met. 11.613–6). Iris then instructs Somnus to “fashion a shape that shall seem true form, and bid it go in semblance of the king” (“sub imagine Regis”) to the widow. The dream must form or feign the picture of the shipwreck (“simulacraque naufraga fingant”, Met. 11.626–8). “Eumaeus”, as well as other episodes in Ulysses, is bristling with the stylistic equivalents of the arsenal of empty shapes: prefabricated phrases, rhetorical forms, tropes, hackneyed quotes, often culled from ancient authors, to be used when need arises — “in the arms of Morpheus” is one among many. The blending of fictions with facts is continued when Morpheus as counterfeit Ceÿx reassures

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his wife dissemblingly of the truth of his message: “It is no uncertain, dubious author who tells you this; you do not hear a wandering, vague rumour” (“non haec tibi nuntiat auctor ambiguous / non ista vagis rumoribus audis”, Met. 11.666–7). He is lying, but his deception amounts to the truth. The plot has been laid out in such detail to show some pervasive concerns that Joyce may share with Homer and Ovid. Morpheus is a protagonist in a series of impersonations, images, likenesses, imitations, simulacra, deceptive shapes or forms, fictions (“naufraga fingant”, Met. 11.666–7), in other words, pretences that correspond to those that occur in “Eumaeus”. In addition, rumours abound in the episode as well as doubtful reports. The episode of Ceÿx, Iris, Morpheus and Alcyone is in itself “a complete fabrication from start to finish” and yet “not an entire fabrication” (U 16.153, 827). Correspondingly, Joyce is an “auctor ambiguuus”: ambiguous both in the original sense of going in at least two directions and in the way the term has come to be understood, obscure or uncertain in meaning. Ambiguity suffuses “Eumaeus” though the word itself does not occur in Ulysses. As cited above, three features are singled out in the imitative art of Morpheus: “incessus vultumque sonumque loquendi”. They are the way of walking, the facial expression and the manner of speaking. Translators settle on “gait, walk, way of walking” / “features, look, countenance”/ “(habit of) speech, sound of a voice” (sometimes “rhythm of gesture” is added). It is remotely possible that the figure of a woman with “the eyes and voice and gestures of a woman without guile” in Stephen’s imagination faintly reflects the Morphean traits in Portrait (P 183). The name of Stephen Dedalus (still Daedalus in Stephen Hero) is the most salient of Joyce’s use of myths from the Metamorphoses. The “genius of the elegant Latin poet who has handed down to us [fables] in the pages of his Metamorphoses” is slantedly acknowledged in “Oxen of the Sun” (U 14.995) and diversely exploited. When Leopold Bloom, unlikely to have Ovid at his fingertips, wonders in the cemetery how one can remember those who have long passed away, he itemizes “Eyes, walk, voice” (U 6.962) and then recalls that the voice, at least, can now be recorded thanks to relatively new technical devices like the gramophone. Bloom’s list almost coincides with that of Ovid, though he fixes on eyes rather than features, expression, or look (as vultus has been rendered by many translators). Expression, eyes, the mode of walking and the characteristics of the human voice are of course what writers try to conjure up through language. It is part of their professional competence. The virtuosity attributed to Morpheus is also Joyce’s in his portrayal of features and movements. He pays minute attention to how his characters walk, stride, trot, saunter, dander, or mazurka:

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Bloom is seen “hastily stepping down with a flurried stork’s legs” (U 4.383), Artifoni “trotted on stout trousers” (U 10.364), and Ben Dollard approaches “at an amble” (U 10.903). With literary flourishes, a librarian “came a step a sinkapace forward” and then “corantoed off” (U 9.6–12). Stephen Dedalus tries to capture expressions for a particular combination of walking and carrying: “She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load” (U 3.392). Examples could be multiplied.7 To list and classify all Morphean traits in Ulysses would be superfluous and tedious. But the first, short episode alone, “Telemachus”, manifests them in abundance. Buck Mulligan moves briskly, skips, mounts, and hops in histrionic variety. Gaits and gestures mingle in an evocation of his imitation of both Christ ascending and perhaps Hermes rising in the air: Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved a doll’s head to and fro … He tugged swiftly at Stephen’s ashplant in farewell and, running forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air … He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury’s hat quivering in the fresh wind … (U 1.579) Mulligan excels in Morphean antics. His eyes are often focused on: they are “grey searching”, “smokeblue mobile”, and “blinking … pleasantly”; they may show “silver points of anxiety” or they may demand the key of the tower (U 1.631). Stephen remembers his mother: “Her glazing eyes, staring out of death” (U 1.273) — so eyes can be remembered. Haines in turn speaks “with wondering unsteady eyes” which are “pale as the sea wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent” (U 1.573). His “cold gaze”, we are likewise told, is “not at all unkind” (U 1.634). It is Mulligan’s voice above all that is notable and versatile. It is experienced in turn as “gay”, “wellfed”, “kind”, “loud”, “fine puzzled”, “finical sweet”, “hoarsened, rasping”, “happy foolish”, and finally “sweettoned and sustained” (U 1.40–741). He passes out “with grave words and gait” (U 1.525). Mulligan breaks into intonation, song or chant, or, with more elaboration, “the drone of

7 Senn, Fritz, “In Full Gait: Aesthetics of Footsteps”, Ulyssean Close-ups, ed. Franca Ruggieri (Rome: Bulzoni, 2007).

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his descending voice boomed out of the stairhead” (U 1.237). Like Morpheus, Buck Mulligan is an expert simulator and imitator, a man of many appearances, polytropic and multi-faceted. So one more role may be added to his Ulyssean versatility. In “Telemachus”, a short episode (of slightly above 7,600 words), we already find a fairly high incidence of those traits that Bloom rightly and independently considers challenging to remember. To the samples taken from “Telemachus” and “Eumaeus”, many more could be adduced, ad nauseam, from elsewhere, mainly of course from the “Circe” episode with its rapid dreamlike transformations. Morpheus, who attends to expressions and movements, in Ovid also supplies the appropriate costumes and clothes (“vestes”). His coworkers Icelos and in particular Phantasos might well be employed as stage managers: Icelos in particular could take charge of the numerous animals; Phantasos qualifies for the role merely on the implications of his name. There would even be a place for Phobetor, the alternative name of Icelos, which calls up an agent who induces fear (phobos). There is always the danger of elevating coincidences to the status of supportive allusions. When Morpheus appears to Alcyone, he assumes the face and form of Ceÿx, who is naked and pale like a corpse, luridus in Latin (Met. 11.654). The word “lurid” has changed its meaning towards ghastly or shocking. It so happens that it only occurs in “Eumaeus”: “the lurid story narrated” and “these lurid tidings” (U 16.491, 1011). The story of Ceÿx and Alcyone is clearly a lurid one in the modern sense. The mode of the first part of “Nausicaa” has discernible affinities with “Eumaeus”. Gerty MacDowell too has picked up a classical allusion from a picture; she has even verified what “halcyon days” means by looking it up in “Walker’s pronouncing dictionary” (U 13.334–44).8 Stylistically, “halcyon days” are on a par with “the arms of Morpheus”. As it happens, the two phrases

8 Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language (London: Longman & Co., in its 6th edition of 1860) defines “Halcyon” as “The king-fisher or alcedo, a bird said to lay her eggs in nests on rocks near the sea during the calm weather in winter, and to have a continuance of the calm while she incubates: — adj. An epithet originally applied to seven days before and seven after the winter solstice, if they were quite calm; hence calm, quiet, peaceful, undisturbed, happy”. Walker’s dictionary defines “Metempsychosis” as “The transmigration of the soul into the bodies of other animals, as taught by Pythagoras, and still believed in some parts of East”. This ties in with Bloom’s adequate explication — “That means the transmigration of souls” — and his subsequent deviation into metamorphoses — “They used to believe you could be changed into an animal or tree” (U 4.342, 375) — would have had the authority of Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary.

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are mythologically connected: Alcyone, in Greek Halkyone, derives her name from (h)alkyôn, the kingfisher, for both she and dead Ceÿx were changed into these birds so that they were finally united in lasting affection (Met. 11.730ff). But “halcyon days” have come to stand for a peaceful or happy period, since the kingfisher was supposed to lay its eggs in the winter solstice, when the seas were calm. This in fact comes close to what Bloom imagines on the beach: “Then you have a beautiful calm without a cloud, smooth sea, placid”, a brief interlude that is inserted between reflections on the life and dangers of sailors and the immediate sequence of “crew and cargo in smithereens” (U 13.1148–64). The backdrop in either case is a tragedy of shipwreck, death and loss. Ovid’s Morpheus, just like Homer’s Proteus, seems to have been created for the respective purpose at hand. They are not like the mainly pre-Hellenic names of the classical gods, with often obscure origins, but both have obvious derivations, either from morphê, shape, or what is first, prôton. Both change shapes, Proteus only himself while Morpheus assumes those of others. Both fit well into Joyce’s books of metamorphoses, and they may contribute echoing details of the kind that have been adduced here. As a dream, a book of the dark or a nightbook, Finnegans Wake is solidly in the arms of Somnus and his son Morpheus. With its “gradual morphological changes” and its “somnolutulent form” (FW 165.26, 76.30), it is all metamorphosis — or “slowrolling, amplyheaving metamorphoseous” (FW 190.31). Reading it consists in metamorphosing its verbal scrambles into potential sense. Anything can become “martimorphysed” (FW 434.32); one of the book’s dynamics can be termed “morphological circumformation” (FW 599.16). It contains “collateral andrewpaulmurphyc narratives” (FW 31.35), a meeting is easily “metandmorefussed to decide” (FW 513.31). With interpretive sleight of hand, “morphomelosophopancreates” (FW 88.9) or “zoomorphology” (FW 127.13) might serve as illustrations for the idiosyncrasies of the Wake and of its conception. A marginal note, “mutuomorphomutation” (FW 281), tautologically looks like a Greek and Latin mixture of “metamorphosis” and may well play around with the opening words of Ovid’s poem: “… mutatas … formas” (“changed forms”, Met. 1.1). The ubiquitous Twelve are called “The Morphios!” and seem to become “a dozen of the Murphybuds” (FW 142.29, 161.29), and there is a liberal sprinkling of Murphies throughout. Irrespective of their contexts, such items might lead towards the ghostly impact of Morpheus or Ovid in Finnegans Wake. Perhaps we do not need Morpheus to highlight features like eyes, gait, or voice in Ulysses or a dominant drive of Finnegans Wake. From time immemorial, writers have tried to simulate human characteristics. “Fiction”, from

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fingere (“fingant” Met. 11.628), like its cognates “feign, figure, figment”, by definition and origin has to do with giving shape or form; its Germanic sibling etymologically is malleable “dough”. The outward disparity of words like “dough” or “figure”, which seem to have nothing in common but go back to the same root, in itself indicates a complex process of phonetic changes over the millennia. They are the subject of linguistic morphology and were compounded in such productions as the Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by W.W. Skeat (1879), which we know Joyce, or at least Stephen Dedalus, read extensively. Ovid subsumed existence under the heading of multiple changes. The search for echoes from his Metamorphoses in Joyce’s works may or may not add significant, vitalizing resonances. All artists are basically shapers, moulders, and therefore formalists. They have to concern themselves with shaping the material at hand. Stephen’s disquisition on aesthetics, delivered to an audience consisting of one, the terms “form(s)” or “formal” occur with amazing frequency, up to 20 times within a dozen pages (P 204–15). At the most superficial level, charges levelled against Joyce were often made in terms of an excessive formalism, charges that the shaping process seems to get more attention than what is being shaped. Joyce certainly became increasingly heteromorphic as he went along towards constructions that had not been known before.

Chapter 14

The Warped Modality of Joyce’s “Ithaca” Ulysses holds Human Error up to Nature, and in this light the “Ithaca” episode is intended to serve as a corrective to an inherent human condition and to narrative aberrations. The premise that the Ithacan procedure aims to get right what went ostensibly astray at least from “Sirens” onwards. In this tendency, it may go against a grain in Ulysses which, for all its excessive realism in parts, foregrounds psychological, subjective assimilation and results in unreliability. The preceding chapters are notable for their deviation with a strong bias towards parody in “Cyclops”, “Nausicaa”, and “Oxen of the Sun”. “Circe” shows a world of phantasy: Bloom’s parents, for example, are not present, and inanimate objects are capable of speech. “Eumaeus” returns to reality but distorts it by its attempted rhetorical ornamentation; “a cool £100 a year” can be made “general ducks and drakes of” by idiomatic sleight of hand (U 16.950). Mismatched metaphors tend to disrupt and mislead. By contrast, “Ithaca” strives to rid the text of disturbances and meanderings. It favours precision and sharp contours. Joyce described its “technic” as “Impersonal Catechism” in his schema. Catechisms are in the service of dogmatic Truth without a shade of relativity: it is clear Who Made the World, and there are seven deadly sins, and everything is neatly mapped out. “Ithaca” avoids blurry idioms, embroideries or ambiguities; the aim is accuracy and no frills — but at the cost of verbal concision or elegance. There are affinities with legal language which sacrifice graceful polish to scrupulous precision with no place for semantic loopholes. Getting things right is a Bloomian aspiration. His endeavours are genuine; the results, however, may fall short of their aim. The effort is seen in his discontinued guesses at physical facts: “Black conducts, reflects (refracts is it?), the heat” (U 4.79).1 His day begins with “righting her breakfast things” (U 4.7), he devotedly tries to explain the meaning of “metempsychosis” in repeated attempts (U 4.331), and he is full of plans for improvement. “Circe” exaggerates his genuine attempts to stand “for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments” (U 15.1685); he is elevated to “the world’s greatest reformer” (U 15.1459). His author also makes him continuously re-form himself; he is a man of many turns and roles in the Book of Many Metamorphoses.

1 Note that “Ithaca” tacitly inserts the right term for the transmission of heat: “… in part absorbed” (U 17.267).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_015

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In the episode whose “Art” is “Science” (in the Schema), Bloom represents the “scientific” “temperament” (U 17.560) and so “Ithaca” becomes an extension of Bloomian traits like his interest in physical causation. But such interests are moved on a neutral level. Joyce’s description of the episode highlights some aims; it stresses coldness, the lack of intrusive emotions, and baldness, combined with a cosmic distance: I am writing Ithaca in the form of a mathematical catechism. All events are resolved into their cosmic physical psychical etc. equivalents … so that not only will the reader know everything and know it in the baldest coldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze. (Joyce to Frank Budgen, end February 1921)2 Such a thumbnail cannot be, and was probably never intended to be, comprehensive. It is also less than accurate. The reader is far from knowing everything; in fact, it shows limited concern for what a traditional reader may want to know. Pedantic impassive information is provided in abundance, though it may in parts seem irrelevant or downright superfluous, as when events are enumerated that do not happen. On the other hand, some facts worth knowing are withheld. For example, we learn next to nothing about Bloom’s mother or his own exact birthday. The verbal expenditure is not always proportionate to its revelations. Impartiality prevails: in an early catalogue, “exposed corporation emergency buckets” jostle with — and may be more or less important than — “the Roman catholic church” (U 17.14). Some conventions of storytelling can be dispensed with; conventional expectations are disregarded. Implied, somehow, is the question of what is worth reporting and what sort of information an author owes to his readers. Occasionally, the narrative returns to epic naiveté of a time when even habitual human actions were worth telling and nothing was taken for granted. As a narrative oddity, “Ithaca” has come in for some strictures, notably from Fredric Jameson, who claimed, in a tone of stating the obvious, that “most people would agree” that “the two most boring chapters … are surely ‘Eumaeus’ and ‘Ithaca’”. “The elaborate anatomy of the process of boiling water is boring” because it is “essentially non-narrative”; “it is inauthentic, in the sense in which these mass-produced material instruments (unlike Homer’s spears and shields) cannot be said to be organic parts of their users’ destinies”; and

2 James Joyce, Letters, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1957 & 1966), I.159–60.

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“finally, these objects are contingent and meaningless in their instrumental form, they are recuperable for literature only at the price of being transformed into symbols”.3 In part, this seems to have been directed at an endemic bias towards instant symbolism of some decades ago. But Joyce’s clearly depicts and caricatures the scientific temperament, with a penchant for arid enumerations or apparently gratuitous explanations, as what exactly goes on when water is being boiled. Homerically, Ithaka, the island of Odysseus, is described as “rocky”: “Ithakê kranaê” (Od. 1.247, 15.519). It is rugged, jagged, not known for scenic beauty, but solid. Elsewhere, it is “Ithakên eudeielon” (Od. 9.21), meaning clearly seen, or far seen, or it has clear outlines. Oddly enough, the words “rocky” or “rock” do not figure in the episode at all (as one might conceivably expect); the one homophone (“roc’s auk’s egg … of all the auks the rocs”) in the ultimate verbalized answer refers to the Roc, a mythological large bird from A Thousand and One Nights, which would find its appropriate place in “Circe”.4 Richard Ellmann also sees “Ithaca” as a corrective of “Eumaeus”, in which “the Pendulum swings in the opposite direction. Instead of subjective distortion there is objective distortion. Trompe l’œil gives way to the computer, unreliability to excessive reliability”.5 Objectivity and reliability are foregrounded and compulsively groped for. No great insight is needed to show, as will be expatiated here, that reliability is more of a goal than an accomplishment, and that “Ithaca” fails on its own implicit objective. An intention of this kind seems implied right at the outset when differences in Bloom’s and Stephen’s views are listed and one specific “rectification” is featured at some length: Bloom assented covertly to Stephen’s rectification of the anachronism involved in assigning the date of the conversion of the Irish nation to christianity from druidism by Patrick son of Calpornus, son of Potitus, son of Odyssus, sent by pope Celestine I in the year 432 in the reign of Leary to the year 260 or thereabouts in the reign of Cormac MacArt

3 Fredric Jameson, “‘Ulysses’ in History”, James Joyce and Modern Literature, eds. W.J. McCormack, and Alistair Stead (London & Kegan Paul, 1982), 126, 140. 4 A note on statistics in interpretation: we often find thematically congenial terms in the episodes of Ulysses; in fact, they are one of its trademarks. Their absence, however, does not serve argumentation. Ironically there may be an inverse relation since “Eumaeus”, for example, notorious for its factual unreliability, has the highest incidence of “fact(s)”, that is 34 out of a total of 66, whereas there is only one single occurrence of “factual” in “Ithaca” (U 17.1005). 5 Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 156.

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(† 266 A.D.), suffocated by imperfect deglutition of aliment at Sletty and interred at Rossnaree. (U 17.30) The rectification refers to what ostentatiously is of the least factual nature; it is based on the most unreliable and accidental sources in an area where certainty can hardly be separated from legend. In a correction of an anachronism, a date like “260 or thereabouts” looks particularly out of place. The extended elaborate effort has the air of a waste with little informative gain. An ancillary question is how the whole topic was broached in the first place. It is due no doubt to Bloom’s earlier reminiscence that the “last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the school poem choked himself at Sletty southward of the Boyne” (U 8.663); the prevalent diction of “Ithaca” manifests itself in the distanced phrasing of “suffocated by imperfect deglutition of aliment” as opposed to “choked himself” in the vernacular. It is not stated by what associative chain Bloom arrived at it; it seems loosely connected with “diet” in the preceding list of conversational subjects and possibly connected with “the Roman catholic church” (U 17.12–17). It is typical of the episode that we often cannot surmise what underlying story or event is responsible for the surface ripple. The rectification offered, at any rate, would be sorely in need of further emendation.

1

Textual Errors, Textual Faults

The need for such emendation is the stated intention of a Reader’s Edition of Ulysses undertaken by Danis Rose. It sets out to rectify what went wrong in the book: its “textual faults” due to Joyce’s oversight or occasional ignorance as it occurred particularly in “Ithaca” which in its nature should be accurate and correct. The preface states the aims in clear terms: Throughout the Reader’s Edition textual errors, textual faults, misspellings of words and names of persons and places are corrected, but more extensive and invasive surgery is needed in the case of ‘Ithaca’ where the text has been emended in line with Joyce’s own request that the mathematical, astronomical and other scientific facts be checked for the mistakes. For the most part this has required emendations to some of Joyce’s numerical computations and the occasional completion of his calculations.6 6 Reader’s Edition of Ulysses, ed. Danis Rose (London: Picador, Macmillan, 1997), xxiv. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as RE followed by the page number.

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Examples from this Reader’s Edition are adduced here, not in order to evaluate editorial procedures, but to demonstrate how the nature of the “Ithaca” episode has been conceived. The underlying premise is that — in an epic brimful of errors, misunderstandings, and subjective distortions — the author himself was prone to error so that an editor has to come to his rescue. It can happen with cosmic coordinates. The Blooms united in their bed are “[a]t rest relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of neverchanging space” (U 17.2306). The Reader’s Edition changes “both carried westward” to “both carried eastward”, no doubt in accordance with gravitational conditions (not always easy to straighten out for lay persons), and the possibility that Bloom himself might be confused is eliminated. A prolonged catalogue of what Bloom admires about water (which of course reaches far beyond his own actual thoughts at the moment or his knowledge) lists “… its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms” (U 17.187). The Reader’s Edition boldly substitutes a correct location: “… its unplumbed profundity in the Marianne Trench of the Pacific exceeding 6000 fathoms” (RE 585), in remedial retrenchment. If only Joyce had known, the implication must be, he would or should have put his geography straight. True to its aims, the Reader’s Edition corrects the numbers in the irrational comparison between Bloom’s and Stephen’s ages. The assumption being that Joyce wanted the wholly imaginary and irrelevant computations to be accurate but somehow lacked the persistence to achieve it. Joyce’s language is critically examined and, on occasion, rectified as well. Where Bloom speculates that different forms of life “might subsist otherwise under Martian, Mercurial, Veneral, Jovian, Saturnian, Neptunian or Uranian sufficient and equivalent conditions”, the edition replaces “Veneral” with “Venusian”, the lexically correct adjective derived from the planet, as opposed to the goddess (U 17.1093, RE 612). Joyce’s admittedly “wrong” derivation allows the kind of illicit vibrations that the Reader’s Edition is at pains to obliterate. A short list of “future careers” that would have been “possible for Bloom in the past” contains not only John Conmee, S.J., a top ranking Jesuit, as well as Alexander J. Dowie, the American evangelist, but also, with equal improbability, “the reverend T. Salmon, D.D., provost of Trinity college” (U 17.787). The Reader’s Edition, intent on verifying names or addresses of existing persons, substitutes a “Reverend G. Salmon” with the middle initial corrected because the Provost of Trinity was the Reverend George Salmon (1819–1904). Joyce, however, in all likelihood and not conforming to objective external reality, carries along Bloom’s subjective associations in “Lestrygonians”: “Provost’s house.

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The reverend Dr. Salmon: tinned salmon, well tinned here” (U 8.496), so that “T”. stands for “Tinned”, as it is also on record in a Circean catalogue which features “the reverend T. Salmon” (U 15.4343). A departure like “T” for “G” causes a ripple on the surface of an otherwise correct but intrinsically banal enumeration. Any unauthorized change has repercussions in an elaborate texture. One entry in the note sheet of “Love’s Old Sweet Song”, as Bloom observes it open on the piano, may well contain an authorial mistake. The sheet is “open at the last page with the final indications ad libitum, forte, pedal, animato, sustained pedal, ritirando, close” (U 17.1306), where the term “ritirando” is out of place and seems confused with the real musical notation “ritardando”, which on the actual song sheet is abbreviated to “rit”. So the Readers’ Edition amends the term to “ritardando” (RE 618). It may well be right and Joyce’s clearly written alternative might indeed be an authorial slip. However, the series “ad libitum, forte … animato, sustained pedal, ritirando, close” might describe the curve of an erotic sequence. It is the lapsus that makes the series more “animato”. When Bloom climbs over the area railing of his house, allowing “his body to move freely in space by separating himself from the railings and crouching in preparation for the impact of the fall”, the next question is a naïve: “Did he fall?” (U 17.88). Empirical experience could supply the answer — yes, he did — irrespective of his weight and the circumstances by which it was established, but in the best scientific tradition albeit with excessive pedantry, the place and date of Bloom’s weighing himself are detailed, including the temporal coordinates of the Christian, the Jewish and the Mohammedan calendar, and the basics by which the Church works out its moveable feasts is added for good measure:7 “golden number 5, epact 13, solar cycle 9, dominical letters C B, Roman indication 2, Julian period 6617, MXMIV”.8 The wrong Roman year, “MXMIV”, has been noticed all along, but less so that “indication” is incorrect for the technical term “indiction” (for a cyclical period), an easy oversight. Both Gabler’s and the Reader’s Edition corrected this to “indiction” and “Indiction”, respectively, as well as the year to “MCMIV” (U 17.97; RE 582). Joyce added both wrong versions fairly late, probably under tremendous stress of last corrections; the “insertion is dated 25.I.22”, slightly more than a week before publication. The two editions just quoted assume that Joyce erred under pressure, and they come to the aid of his supposed intention. It is still 7 The weighing, ironically, took place on “the last feast of Ascension, to wit, the twelfth day of May” (U 17.9), which celebrates the ascent of Christ’ body in defiance of all Newtonian laws of gravity. 8 James Joyce. Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922), 621–2.

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conceivable that the two easily verifiable entries inserted on the same occasion might not be accidental: they might just underline basic human fallibility. Was Joyce being sloppy or sly? Some of the Reader’s Edition’s emendations have been adduced here to show their underlying assumption that the “Ithaca” episode is more scientifically construed than in the view presented here.

2

“Circumscribed” (U 17.2292)

The intended verbal precision, accurate, distanced, not idiomatically blurred, results in lexical and scientific ponderousness, as is evidenced in the second question: “Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?” (U 17.11). The elaborate phrasing was a late correction, a translation of “Of what did they speak” into Ithacese: “they” is enlarged to a recondite “duumvirate”, a simple “speak” is elevated to “deliberate” (25.I.1922),9 in a pedantic last moment lick of paint. To “deliberate”, originally weighing upon a scale, is in semantic excess for a simple — and in all probability one-sided — casual conversation. A short walk of about twenty minutes with no problems of orientation can be called, by some linguistic stretch and an ironic note, an “itinerary”. “Duumvirate” was the term for a joint city office for two men (duo viri) in ancient Rome; Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, both exiles in their own way, pointedly hold no office in their city. The word is out of place and, at best, mildly facetious — it resembles the jocular diction of “Eumaeus” from which “Ithaca” wants to distance itself. Leopold Bloom, not from entirely altruistic motives, took care of aging and ailing Mrs Riordan by escorting her to watch the traffic of the North Circular Road on warm summer evenings (U 17.488–97). This act is called “his vigil”, an inappropriately loose use of the term as a “vigil” is either a night watch or the eve of a festival. Again the word is reminiscent of Eumaean latitudes. A detached, often superior perspective should exclude such vibrations, which can lead to ludicrous effects. The spit of Bloom’s daughter in the lake in Stephen’s Green occasions geometric description: “… her uncommented spit [suggesting a category of commented spit], describing concentric circles of water rings, indicated by the constancy of its permanence the locus of a somnolent prostrate fish” (U 17.898). A casual observer might be at a loss to distinguish a sleeping fish from a perhaps dead or even somnolent fish — if

9 The James Joyce Archive, eds. Michael Groden et al. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), 27:138. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as JJA followed by the volume and page number.

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fish can ever reach such a state — but it would be next to impossible for a fish, no matter how devote, to be, or just appear to be, “prostrate”, which generally means stretched out on a solid ground and often in religious observance. The scientific veneer and its impressive polysyllabic attributes are manifestly bogus. Water boiled in Bloom’s kitchen produces a “double falciform ejection of water vapour from under the kettlelid at both sides simultaneously” (U 17.273). In spite of its air of precision, the Latinate “falciform” is spurious in suggesting the form of a sickle (Lat. falx). Sickles have sharp contours, but what form could vapour assume, possibly the most shapeless imaginable substance? “Falciform” is visual imagination, not perception. Molly Bloom has engaged at times in “laconic epistolary composition”, and Bloom’s report to Molly about the past day is described as “intermittent and increasingly more laconic” (U 17.682, 2273). Clearly, Molly Bloom’s letters are not expansive and the couple’s talk was gradually fading out. To a fading conversation or simple words in a letter, “laconic” is wrongly applied; it means the very opposite, short, terse, but pointed diction. Simple enumerations may get out of line. Bloom is finally entering his bed with manifest apprehension: What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter? New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed. (U 17.2122) Upon contact, the limbs would certainly sense new clean linen (with the deduction that the bed had been prepared for the special occasion), and they would feel a live human form as well as crumbs and flakes of potted meat (which promises to turn the home into an “Abode of Bliss”, U 5.147). However, that limbs would be able to make out the imprint of a human form is next to impossible since any dent would have disappeared if the remaining inhabitant of the bed had been tossing in it for hours. The imprint is not a matter of physical contact, but of an unsettling association. In this context, it is easy to overlook that limbs cannot encounter odours. Perceptions mingle with imagination. The narrative mind is often losing control or yielding to associative digressions. Among other things, “Ithaca” also transposes an underlying string of associations10 into scientific sounding diction. 10

Whether Bloom’s eleven companions in the cemetery at Dignam’s interment were all, as the detailed list indicates, actually “(in bed)” — in all probability, they were — or only in Bloom’s imagination can hardly be ascertained (U 17.1235–41).

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At the sight of Hozier’s History of the Russo-Turkish War, Bloom has a momentary difficulty calling up the “name of a decisive battle (forgotten), frequently remembered by a decisive officer, major Brian Cooper Tweedy (remembered)” (U 17.1419). This creates the appearance that Bloom’s fatherin-law took a “decisive” part in the Battle of Plevna, in 1877, which was indeed decisive. Such an appearance was already created at the first mention of “old Tweedy” in Bloom’s memory: “At Plevna that was. I rose from the ranks, sir” (U 4.63). No British troops, however, were involved in that battle, and chances are that Tweedy merely read about the battle and frequently talked about it. That Molly remembers him “talking about Rorkes drift and Plevna and sir Garner Wolseley and Gordon at Khartoum” (U 18.690) does not indicate that her father took an active part in any of these historical events. One remote possibility is that Bloom himself has been misled, but, at any rate, “decisive” does not quite equal “decisive” in the same sentence; old Tweedy, major or sergeant major, may have been decisive in his nature, but not in a momentous battle. In a comparison of the religious upbringings of Bloom and Stephen, the text states impassively that Bloom has been baptised (three times), by the reverend Mr Gilmer Johnston M. A., alone, in the protestant church of Saint Nicholas Without, Coombe, by James O’Connor, Philip Gilligan and James Fitzpatrick, together, under a pump in the village of Swords, and by the reverend Charles Malone C. C., in the church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar. (U 17.542) This documents Bloom’s formal adherence to the Protestant and then the Catholic denominations; he takes part in three religions yet stands outside of them all. The middle baptism, “by James O’Connor, Philip Gilligan and James Fitzpatrick, together, under a pump in the village of Swords”, that is to say by “layman” not “cleric” (U 17.541), seems to be more of a juvenile prank, perhaps with an antisemitic touch, than a real ceremony. Possibly, the wording “baptised” simply reverts to an original meaning, as in other instances: Greek baptizein originally just meant “dip, plunge, submerge” before it acquired the meaning of a ritual act. However, a dogmatic possibility is that any act of sprinkling water over a person accompanied by the prescribed words counts as a real baptism. If so, Bloom’s third baptism would have been superfluous as well as invalid, or, in another view, it would make Bloom of all people ironically more Catholic than anyone else in the book. In going over the past day, Bloom notes that he failed to obtain tea from Tom Kernan, to take a proper look at the backside of statues (“certify the presence

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or absence of posterior rectal orifice in the case of Hellenic female divinities”), and to attend the Gaiety theatre (U 17.2074). These entirely minor failures are subsumed under “imperfections in a perfect day”. Does the one day where Bloom goes out of his way to connive in his wife’s affair count as “perfect”? The adjective may be used in a sloppy, oblivious, manner, wholly inappropriate for “Ithaca”, or possibly it is narrowed to its grammatical, temporal meaning: the day is over, “perfectum” done, in perfect tense. Bloom’s response to the “catechetical interrogation” to which he is submitted is not offered in detail, but only through his “modifications”, that is departures from facts. Understandably, he does not bring up his “clandestine correspondence” with Martha Clifford, nor the “exhibitionism” of Gerty MacDowell in Sandymount, or the “altercation” in Bernard Kiernan’s public house.11 To account for the evening hours spent, he invents a visit to a theatre performance and a dinner, neither of which took place. But under the same heading, he lists the “peccanimous” book Sweets of Sin, which he did in fact bring home, as well as an “aeronautical feat” in the presence of a witness “with gymnastic flexibility” (U 17.2250) — this latter must refer to Bloom’s stratagem in climbing over the area railings (U 17.83). So “modifications” is to be redefined retrospectively. It comes to mean events that would not occur in the normal run of affairs and therefore may be worth telling. Such disarray is not infrequent in Ithacan lists: they are often disrupted by intrusive associations that run counter to scientific arrangement. Bloom’s incomplete list leads to the question: “Was the narration otherwise unaltered by modification?” Given the truism that Bloom could hardly report all the day’s events adequately, even if this were attempted, and the fact that every narration of an act is of necessity a modification, the answer is all the more absurdly unfitting: “Absolutely” (U 17.2267). “Absolutely” is one of the strongest possible terms in science as it leaves no question open. In the present context, “Absolutely” could only be a vague assertion as it is used colloquially; it fits the diction of “Eumaeus” (where indeed it occurs four times: U 16.353, 1321, 1387, 1587). But one of the characteristics of “Ithaca” is that it saliently sets itself off from its predecessor.

11

The account Odysseus gives to Penelope when they are reunited after twenty years has analogous omissions: he briefly lists his adventures in an even tone, and from his brief mention of Kirke (“then he told of all the wiles and craftiness of Kirke”) or Kalypso (“how he came to Ogygia and to the nymph Kalypso, who kept him there in her hollow caves”, Od. 23.321, 333), one could not deduce that Kirke had been his lover for one year, or Kalypso for seven.

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“mythametical” (FW 286.23)

On 7 June 1921, Joyce wrote to Alessandro Francini Bruni: “L’episodio d’Itaca adesso tutto geometria, algebra e matematica”.12 Indeed, there is a strong bias towards mathematical precision which can be misapplied to a comparison of Bloom’s and Stephen’s respective ages and their relation, an extended calculation which soon escalates into an muddle of irrationality, apart from its overall irrelevance: Bloom, for example, “… would have been obliged to have been alive 83,300 years, having been obliged to have been born in the year 81,396 B.C.” (U 17.459), where the figures are not only hilariously irrelevant but also inaccurate.13 The speed of drinking cocoa is not generally expressed in a mathematical formula, except in “Ithaca”: Who drank more quickly? Bloom, having the advantage of ten seconds at the initiation and taking, from the concave surface of a spoon along the handle of which a steady flow of heat was conducted, three sips to his opponent’s one, six to two, nine to three. (U 17.377) The ratio of three to one can hardly be extrapolated as a reliable series of reciprocal sips. Budgets ought to be accurate, but the one offered in “Ithaca” “for June 16” manifestly is not (U 17.1455); it also includes expenses of the 17th. Three competing editions of Ulysses disagree about the price of Fry’s plain chocolate which is “0. - 0. - 1” in the Paris edition of 1922, but “0. - 1. - 0” in Gabler’s Ulysses (U 17.1472), and the “Loan (Stephen Dedalus)” has been corrected from “1 7 - 6” to “1 - 8 - 11” in the Reader’s Edition. The differences are not caused by editorial negligence but are inherent in the state of the documents. Geometry is predominant as though the episode were to return to “The Sisters”, where Euclid was the first name to be mentioned and the opening paragraph contained both a “square” and a “gnomon” (D 9). “Ithaca” ends with a “square round Sinbad the Sailor’s roc’s auk’s egg” (U 17.2328), in a phrasing that seems to anticipate the Wake and where the conjunction of “square” and “round” may also hint at the quadrature of the circle (U 17.1696). In its futile

12 13

James Joyce, Letters, III.46. The Reader’ Edition dutifully corrects the last figures to “20,230” and “17,158” respectively (RE 592, see above).

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search for completeness and accuracy, the “Ithaca” episode seems to aim at such a feat. Bloom meditates on educational scientific toys for kindergartens, learning by playing, and they show Bloom’s scientific bent: They comprised astronomical kaleidoscopes exhibiting the twelve constellations of the zodiac from Aries to Pisces, miniature mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatine lozenges, geometrical to correspond with zoological biscuits, globemap playing balls, historically costumed dolls. (U 17.569) Even the human anatomy can be described geometrically: [Bloom] unbuttoned successively in reversed direction waistcoat, trousers, shirt and vest along the medial line of irregular incrispated black hairs extending in triangular convergence from the pelvic basin over the circumference of the abdomen and umbilicular fossicle along the medial line of nodes to the intersection of the sixth pectoral vertebrae, thence produced both ways at right angles and terminating in circles described about two equidistant points, right and left, on the summits of the mammary prominences. (U 17.1135, the relevant terms are emphasized for clarity) A handshake can take geometrical form: “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” (U 17.1220, again emphasis provided). After all, the episode begins with a strong geometrical bent: What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning? […] Approaching, disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before George’s church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends. (U 17.1, again emphasis provided) Geometry is an exact science, with a strict definition of “parallel”, as is elsewhere stated: “Retreating, at the terminus of the Great Northern Railway, Amiens street, with constant uniform acceleration, along parallel lines meeting at infinity, if produced: along parallel lines, reproduced from infinity” (U 17.2084, “produced” is used in the purely spatial sense of “extended”). In loose parlance, Bloom and Stephen follow “parallel” courses, but not in a strict geometrical

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sense. The pair walks side by side, alongside each other, but definitely not in accordance with what “parallel” means, especially since Stephen’s is likely to be wavering (“weak on his pins”). The apparent accuracy is spurious already at the outset (and, incidentally, Stephen is not “returning”). Again Joyce might go back to the original meaning of “parallêlos” as merely “beside one another, nebeneinander”, before Euclid narrowed it to its technical use. If, on the other hand, “parallel” is to be taken at face value, it might suggest, by geometrical axiom, that Bloom and Stephen will never come together.

4

Hypostasis

One overall question in “Ithaca” is the significance of its many single items when they are presented in the same deadpan way. How can the significance of the two main characters’ meeting be evaluated: from a common consumption of “Epp’s massproduct”, from the singing of an antisemitic ballad, from concomitant micturition, or from some hidden symbol? The chapter of many answers does not provide many conclusive ones. Scholars are given to revealing interpretations and so attempts have been made to find an Archimedean lever somewhere in the random particulars, and one of them, a particularly resolute pivotal claim, might be singled out: The significance of the early episodes in Ulysses can only be fully grasped upon a rereading of the novel, and even then only if one is reading from the moment in “Ithaca” when Stephen sees in Bloom “the traditional figure of hypostasis …” The novel is designed to take on its fullest meaning only once this moment is confronted and understood.14 Other readers of Joyce might be more reticent in bestowing unique validity on one particular focal passage. What were Stephen’s and Bloom’s quasisimultaneous volitional quasisensations of concealed identities? Visually, Stephen’s: the traditional figure of hypostasis depicted by Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphaniuss Monachus as leucodermic, sesquipedalian with winedark hair. (U 17.783)

14

Stephen Sicari, Joyce’s Modernist Allegory: Ulysses and the History of the Novel (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 30.

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The decisive term is “hypostasis”, defined theologically as the union of God the Father and Christ, and from this cue, everything falls into harmonious perspective: Bloom is Christ, not spectacularly new, but now haloed with new radiance. In the documents attributed to the authors that are quoted, Jesus Christ was in fact depicted as being white-skinned with auburn, “reddish” or “dark and glossy” hair.15 Stephen Hero examines these views when Stephen questions his mother about matters of belief: — I don’t believe, for example, that Jesus was the only man that ever had pure auburn hair. — Well? — Nor that he was the only man that was exactly six feet high, neither more nor less. — Well? — Well, you believe that. (Stephen Hero, 134) Perhaps the prefix “quasi” (in “quasisimultaneous volitional quasisensations”) might caution against too authoritative an interpretation. The whole passage was added on the page proofs of Ulysses as late as 17 December 1921 (JJA 21:59), practically a month and a half before final publication. It is unlikely that a passage considered so crucial that it holds the key for the whole book would have been held back for a final insertion just before publication. “Ithaca” transposes the colour of the hair to “winedark” of Homeric overtones (U 3.394 et passim), and uses the medical term “leucodermic” (suggesting congenital albinism) for simply white-skinned and so obviously takes some liberties with the sources. “[S]esquipedalian” aims at “six feet”, as in Stephen’s question to his mother (“exactly six feet high”). But Latin “sesquipedalia” does not mean six feet, but only one foot and half (accordingly, the Reader’s Edition supplies a helpful but undocumented “sexipedalian” [RE 602], at the risk of calling up voyeuristic delight in view of female cyclists) to set the record straight. Part of the classical heritage, the word “sesquipedalian” is well known from Horace’s Art of Poetics, where he says that, when tragic actors want to move their audience, they forego or throw away their bombastic words of one and a half foot length: “sesquipedalia verba” (Ars Poetica, 97). So the adjective describes a word, not a person, and thus it is clearly misapplied to Jesus

15

See: William E. Addis & Thomas Arnold, eds., A Catholic Dictionary (London: Kegan Paul, 1903), 175. Quoted in “Joyce’s Sense of Rumour” in this volume (p. 58).

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Christ. Of course, one might argue that, after all, Jesus Christ is the Logos, the Word, according to John 1:1, and so the slippage might be circuitously justified. But the word is wrong and possibly unsuitable for dogmatic speculations. But without a doubt, it can be applied self-reflectively to the vocabulary of the episode. “Ithaca” is characterized by sesquipedalian terms. It appears unlikely that the secret meaning of Ulysses is condensed in one quintessential passage, a passage with theological overtones that are anything but consistent. All of this is not to exclude that Joyce might, after all, hide some essential messages in a twisted, refracted way under a jocular surface.

5

Catalogues

“Ithaca” contains more catalogues than any other episode; the paradigmatic enumerations of related items is one of its distinctive features. In fact, “Ithaca” is constructed almost like a catalogue of paired questions and answers.16 Some of them could easily be rearranged, or new ones could be inserted in the complex additive composition. The longest one, induced by “What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?” (U 17.183), transposes what at best must be vague and fleeting thoughts into the semblance of systematic order. It amounts to a heterogeneous jumble of stray, somewhat related associations, the record of a brainstorming. Comprising 473 words (U 17.183–228), it is in turn geographic, chemical, and biological. It can relate to water and its properties or to contemplations about the sea, at times it derails into anthropomorphism (“its democratic quality”); it spawns sub-lists and lacks logical coherence — the opposite of a methodical tabulation in the wake of scientists like Linné. By the time the end is reached and the “noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marches, pestilential fens” is itemized, we may have forgotten that the list takes its origin in what Bloom admires. The catalogue has acquired a wayward momentum of its own and climaxes in a romantic evocation of “stagnant pools in the waning moon”. Ithacan catalogues tend to wobble out of focus in a purely associative way as in a listing of foreign locations that come to Bloom’s mind: Ceylon (with spicegardens supplying tea to Thomas Kernan, agent for Pulbrook, Robertson and Co, 2 Mincing Lane, London, E. C., 5 Dame 16

Fritz Senn, “‘Ithaca’: Portrait of the Chapter as a Long List”, Joyce’s “Ithaca”, ed. Andrew Gibson, European Joyce Studies 6 (Amsterdam: Rodopi. 1996), 31–76.

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street, Dublin), Jerusalem, the holy city (with mosque of Omar and gate of Damascus, goal of aspiration), the straits of Gibraltar (the unique birthplace of Marion Tweedy), the Parthenon (containing statues of nude Grecian divinities), the Wall street money market (which controlled international finance), the Plaza de Toros at La Linea, Spain (where O’Hara of the Camerons had slain the bull), Niagara (over which no human being had passed with impunity), the land of the Eskimos (eaters of soap), the forbidden country of Thibet (from which no traveller returns), the bay of Naples (to see which was to die), the Dead Sea. (U 17.19179) The descriptive tags in parentheses are of a different order: some are factual, some are memories, others are local stereotypes and at least one is outdated: by 1900, Niagara Falls had been traversed. Gradually, stray rumours or clichés take over (Eskimos devouring soap), a Shakespeare quote is applied to Thibet, from where surely some travellers did return, and finally a common saying is taken at face value: if “to see” Naples “was to die”, it would turn the ancient city into a cemetery. It has become commonplace (and obvious for anyone reading the book closely) that the series of what was often taken to be Molly Bloom’s lovers (U 17.2132, analogous to the unsuccessful suitors in the Odyssey) hardly refers to men that occupied Molly’s bed, as the text blandly seems to assume. So the question is what is the series a series of? It may be a list of men that paid some attention to Molly at one time or other, a matter of speculation but not of bare facts. Again an undercurrent of interior monologue infuses the episode.

6

Expectation

“Ithaca” plays with narrative conventions and readerly expectations. It offers a lot of details of doubtful practical import (like the relative speed of sipping). The addresses of shops are pedantically supplied irrespective of their bearing on the events, or even of the goods supplied. On the other hand, apart from nothing being known of Bloom’s mother or Bloom’s Jewishness, Stephen’s significant attitudes are never revealed. Normally, oral or written tales concentrate on what is worth telling, extraordinary or unexpected. “Ithaca” often departs from this. In detailing an itinerary, it is assumed that the order of the telling corresponds to the way taken, but “Ithaca” specifies a redundant “in the order named” (U 17.3).

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We know that bodies fall and that normally, when a faucet is turned, water comes pouring out, and only if it doesn’t or something else issues forth, is it worth mentioning. But “Ithaca” spells out the expected norm: “Did it flow?” is answered “Yes”, and it is supplemented by a detailed description of Dublin’s water supply and its present problems (U 17.164–184). The irrelevance seems to be announced by a grammatical lapse that almost goes unnoticed. “Did it flow?” logically refers to “water”, as the detailed answer makes clear, but a precedent “water” is absent in the preceding question: Bloom “rose and carried the iron kettle to the sink in order to tap the current by turning the faucet to let it flow” (U 17.161), where “it” could only refer to the “current”. “Water” is implied but not present, and yet the following two items, water supply, and its admired properties depend on it.17

7

Dangling Correlatives

The discrete items in “Ithaca” tend to be interlinked by analogous terms, often adjectives, which serve as structural devices in emphasizing coherence or contrast. A good example is a tightly woven paragraph with echoing interconnective terms: That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown: an infinity renderable equally finite by the suppositious apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space, remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its probable spectators had entered actual present existence. (U 17.1139, emphases provided)

17

Where an original text is slipshod, translations often set things right; therefore, they can serve as control groups. Most translation are grammatically correct: “… aux fins de faire couler l’eau en établissant le courant par l’ouverture de la chantepleure” (Ulysse, trans. Auguste Morel et al., Paris: Gallimard, 1948 {1929}, 596). “… afin d’en capter le courant en tournant le robinet pour que l’eau coule” (Ulysse, trans. Jacques Aubert et al., Paris: Gallimard, 2004, 9955). “… per far scorrere e attinger l’acqua girando il rubinetto” (Ulisse, trans. Gianni Celati, Torino: Einaudi, 2013, 832). “… um dort vermittels Drehen des Hahnes den Wasserstrom zum Fließen zu bringen” (Ulysses, trans. Hans Wollschläger, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975, 846).

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At times, such correlatives are foregrounded beyond their possible relevance: “What proposal did Bloom, diambulist, father of Milly, somnambulist, make to Stephen, noctambulist?” (U 17.929). The ostentatious distinctions appear to highlight essential traits in the three characters; even a neologism, “diambulist”, is introduced, probably to match a walker at night (Lat. nox, noctis) with one during the day (Lat. dies). Yet the terminological excess is largely vacuous. There is little evidence that Milly was prone to somnambulism (U 17.860), and one minor instance of somnambulism, or fear, is attributed to Bloom (U 17.850). Moreover, “somnambulist” is often used synonymously with “noctambulist”. At the end of “Circe”, Bloom fleetingly imagines Steven being a “Somnambulist” (U 15.4926). Above all, both Bloom and Stephen have been walking by day and by night; in fact, both were already referred to as “our two noctambules” in “Eumaeus” (U 16.326).18 The pedantic scientific differentiation is more show than pertinence and mainly a gesture towards classification. It appears that Joyce reinforced such correlations at a fairly late stage. A systematic trinity of parallel composites, “What selfimposed enigma …”, “What selfinvolved enigma …”, “What selfevident enigma …” (U 17.2059, 2063, 2067) was inserted on the page proofs on 27 January 1922 (JJA 27:204). In the two protagonists’ “respective parentages”, Bloom is listed as “only born male transubstantial heir” as distinguished from Stephen as “eldest surviving male consubstantial heir” (U 17.534), calling up theological spectres that have occupied Stephen throughout the day.19 It is less easy to account for Bloom being “transubstantial” though serious patristic relationships may still be at work. The point here is simply that the theological adjectives were added on 25 January 1922 (JJA 27:155), again very late as though Joyce wanted to imbue the episode with more of a scientific flavour. All the exemplification and many more similar instances might be condensed into one trite, perhaps unnecessary observation: the “Ithaca” episode, whatever else and whatever the author’s intentions, is also high comedy at its miniscule verbal level. 18

19

The network could be extended to King Hamlet, “Doomed for a certain time to walk the night”, which Bloom changes to “walk the earth” (Hamlet 1.9, U 8.68) and Molly’s “meeting God knows who nightwalkers and pickpockets” (U 18.1453). “Arius, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of Son with the Father”; “Is that then the divine substance wherein the Father and Son are consubstantial?”; “Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantialilty”; “My consubstantial father’s voice”; “Entweder transubstantiality oder consubstantiality but in no case subsubstantiality” (U 1.657, 3.49–51, 62, 14.308).

Chapter 15

Events in Language: Joycean Extras The following extended remarks have one highly unoriginal purpose: to show, at the risk of being redundant, how consummately Joyce handled language. They concentrate not on the content, the What, but on How something is expressed. Such an approach entails slow and careful reading, a series of closeups, with the perennial danger of essentially subjective comments. Among the variegated quotations in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, a particular one is taken from “a ragged book written by a Portuguese priest”: “Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates” (P 179). It has been translated variously: “The orator condenses, the poet-seers amplify in their verses”;1 “The orator summarizes, the poet-prophets transform (elaborate) their verses”.2 The gist of both generalisations is that orators and poets proceed in contrasting ways, either by condensation or else amplification, or summaries are contrasted with transformation. Poets, of course, are known for variation. It may be revealing that Joyce chose a potentially ambiguous rule, for the line refers to a technicality of Latin verses: The meaning of the Latin line is clarified: “A vowel, naturally short, when it goes before a mute and liquid, is common in verse; but in prose it is always short”, according to the author.3 Latin verse depends on long and short syllables, not on stress. The combination of “mute” consonants (b, p; f, v; d, t; g, c[k]) followed by “liquids” (r, l)4 deserves special treatment; in prose it is short, yet in poetry it is either short or long. Why should Joyce, with a whole long tradition at his command, choose trivia of classical prosody? There is no answer, except that the quote may indic-

1 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 523. 2 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 264. 3 The Latin Prosody of Emanuel Alvarez, S.T.P., with the Explanation in English by the Rv. E. J. Geoghegan (Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son, 1864), 11. 4 Joyce was aware of combinations like “bl” or “gr”, as baby Stephen’s distortion of a song shows: “O, the wild rose blossoms / On the little green place” is reduced to “O, the geen wothe botheth”. Two consonants are too much to articulate: “green” is shortened to “geen”, “blossoms” to “botheth”. (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993). Boldface is used throughout to signal differences.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_016

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ate how small items of sound or rhythm do matter esthetically. This, at least, is a basis of the observations to follow. Another starting point is taken from Stephen Dedalus’s pronouncements on Beauty in A Portrait, where he holds forth: [Y]ou apprehend [the esthetic image] as balanced part against part within it limits … You apprehend it as complex, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is consonantia. (P 212) Harmony/consonantia (how the various parts sound together) has to do with tonal interrelations. An analogous example is recorded by Frank Budgen remembering that Joyce one day had written two sentences (no doubt far less than his average output), having the words already but aiming at their perfect order.5 The two sentences, from “Lestrygonians”, at that time, around 1918, were: Perfumes of embraces assailed him. His hungered flesh obscurely, mutely craved to adore.6 Bloom is seen from outside, the choice words employed are not within his range, and the register is literary. But even these sentences were still to be improved on in further refinement. {Perfumes of embraces assailed him.} Perfume of embraces all him assailed. {His hungered flesh obscurely, mutely craved to adore.} With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore. (U 8.637) The choice constructions — idiosyncratic and memorable — are set off from their surroundings, punctiliously (and obscurely) crafted in balanced cadences. They draw attention to themselves as exquisite constructs, a departure from the surrounding colloquial mode.

5 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 20. 6 James Joyce, Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript (London: Faber & Faber, in ass. with Philadelphia: The Philip H. & A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1975), 160–1.

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Life on the Raw

One of the tensions in the first episode turns around the possession of the one (and only) key to the Martello Tower, which in the end will be ceded to Buck Mulligan. It makes an unobtrusive entrance when Haines opens the door: “The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered” (U 1.327). One is generally not aware of routine actions like opening a door unless a special effort becomes necessary. The key scrapes “harshly”, with an audible noise, so that another try is called for, “twice”; the mechanism is not functioning too well. The impression is reinforced by a ponderous subordinate clause, separated by commas: “and, when the heavy door had been set ajar,” which again points to additional exertion. Both key and lock must be old, perhaps rusty, which is not surprising in a historical tower. The extra effort makes the entering air all the more welcome (secondarily, the “heavy” door is set off by “light”). A trivial event is mirrored in language. We now know that the actual key to the Tower was huge and uncomfortable to carry, but this might already have been deduced from the laborious description. Language, it seems, is acting out what it expresses, a feature that is common in the early, more realistic part of Ulysses, where we may come close to an illusion that what happens and how it is put into words are identical. In “Hades”, Bloom is also struggling with the door of the shabby funeral carriage: “He pulled the door to after him and slammed it twice till it shut tight”.7 To get out, “Martin Cunningham put out his arm and, wrenching back the handle, shoved the door open with his knee” (U 4.9, 4.490; again, note the commas). Incidentally, most objects in the Blooms’ house appear to be old: his “creaky wardrobe”, “secondhand raincoat”, “chipped eggcup”, etc. An analogous effect is achieved when the carriage arrives at the cemetery: “The felly harshed against the curbstone, stopped” (U 6.490), where “harsh” has been turned into an active verb with an almost tactile impact, a verbal imitation which could hardly have been condensed into fewer words. Joyce’s prose is full of the imitation, or at least simulation, of sensual effects. Lenehan “tossed the tissues on to the table” (U 7.390), where alliteration is

7 In the 1922 edition of Ulysses and all subsequent printings before the Gabler Critical and Synoptic one, the passage read “… slammed it tight till it shut tight” (Ulysses 1922, 84). This reading, now thrown out as an “erroneous anticipation”, would have told a different story in slow motion: Bloom would have thought the door was shut the first time, but then found that another effort was necessary, the first “tight” representing a failure, the second the achievement. See Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, eds. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York and London: Garland Publishers, 1984, 1986), III.1735.

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reinforced by a sibilant sequence in an almost audible compact sentence, this in “Aeolus”, the chapter of rhetorical devices. It also features a combination of assonance and the repetition of initial consonants: “A smile of light brightened his darkrimmed eyes, lengthened his long lips” (U 7.560). The more realistic early episodes feature concise epiphanic sketches that may even evoke noisome repugnance: “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” (U 1.108). The sentence invites slow, emphatic reading aloud. Stephen Dedalus imagines the corpse of a drowned man rising to the surface in a harsh close-up: “Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun” (U 3.480). “A man with an infant’s saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet” (U 8.658). Such passages, when read aloud, seem to allow each word to get full attention.

2

Grace of Alacrity (U 11.217)

As against stark almost palpable realistic vignettes, many well-wrought constructions of distinct artifice seem to preen themselves; they could even be isolated as prose poems. They abound in a musically orchestrated episode like “Sirens”. The initial arrangement of motif fragments without context, the “Overture”, prepares for what is to follow: “Last rose of Castile of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone” (U 11.54). It combines The Rose of Castile, an opera as yet still unrevealed, with Thomas Moore’s “Last Rose of Summer” (“Tis the last rose of summer / Left blooming alone”), with a letter Bloom is going to write, but it is also an independent composition with its own intrinsic grace. Early on, a poised orchestration of sadness is exemplary: With sadness. Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a hair. Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a curving ear. — It’s them has the fine times, sadly then she said. (U 11.81) The three sentences rearrange a few motifs: “saunter”, “sad”, “twining/ twisting”, near-rhyming “hair” and “ear”, with assonances (“bright”, “light”, “behind”, “twine”) and alliterations (“sadly sauntering”, “twisted twined”) for which of course musical analogies can be adduced. The para-tautological sketch could be an attempt to tease out the best possible syntactic order, or

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it mocks operatic repetitions and variations, internal echoes of identity and difference. Such clusters within an ongoing rhythmical whirl interrupt the current, the continuous flow; they invite leisurely appreciation; they act as timeouts or interludes. The breathless drawn-out end of an aria in Martha reaches climactic heights: — Come …! 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, 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! (U 11.744) The extended musical note is descriptive and evocative, in typical amalgamation, it features interior monologue fragments as well as echoes from the inflated speech in “Aeolus” that are outside of Bloom’s potential memory.8 Some passages are intricately patterned, as exemplified in an early encounter: “The boots to them, them in the bar, them barmaids came” (U 11.89). The crescendo (“to them, them in the bar, them barmaids”) has a musical effect, but “them barmaids” might also serve the (assumed) colloquialism of the entering person whom the barmaids consider beneath their station. The first occurrence of “boots” in the chapter could be misread as boots in a predominant pars pro toto manner (“Her wet lips tittered”), but it turns out that the word primarily refers to the bootsboy, the lowest rank in the hotel, who is generally looked down on. As an unwanted intruder, he is vainly clamouring for attention by threefold repetition: “The boots to them, them in the bar, them barmaids came”. For all the triplicate thems, they are still “unheeding him”, so that a clattering noise, with assonant and alliterative reinforcement, emphatically obtrudes: “For them unheeding him he banged on the counter his tray of chattering china” (U 11.89). The carefully structured paragraph includes undercurrent tension as well as a consciousness of class and caste, which will be developed in the next lines. Internal rhythmic reiteration of themes can approach farcical near-vacuity:

8 Dan Dawson’s speech featured “pensive bosom”, “high on high”, “irradiate her silver effulgence” (U 7.246–328) and in itself already consisted of an airy aria.

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Bald Pat who is bothered mitred the napkins. Pat is a waiter hard of his hearing. Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. Hee hee. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. While you wait if you wait he will wait while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. Hoh. Wait while you wait. (U 11.915) Bloom’s endeavour to divert his mind (“Wish they’d sing more. Keep my mind off”, U 11.914) results in an echoing jingle which revolves around three subjects: wait, hee, while. By apposite chance, the English word “waiter” contains the verb that refers to the time that seems to pass before his attention is caught. As it happens, a lot of waiting is going on in the episode, by Molly in view of Boylan’s delay; “Waiting” happens to be a song: “Singing. Waiting she sang” (U 11.730). The jingling reformulations also suggest that time is idly whiled away by almost everyone. Sound variants can turn into blatant nonsense, as in the musings of Stephen Dedalus in the Portrait, where verbal play can go astray: His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms and almost empty jingles: The ivy whines upon the wall, And whines and twines upon the wall, The yellow ivy upon the wall, Ivy, ivy up the wall. Did anyone ever hear such drivel? Lord Almighty! Who ever heard of ivy whining on a wall? Yellow ivy; that was all right. Yellow ivory also. And what about ivory ivy? (P 179) In some instances in “Sirens”, a pattern as pattern takes precedence over the actual meanings. In an emotional tangle induced by sentimental music, Leopold Bloom erotically imagines “[t]ipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup” (U 11.706), where it does not seem to matter primarily what — exactly — “tepping” stands for and what the semantic uses of “tipping” or “topping her” are, the sexual current being of course obvious. Such passages preen themselves as self-contained compositions. Bloom’s calculated entrance behind Richard Goulding into the Ormond dining room is depicted with the utmost economy: “The bag of Goulding, Collis, Ward led Bloom by ryebloom flowered tables. Aimless he chose with

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agitated aim, bald Pat attending, a table near the door. Be near. At four” (U 11.391). The “ryebloom flowered tables” are a carry-over from “[w]hen the Bloom is on the rye”, as unoriginally quoted by Lenehan: “Leopoldo or the Bloom is on the Rye” (U 10.524), which was resumed in “Bloom. Old Bloom. Blue Bloom is on the rye” (U 11.230). A delicate situation must be strategically handled by Bloom, who unobtrusively wants to choose a seat that allows him, unseen, to observe Boylan’s movements; he has to manoeuvre carefully, following Goulding, moreover, in the presence of a waiter hovering nearby. He once more assumes a careless air: “Aimless he chose …”. But the latent uneasiness shows in the sequel right away: “… with agitated aim”. The subterfuge is condensed into a few words with an inherent contradiction of “aimless” with “chose”. “Aimless” also faintly chimes with “tables”. Boylan greeting Lenehan with “I hear you were round”, as he enters the Ormond bar, would not deserve any attention if it had not been preceded by a phonetically circular sentence: “Lenehan round the sandwichbell wound his round body round” (U 11.240). The phrase “wound round” also turns into an independent motif: “Bloom unwound the elastic band of his packet. … Bloom slowly wound a skein round four forkfingers, stretched it, relaxed, and wound it round his troubled double, fourfold, in octave, gyved them fast” (U 11.681). “‘Tis the last rose of summer dollard left bloom felt wind wound round inside” (U 11.1178). So Lenehan is associated with “round”. But apart from the reiteration effect, his physique is in focus too. In Dubliners, he was described as “squat and ruddy … But his figure fell into rotundity”.9 So it is not rhyme alone, but also reason, which accounts for the reiteration. “Sirens” shows itself as — also and predominantly — a patterned artefact. Self-contained sketches tend to halt the narrative current and invite musing over, as in poetry. It is a Joycean epiphanic quality that when a passage is read mutely, or voiced aloud, every word or phrase tends to achieve its full splendour (whatness) and comes into its own, something to be tasted and dwelt on. “Sirens” is made up of predominantly short paragraphs, preceded and followed by a minimal pause. In its “Overture”, each item is isolated to be treated as an autonomous unit. Echoes are also a momentary reluctance to move forward. A different use of reverberating words is to be found in A Portrait, as when Stephen is caught in a vicious whirl of pain: A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick made his trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: 9 James Joyce, “Two Gallants”, Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 49.

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and at the sound and the pain scalding tears were driven into his eyes. His whole body was shaking with fright, his arm was shaking and his crumpled burning livid hand shook like a loose leaf in the air. A cry sprang to his lips, a prayer to be let off. But though the tears scalded his eyes and his limbs quivered with pain and fright he held back the hot tears and the cry that scalded his throat. (P 50)10 The device also lends itself to evoke an ecstatic moment: It seemed to him that he heard notes of fitful music leaping upwards a tone and downwards a diminished fourth, upwards a tone and downwards a major third, like triplebranching flames leaping fitfully, flame after flame, out of a midnight wood. It was an elfin prelude, endless and formless; and, as it grew wilder and faster, the flames leaping out of time […] (P 158)

3

“Succinctly” (U 17.1080)

The gushingly expansive and romantically embellished first part of “Nausicaa” contains poignant interruptions. The three “girl friends” are not as amiable as they are introduced. Edy Boardman in particular is not on good terms with Gerty MacDowell and speaks “none too amiably” (U 13.71). When Gerty misses a kick with a ball, “Edy and Cissy laughed” and Edy Boardman taunts: “If you fail try again”. The response is a paradigm of condensed spite: “Gerty smiled assent and bit her lip” (U 13.360). In a tightlipped curt sentence, all the syllables are closed — ending in plosive consonants -t and -p. The structure seems to act out what it expresses. The contrast between a soft “smiled” is pitted against a pert and clipped “assent”. The verb “smile”, basically intransitive, rarely takes an object. A smiled assent is artificially confected anyway. Such crisp effects can be measured by comparison with their translations, which in this instance can hardly recreate the felicitous pertness. Other languages, without monosyllabic “bit” or “lip”, have to resort to “lèvre”, “labbro”, “labio”, or “Lippen”, ending on unstressed, weak syllables, and so do not phonetically emulate the act.11 The French “Gerty eut un sourire d’assentiment et 10

11

The paragraph looks like an elaboration of a short sentence in Giacomo Joyce: “I burn, I crumple like a burning leaf!” James Joyce, Giacomo Joyce, with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), 15. Translations that have been compared employ an average of 15 syllables as against Joyce’s seven.

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se mordit la lèvre”, elongated as it is, begins with an almost friendly tone;12 the same is true of German “… lächelte zustimmend und biß sich auf die Lippen”.13 All translations inspected in this case have recourse to formulations like “smiled assentingly” — which is quite a distance from a contorted and grating “smiled assent”. An analogous succinct enactment of a physical expression is observed by Bloom: “Richie cocked his lips apout” (U 11.630), and again the impact in part depends on phonetic closure and labials. Goulding is about, or apout, to whistle the air of “All is lost now”, pursing the lips forward (not pouting resentfully, as many translations seem to assume).

4

Grace of Structure (U 14.1084)

The early episodes of Ulysses abound in emulative sentences, as when Bloom’s rising excitement on expecting a stylish lady to step on a carriage, and thereby a revealing a bit of leg, is rendered in a staccato rhythm: “Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white”. By contrast, a passing tram intruding and blocking the view is intimated by ponderous obstructive syllables: “A heavy tramcar honking its gong slewed between” (U 5.130). The first sentence would be read quickly, the second with slow, weighty emphasis. As against such cases, at the other end of the spectrum, airy, unsubstantial processes can be evoked by weightless touches. One of Joyce’s favourite words is “soft/softly”, as at the end of “Scylla and Charybdis” or in “Sirens”:14 Frail from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw of softness softly were blown. (U 9.1228) It [a tuningfork] throbbed, pure purer, softly and softlier, its buzzing prongs. (U 11.315) A telling example is Bloom going “under the railway arch he took the envelope, tore it swiftly in shreds and scattered them towards the road. The shreds fluttered away, sank in the dank air: a white flutter, then all sank” (U 5.300). The delicacy of the minute event is brought out by ethereal, airy cadences (here represented by separate lines): 12 13 14

James Joyce, Ulysse, trans. Auguste Morel, Stuart Gilbert, and Valery Larbaud (Paris: Gallimard, 1948, first published 1929), 340. James Joyce, Ulysses, trans. Hans Wollschläger (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), 496. With 35 occurrences in Ulysses alone.

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The shreds fluttered away, sank in the dank air: a white flutter, then all sank. “Fluttered” picks up on the previous “scattered them”; it is echoed in “a white flutter”; “sank” pairs with “dank”, not just an echo, but in local reality, the air under the Westland Row railway station is indeed dank. The evocative structure in an epiphanic flutter fittingly ends on “sank”.15

5

Still Life

Some descriptions have the appearance of a painting, like Bloom’s kettle that he lifts “off the hub and set in sideways on the fire”, and then, with stark, heavy outlines, as in a painting: “It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out” (U 4.13). The heavy syllables paint the kettle in all its solid materiality, the sentence seems to demand slow, stressed reading. A painting may also come to mind when Bloom picks up a book that Molly points to, under the bed: “He stooped and lifted the valance. The book, fallen, sprawled against the bulge of the orangekeyed chamberpot” (U 4.329). A sprawling sentence in which “sprawled” matches “fallen”, but where “fallen” also silently corrects Molly’s immediately preceding mistake: “It must have fell down”. The vignette ends on a surprise: books are not habitually seen adjacent to chamberpots. The solid, useful, but not inherently romantic object follows a decorative, almost Homeric type of compound, “orangekeyed”, which reinforces the contrast. By the way, it is not easy to determine the precise meaning of “orangekeyed” from a dictionary, and a lot of fumbling is necessary to arrive at the Greek key or Greek fret, a kind of run-on S-like pattern. Romance languages put the adjective after its noun and have to change the order of words: “vaso del notte, decorato da una greca arancione”;16 “du pot de chambre à grecorange”.17 If the order is “chamberpot (decorated) with a Greek orange pattern”, the adventure closes on a classical ornament rather than an anticlimactic down-to-earth toilet utensil.

15

16 17

Elsewhere a constellation of scattering and fluttering spells hectic activity: “A bevy of scampering newsboys rushed down the steps, scattering in all directions, yelling, their white papers fluttering” (U 7.955). James Joyce, Ulisse, trans. Gianni Celati (Torino: Einaudi, 2013), 85. Ulysse, trans. Morel, 94.

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Unexpected turns characterise Joyce’s openings. The first one is directed upwards, as in the Church Latin that Buck Mulligan utters right at the beginning; the words of the Mass should not be spoken on top of a tower by a lay person in a yellow dressing gown, ungirdled. Analogously, Bloom’s preferred taste ends in a word that few would guess. Grilled mutton kidneys “gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented …”, of all things — “urine”. Urine is not what is expected to reside in a palate; it is misplaced. Finally, a book of fiction in close contact with a chamber pot spans a wide spectrum from Literature to physical processes, a characteristic of Ulysses.

6

Terpsichorean Abilities (U 15.1044)

The librarians in “Scylla and Charybdis”, as perceived or transformed by Stephen Dedalus, seem engaged in dance movements, a motif that is turned on at the outset when, in an approximate chiasmus, Quakerlyster “came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor”. Soon afterwards, “Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off” (U 9.5–14), and later, “Brisk in a galliard he was off, out” (U 9.592). The salient words have long been identified as pointing to Twelfth Night: “sink-a-pace” or “cinquepace”, “coranto” and “galliard” are all specific dances which are being mocked: SIR TOBY BELCH … why dost thou not go to church in a galliard and come home in a coranto? My very walk should be a jig; I would not so much as make water but in a sink-a-pace. What dost thou mean? Is it a world to hide virtues in? I did think, by the excellent constitution of thy leg, it was formed under the star of a galliard. (Twelfth Night, 1.3.138–44) Quite in tune, the library floor is called “solemn”, possibly a recall of an equally ceremonious Buck Mulligan, “Stately, plump”: “Solemnly he came forward” in the book’s opening (U 1.1–9). As it happens, the ghost of King Hamlet “with solemn march goes slow and stately by” (Hamlet 1.2.201). Being called a “quaker” librarian — which Lyster was not — he is made to quake in a dance rhythm: “The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with haste, quake, quack” (U 9.887). If not quaking, he is creaking, as in “Twicreakingly” above or — Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. (U 9.12)

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And even more so towards the end in a rhythmic cluster of serial adverbs: — Directly. Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone. (U 9.968) Elsewhere he “creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a chopine” (U 9.329), again with Shakespearean overtones. When taking care of Bloom arriving in the Library, he “took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down unglanced, looked, asked, creaked, asked” (U 9.589). Mr Best is characterized by serial adjectives or adverbs: “Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with grace a notebook, new, large, clean bright” (U 9.74); “— Ryefield Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his book, gladly, brightly” (U 9.263). Lyster, who also “springhalted near”, can be tarred with the same stylistic brush: “Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian, softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous” (U 9.961, 230). Why Joyce depicts two librarians (who actually existed in Dublin reality) in elaborate choreography still remains to be explained.

7

Ithacan Constellations

“Ithaca” in its arid listings aims at skeletal precision, and, though it has its own intrinsic charm, with a preponderance of a Latin-derived vocabulary, it is at the cost of elegance of language. Joyce wrote that the reader will get to know everything, in the coldest way — which is to be taken with a sizeable grain of salt. The episode tends to institute a rational, logical order and thus contains many internal cross-references or correlatives. A report about the relation between Leopold and Molly Bloom is typical: The parties concerned, uniting, had increased and multiplied, which being done, offspring produced and educed to maturity, the parties, if not disunited were obliged to reunite for increase and multiplication, which was absurd, to form by reunion the original couple of uniting parties, which was impossible. (U 17.1963) The correspondent terms — “parties, uniting, increase and multiply, pro- and educe” — also engage in a reiterative ballet, which is structurally similar to resonant clusters in “Sirens” (see “Miss Kennedy …”, U 11.81, above), but the impact is wholly different — musical in “Sirens”, but almost mechanically pedantic in “Ithaca”.

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Concepts are accumulated or contrasted and ricochetting in such density that, instead of the attempted lucidity, the result may be a giddy whirl of permutation. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown: an infinity renderable equally finite by the suppositious apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space, remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its probable spectators had entered actual present existence. (U 17.1139) It takes a real effort — and time — to spell out the intended meaning. The scientific, often mock-scientific, procedure may border on parody. The Ithacan style may deviate into playful parody, as in Bloom’s polite refusal of young boy Stephen’s invitation for a visit: “Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined” (U 17.473). Almost against the grain of Ithacan emotionless precision, the terms seem to conspire to show the insincerity of overdemonstrated gratitude. At some stage, the human feelings, otherwise carefully avoided, can return with an all the more sensual effect: He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation. (U 17.2241) Departing from the predominantly Latinate and therefore distancing diction, voluptuous and homely reverberating words take over. For one short paragraph, the manner of “Sirens” seems to be switched on, with provocative neologisms thrown in. The incongruous “smellow”, apt in its own odorous impact, is also the result of autogenerative propulsion: “mellow yellow smellow”. Even the one Ithacan Latinate term “osculation” (kissing, originally a diminutive, osculum, of “mouth, os) is drawn into the erotic aura. As it happens, the term seems to — but etymologically does not — contain “-cul-”, French for anus, so that the editor Crawford’s exclamation “K. M. A”. (U 7.980) would seem to be finally put into action by Bloom.18

18

I owe this comment to Andrew Gibson in conversation.

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265

“Repeated Again” (U 16.279)

Repetitions can form an esthetic pattern, as in “Sirens”, or may serve a ritualistic purpose, as in the threefold: “Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus” (U 14.1), which opens the “Oxen of the Sun” episode. Bloom reflects that “for an advertisement you must have repetition. That’s the whole secret” (U 12.1147), no doubt without implying that repetition does in fact “advert” (= turning toward) and therefore direct the mind. Bloom offers an example and an analogy: “Pray for us. And pray for us. And pray for us. Good idea the repetition. Same thing with ads. Buy from us. And buy from us” (U 13.1122). A rhetorical sample of balanced reinforcement is paraded in “Aeolus”, which foregrounds oratorical devices: … that stony effigy in frozen music, horned and terrible, of the human form divine, that eternal symbol of wisdom and of prophecy which, if aught that the imagination or the hand of sculptor has wrought in marble of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring deserves to live, deserves to live. (U 7.768) The technical terms for the effect are supplied in the description: “His slim hand with a wave graced echo and fall” (U 7.772). The poised repetitions are at the other extreme of the jarring proximity of the same terms in “Eumaeus”. What looks appropriately decorative in “Sirens” or “Scylla and Charybdis” is felt as cumbersome or as the lack of taut control. The Bloomian streak in the language of “Eumaeus” (as though, if he could write and tell stories, this would be his way of attempting it), an interior monologue transposed into a literary style with an endeavour to be amusing, loquacious, original or even with a humorous touch (“out of the common groove”, U 16.1230). The delightful failure is consistently obvious. On occasion, a word is lagging in his mind and cannot seem to be replaced, as often happens in speech, so that jarring repetitions or tautologies abound (“some beverage to drink”, U 16.5): “Accordingly he passed his left arm in Stephen’s right and led him on accordingly” (U 16.1721). The reduplication of “accordingly” is not an intended trope, but mere negligence, and it does not indicate a particular accord between the two protagonists.19 The same is true about clumsy, not effective, repetitions: 19

One third of all occurrences of “according(ly)” in Ulysses are in “Eumaeus” (which itself comprises 8.5% of the book).

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All those wretched quarrels […] were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything … (U 16.1111) … it struck him great field was to be opened up in the line of opening up new routes (U 16.531) … it struck him, the two identical names, as a striking coincidence (U 16.1775, “struck” and “striking”, the two almost identical words, are near coincidences). The lagging iteration seems due to fatigued mind, with perhaps a second wind — which brings the style occasionally close to features in “Aeolus”. What is artistry in “Sirens”, even if overdone, comes across as inept in “Eumaeus”: Mr Bloom promptly did as suggested and removed the incriminated article, a blunt hornhandled ordinary knife with nothing particularly Roman or antique about it to the lay eye, observing that the point was the least conspicuous point about it. (U 16.817) Ironically, the word “point” thereby becomes awkwardly conspicuous. In a sentence like “Mr Bloom, so far as he was personally concerned, was just pondering in a pensive mood”, even readers unfamiliar with Latin or etymology will feel that “pondering” and “pensive” are close relatives. All through “Eumaeus”, there is a consciousness that language does not quite express what it should (the text is studded with “so to speak” etc.), and at one point, the clumsiness of repetition — “… which in Bloom’s humble opinion threw a nasty sidelight on that side of a person’s character” — is commented on with “no pun intended” (U 16.171), as though the slip were potentially inspired by some kind of wit. Alliterations no longer function as a poetic device for acoustic reinforcement but are experienced more as accidental irritations: “You have every bit as much right to live by your pen in pursuit of your philosophy as the peasant has” (U 16.1157). The photograph of his wife that Bloom shows to Stephen “was a speaking likeness in expression but it did not do justice to her figure …” A few lines later, Bloom leaves “the likeness there for a few minutes to speak for itself” (U 16.1444, 1457). Such a doubling might potentially be witty but is more often the outcome of inadvertent negligence, often coupled with failed aspiration. Echoes, as in

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[n]evertheless he sat tight just viewing the slightly soiled photo creased by opulent curves, none the worse for wear however, and looked away thoughtfully with the intention of not further increasing the other’s possible embarrassment while gauging her symmetry of heaving embonpoint (U 16.1464) are not devised but simply jarring. In at least one instance, a repetition is avoided at the last moment when Bloom imagines a homecoming without a welcome: Still as regards return. You were a lucky dog if they didn’t set the … Clearly the sequence is “set the dog at you”, but the word has just been used figuratively, so that, just in time, an alternative is substituted: You were a lucky dog if they didn’t set the terrier at you directly you got back. (U 16.1339) A terrier is not particularly ferocious, though it may have faint echoes of (unaffiliated) terror. The one terrier in “Circe”, at any rate, looks tame and benignant: “whining piteously, wagging his tail” (U 15.532). In short, some repetitions are more poetical than others; according to context, they can be harmonious or decorative, or else accidentally maladroit, or, as in the parodic interpolations in “Cyclops”, an assumed elevated style can drop bathetically into inept repetition: “Lovely maidens sit in close proximity to the roots of the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs while they play with all kinds of lovely objects …” (U 12.78). This appears to be partially anticipated in one of the pointedly insipid runs of “Sirens”: “He sang that song lovely, murmured Mina. Mr Dollard. And The Last Rose of Summer was a lovely song. Mina loved that song. Tankard loved the song that Mina” (U 11.1175). To say nothing of “Love loves to love love” (U 12.1493) — all with wholly different repercussions. Nothing new under the critical sun. We know that Joyce had the requisite skills of a writer. It may have been worth demonstrating what we all know, in scrupulous detail.

Chapter 16

Ulyssean Histrionics in Everyday Life Many readers may have been impressed by the verbal adroitness of characters in Ulysses, by their tendency to turn every statement into a brilliant event whether the attempt is successful or forced.1 At times, showy eloquence appears more important than what content is being conveyed. Conversation in Ulysses at any rate is bristling with well-turned phrases that draw attention to themselves as salient formulations. The manner of saying something tends to occlude what is being said; the emphasis moves from What to How, in keeping with the evolution of the later episodes. A suitable though rare term for the astute handling of words serves the present purposes. In antiquity, “logodaedalia” meant the skill in adorning a speech, but in modern rare usage, the word may describe an excessive nicety in words or an affectation in selective expression. Both uses, achievement or failure, will merge in the subsequent remarks. Since “logodaedalia” or Greek “logodaidalia” splits into “word” (“logos”) and “cunning” (“daidalos”), it is appropriate for a writer of supreme verbal skill whose early alter ego was named after the artificer Daedalus and who prominently uses “cunning” as one of his “arms” (P 247). It is no coincidence that the flamboyant mannerism is conspicuously flaunted in the rhetorical and wind-inflated “Aeolus” episode with its high level of studied eloquence. One character in particular, Lenehan, would never be caught saying anything in a straightforward way. Avoiding the obvious is his trademark and he is constantly aiming at verbal brilliance, as is evident in the next essay. Whatever Lenehan’s (and others’) motives are, the verbal embellishments provide some sparkle, even glamour, to the drab existences that are otherwise devoid of it, their illusions invoke a more glittering life than real life. Verbal vivacity counteracts customary paralysis. Inflated oral wit with a decorative effect is on a par with embroideries in print as they are held up to ridicule when Dan Dawson’s speech is read out from the newspaper and submitted to scathing comment: — Or again, note the meanderings of some purling rill as it babbles on its way, tho’ quarrelling with the stony obstacles, to the tumbling waters

1 This essay is an adaptation of a talk given at the Trieste James Joyce Summer School in 2013.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_017

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of Neptune’s blue domain, ‘mid mossy banks, fanned by gentlest zephyrs, played on by the glorious sunlight or ‘neath the shadows cast o’er its pensive bosom by the overarching leafage of the giants of the forest. (U 7.243) This aspires to poetic heights with classical set pieces like “zephyrs”, “meanderings”, or “Neptune’s blue domain”, for the sea (which is anything but blue but has already more aptly been depicted as “snotgreen”). But then we are in a novel or epic called “Ulysses” named after a hero whose divine enemy was Neptune (or Poseidon to Odysseus). The parody shows what a novel called “Ulysses” could have been like. Salient phrases like the “pensive bosom” will be echoed later. It is a short step from “overarching” to “overarsing leafage” (U 7.253), from the attempted sublime to the actual ridiculous. Note also in passing that the whole episode is meandering its babbling way, and so, in extension, is all of Ulysses.

1

“Puck Mulligan” (U 9.1142)

Lenehan and Buck Mulligan are kindred spirits on different intellectual levels. Both obsessive jesters are combined in one of the Cyclopean interpolations: Considerable amusement was caused by the favourite Dublin streetsingers L-n-h-n and M-ll-g-n who sang The Night before Larry was Stretched in their usual mirthprovoking fashion. (U 12.541) Ironically, these vocally prominent figures are named with all vowels suppressed. Their aim indeed is amusement and mirth. The ballad they perform is about a convict Larry who is being “stretched” in the sense of “hanged”, but “stretched” might well apply to an often visibly strained endeavour by which the mirth is being provoked. Logodaedalia is inaugurated by an effervescent Buck Mulligan whose almost every utterance is elevated to an ornate act. His opening exclamation is in unexpected Church Latin: “Introibo ad altare Dei”, an obvious displacement from where such words must be spoken, with a subversive effect. He soon pursues in a similar vein: “— For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns …” (U 1.21). Every item is transposed: there is no congregation to address, whatever “Christine” stands for is certainly not “genuine”; imaginary phantoms have taken over and, incidentally, taken us somewhere else: to an imaginary place of worship.

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Buck Mulligan would not stoop to a commonplace like “Give me your handkerchief”; even such a simple demand has to be fancified: “Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor” (U 1.69), where “lend us a loan” has an Irish lilt and happens to be a “figura etymologica” (the use of words of the same derivation). Such surfeit extravagance for a trivial matter also makes it memorable. Mulligan, an excessive quoter, is also quotable. Versatile Mulligan’s logodaedalian spectrum is wide, varied, and mainly religious as when the dishing out of three eggs is accompanied by a sacerdotal “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti” (U 1.351). He is equally adept at a coronation song with a Cockney accent: “O, won’t we have a merry time …” (U 1.299). In these two instances, Mulligan’s targets are Stephen’s “two masters”: the Church and the State — “the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church” and the “imperial British State” (U 1.643). Readers are also taken elsewhere, away from the location of the otherwise predominant realism, which Mulligan can also take in his mercurial stride. In a female role, he assumes “an old woman’s wheedling voice”: — When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water. … — So I do, Mrs Cahill, says she. Begob, ma’am, says Mrs Cahill, God send you don’t make them in the same pot. (U 1.359) Almost everything can induce a joke or a parody. Leaving the tower becomes a momentous act which is evidence of how Buck Mulligan’s facile wit is in collusion with an author’s latent purposes: Resigned he passed out with grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow: — And going forth he met Butterly. (U 1.527) The formality of the diction indicates another item of facetious ceremony in which contemporary readers of Joyce would have recognized the Biblical matrix, the passage where Peter, having betrayed Jesus Christ three times, becomes aware of his deception: “And going forth, he wept bitterly” (Matt. 26:75). The minimal phonetic change is substantial: what looked like the name of a person (when no person is within sight) turns out to be an adverb twisted and personified; an unspecified “he” becomes the disciple who was to succeed Jesus Christ and founded the Church. As a joke, most likely not an original one, it falls poignantly flat and has all the air of one of Mulligan’s stock-in-trade repertoire, but its reverberations reach beyond the perpetrator. The episode

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in the Gospels also contained a remark made to Peter: “For even thy speech doth discover thee” (Matt. 26:73, “bewrays”). In Ulysses, discoveries are made by attention to speech and its inflections. But in a larger context, it was Peter the disciple who — on the basis of his name (“That thou art Peter, and upon this rock [petra] I will build my church”) — was elected: “And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 16:18). This adds ecclesiastical resonances to the question of who should have the key to the tower in his possession: “Did you bring the key?” Buck Mulligan asks right afterwards, and he later on usurps it (U 1.722) and renders Stephen keyless for the rest of the day. In the Gospel, Peter is chosen by way of a play on his name, and Joyce has followed suit through Mulligan’s otherwise pointless witticisms. In their performances, neither Lenehan nor Mulligan are dependent entirely on words; these are generally accompanied by conspicuous bodily gestures. Logodaedalia is intricately mixed with theatrical comportment; appropriately, the top of the Martello tower supplies a round stage. Mulligan’s initial behaviour is odd and erratic: Then, catching sight2 of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. (U 1.11) Such antics are in need of explications that are not supplied by the text; in this case, the most likely account is that Mulligan playacts a sort of exorcism at the sight of a devil — a matter of interpretation. Stephen Dedalus, who turns up at this moment, after all has given up his faith in the wake of “non serviam: I will not serve” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (P 117, 239). As in Mulligan’s verbal behaviour, the act is in grotesque excess of its occasion, an act for the sake of an act. Mulligan’s range is considerable; his performances can be priestly, military, or affect stage Irishness. Other times, they are in tune with his nickname “Buck” and its animal overtones, the full name, “two dactyls”, is “tripping and sunny like the buck himself” (U 1.42); at one moment, “he capered before them” (U 1.600; to caper is to behave like a buck goat, Lat. caper). The animal in the name can become a copulative verb: “Redheaded women buck like goats” (U 1.704). Elsewhere, in a comic fashion, he “sigh[s] tragically”, as though to underline his theatrical mannerisms (U 1.502); etymologically a tragedy, tragoidia, is the song (oidia) of buck-goats (“tragos”).

2 Even “catching sight of” has a theatrical ring.

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His histrionic nature is expressed by all the prominent adverbs in the “Telemachus” episode; most of them suggest a temporary role. Among them, a few (“Solemnly”, “gravely”, “kindly”, impatiently”, vigorously”, “tragically”) will be echoed in the theatrical episode “Circe”. Out of them all, two complementary adverbs reoccur almost like minor motifs: gaily:3 “The mockery of it, he said gaily” (U 1.34); “Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama as with a bauble” (U 9.489); “Buck Mulligan’s primrose waistcoat shook gaily to his laughter” (U 10.1065) and gravely: [Buck Mulligan] “blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains” (U 1.10); “… looked gravely at his watcher” (U 1.30); “He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown” (U 1.508); “… and then gravely said, honeying malice”. (U 9.1087) Often they are paired: From the window of the D.B.C. Buck Mulligan gaily, and Haines gravely gazed down at the viceregal equipage … (U 10.1224) PHILIP DRUNK (gravely) Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position, Philippe? PHILIP SOBER (gaily) C’est le pigeon, Philippe. (U 15.2582) Even Bloom is affected: BLOOM: Dash it all. It’s a way we gallants have in the navy. Uniform that does it. (he turns gravely to the first watch) Still, of course, you do get your Waterloo sometimes. Drop in some evening and have a glass of old Burgundy. (to the second watch gaily) I’ll introduce you, inspector. (U 15.743)

3 The corresponding noun gaiety (“blinking with mad gaiety”; “Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it”, U 1.581, 606) may be associated with the Gaiety Theatre, which is often in Bloom’s memory: “Michael Gunn, lessee of the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King street” (U 17.420).

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Seen in the light of Ulyssean histrionics, “gravely” might stand for the Tragic Muse, Melpomene, and “gaily’ for Thalia, the Comic one. The Odyssey begins with an appeal to the Muse; Buck Mulligan, ever intent on amusement, in turn seems to impersonate one: “Amused Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself” (U 9.1119). In many ways, Oliver St. John Gogarty, the real-life prototype for Buck Mulligan, proved to be a muse for Joyce, who drew so much from his exuberant wit and humour and his versatility: Gogarty was, as Odysseus is, “polytropos” (Od. 1.1, versatile, resourceful, all-round) and an arch-imitator and, incidentally, a wielder of rhetorical tropes. He becomes theatrical at the slightest provocation. When Stephen Dedalus in the library wants to refer to Saint Thomas, Mulligan interrupts with a groan, “— Ora pro nobis”, and drops into a routine of keening in what is now termed Hiberno-English: “— Pogue mahone! Acushla machree! It’s destroyed we are from this day! It’s destroyed we are surely” (U 9.772). In the literary episode, “Scylla and Charybdis”, his name also matches his flexibility; he becomes “Monk Mulligan” in tune with his momentary ecclesiastical part, but he transmutes easily into “Sunmulligan”, “Cuck Mulligan”, “Puck Mulligan”, or “Ballocky Mulligan” according to context or script (U 9.773, 1025, 1125, 1141, 1176). One of his chosen targets is Synge, the emerging playwright (Shakespeare becomes the “chap that writes like Synge”, U 9.510). Mulligan can imitate his typical diction, when he proclaims “in a querulous brogue”: — It’s what I’m telling you, mister honey, it’s queer and sick we were, Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. ’Twas murmur we did for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I’m thinking, and he limp with leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery’s sitting civil waiting for pints apiece. (U 9.556) The same skill surfaces among the multiple refractions of the period refractions in “Oxen of the Sun”, where the unheard words of Hibernophile Haines are transformed into a caricature of Synge’s mannerisms: This is the appearance is on me. Tare and ages, what way would I be resting at all, he muttered thickly, and I tramping Dublin this while back with my share of songs and himself after me the like of a soulth or a bullawurrus? (U 14.1018) A “jester at the court of his master”, as Stephen sees him (U 2.44), he can suavely “do the Yeats touch” when he claims that, instead of giving his bene-

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factress, Lady Gregory, a bad review, Stephen should have written: “The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time. One thinks of Homer” (chanted theatrically “with waving graceful arms”, U 9.1161). By devious ways, in a meta-narcissistic turn, the imagined verdict of a fictional character, based on a real one, puts words into Yeats’s mouth that now prominently apply to the book in which all of this occurs. It is no surprise that Mulligan, muse, actor, jester, fool, imitator also conceives of play at a moment of mock inspiration: “The Lord has spoken to Malachi” (U 9.1058). The result is a sketch of “national immorality in three orgasms” entitled “Everyman His Own Wife or A Honeymoon in the Hand” by “Ballocky Mulligan” with an obscene cast (U 9.1171). Like Shakespeare, he is a real-life character, an actor, and a playwright in nuce. Adaptable like Odysseus, in the Maternity Hospital, he assumes a motherly part: he “smote himself bravely below the diaphragm, exclaiming with an admirable droll mimic of Mother Grogan (the most excellent creature of her sex though ’tis pity she’s a trollop): There’s a belly that never bore a bastard” (U 14.731). In the Library as well as the Maternity episode, human procreation is aligned with literary conception. In sweeping generalisation, Ulysses might also be characterized by Mulliganesque traits as they are increasing and finally even shaping the extravagant later parodic episodes.

2

“Midsummer Madness” (U 15.1768)

No detailed demonstration is needed to show that in “Circe” all histrionic elements combine to a protracted climax in which most of the persons and even objects or abstractions take a theatrical part in a drama that exceeds the possibilities of a stage. The episode is furthermore a rearrangement or permutation of themes and topics that have preceded. The stagey adverbs of “Telemachus” are magnified into elaborate stage directions that on occasions get completely out of control or spill over into the narrative. Among the extended cast of “Circe”, Buck Mulligan is just one more actor among many, but at least initially, off stage, he dominates ceremonious actions as he did in the first chapter. When Stephen is entering the scene, he does not hold a shaving bowl aloft, but “flourishing the ashplant, chants with joy the introit for paschal time”. In his turn, he chooses ecclesiastical Latin “Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. Alleluia” to be followed by “Et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista” (U 15.73, 84) — not necessarily normal procedure for young men entering a brothel district. The “introit” echoes Mulligan’s initial “Introibo”. The Mass, at any rate, in the view of believers, is a momentous drama

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behind the visible scenes. In multiple ways, the last episode of Book II echoes the beginning of Book I.4 A few moments later, he answers Lynch’s question, “Where are we going”, with “… to la belle dame sans merci, Georgina Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam” (U 15.120). Conscious of it or not, he continues the opening as it is celebrated by Mulligan’s “Introibo ad altare Dei” (U 1.5), which in the Mass is instantly completed by: “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam”. There are merely two minimal changes: by spelling “Deum” in lower case and making it female (“deam”), he converts God into a human female, in keeping with the prevailing metamorphoses throughout the episode. So it is now a prostitute for whom Stephen is looking in vain, Georgina Johnson, who “gladdens [his] youth”. In fact, “Circe” is comprised of perversions, both in the narrower psychopathological sense and in a general, mechanical one: a turning inside out, upside down. This process reaches an extreme, lowest, point towards the end where, instead of the Mass intimated in the first chapter, a Black Mass is celebrated, where everything is turned into its opposite. Buck Mulligan fuses with Father O’Flynn from a jocular song, as (… Father Malachi O’Flynn in a lace petticoat and reversed chasuble, his two left feet back to the front, celebrates camp mass. The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a plain cassock and mortarboard, his head and collar back to the front, holds over the celebrant’s head an open umbrella.) (U 15.4693) The composite priest is paired with “the Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A”. — which combines the Rev. Hugh C. Love, the clerical historian and landlord from Episode Ten, with Haines from whose name the French “haine”, hatred, may be extracted — so that Bloom’s earlier scrambled definition of Love as “the opposite of hatred” (U 12.1485) also reverberates. FATHER MALACHI O’FLYNN then inverts the opening words in yet another direction: “Introibo ad altare diaboli”. THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE, who antiphones: “To the devil which hath made glad my young days” (U 15.4688). The book of many turns becomes the book of many perversions, which infect the letters of the wording itself. THE VOICE OF ALL THE DAMNED chant, inverting the alphabetical order in accordance with Semitic usages: 4 Note that Mulligan’s “long slow whistle of call” which is then answered by mysterious “two strong shrill whistles” (U 1.24–6) is echoed in “[w]histles call and answers” right at the beginning of “Circe” at the end of the first stage direction (U 15.9).

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Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof, Aiulella! The ADONAi then call Dooooooooooog! till THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED set things back in their order Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! From on high the voice of ADONAI calls Goooooooooood! (U 15.4707) It plays into Joyce’s hands that “God” (“Goooooooooood”) inverts into an elongated “Dooooooooooog” (but of course only in English so translations lose some of the effortless and potent blasphemy) since the sorceress Kirke turned men, and, here it seems, now also divinities, into animals. Of course, such an inversion,5 which reflects the different orientations of the Semitic and the Roman alphabet, only works on the literal and certainly not on the phonetic, spoken, level. Stephen’s entry into Nighttown was also accompanied by a magnificent gesture: “He flourishes his ashplant, shivering the lamp image, shattering light over the world” — in anticipation of his final smashing “of the chandelier”, inducing “Time’s livid final flame” and “ruin of all space” (U 15.4243). This is followed by an erudite pronouncement: So that gesture, not music not odour, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm. (U 15.105) And a few paces later, a gesture is elaborated on in detail: (Stephen thrusts the ashplant on him and slowly holds out his hands, his head going back till both hands are a span from his breast, down turned, in planes intersecting, the fingers about to part, the left being higher.) (U 15.124)

5 Even stage direction follow suit: they are habitually in italics but words that would normally be in italics revert back to Roman type, as in “the introit for paschal time” (U 15.74). This of course is normal practice, but it seems appropriate.

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The almost geometrical precision is untypical for Circean stage directions but reminiscent of the impassive diction of “Ithaca”. True to its theatrical nature, “Circe” is full of non-verbal gestures that easily lead to unrealistic extravagances. Towards the end, however, the noisy, dramatic and inconsequential events in “Circe” gradually calm down until finally the stage is left to unconscious Stephen, solicitous Bloom, and Cornelius Kelleher; the physical world reasserts itself, and fewer but more real words are spoken. Even those fade away, and one scene has recourse to mere gestures and mute dumb show communication, “pantomimic merriment”: With thumb and palm Corny Kelleher reassures that the two bobbies will allow the sleep to continue for what else is to be done. With a slow nod Bloom conveys his gratitude as that is exactly what Stephen needs. (U 15.4913) The parody of a pantomime exaggerates the semantic reach of gestures. Beyond a general sense conveyed, it would take an immensely refined gestural code, or an advanced course in sign language, to transmit the niceties involved — with a nod or, even more, so with “thumb and palm”! What, for example, is “exactly” in “slow nod”?

3

Elocutionary Arms

Rhetorics are paired with gestures, and naturally they abound in “Aeolus” as they underline and reinforce the speech, as when “the editor … suddenly stretched forth an arm amply” (U 7.431); “— You can do it, Myles Crawford repeated, clenching his hand in emphasis” (U 7.627); “His slim hand with a wave graced echo and fall” (U 7.773); “… Myles Crawford said, throwing out an arm for emphasis” (U 7.981, the oratorical gestures are marked by italics). Professor McHugh at one point “extended elocutionary arms”, anticlimactically, “from frayed stained shirtcuffs” (U 7.487). Elocution, the art and skill of expressive speech and articulation, was taught at schools, and one standard work, Bell’s Elocutionist, was in wide circulation. It contained detailed instructions of what to do with arms and hands:6

6 Bell’s Standard Elocutionist: Principles and Exercises, Chiefly from Elocutionary Manual (1889) by David Charles Bell and Alexander Melville Bell. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce refers to the book as “Boawwll’s Alocutionist”, whose twisted vowels seem to indicate failed elocution (FW 72.16), as well as in “allocutioning in bellcantos” (FW 381.18), which brings elocution close to singing.

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Bell’s standard elocutionist

The manual also contains numerous exercises for recitation, mainly popular poems: One called “Nature’s Gentlemen” is actually quoted, or echoed in the episode: “They were nature’s gentlemen, J.J. O’Molloy murmured” (U 7.499). The co-author, Alexander Melville Bell, an authority on phonetics and defective speech, was the father of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. It is apt that some of the elocutionary actions in the chapter take place while there is a telephone conversation in progress. One implicit irony is that gestures cannot be passed on by sound transmission (a fact that in due course might even reach arm waving users of mobile phones). Statues, incidentally, whether “horned and terrible”, “stonehorned” (Moses, U 7.768, 854) or “onehandled” (Nelson, U 7.1018), in “Aeolus” and elsewhere (“the stern stone hand of Grattan, bidding halt”, U 10.352) are usually shown in heroic postures, with arms stretched out.7

7 Fritz Senn, “Transmedial Stereotypes in the ‘Aeolus’ Chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses”, Word & Image Interactions: A Selection of Papers Given at the Second International Conference on Word and Image, ed. Martin Heusser (Basel: Wiese Verlag, 1993), 61–8.

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279

As Good as Any Play

In “Cyclops”, the last glimpse of Bloom — who is neither a great orator nor an accomplished actor — is “old sheepface … gesticulating” on the castle car (U 12.1907), no doubt in a more blundering than dignified way. “Cyclops” too is an episode full of rhetorics and dramatics. Its unnamed narrator of the episode is eloquent on his own charming vulgar level and with punchy hyperboles, but mainly in his thoughts. Most of the men gathering in the public house aim to give their saying an expressive twist, and Lenehan adds his usual quota of attempted jocularities. Bloom once more is the odd one out, not witty, not a gifted speaker, but something of a nuisance with a habit of contributing tedious facts and using the occasional inappropriate term (“phenomenon”, U 12.465). He has little entertainment value, on top of his not partaking in the custom of standing rounds. As soon as Barney Kiernan’s pub is entered, the Citizen in residence stages a ritual, a ceremony which could easily be lost sight of in a dialogue that must have the semblance of ordinary talk. Hugh B. Staples long ago noticed that the journalist Joe Hynes, in the know, and the Citizen engage in the formulaic words and gestures by which the Ribbonmen, members of a secret rebel society, were able to identify their fellow conspirators: — Stand and deliver, says he. — That’s all right, citizen, says Joe. Friends here. — Pass, friends, says he. Then he rubs his hand in his eye and says he: — What’s your opinion of the times? Doing the rapparee and Rory of the hill. But, begob, Joe was equal to the occasion. — I think the markets are on a rise, says he, sliding his hand down his fork. So begob the citizen claps his paw on his knee and he says: — Foreign wars is the cause of it. And says Joe, sticking his thumb in his pocket: — It’s the Russians wish to tyrannise. (U 12.129, the revelatory items are emphasized for clarity)8

8 Hugh B Staples, “‘Ribbonmen’ Signs and Passwords in Ulysses”, Notes and Queries 13.3 (March 1966): 95–96.

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It is no wonder that the impatient and thirsty narrator tries to interrupt: “Arrah, give over your bloody codding, Joe, says I. I’ve a thirst on me I wouldn’t sell for half a crown” (U 12.141). The performance is indeed an act of “codding” or playacting which, naturally, does not detract from historical reverberations. Further codding is to follow: “Are you codding, says I”; “Poor old sir Frederick. says Alf, you can cod him up to the two eyes” (U 12.307, 1096).9 In the same vein, “doing the …” meaning an imitation or pretence is frequent: “Doing the rapparee and the Rory of the hill”; “And Bob Doran starts doing the weeps”; “So of course Bob Doran starts doing the bloody fool with him” (U 12.488); “and Bloom trying to get the soft side of her doing the mollycoddle playing bezique” (U 12.506); “So J. J. puts in a word, doing the toff about one story was good till you heard another” (U 12.1341. 395, 506, 1192). An alternative phrasing is “letting on” for the opposite of a histrionic display, the attempt to feign unconcern or ignorance. This happens to Bloom when the topic of Blazes Boylan crops up: — He [Boylan] knows which side his bread is buttered, says Alf. I hear he’s running a concert tour now up in the north. — He is, says Joe. Isn’t he? — Who? says Bloom. Ah, yes. That’s quite true. Yes, a kind of summer tour, you see. Just a holiday. — Mrs B. is the bright particular star, isn’t she? says Joe. — My wife? says Bloom. She’s singing, yes. I think it will be a success too. He’s an excellent man to organise. Excellent. (U 12.988) Quite manifestly, Bloom pretends ignorance of the unsettling topic at hand. This is the Bloom who is elsewhere described as “letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing” (U 12.1160). “Cyclops” is full of “letting on”: “letting on to answer, like a duet in the opera”; “— Na bacleis, says the citizen, letting on to be modest”; “And he starts taking off the old recorder letting on to cry”; “I was just looking around to see who the happy thought would strike when be damned but in he comes again letting on to be in a hell of a hurry”; “pisser Burke was telling me card party and letting on the child was sick”; “… and him being in the middle of them letting on to be all at sea and up with them on the bloody jaunting car” (U 12.705, 884, 1103, 1160, 1566, 1754, 1769). More specific codding takes place when courtroom scenes are enacted for jocular diversion. Alf Bergan, the likely perpetrator of the “U. p: up” postcard hoax, is submitted to a cross examination: 9 In “Circe”, a writing on the wall proclaims “Bloom is a cod” (U 15.1871).

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— Was it you did it, Alf? says Joe. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you Jimmy Johnson. — Me? says Alf. Don’t cast your nasturtiums on my character. — Whatever statement you make, says Joe, will be taken down in evidence against you. (U 12.1038, “nasturtiums” for “aspersions” is a commonplace example of trite logodaedalia). All of “Cyclops”, perhaps the most dramatic episode, is situated near the Dublin court houses. Cases are discussed, the lawyer J.J. O’Molloy offers unwanted legal opinions, and a courtroom scene with Sir Frederic Falkiner as judge (“you can cod him up to the two eyes”, see above) is mockingly reenacted: And he starts taking off the old recorder letting on to cry: — A most scandalous thing! This poor hardworking man! How many children? Ten, did you say? — Yes, your worship. And my wife has the typhoid. — And the wife with typhoid fever! Scandalous! Leave the court immediately, sir. No, sir, I’ll make no order for payment. How dare you, sir, come up before me and ask me to make an order! A poor hardworking industrious man! I dismiss the case. (U 12.1103) Some of the episode characteristic interpolations could be described as extensions of the pervasive theatrical tendencies. The passing mention of a ghost for example conjures up an elaborate séance where defunct Dignam gives a report of the divide beyond in a lengthy paragraph (U 12.326–73). A session in the parliament of Westminster is given in facetious exaggeration (U 12.860–79). A wish for the re-afforestation of Ireland results in a formal Tree Wedding (U 12.1266–95). A merely habitual toast (“Well, says Martin, rapping for his glass. God bless all here is my prayer”) is taken at face value and instantly transformed into a ceremonial Benediction of the small public house in Little Britain Street with the full force of the Church attending, religious orders and saints — all in all some 852 words, ending in ponderous Latin (U 12.1676–1750). Not only are a bunch of saints with their paraphernalia summoned, but all the pub’s momentary patrons are blessed in increasing specification: “… S. Martin of Todi and S. Martin of Tours and S. Alfred and S. Joseph and S. Denis and S. Cornelius and S. Leopold and S. Bernard and S. Terence and S. Edward”, down to “S. Owen Caniculus” (U 12.1694). The Benediction even extends to the techniques of naming or misnaming and the prevalent logodaedalian

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devices: “… and S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S. Synonymous” (U 12.169). Naming and misnaming are being sanctified. The narrator comments that the action going on is “as good as any bloody play in the Queen’s royal theatre” (U 12.1843). The realistic part of the “Cyclops” chapter would probably be the easiest one to transfer onto a stage.

5

Drama in Nostos

With “Circe”, the momentous histrionics have come to an end. The Nostos episodes take different slants. There is no room or occasion for acting in Molly Bloom’s monologue as there is no audience to appreciate it. But Molly internally rehearses postures and techniques for her stage appearance to come: … weeping tone once in the dear deaead days beyondre call close my eyes breath my lips forward kiss sad look eyes open piano ere oer the world the mists began I hate that istsbeg comes loves sweet sooooooooooong I’ll let that out full when I get in front of the footlights again … comes looooves old deep down chin back not too much make it double … (U 18.896) Similarly she imagines a dramatic scene for the next morning: … I know what Ill do Ill go about rather gay not too much singing a bit now and then mi fa pieta Masetto then Ill start dressing myself to go out presto non son piu forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he wanted … (U 18.1506) In “Eumaeus”, an Odyssean home-coming sailor with a flair for pithy expressions holds centre stage. He entertains the company in the cabman’s shelter with melodramatic incidents, one of which he claims to have witnessed in Trieste: — And I seen a man killed in Trieste by an Italian chap. Knife in his back. Knife like that. Whilst speaking he produced a dangerous looking claspknife quite in keeping with his character and held it in the striking position.

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— In a knockingshop it was count of a tryon between two smugglers. Fellow hid behind a door, come up behind him. Like that. Prepare to meet your God, says he. Chuk! It went into his back up to the butt. His heavy glance drowsily roaming about kind of defied their further questions even should they by any chance want to. (U 16.576) He also vividly reenacts a shooting trick in a circus act attributed to one Simon Dedalus; it is unlikely to have taken place as reported (U 16.389–405). Even the sailor’s skin seems to provide a kind of stage when it prominently exhibits a “figure sixteen and a young man’s sideface looking frowningly rather”. The tattooed face proves pliable in the subsequent demonstration: There he is cursing the mate. And there he is now, he added, the same fellow, pulling the skin with his fingers, some special knack evidently, and he laughing at a yarn. … And in point of fact the young man named Antonio’s livid face did actually look like forced smiling and the curious effect excited the unreserved admiration of everybody including Skinthe-Goat, who this time stretched over. (U 16.673)10 The formerly frowning and “cursing” expression turns into a “laughing” or “forced smiling” one — as though in faint reflection of the Tragic and the Comic Muse (echoing “gravely” and “gaily” above) — they now find an undignified habitat on a mariner’s chest. In the prolific and often wayward metaphors that “Eumaeus” flaunts, there seems to be some histrionic effort gone astray. A Bloomian streak can be discovered in the style, which clearly aims “to contribute the humorous element” in the wake of Buck Mulligan (U 16.280). While Mulligan in one of his early impersonations “at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face” (U 1.579), the manner of “Eumaeus” can easily concoct a figurative phrase of grotesque effect: “… evidently there was nothing for it but put a good face on the matter and foot it which they accordingly did” (U 16.1757). Such jarring collocations are on a par with “other high personages simply following in the footsteps of the head of the state” (U 16.1200). Bloom’s praise of Mozart’s Gloria almost asks to be put on a stage: “… being, to his mind, the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat” (U 16.1757). Cocked

10

It looks like a Joycean touch that the exhibited transformation of a skin drawing is observed also by the historical character named Skin-the-Goat who, we read, “this time stretched over”, where “stretched” obviously radiates back to the act related.

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hats generally appear on stages; an assurance like “literally” would mean that it actually could be done. Surrealist pictures may emerge when another hybrid metaphor unfolds: “Not, he parenthesised, that for the sake of filthy lucre he need necessarily embrace the lyric platform as a walk of life for any lengthy space of time” (U 16.1842). Platforms can serve as a stage. In pointed contrast, “Ithaca” attempts to be devoid of jocular levities, figurative digressions or erratic idioms; its factual diction precludes histrionic excesses. Even so an “attendant ceremony” is staged with Old Testament echoes in the “exodus from the house of bondage to the wilderness of inhabitation”: Lighted Candle in Stick borne by BLOOM Diaconal Hat on Ashplant borne by STEPHEN (U 17.1023) Again the ecclesiastical opening of Ulysses is called up, in each case with a formal intonation. A circle is closed. Upon his entry, Mulligan “intoned” Church Latin; Stephen’s exit — “With what intonation secreto of what commemorative psalm?”11 — is followed by “The 113th, modus peregrinus: In exitu Israêl de Egypto: domus Jacob de populo barbaro” (U 17.1029). The spurious geometrical precision of Stephen’s leavetaking 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 (U 17.1221) contains “valedictory arms” that have an odd theatrical ring about them, not unlike the editor’s “elucutionary arms” in “Aeolus” (U 7.487). Bloom wisely refrained from contributing a song for a Christmas pantomime in the Gaiety theatre, possibly never more than a transient thought. But Stephen invents a scene which looks like a long stage direction reduced to bare bones without any decor: What suggested scene was then constructed by Stephen?

11

“Introibo ad altare Dei” derives from Psalm 42:4.

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Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from his dark corner. He seizes solitary paper. He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads. Solitary. What? In sloping, upright and backhands: Queen’s Hotel, Queen’s Hotel, Queen’s Hotel. Queen’s Ho … (U 17.619) Bloom, along with most readers, is struck by the coincidence of the hotel’s name with that which his father owned and where he committed suicide. Yet what exactly is Stephen doing? Stage directions are essentially written, they may become the setting of a scene, but they are not heard. Would Stephen actually speak or mumble them for Bloom’s benefit? It then would amount to Stephen’s longest and plainest utterance in the whole chapter, even less ornate than the story he makes up in “Aeolus” (U 7.920–51, 1002–28, later to be entitled “The Parable of the Plums”).

… The focus so far has been on showy histrionics as they tend to embroider an ordinary day in Dublin with little occasion for jubilation. Acting can also become a real-life strategy in awkward situations, as when Bloom is feigning ignorance in “Cyclops”. When Blazes Boylan is seen from the funeral carriage, Bloom intensely “reviewed” his nails to cover his nervousness (U 6.200). His dialogue with his wife, “Mrs Marion Bloom”, in “Calypso” is fraught with submerged tension: Homeric Kalypso is the goddess of hiding (kalyptein). As he returns to the bedroom with the breakfast, an innocent conversation takes place, innocent on the surface: A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow. In the act of going he stayed to straighten the bedspread. — Who was the letter from? he asked. Bold hand. Marion. — O, Boylan, she said. He’s bringing the programme. — What are you singing? — La ci darem with J.C. Doyle, she said, and Love’s Old Sweet Song. (U 4.308)

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Bloom of course already knows who sent the letter; it notably discomposed him when he entered the house (U 4.243). But conversation has to be made and so he asks his question in feigned ignorance, which Molly sees through, and she knows that he knows. She answers with a casually dismissive “O, Boylan” and states the purpose of her manager’s visit. Bloom then enquires about the programme that is to be rehearsed in the afternoon; it is hard to believe that the couple did not discuss such an important detail before. A tacit agreement seems to prevail that discomforting subjects are to be avoided. In this light, it is conceivable that Molly asks her husband about the difficult word “Metempsychosis” not out of philological curiosity, but to divert the conversation from any embarrassing subject. Bloom, once he has placed the tea and the tablet near Molly’s bed, could have retired without further enquiries. But as in the first encounter in the bedroom (U 4.255), he delays when he sees the semi-hidden envelope and finds a pretence to stay. In somewhat clumsy phrasing: “In the act of going he stayed to straighten the bedspread”. With hindsight, we can make out that Bloom’s remaining to talk is in fact an act of going, something staged to prepare for the talk that consists of communication and evasion. Acts at times are close to acting. Buck Mulligan set the pace with his versatile playing of roles. As has been sketched out in increasing progression: “Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They mock to try you. Act. Be acted on” (U 9.778). Speaking, acting and playacting are intricately interwoven.

Chapter 17

Logodaedalian Bypaths: Evading the Obvious There is a tendency of certain Joycean characters in conversation to evade the commonplace expression by giving their diction a particular, unexpected, impressive twist, and this verbal excess is perhaps proportionally more than ordinary human vanity would account for. This may or may not be a trademark of gifted Irish speakers who manage to bring a touch of sparkle into otherwise drab reality. Ulysses begins with such a commonplace action as the preparation for morning shave, but the first act is a ceremonious gesture and an out of place intonation of the Catholic mass in ecclesiastical Latin. It calls for attention and generates overtones, in this case liturgical ones, right from the start. Buck Mulligan elevates or magnifies every statement to an amusing level. Many characters will follow suit with different levels of success and on different performative levels. Linguistic exhibitionism is predominant and in the long run will affect whole episodes. As already demonstrated in the previous essay, Mulligan is particularly fond of using poems and songs. Within the first chapter alone he quotes, Yeats (“And no more turn aside and brood …”, U 1.264), Swinburne (“Heart of my heart, were it more …”, U 1.463), “when the French were on the sea …” (U 1.543), “The Ballad of Joking Jesus” (“I’m the queerest young fellow …”, U 1.584), with bawdy songs (“For old Mary Ann …”, U 1.382) thrown in for good measure: “Redheaded women buck like goats” (U 1.707). His diction too is poetically punchy: “The jejune Jesuit”, “the bards must jeer and junket”, etc. (U 1.45, 468). At times Joyce marks quotations by italics, often they are mutely embedded in the text. Quite apart from all those lyrical runs in Ulysses — Stephen’s thoughts in “Proteus” or the closing word of Molly’s are familiar examples — many of Joyce’s descriptive prose passages could pass for poetry, perhaps in a different arrangement of lines: The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars, rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures on the air. The felly harshed against the curbstone: stopped. (U 6.486)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_018

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The subject here however is not poetic quality but efforts towards preciosity in speech. An assumption made is that there is often a simpler way of expressing what in an illustrative example is rendered in parodic elaboration: “Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate one expensive inaugurated libation?” (U 14.1529). Something trite is expanded into a glamorous display that emphasizes the phrasing more than what is being conveyed. The aim is to rise above the ordinary or the usual, to turn a pedestrian utterance into a verbal event, to give it momentary radiance, often in a gesture towards originality. A tiny bit of excitement is brought into lives that are otherwise devoid of it. The motive may be simple vanity, to impress by being different or humorous. It may serve as an antidote to the banality of the everyday, to (as it shows itself say in what Joyce called the “paralysis” of his city). This is in line with all those other substitute satisfactions we see at work, diversion through music (“Sirens”), drinking and vociferating (“Cyclops”), or daydreaming (“Nausicaa”). On a lower scale, the attempt is to achieve something analogous to what an ambitious Stephen Dedalus grandiloquently aimed at: “transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life” (P 221). Some transient radiance is thus applied to the tiny crumbs of experience by fanciful ornamentation. High-flown endeavours of this sort easily fail. The fancification of the ordinary is a common pastime in Ulysses. Buck Mulligan sets the pace as probably the most accomplished of its practitioners. In the present probe, the key witness is Lenehan, his counterpart, who does his obsessive best not to say anything in a straightforward way. He amply displays his resourcefulness as he enters the stage of the newspaper office in “Aeolus” where his jocular circumlocutions are also in tune with the episode’s thematic concern. In fact, he offers us a compendium of rhetorical tropes of his own. Lenehan uses near synonymic repetition: “Our old ancient ancestors”, “Reflect, ponder, excogitate, reply” (U 7.514, 683). He can cite palindromes: “Madam, I’m Adam. And Able was I ere I saw Elba” (U 7.496). He recirculates jokes: “Our old ancient ancestors, as we read in the first chapter of Guinness’s, were partial to the running stream” (U 7.496). Everything is elaborated: “Owing to a brick received in the latter half of the matinée. Poor, poor, poor Pyrrhus!” and “A sudden-at-the-moment-though-from-lingering-illness-oftenpreviously-expectorated demise, … And with a great future behind him” (U 7.575, 874). Above all, he glibly calls up foreign languages: “Entrez, mes enfants!” or “The accumulation of the anno Domini” (U 7.507, 422). A simple “Thank you” is touched up into “Thanky vous” or “Muchibus thankibus” (U 7.468, 780). At his most mechanical he shifts letters or words: “I hear feetstoops!”; “Clamn

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dever”; “O, for a fresh of breath air!” (U 7.393, 695, 812). He favours poetic or at least exalted diction and even contributes a limerick, not necessarily of his own invention, and perhaps simply modified for the occasion: — There’s a ponderous pundit MacHugh Who wears goggles of ebony hue. As he mostly sees double To wear them why trouble? I can’t see Joe Miller. Can you? (U 7.578) The effort is tritely unimaginative, but it reinforces themes at hand. A new, double vision is characteristic for “Aeolus”, which changes focus and perspective; it pits body text against headlines, and it features language as spoken or as printed. One Homeric and Mosaic motif is not reaching a goal that is within view. “Joe Miller” for “joke” is a minute item of Lenehan’s habitual practice. His main effort is a punning riddle, “Silence! What opera resembles a railway line?” with the solution: “The Rose of Castile. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel! Gee!” Like any pun, this one is instantly evaluated, with a feigned gasp (U 7.514, 591): “O, my rib risible!” (U 7.448) almost seems to indicate his customary aim to incite laughter. There is something compulsive about his oratory, originality at any price tends to pall, an effect similar to how Stephen Dedalus feels about Mulligan’s witticisms that he has heard, he remarks, “Three times a day, after meals” (U 1.610). None of the quips offered by the jesters in residence, Lenehan and Buck Mulligan, may deserve spellbound acclaim but they remain hauntingly memorable. Lenehan was already characterized in Dubliners: “… his adroitness and eloquence had always prevented is friends from forming any general policy against him…. He was a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of stories, limericks and riddles” (“Two Gallants”, D 50). His first utterance on record is already typical: “— Well! … That takes the biscuit!” (D 51). He instantly improves on the idiom, “to enforce his words … — That takes the solitary, unique and, if I may so call it, recherché biscuit”, and he tenaciously returns to it: “— Of all the good ones I ever heard, he said, that emphatically takes the biscuit” (D 50). This is making a lot of a plain and, for that matter, entirely figurative biscuit though oddly enough we never learn what exactly causes his particular outburst.1 1 As it happens, the “little jets of wheezing laughter followed one another out of his convulsed body” in his description (D 49) are indicative: something like wheezing laughter is what he generally produces, quite apart from his own remark, quoted above: “See the wheeze?”

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Manifestly Lenehan wants to say something that is unique and even recherché in emphatic French. “Recherché” is what has been “carefully thought out” and so fittingly characterizes Lenehan’s mannerism. He even carries his figurative biscuit into Ulysses when he comments on the Gold Cup race: “— Twenty to one, says Lenehan. Such is life in an outhouse. Throwaway, says he. Takes the biscuit, and talking about bunions. Frailty, thy name is Sceptre” (U 12.1226). Motivated, perhaps, by his own words, “… he went over to the biscuit tin Bob Doran left to see if there was anything he could lift on the nod” (U 12.1229), but is told that all the biscuits have been fed to the dog Garryowen. So there are no biscuits, real non-figurative ones, for him to take. The tin, like the phrase, is empty.

1

In the Bakery Line (U 7.339)

In “Two Gallants”, Lenehan is manifestly hungry and so biscuits might in fact be on his mind. Joyce, transmuting the daily biscuit of experience, even introduces them into “Aeolus” by way of one unusual, unique and recherché adverb: “— The ghost walks, professor MacHugh murmured softly, biscuitfully to the dusty windowpanes”, where it is again applied to McHugh, who later on interrupts a speech with a “dumb belch of hunger” (U 7.237, 860). In “Cyclops”, it is the empty biscuit tin that will be given prominence; in Circe the emphatic word in is elevated to liturgical heights: “Namine. Jacobs. Vobiscuits. Amen” (U 15.1241), where Jacob’s biscuits combine with Dominus vobiscus! Finnegans Wake even features “bixed miscuits” (FW 166.14). With so much emphasis on them, biscuits are worth another look. A “bis-cuit” is what has been “twice cooked”, the result of a process repeated, concocted one more time. Like most of Lenehan’s jokes, they are often patently stale, similar to Richie Goulding’s (“Jokes old stale now”, U 11.647). There is something déjà vu about Lenehan’s sayings; his contributions in “Aeolus” and elsewhere are mainly clichés or stereotypes, terms originating from printing, since the same plate can be used mechanically any number of times. “Aeolus” sports a variety of the oratorical ornamentation, above all condensed form in Dan Dawson’s florid speech which becomes an object of satirical ridicule (U 7.240–8, 295–327). It is based on the same technique as Lenehan’s much more low key inspirations. Its clichés tend to be classical (“Neptune’s blue domain”, U 7.245), romantic and pleonastic (“translucent glow of our mild mysterious Irish twilight”, U 7.323). Bloom acknowledges, however, that “it goes down like hot cake that stuff. Why they call him Doughy Daw”; Dawson was “in the bakery line” (U 7.338–40). In the wind-

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blown episode the emphasis is on inflation: a lump of dough is extended into bread. The language of “Eumaeus” is similarly inflated by failed attempts towards original expression; it blatantly strives to “pen something out of the common groove” (U 16.1230). It is bread, of all things, that calls up to Bloom a not very original twisted Shakespeare quotation, most likely a current Dublin joke: “O tell me where is fancy bread, at Rourke’s the baker’s it is said” (U 16.58). Dublin bakers advertised and sold plain as well as fancy bread.2 From this perspective, Lenehan habitually turns plain into fancy expressions. In “Eumaeus”, whatever might be plain is transposed to fanciful stylistic exploits. All parodies, imitations, mockeries, pastiches (of which more later) are by definition twice-cooked. The most extreme manifestation is the “Oxen of the Sun” episode, where by stated authorial intention, everything consists in imitative, fancy concoctions.

2

Logodaedalia3

Rhetorical embroidery or logodaedalia is not limited to Lenehan, but it distributes itself all over Ulysses, with a notable climax at the end of “Oxen of the Sun”, often referred to as a “Coda” where the group of men, including both Buck Mulligan and Lenehan, inspired by a Pentecostal spirit, engage in an impromptu revelry of twisted expressions and imaginative expansions where hardly anything is said in a straightforward way (U 14.1440–1591). The passage is one of the greatest challenges within the book for readers to figure out who might be saying what in what particular manner and idiom, and with what possible aim.

2 Bloom at his most unimaginative inadvertently tips off a race-oriented Bantam Lyons about the Gold Cup race, who then, in “Wandering Rocks”, communicates his error to Lenehan, who in turn proclaims the rumour that Bloom won money on a bet himself (U 10.517). In this intricate network, Bloom refers to “that halfbaked Lyons” who “ran off at a tangent in his impetuosity to get left” (U 16.1290). Half-baked Lyons and Lenehan’s twice-baked biscuits seem to be in some peripheral relation. 3 As noted in the previous essay, logodaedalia, Greek logodaidalia, combining logos (“word”) with daidalos (“cunning”), denotes skill in verbal artfulness, or the arbitrary or capricious coinage of words. It serves as an apt description for techniques of an author who chose the mythical Daedalus for a penname, and silence and cunning for defensive strategies. There is also something labyrinthine in verbal logodaedalia. Stephen Dedalus appropriately has his own virtuoso way with words, different in kind and scope from the variety treated in this probe.

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The results are confusing and often misleading. In “Where the Henry Nevil’s sawbones and ole clo?” (U 14.1442), a conspicuous name leads astray as it primarily substitutes for “where the devil …” in Cockney rhyming slang. “Sawbones” refers to the doctor in the group, and Bloom once sold “old clothes”, so the one clear name is a phantom (even if some Henry Nevil has been identified) and two real persons are hidden in circumlocution. For years, Joyce readers have collectively unravelled most of the distortions and refractions. “Avuncular’s got my timepiece” (U 14.1471) hinges on the word “uncle” for a pawnbroker which is Latinized into a jocular adjective so that the sentence translates, around several corners, into something like “My watch is in pawn”. “Nix for the hornies” (U 14.1553) may lead to all kinds of stray associations; it is outdated slang for “Watch out for the police”. Plain words are meticulously avoided and, for practical purposes, the paragraphs are couched in a partly foreign language that has to be converted into the comprehensive standard. English itself becomes foreign. Deviant elaboration may, and generally does, happen on less sophisticated levels. In “Nausicaa”, Cissy Caffrey is the adventurous one, both in behaviour and diction. With “a frolicsome word on her cherryripe lips”, she says “tea and jaspberry ram” (a transposition reminiscent of Lenehan’s twists), or “I’ll run ask my uncle Peter over there what’s the time by his conundrum”, matched by “his waterworks were out of order” (U 13.272, 536, 551). She may be using existing facetious terms or she may make them up ad hoc just to sound a trifle more interesting, though perhaps not quite ladylike. As usual, Bloom is not rhetorically resourceful and tends to be fumbling rather than sparkling. Not that he would not try on occasion, but to refer to Stephen as “a friend of yours” to his father, or “Your son and heir” (U 6.39), or to Mrs Breen’s husband as “Your lord and master” (U 8.227) are comparatively fatuous efforts. His minor departure into another register, “natural phenomenon”, is felt to be out of place and evokes ridicule (U 12.464). He admires the “[m]ost amusing expressions” of Simon Dedalus and in Eumaeus aspires to contribute “the humorous element” in the vein known of Buck Mulligan (U 6.599, 16.280), but the envisaged literary dexterity generally results in out-of-tune gaucheness. Bloom is an Odysseus deprived of persuasive eloquence. His are not the gentle but winning words that a diplomatic Odysseus commands when confronting princess Nausikaa (“epeessin … meilichioisi” Od. 6.143); in fact, when Bloom is approached by a young Cissey Caffrey, he cannot even do what he is generally best at, give factual information, since his watch has stopped (U 13.546). Logodaedalian bursts are found in odd places. The cast of “Circe” in Dublin’s Nighttown sports figures like a Bawd, a Virago, a Dark Mercury, all with their

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respective racy vernacular. Yet one would hardly expect a bystander named BIDDY THE CLAP commenting on Stephen in a remarkable jargon: “He expresses himself with such marked refinement of phraseology”, or CUNTY KATE topping it with “And at the same time with such apposite trenchancy” (U 15.4524). They even aspire to medieval or heraldic diction: “Methinks yon sable knight will joust it with the best” and “Nay, madam. The gules doublet and merry saint George for me!” (U 15.4638), with terms that might be fitting for Stephen in “Nestor”.

3

Highly diverting (U 11.272)

Lenehan remains true to type in “Sirens”, where he tries to ingratiate himself to Simon Dedalus in another poetical burst, with classical decorations, referring to Stephen: “I quaffed the nectarbowl with him this very day … In Mooney’s en ville and in Mooney’s sur mer. He had received the rhino for the labour of his muse” (U 11.263). The labour of Lenehan’s Muse falls on deaf ears and elicits only a curt “That must have been highly diverting” (U 11.272). Again “diverting” may be the appropriate term (apart for its musical vibrations) for diversion (from grim reality) is one of the aims of a person like Lenehan who faces so many snubs and disappointments. In “Sirens”, the trait of embellishment or fancification suffuses the whole episode. Tonal effects at times override the meanings, especially in the first sketchy arrangement that is often termed “Overture” (U 11.1–64), where “Full tup. Full throb” (U 11.25) is notable for its structure but makes little immediate sense. Music serves as a diversion or distraction for almost everyone. As Bloom muses, slightly off track: “Music hath charms. Shakespeare said” (U 11.904). Simple words or phrases turn into motifs to be vibrantly elaborated. While the viceregal convoy is passing “Miss Douce said yes, sitting with his ex, pearl grey and eau de Nil”. It is followed by “— Exquisite contrast, miss Kennedy said” (U 11.67). The colloquial “ex” for “His Excellency” chimes with “exquisite” in the first of those many tonal glides that often link paragraphs. Soon “exquisite” becomes the subject for repetition and, some lines later, for variation: Ladylike in exquisite contrast. — The tuner was in today, miss Douce replied, tuning it for the smoking concert and I never heard such an exquisite player. … where bald stood by sister gold, inexquisite contrast, contrast inexquisite nonexquisite, slow cool dim seagreen sliding depth of shadow, eau de Nil. (U 11.106, 277, 464)

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This is on a par with Lenehan’s amplifications, but the device is applied to the entire composition. As it happens, “exquisite”, deriving from Latin “exquisitus” (exquirere: “to seek out”) is akin to an earlier “recherché”, something fastidiously chosen. Choice words can be used to express class: “With the greatest alacrity, miss Douce agreed”, and the narration instantly takes it up: “With grace of alacrity … she turned herself … alacrity4 she served” (U 11.211–8). What Bloom observed of a bird — “Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley. Taking my motives he twined and turned them” (U 11.633) — is one of the chapter’s dominant devices, as in an early passage of echoing permutations: With sadness. Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a hair. Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a curving ear. — It’s them has the fine times, sadly then she said. (U 11.80) The subject of the triple variations is slight and almost muted by the intrusive orchestration of sounds, motifs, words, assonances and alliteration. Such salient effects are now taken for granted as the episode’s hallmark, but at the time of writing, such startling mannerisms alienated even such a staunch admirer as Ezra Pound, who responded with a burst of jingling parody: “O gloire et decor de la langue Irso-Anglais: … The peri-o-perip-operiodico-parapatetico-periodopathetico — I don’t-off-the markgetical structure of yr. first or peremier para-petitec graph … you have gone marteau-dingomaboule —” (10 June 1919).5 As usual, Joyce extended the practice in fanciful variations. However, the sonant pyrotechnics contrast with the extreme opposite, utter banality, mere conversational common places, which by repetition also turns into an arrangement: George Lidwell told her really and truly: but she did not believe. First gentleman told Mina that was so. She asked him was that so. And second tankard told her so. That that was so. Miss Douce, miss Lydia, did not believe: miss Kennedy, Mina, did not believe: George Lidwell, no: miss Douce did not: the first, the first: gent 4 The underlying Latin adjective, alacer (“lively, brisk”), was to spawn the musical term “allegro” in Italian. 5 Forrest Reid, ed., Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce with Pound’s Essays on Joyce (New York: New Directions, 1967), 157.

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with the tank: believe, no. no: did not, miss Kenn: Lidlydiawell: the tank. (U 11.815)

4

Give it a name (U 12.143) to celebrate the occasion (U 12.318)

Whatever else, the “Cyclops” episode also presents variations of in how many ways a drink can be ordered without being named: — Give it a name, citizen, says Joe. — Wine of the country, says he. — What’s yours? says Joe. — Ditto MacAnaspey, says I. (U 12.143) MacAnaspey is a name, though not of a drink, but a once current phrase; it looks thrown in simply for its out-of-the-wayness. Another round sports different labels, and Lenehan contributes his quota: — Could you make a hole in another pint? — Could a swim duck? says I. — Same again, Terry, says Joe. Are you sure you won’t have anything in the way of liquid refreshment? says he. (U 12.756) — Hear, hear to that, says John Wyse. What will you have? — An imperial yeomanry, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion. — Half one, Terry, says John Wyse, and a hands up. Terry! Are you asleep? — Yes, sir, says Terry. Small whisky and bottle of Allsop. Right, sir. (U 12.1317) Helpful translations are provided for outsiders: an “imperial yeomanry” is explained as “Half one” and then further as a “small whisky”; “a hands up” is a phonetic approximation of Allsop beer, as well as a graphic illustration as the label on the bottle showed the Red Hand of Ulster. In tune with the chapter’s nationalistic concerns, the roundabout references to drink carry historical overtones. Beyond minor excrescencies in the dialogue, the Cyclopean interpolations serve a similar purpose on a major scale. Simple events are elevated and transposed to a different place, occasion, perspective and mood. When drinks are served (“— Hurry up, Terry boy, says Alf”, U 12.279), a simple habitual act is magnified out of proportion into a ceremonial gift exchange as it might occur

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in classical epics. The prevailing technique is gigantic exaggeration and apposite diction: Terence O’Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal cup full of the foamy ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of deathless Leda. For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat. Then did you, chivalrous Terence, hand forth, as to the manner born, that nectarous beverage and you offered the crystal cup to him that thirsted, the soul of chivalry, in beauty akin to the immortals. But he, the young chief of the O’Bergan’s, could ill brook to be outdone in generous deeds but gave therefor with gracious gesture a testoon of costliest bronze. Thereon embossed in excellent smithwork was seen the image of a queen of regal port, scion of the house of Brunswick, Victoria her name, Her Most Excellent Majesty, by grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British dominions beyond the sea, queen, defender of the faith, Empress of India, even she, who bore rule, a victress over many peoples, the wellbeloved, for they knew and loved her from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, the pale, the dark, the ruddy and the ethiop. (U 12.280) In old epics, due weight is given to transactions; they are treated as unique events. The beverage handed out is appreciated as the work of the brothers Guinness in person (who became knighted as Lord Iveagh and Lord Ardilaun).6 The bartender is addressed in a Homeric second person, and the penny offered in payment (hardly ever looked at) becomes a crafted work of art. The abbreviations of Queen Victoria’s titles on the coin are spelled out in dead earnest (with a nice overtone, “of royal port”). We are brought down again from a historical “testoon”, an appropriate word since the penny depicts a head (testa) of Queen Victoria, to the trite reality of the scene with a prosaic and slangy “— Here you are, says Alf, chucking out the rhino” (U 12.303).

6 Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun: Brewers were called “bungs” in slang; hearing trains overhead under the railway station Bloom had imagined Guinness barrels and “bungholes sprang open” (U 5.315).

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297

Turbatque Notas

Interpolations in “Cyclops” are not visibly underlined; Joyce could have used italics or indentation. What distinguishes Joyce is that he does not mark variations or aberrations: he does not use signposts. In this, he is like his early mythological prototype, Daedalus, the first artificer or engineer, a sculptor who fashioned a lifelike cow out of wood, who invented flying and built a labyrinth. The way the Cretan labyrinth was constructed is reminiscent of Joyce’s proceedings. Daedalus “… ponit opus turbatque notas et lumina flexum ducit in errorem” (“… constructed the work and confused the [usual] marks [of direction] and led the eyes [of the beholders] astray by devious paths winding in different directions”) (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.160).7 There were, in other words, no signs, no guideposts. In Ulysses, they have to be supplied by commentary and annotations. The interior monologue, puzzling at first, is not set off from the rest.8 Readers therefore can be misled (their eyes may go astray) and they frequently have to retrace or reinterpret, a common experience for example in the flowing syntax of “Penelope”. No outward sign in Ulysses distinguishes imagination from fact, the real from the fanciful, what is straightforward from what is refracted. They mingle as in Stephen’s thoughts about a drowning case: The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, saltwhite. Here I am. (U 1.675) The puffy saltwhite face is not seen, but mentally visualized. It is not Stephen of course who asserts his existence but the imagined corpse is proclaiming “Here I am”.9 An early tacit deviation from observed reality is to be found in “Hades”:

7 Fritz Senn, “Labyrinthine Joyce — Classically Detailed”, Literatur ohne Kompromisse. Ein Buch für Jörg Drews, eds. Sabine Kyora, Axel Dunker, and Dirk Sangmeister (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2004), 263–78. 8 A new edition, Ulysses Remastered, by Robert Gogan, facilitates orientation by putting dialogue between quotation marks and marking interior monologue by italics and isolating it in separate paragraphs (Stalteens: Music Ireland Publications, 2012). It also separates the interpolations in “Cyclops”. 9 This links to the controversial issue of who pays the rent for the Martello tower and who deserves to be in charge of the key. Is “It is mine. I paid the rent” (U 1.631) Stephen’s position, or a memory of what Mulligan had said or a guess at what he might say?

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— First round Dunphy’s, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Gordon Bennett cup. — Praises be to God! Martin Cunningham said piously. Bom! Upset. A coffin bumped out on to the road. Burst open. Paddy Dignam shot out and rolling over stiff in the dust in a brown habit too large for him. Red face: grey now. Mouth fallen open. Asking what’s up now. Quite right to close it. Looks horrid open. (U 6.421–24) It takes a few beats to realize that the coffin bumping out into the road is not something actually witnessed but something that occurs in Bloom’s imagination; it is not part of the so far prevailing reality. Correspondingly, in “Proteus”, Stephen Dedalus asks himself, “Am I going to aunt Sara’s or not?” The sequel, soon after: “I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage: and wait. They take me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage …” (U 3.61ff) has made many readers backtrack to find out that the visit did not take place outside of Stephen’s mind. Visible signs might have helped.10

6

In the Larger Analysis

Whole episodes, in particular the later ones, can be subject to elaboration. From the perspective adopted here headlines in “Aeolus” can be seen as extensions from ad hoc verbal antics. One instance, “— Clever, Lenehan said. Very”, in point of fact has been converted into the heading, nearly verbatim, “CLEVER, VERY” (U 7.674). But the capital letters make them stand out from the context in rare cases of typographical emphasis. Some of the later ones increasingly attract by their fanciful extravagance and their (attempted) verbal ingenuity. SOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP. (U 7.1032) This elevates a simple speculation (in a treatise attributed to Antisthenes of which only the title is known, “Helen and Penelope”) to a pre-Homeric beauty contest with national overtones; it also bathetically equips the most beautiful woman of antiquity with an elephantine “proboscis” — the elaborations are in the manner of Lenehan, but with heightened sophistication. 10

They are provided in Robert Gogan’s “masterminded” edition where the whole passage is italicized and thus identified as interior.

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If Lenehan can turn “footsteps” into “feetstoops” (U 7.394) or invert the initial consonants of “Damn clever” (U 7.695), in “Sirens”, elements can become displaced out of syntactical sequence: Goulding, a flush struggling in his pale, told Mr Bloom, face of the night, Si in Ned Lambert’s, Dedalus house, sang ’Twas rank and fame. (U 11.783, the split elements are marked in bold) Musically perhaps, one instrument in the orchestra seems to play out of step; the result is a double take in reading and the necessity of a mental rearrangement. After the sample is given, the device is instantly varied by another re-arrangement of the same event, this time in pedantic over-identification: He, Mr Bloom, listened while he, Richie Goulding, told him, Mr Bloom, of the night he, Richie, heard him, Si Dedalus, sing ’Twas rank and fame in his, Ned Lambert’s, house. (U 11.786) “Cyclops” is split up between a straightforward oral tale and excrescent interpolations, tangential offshoots of the prevailing theme. “Nausicaa” continues the process but separates the artificial first part, a type of romantic fiction, from its realistic second one, where Bloom’s extended interior monologue is felt almost as a relief from the preceding oddities. Most of them — parodies, imitation, special effects — seem to converge in “Oxen of the Sun”, where practically nothing is natural or obvious and everything is transposed in time, lexis and situations before it ends, in its “Coda” in a concentration of demonstrative oral contortions. What Buck Mulligan or Lenehan start off in small scale verbal exploits seems to magnify into the salient idiosyncrasies of later episodes.

7

Deshil Holles Eamus (U 14.1)

A claim could be made that the introduction to “Oxen of the Sun” is the most extravagant element in all of Ulysses, a multiply erratic block and a genuine obstacle in reading. The opening is “obvious” in an original sense of its now almost opposite meaning. Originally, “obvious” meant just what stands in the way (ob-viosus, via, way) and arrests smooth progress. In English, the meaning veered towards that. Since what obstructs is clearly noticed, the English “obvious” has changed its meaning. There is perhaps nothing that is less obvious in the common sense and more obvious in its etymological, obstructional

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one than the opening of “Oxen of the Sun”. It obviates, stands in the way of, instant comprehension. We are brought up against a cryptic: “Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus” (U 14.1). The three words are apparently unconnected, but repeated three times. Whenever something looks enigmatic or meaningless, attention is diverted to its formal aspects, in this case the threefold nature, three times three. On one level, this could be suggestive of the nine months of pregnancy since the chapter deals with birth in a maternity hospital. Purely structurally, the opening continues the end of the previous episode which closed in a threefold “Cuckoo”, repeated also three times (U 13.1289–1305). A formal pattern is dominant, but no meaning emerges, and speculation becomes necessary (one view once took it for a nearly Irish name: “Eamus, Deshil Holles”). Clarification was provided by Stuart Gilbert, who was close enough to the author to consult him. And so — prematurely, for better or worse — we have it straight from the stable that the wording is an incantation, “in the manner of the Fratres Arvales”, that resolves itself into “Let us go south to Holles Street”.11 It is a hybrid composition. The first word is Irish deasil (with spelling variants), towards south, towards the right, sunwards, Holles is the name of the street, and “Eamus” is the Latin imperative for “go”. Conceivably someone like Mulligan might utter it. Once decoded, it sets the place, and it may function as a meta-injunction to the reader. It so happens that the opening contains the main ingredients of the language as spoken in Ireland, English (in the name Holles), Irish, and Latin. There is also something analogous to the first departure into a liturgical direction, Mulligan’s “Introibo ad altare Dei” (U 1.5) at the beginning. “I will enter” matches “Let us go!” Threefold repetition is common in liturgies and prayers (“Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus!”). Gilbert informed us that the three words also take us back to the beginning of Latin literature, a prayer for fertility of the Fratres Arvales in Rome; it is, based on threefold repetition: enos Lases iuuate, (e)nos Lases iuuate, enos Lases iuuate The episode that rehearses the development of the English language goes back to the beginnings of Latin poetry. “Arval” gets a passing mention in “Scylla and Charybdis”, among names and terms in occultism: “Dunlop, Judge, the nobles

11

Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 290–91.

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Roman of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name ineffable, in heaven hight” (U 9.65). “Arval”, the name of a college of priests, derives from “arvum”, a ploughed field (arare, to plough). It is fittingly also used for the female genital. A ploughing metaphor also occurs in the episode: “has [Bloom] not nearer home a seed field that lies fallow for the want of the ploughshare?” (U 14.929). In the Library episode, Shakespeare’s “uneared wombs” (U 9.664) echo “Where is she so fair whose unear’d womb / Disdains the tillage of thins husbandry?” of Shakespeare’s sonnets (III, 5–6), where “unear’d” means unploughed. The verb “ear” is a cognate of Latin arare; “uneared” is misleading (compare a librarian “bald, eared and assiduous”, U 9.231), and yet it may bring to mind views according to which conception could take place through the ears. The point of such ramifications is that the cryptic formula serves as a manifold and fertile stimulus (for fruitful or fatuous speculation), the secondary harvest may be significant, but compared to the lack of obvious meaning, they appear like side issues or embroideries. Why this particular formula, which may be thematically apt, but is not part of the book’s chronology? Nobody says it; no one seems to think of it. It is an intrusive, egregious, extraterritorial, gratuitous and amply significant addition on a meta-level: it is logodaedalian par excellence. Such was Joyce’s way, per vias indirectas. Aldous Huxley long ago described Joyce in negative terms when he said that a large part of Ulysses “is taken up with showing a large number of methods in which novels cannot be written”, which is one way to designate many of Joyce’s innovations. All of the foregoing could be subsumed under the general heading of Making a Lot out of Very Little. Joyce’s plots, right on from Dubliners, are notoriously unspectacular. All of Ulysses consists of relative minutiae within a limited area lasting less than a whole day. And what actually happens in Finnegans Wake, a work whose nets are probably cast widest in all literature? Secondary elaboration seems to be ubiquitous, and logodaedalia is one particular aspect. An underlying assumption has been by stressing departures from the normal or the “obvious”, it is the assumption that we know what is the norm and what is the departure. Joyce implicitly questions such premises along with others. Is there a valid standard? What is rule and what exception? What is worth telling and which possible expectations ought to be fulfilled? Put slightly differently in Bloomian naiveté: “How can you hold water really?” (U 8.93).

Chapter 18

The Odyssey through Joycean Lenses Ulysses would not have been possible without Homer’s Odyssey, but perhaps Joyce’s Ulysses has also changed the Odyssey. The following non-expert speculations about the Odyssey are a consequence of a protracted involvement in Joyce’s epic, but this time the direction is reversed, with the growing conviction that Homer’s and Joyce’s techniques, the way they handle language, have more in common than may have been put on record. The focus is not on matters of characters or actions, but on textual subtleties, on the lexical level of word relations, at times on word play, that, to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, have not been taken up by classical philologists. Joyce’s influence on Homer has become an intriguing pastime with all the hazards of over-reading. Interacting with Joycean close-ups, I may wilfully transfer an engrained reading habit, with its attendant distortions, to Homer. A mere dabbler in Greek, without the drill of proper instruction, may naively see, or invent, more minute relations than trained and well-informed experts do. To their judgement the following amateur gropings, a random series of select examples, are submitted.1 The most common denominator for all the devices under inspection are verbal similarities as they are used by Joyce more than by most other writers and are intensified beyond limits in Finnegans Wake (outside the range of this attempt). In Ulysses, they may consist in repartee, chance echoes, phonetic or semantic congestions (“Madden back Madden’s a maddening back”, U 14.1519), slips of the tongue (a “wife’s admirers” are close to her “advisers”, U 12.762), play on words, whether clever (“lecturer on French letters to the youth of Ireland”, U 9.1101) or forced (“What opera resembles a railway line? … The Rose of Castile … Rows of cast steel”, U 7.514, 589), the comic or lewd potential of names such as “Cockburn” (U 12.231), “Opisso” (U 18.1466), and analogous applications. Some of Homer’s analogous devices are on record. The best-known instance, Odysseus calling himself “Outis” (“Nobody”), and so outwitting the naïve Kyklops is so conspicuous that it could not be overlooked. Homer notably plays with names elsewhere. The beggar Arnaios is called “Iros … because he used to run on errands” like the divine messenger Iris. When challenged in combat, “Iros” may become “Airos” (he is “un-Irosed”, Od. 18.73). 1 In practice, I am dealing with items not glossed in A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, 3 vols., by Alfred Heubeck and Arie Hoekstra (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988–92).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004516717_019

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O-dys-seus

Odysseus is introduced not by his name but by his epithet, “polytropos” (“much turned, much travelled, versatile, many-faceted”) before he is named in the assembly of the gods in Book 1 where Zeus in a leisurely causerie complains that humans generally blame the gods for all evils and yet are mainly responsible for their own fate. He picks out Aigisthos, who killed his mother against explicit divine warning, so his deed was a transgression, beyond what was ordained, “hyper moron” (Od. 1.35, “moros”: what is allotted by Fate). At this point, Pallas Athene, impatient, bursts in with a spirited appeal for her protégé: “But my heart is rent for wise Odysseus”, who is “dysmoros”, hapless, ill-starred, unlucky. Whereas Aigisthos acted beyond, in the teeth of, Fate, Odysseus had Fate, the allotted portion, pitted against him. What is maintained here is the emphasis on an accidental “dys-” in his name, it has no etymological basis, but it is deployed as a contrast: Aigisthos sinned against his apportioned lot (moros), Odysseus became its victim. He is the man whose actions go dys, wrong, bad, against him; this distinguishes him from the other heroes returning from Troy. Without “dys”, that is, misadventures, there are no plots worth telling, and certainly no Odyssey which is a series of dysadventures from which its protagonist extricates himself by cunning strategies adapted to each occasion. As it happens, on a minor, everyday scale a lot also goes dys in Bloom’s day, from the girl next door turning the wrong way out of the butcher’s (U 4.174) all the way to Molly’s affair. Odysseus is called “dysmoros” on more occasions: when he is drifting in the sea, or when he is described by Philoitios, and again when, almost gratuitously teasing his father, he talks about himself in the third person and characterizes himself as “dysmoros” (Od. 24.311). It is also what his old father calls him (Od. 7.270, 20.194, 24.290). Towards the end of Book 5, when he is fighting the waves, we are told that, if Athene had not given him courage, “hapless” (“dystenos”) Odysseus would have “perished beyond his fate” (“hyper moron”, Od. 5.436); and again “hyper moron” is contrasted with a different adjective: “dys-tênos”, which has already been applied to Odysseus earlier on (Od. 1.55), and then by Menelaos (Od. 4.182,) by Athene (Od. 13.331) and by Telemachos (Od. 17.10); he is also a wretched one (“dystênon”, Od. 17.483) and a wanderer (“dystênos”, Od. 17.501). Penelope refers to him by the same adjective (Od. 19.354), and so does his father Laertes (Od. 24.289). Compounds on dys- are his trademark. Within the same context Zephyros, the West Wind, is called “dysasaês” (“ill-blowing”) when it, along with the other winds, sends the hapless man a destructive wave (Od. 5.295). When he is finally safe among the bushes of Phaiakia, he still fears the night bringing pain or discomfort: “dyskêdea nykta” (Od. 5.466).

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When Penelope converses with the beggar, actually her husband, — whom she may (less likely) or may not (more probably) recognize — she decides on the fateful trial of the bow. Drastically changing the subject to her recent dream, she announces that the “morn of evil name” has come: “êôs … dysônymos”; it is immediately followed by “which is to cut me off from the house of Odysseus”, with nearly echoing sounds (Od. 19.571). Homer, like Joyce, may accommodate lucky coincidences. Odysseus, hearing the screams of Nausikaa and her companions, emerges from under the bushes he has been sleeping in; the phrasing is “hypedyseto dios Odysseus” (Od. 6.127), where a wholly unrelated and non-etymological syllable “-dys-” again emerges; “-edyseto” is an aorist form of a verb dyein. At this moment Odysseus is at his lowest point, helpless, without even clothes and totally dependent on support — that is to say, never more “dys” or “nobody” in the whole poem. A slight phonetic pattern, “hypedyseto dios Odysseus”, might underline the possible connection. The form “hypedyseto” only occurs in this passage. When in that first session on Olympos Athene introduces the name, its very first occurrence, she underlines it with alliterative force: “Odysêi daiphroni daietai hêtor” (literal: “[for] Odysseus wise is torn [my] heart”). She soon provides more phonetic emphasis by throwing in that Kalypso, daughter of Atlas, “keeps back the unlucky sorrowing man”: where “… dystênon odyromenon” almost echoes and scrambles the name (Od. 1.55). As though to top this, she famously concludes by “Why do you have such wrath against him, O Zeus?” — ending with an emphatic “ôdysao, Zeu” (Od. 1.62). She is manifestly playing upon the derivation of his name, which is explained as a suggestion of his grandfather, the tricky Autolykos, who describes himself as “one who has been angered with many” (“odyssamenos”) and so the child should be named “Odysseus” (Od. 19.407–9). This play with the name is inscribed into the epic and has frequently been pointed out. It is as though Athene by orchestrating a tangle of echoing “dys” and “ody-” or “ôdy-” sounds were dinning in the name in phonetic modulation to remind her chatty father that it is time for supportive action. The name of the nymph Kalypso looks like an ad hoc derivation from the verb kalyptein, to cover, envelop, hide. She has been hiding Odysseus on her island for seven years. In the Homerically named “Calypso” episode of Ulysses, Molly Bloom and her husband play a complex game of hiding and revealing, apart from an envelope being half hidden under a pillow (U 4.308). In Book V of the Odyssey, Kalypso is forced by divine decree to release her former lover and send him off on a raft. On which occasion she is covering her head with a veil, called “kalyptrên” (Od. 5.232). Angry Poseidon, Odysseus’ arch-enemy, smashes the raft and forces him to swim for dear life until he reaches the

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safe shore of the Phaiakians where, utterly exhausted and destitute, he finds shelter under bushes. He covers or envelops himself with leaves: “Odysseus phylloisi kalypsato”, where the verb nearly spells the name of the goddess who has been hiding him. The adventure closes with Athene shedding sleep in his eyes and enfolding his lids so that his “toilsome weariness” might end; the word for enfolding, “amphikalypsas”, in fact closes the fifth book (Od. 5.493). Somehow the name Kalypso towards the beginning and at the very end of the song envelops (“amphi-”, around, on each side) the episode. The adjective for the toilsome weariness is “dysponeos” (from “ponos”, “labour, hardship”) and adds another “dys-” so that the two main protagonists deviously seem to come full circle.

2

Under, Out and Forward

A case in point of what appears to have been overlooked is a passage in Book 6 where Nausikaa and her companions are driven to the beach to do their laundry, a place where springs provide clear water. Practically all translations render the lines under discussion in basically the same manner, expected variants in wording apart: “Now when they were come to the beautiful stream of the river, where truly were the unfailing cisterns, and bright water welled up free from beneath, and flowed past, enough to wash the foulest garments clean, there the girls unharnessed the mules from under the chariot and turning them loose they drove them along the banks of the eddying river to graze on the honey-sweet clover” (Od. 6.84–8).2 Greek verbs abound in prefixes; sometimes Homer puts two together, and on rare occasions even three of them. In the original, the water wells up from under (hyp), flows out (ek) and then forward (pro); this results in an unusual but very graphic combination: “hypekprorheen” (Od. 6.87). This is matched in similar, parallel construction in the line immediately following: they loosened (lys-) the mules from the harness, in an identical triple prefix: “hyp-ek-prolysan” (Od. 6.88). Clearly some playful echoing is going on. Clearly? Either the commentators take the salient ripple on the surface for granted or as beneath their dignity, so it has escaped critical attention. A fairly recent commentary glosses “hypekproreen” (a variant of the verb in some editions) by merely referring to its present tense, but not its internal connection.3 However, to a reader 2 The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Samuel Henry Butcher and Andrew Lang (London: Macmillan and Co., 1897), 95. 3 Heubeck, A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, I.289.

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of Ulysses, it looks as if its joker in residence, Lenehan, could have produced something of the sort. A combination of the same three prefixes attached to a verb for fleeing is linked to Charybdis, the whirlpool, when Odysseus wonders how he could escape from its deadly clutches: the form is again a very graphic “hypekprophygomai” (Od. 12.114). He uses the identical combination with Pallas Athene when the slaughter of the suitors becomes imminent: how could he escape — “hypekprophygomai” (Od. 20.43) — from their avengers. It is glossed in A Commentary of Homer’s Odyssey: “hypekprophygomai”: “the compounded prepositions that create this unusually long verb suggest that Odysseus will need to get ‘out from under’ and then move ‘ahead’ of the threat of vengeance from the families of the murdered suitors”.4

3

Spectral Knees

The word for Odysseus, woken up by the screams of the girls on the beach playing with a ball, coming forth from the bushes, “hypedysato” (Od. 6.127), has already been commented on because of its coincidental -dys-. Its construction is similar: “hyp-e-…” (ek losing its k before certain consonants); he also then “came forward”, in fact like a shaggy lion (Od. 6.130). Joyce commented on the scene: “When he [Odysseus] advanced, naked, to meet the young princess he hid from her maidenly eyes the parts that mattered of his brine-soaked, barnacle-encrusted body”. Joyce called him “the first gentleman of Europe”.5 The scene is worth a closer look. As Odysseus approaches the bevy of young girls, with a protective leafy branch in one hand, and not a great sight, he considers the best way of addressing the princess, who is the only one to meet him undismayed. He ponders whether he should clasp her knees (“gounôn”) or, standing apart, beseech her with gentle words. With almost the same phrasing, he decides it would be preferable to remain at a distance and use the gentle words, “lest the maiden’s heart should be wroth with him if he clasped her knees (gouna)”. Such a move might be misconstrued (besides what would he do with the branch?). Words are preferable to the physical contact of knees (“gouna”). What Odysseus then utters is “Gounoumai se …”. For one fleeting moment, an audience picking up “goun-” might wonder what Odysseus is doing with

4 Heubeck, A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, III.120. 5 Frank Budgen, Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 17.

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her knee after all, but the full verb is merely metaphorical: “I beseech you”, a figurative, not physical touch. It is at least possible to conceive of a potentially erotic misdirection. Of course, none of the translations inspected aim at a possible erotic ripple; it is out of their notice, interest or range. As it happens, knees are featured in Joyce’s voyeuristic “Nausicaa” episode. Gerty MacDowell “… caught her knee in her hands”, Bloom “… had a full view high up above her knee”, and there are decorous genuflections in a nearby church (U 13.696, 729, 675). But then Joyce, relying on translations, probably never came across the original verb “Gounoumai”.

4

Undertones

A possible lewd undercurrent occurs when Odysseus faces Agamemnon in the underworld. Agamemnon has good reason to feel bitter about women since his wife Klytaimnestra was a party in murdering him on his return: “there is nothing more dread or more shameless than” such a woman, and he condemns the whole sex. But he pointedly excepts the wife of Odysseus, Penelope, who is very prudent and “of an understanding heart” (Od. 11.420–46). The formula frequently used in the epos for this feature is “mêdea oide”, literally “she knows mêdea”, that is, “discretion, schemes, or devices”. But an outwardly identical word mêdea, of different origin, has the meaning of “genitals, private parts”. As such it occurs in just the scene when Odysseus out of the bushes discretely hides his own “mêdea” from the sight of innocent maidens (Od. 6.129). Later on, the beggar Iros is threatened to have his “mêdea” torn out and fed to the dogs (Od. 18.870); after killing Melanthios the victors of the slaughter tear out his “mêdea” and give them to the dogs (Od. 22.476, translators tend to use euphemisms like “nakedness” or “vitals”). Whatever Homer wanted to convey, it is a lexical fact that two unrelated words coincide. One can imagine sniggering schoolboys discovering them in a dictionary and being sternly reprimanded. It is conceivable, at least, to imagine Agamemnon, jealous of his still living companion with a wife awaiting him, hitting below the lexical belt with a psychological double entendre. Bloom’s wife, at any rate, does “know mêdea”. Homer may or may not exploit minor verbal coincidences. Menelaos in Book 4 according to custom does not immediately ask his guest, Telemachos, for his name in conversation. Yet when Helena makes her stately appearance, she instinctively notices his similarity to Odysseus. She instantly takes over and becomes the dominating figure. Her entry is impressive, she comes forth in style, attended by handmaids, sits down upon a chair, and “below was a

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footstool for the feet”, “thrênys posin” (Od. 4.120–37). There are several variants for the dative plural of “pous”, foot, metric convenience usually determining the choice; the form used in this passage is “posín”. Sitting down she turns to her husband to ask who the strangers are; the word for husband in the accusative is “pósin”; the accent alone differentiates the feet “posín” from the husband (“pósin”), but they are close enough to speculate whether perhaps Menelaos is no more than her footstool. He is in fact subordinate, the renowned Helena’s husband merely: it was she who wreaked so much havoc, the cause of a protracted and disastrous war.

5

Matters of Tone

In Ulysses, certain words stand out conspicuously and get the full limelight; they may be shocking (like the mock-Homeric epithet of the sea, “scrotumtightening”), strange (“Agenbite of Inwit”) or unfamiliar (“metempsychosis”). Homer features at least one, a powerful aâatos with three a’s in succession, a long between two short ones (the word stands little chance of getting into print, officious editors tend to shorten it to two a’s). Its meaning has been given as “decisive, ruinous, destructive, perilous, awful …”. It is applied to the impending trial of the bow, the “decisive contest”, “aethlon aaaton” (Od. 21.91). When at the climax Odysseus is finally in possession of the bow and facing all the unarmed suitors, he takes up the phrase: this “aaatos contest is now ended” (“aethlos aaatos ektetelesthai”, Od. 22.5) before he shoots the first arrow at Antinoos, his chief antagonist. Even without knowledge of Greek the phonetic impact of the short and weighty passage can be felt: the four a’s in “aethlos aaatos” are succeeded by four rapid short e’s, “ektetelesthai”. The line allows for performative scope; it can be spoken in a defiant, vindictive, even nasty tone. The power of the ominous adjective is hard to convey in translation and comes out far less ponderous, threatening or poignant (“decisive, terrible, mighty”, “crucial test, dread ordeal, great, adventurous, clear-cut, or venturous game” have been offered but they are relatively feeble). A similar tone may express resentment when Kalypso is told that she has to release her lover after seven years. The messenger is Hermes, who is accorded a somewhat curt welcome when he unexpectedly arrives in faraway Ogygia. It was custom among mortals and probably gods that a guest was to be treated to a meal first, and serious matters afterwards. Kalypso knows her guest (gods know each other), and with almost undisguised misgivings, she blurts out her question: “Why have you come here?” and then adds a courteous “honoured and welcome, philos”. She urges him to state his mission straightaway and pre-

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cedes it with a less than welcoming clause: “My heart bids me fulfil it, if fulfil it I can, and it is a thing that has fulfilment” (Od. 5.87–90). Even in translation, the preliminary hedging sounds more cautious than cordial, but more so in the original, where “fulfilment” is based on the word “telos”: “telesai de me thymos anôgen, ei dynamai telesai ge kai ei tetelesmenon estin”. Here the reduplication of short e-sounds (“telesai … telesai … tetelesmenon”) lends itself to an embittered intonation. Homeric epithets have something grand or stately about them; they are often formulaic: the Myrmidons are “enchesimôrois”, “eager with spears”, “champion spearmen” (enchos, spear: the second element is uncertain; Od. 3.188; also Iliad 2.692, 840). This is on a par with “iomôros”, “eager with arrows” (“ios” Iliad 4.242, 10.479). A similar propensity can be transferred to the dogs seeing Odysseus approach the hut of Eumaios: “kynes hylakomôroi”; “prone to barking”, they attack him (Od. 14.29). But later on, when Telemachos arrives, the “bark-prone” dogs notoriously do not bark, but fawn (a sign of their knowing him, as Odysseus points out): “kynes hylakomôroi, ouk’ hylaon” (Od. 16.5). Dogs doing their duty may well deserve a resounding epithet, but nevertheless there is something bathetic (and humorous) about dogs being characterized analogously to battling heroes, possibly with a touch of parody.

6

Wandering

Most of the intricacies of a Greek original are beyond the grasp of translations. A passage in Book 14 can demonstrate how the impact and tone of a rejoinder may change. Odysseus in the shape of a beggar has arrived at the hut of Eumaios, who instantly laments the absence of his master. Odysseus pretends to want to know the name of this master: perhaps, he suggests, he has seen him on his wanderings and may have news. Eumaios dubiously retorts that travelling strangers are likely to invent convenient reports in order to ingratiate themselves to their hosts and their tales don’t deserve much credence. Such an air of distrust pervades the Nostos part of the Odyssey. Odysseus is generally the suspicious one, but here the tables are turned against him. This is the version as given by Butcher and Lang: “… tell me, if perchance I may know him, being such an one as thou sayest. For Zeus, methinks, and the other deathless gods know whether I may bring tidings of having seen him; for I have wandered far”. Then the swineherd, a master of men, answered him: “Old man, no wanderer who may come hither and bring tidings of him can win the ear

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of his wife and his dear son; but lightly do vagrants lie when they need entertainment, and care not to tell truth. Whosoever comes straying to the land of Ithaca goes to my mistress and speaks words of guile. And she receives him kindly and lovingly and inquires of all things, and the tears fall from her eyelids for weeping, as is meet for a woman when her lord hath died afar. And quickly enough wouldst thou too, old man, forge a tale, if any would but give thee a mantle and a doublet for raiment”. (Od. 14.119–3)6 Eumaios picks up on “wandered far”: wanderers or travellers will tell tactical lies, and so does “every one who finds his way” here. Odysseus, the resourceful inventor of stories, is warned. In Greek, the passage plays with variant repetitions of “wandering”; the verb is alaomai (“I wander, rove”) from a root “alâ” or “alê”, it spawns related noun and verb forms. Odysseus had ended, I have wandered far: “polla d’alêthên”; Eumaios rejoins with three different formations, words based on “alê-” or “alâ-” (marked here for emphasis): ô geron, ou tis keinon anêr alalêmenos elthôn angellôn peiseie gunaika te kai philon hyion, all’ allôs komidês kechrêmenoi andres alêtai pseudont’, oud’ ethelousin alêthea muthêsasthai. hos de k’alêteuôn Ithakês es dêmon hikêtai, elthôn es despoinan emên apatêlia bazei. (Od. 14.119–3) A wanderer is first “anêr alalêmenos”, a man who is wandering (participle of the verb), then there are “andres alêtai”, men who are vagrants (a noun), an alternative word is “alêteuôn”, from a closely related verb. It is easy to see why translators — if they noticed the similarities at all — do not follow suit, since a close succession of “wanderer” or “wandering” might have sounded too ineptly monotonous. But without the repetitions it is far less obvious that Eumaios is throwing the word back at his guest, possibly with a notably mistrustful or mocking tone. That travelling strangers do not tell the truth is said twice: they lie (“pseudont”), they do not care to tell the truth (“oud’ ethelousin alêthea mythêsasthai”). The word used for truth in Greek is “alêthea”; it is wholly unrelated to wandering but, as it happens, only minimally different from “alêthên”, the departing point. Those who “alêthên” do not speak “alêthea”. Wanderers wander from the

6 The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Butcher and Lang, 226–7.

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truth. Eumaios is pointedly exploiting a chance similarity: he is in fact punning. His speech is cunningly orchestrated; the passage is vibrant with echoes and taunts. It makes the swineherd a match of resourceful Odysseus. A gracenote may have slipped in when Eumaios addresses his unrecognized master as “Old man” and then goes on to say “not one of those wanderers …”, in the original: “ou tis …”. Unwittingly, he uses the form for “not anyone” close to the name which Odysseus gave himself in the cave of the Kyklops, Outis, and which was so successfully misunderstood by the grudging fellow Kyklopes and efficiently saved Odysseus’ skin. The powerless beggar of no identity or possession is at this juncture once more a nobody. Eumaios goes on: “And quickly enough wouldst thou too, old man, forge a tale” — “epos paratektênaio” (Od. 14.131). This aptly describes what the disguised beggar will produce, a tale that is fashioned (-tekt-; a tektôn is a skilled craftsman or carpenter, the same root is in “architect”) alongside (para-) the truth. Eumaios is right: Odysseus will claim that he came from Krete undergoing various adventures but was stranded on Ithaka; his later tales equally depart from the facts but bring him to Ithaka by alternative routes. To “paratektainomai” is to construct something alongside, to invent a fiction that may be close to, but not identical with, reality. Odysseus excels at that in the following episodes, until the final showdown in Book 23, he will make up fake or para-biographies, plausible falsehoods, to account for his presence. He is the archi-paratektôn, throughout, not only fabricating apposite yarns but also suspecting others of the same tricks. Odysseus is the one who is versatile at para-tektoning, twisting the facts strategially. In some sense, this also applies to Ulysses as a paratektoning of the Odyssey, or, if you want, a Parodyssey. The verb “paratektainomai” (a middle form) occurs only here and once in the Iliad when the Achaians seem to retreat, unwilling to fight, and Nestor remarks that not even Zeus could change or prevent it; more literally, he could not “contrive it otherwise” (Iliad 14.54).

7

Protean Changes

Homer may have prefigured Joyce in making language act out the theme at hand, in doing what it says. So in the tale of how Menelaos managed to get hold of Proteus, the old man of the sea who continually changed his shapes, by following the instructions given by Eidothea, his own daughter. She, too, is a goddess of shapes: “eidos” (“appearance”, originally connected with seeing). Menelaos and his companions have to hide under sealskins, that is take on

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the deceptive shape of seals, and once Proteus has counted them, he can be forcefully grasped and then questioned. This happens as foretold. “At noon the old man came from the sea, found the fatted seals, and he went over all, and counted their number”, “lekto d’ arithmon”; the form “lekto” is an aorist of the verb legein (to count, or tell, it is to be found in words like “dialect, lexicon, catalogue”, etc.). “Among the creatures he counted us first,7 and in his mind did not suspect any guile”; here the past form of the same verb is “lege” in the imperfect tense. The story goes on: “epeita de lekto kai autos” (Od. 4.450–4), “lekto …” — what is he counting again? But here “lekto” is the aorist form of a different verb, whose root is lech-; Proteus is lying himself down to sleep. The second form “lekto” is deceptive, the same appearance or shape as before, but an altered meaning. While “lekto” and “lege” are variant tense forms of the same activity, an identical “lekto” signifies a different one. We cannot trust appearances in reality or words. Language plays out what is at stake. Joyce who undoubtedly was unaware of the intricacies of Greek conjugations, uses analogous techniques, above all in his “Proteus” episode, which deals, according to his own schema, with Philology and which sports many words that look the same and are not: “mare”, “lap”, “loom”, “weeds”, etc. Echoing reinforcement seems to be a device. When Polyphemos, the Kyklops, has been plied with strong wine, he falls on his back — “pesen hyptios” (from “hyp”) — and then drops into sleep, “hypnos” (Od. 9.372–3). The words are unrelated but the sound similarity links the two necessary conditions for the blinding: the giant lies face upwards and is unconscious and therefore helpless. Similarity of sounds is a timeless expedient, in the service of playfulness, emphasis or as a source for errors. “That’s how poets write. The similar sounds” (U 8.64), thinks Leopold Bloom; what he has in mind is rhymes, but it can easily be extended to misunderstanding, puns or distortions, witty or forced, as when he remembers Molly’s “base barreltone” for “base baritone” (U 8.117). It ranges from mere uneducated sound transitions: “Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier” (U 2.26), to shrewdly distorted quotations: “And going forth he met Butterly”, which is only two phonetic steps from “And going forth he wept bitterly” (U 1.527, Mat. 26:75). Joyce exploited similarities or coincidences throughout. Many poets and writers forestalled him, including Homer.

7 “… he counted us first”. In Greek, Proteus “counted us first = prôtous”, as though to echoingly underline that Proteus might be the prime matter.

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313

Much Ado about Outis

The best-known case is Odysseus tricking the cannibalistic Kyklops with his name. He calls himself “Outis”, nobody, by forming a name out of the combination of “ou” (“not”) and “tis” (“somebody”), and highlights it by giving, in an almost schoolmasterly fashion, both the nominative and the accusative case: “Outis is my name, and Outin call me my mother and father” (Od. 9.366). When his single eye has been destroyed, he cries out to his fellow Kyklopes (who are not known to care for each other) for help. When they assemble outside the cave in obvious resentment of being summoned in the middle of the night, they list the two unlikely causes for such an alarm: someone might be stealing his flocks or trying to murder him, “by guile or by force”. The way they phrase it in both cases is “mê tis …”. In Greek, the negation “ou” can syntactically change to “mê” (analogous perhaps to English “some” and “any”); it is clear that they dismiss both possibilities. So when Polyphemos, with a decisive lack of clarifying redundancy, answers that it is “Outis who is murdering me by guile and not by force”, they find themselves confirmed that no one, “ou tis” (as he phrases it) or “mê tis” (as they suspected) is molesting him and they abandon him unaided. In the original, the semantic shifts come across as far more subtle, as well as natural, than in any translation. Homer then compounds the verbal tangle. Odysseus congratulates himself: “My heart laughed that my name and cunning (cleverness/stratagem) had deceived him” (Od. 9.414–5). The noun used is “mêtis”, wholly unconnected to the preceding “mê tis”, a mere phonetic chance; “mêtis” (“skill, astuteness, council, scheming”) is the dominant quality of Odysseus, whose frequent epithet is “polymêtis” (“of many devices”). If Homer brings it off here, he could do it elsewhere, as it is posited in the examples adduced. Right afterwards, the Kyklops, blind and in pain, groans and travails in anguish: “ôdinôn odynêsi”, which sounds like another echo (ôdi-, ody-) of the perpetrator. By his later admission he reveals that a soothsayer had predicted the loss of his sight, but he never expected it to be achieved by such a puny and worthless, “outidanos”, man, the word is, and he had already called him “outidanos … Outis” (Od. 9.515, 460). Once the connection between Outis, “ou tis”, “mê tis” and “mêtis” is established, it can be unobtrusively evoked. When Odysseus has to hold himself in control, he addresses his heart to remember his escape from the Kyklopes due to his subtlety (“mêtis”, Od. 20.20). Similarly, when he, still in the guise of an unidentified beggar and so a non-entity, is questioned by Penelope who he is and where he is from, his answer begins with an address, “Ô gynai” (“lady”), followed by “no one of mortals could find fault with thee …”, “ouk an tis …”

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(Od. 19.105–7), an extended form of “ou tis” (“ouk” is the form before vowels, “an” a conditional particle). There may be a latent hint by Odysseus or possibly a narrative nod. There translations almost automatically use “no one” or “nobody”. The motif precedes the mention of the actual trickery with the name in Book 9. Odysseus, who enters the epos fairly late, in Book 5, is foreshadowed thematically as well as verbally. Telemachos asks his host Nestor about the possible fate of his father, and Nestor descends into rambling reminiscences about the war of Troy, where “no man” (ou tis) ventured to vie with him [Odysseus] in counsel (“mêtin”), since Odysseus excelled in all manner of wiles” (Od. 3.120). The proximity of “ou tis”, “mêtin” (counsel or cunning, accusative) and Odysseus anticipates the adventure as it is told later. When, in Scheria, Odysseus walks towards the city and Athene surrounds him with a thick mist “so that no one of the Phaiakians meeting him would speak mockingly to him”, again we find a coincidental “mê tis …” (Od. 7.16). Invisible and as yet without status as a guest, he is essentially a nobody. Such low-key echoes are ubiquitous.8 One among many proposed etymologies of Odysseus is an account given by Silenos of Chios whereby Antikleia, mother of Odysseus, surprised on her way by a rain caused by Zeus, gave birth to her son “kata tên hodon hysen ho Zeus”, and, according to this speculation, the name is synthetized from the fragments od, hys and (Z)eus. We know that Joyce took note of this derivation when he copied “Epeidê kata tên / odon ysen ho Zeus” [sic].9 Odysseus’s phrasing as to why he arrived is “allên hodon alla keleutha / êlthomen: houtô pou Zeus êthele mêtisasthai” (Od. 9.261), literally “by another way, another path / we have come; thus Zeus wanted to devise it”. That the word for devising contains “mêtis” makes an undercurrent hint less unlikely. The “rain of Zeus” occurs (Od. 9.358).

9

Assembly of Words

Homer often uses readymade formulae for routine events so that the epic resounds in almost stereotype repetitions. As though to lighten the monotony, 8 Odysseus, hiding his name, had emphasized that his mother and father had called him Outin, where the verb for calling is “kiklêskousi” (Od. 9.366) and has the consonant structure of Kyklops, so that Nobody and Kyklops are already in phonetic opposition. 9 Phillip F. Herring, Joyce’s Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 30; W.H. Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1897–1902), I.374.

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such acts can be exaggerated with a flavour of parody. At the beginning of Book 2, Telemachos calls an assembly: he “… bade the clear-voiced heralds to summon to the assembly the long-haired Achaians”. This is done in almost mechanical repetition: “And the heralds made the summons and the Achaians assembled quickly. Now when they were assembled and met together, [Telemachos] went to the assembly …” (Od. 2.6–10). The passage seems to be pivoting around two roots. The word for herald is “kêryx”, what they do is “kêryssein”, to gather people is built around the verb “ageirein”, the assembly place is the “agorê”, and more derivatives are thrown in. They are highlighted in the following transcription: Aipsa de kêrykessi ligyphthongoisi keleuse Kêryssein agorênde karê komoôntas Achaious. Hoi men ekêrysson, toi d’êgeironto mal’ ôka. Autar epei r’ êgerthen homêgerees t’egenonto, Bê r’ imen eis agorên. (Od. 2.6–10) An illustrative but impossible translation of the effect might sound like: “He bade the clear-voiced heralds to herald the long-haired Achaians to the gathering-place. Those heralded, they gathered. And when they had gathered together Telemachos came to the gathering place”. In Greek, of course, the various forms with their inflections sound far less monotone, but a touch of mockery may be made out, quite apart from a series of ep- êg- êg- eg- in a single line. Joyce flaunts similar effects in Ulysses: “When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once …” (3.144). The most extreme example occurs in the “Sirens” episode: Bald Pat who is bothered mitred the napkins. Pat is a waiter hard of his hearing. Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. Hee hee. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. While you wait if you wait he will wait while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. Hoh. Wait while you wait. (U 11.915) Many of the above items can be attributed to mere coincidence, a perennial risk of nit-picking interpretation. But then one can only assert that coincidences of this sort are more dominantly frequent in Joyce than in most other writers — and, perhaps, also in the Odyssey. Homer might have indulged in some lexical sleight of hand. A minor, almost feminist trait might be seen in the censorious term for the suitors; they are overbearing, wanton, arrogant — “hyperênoreontes”, a participle made up of

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hyper and the word for man, anêr, whose accusative form is the first word in the Odyssey: “Andra moi ennepe” (“[the] man, tell me, O Muse”). It is a wholly positive word, a worthy theme for the whole epic. Yet an excess of it does not result in a superman or a Nietzschean “Übermensch” (U 1.708), but it is a reproach, it designates inconsiderate, reckless, brutal virility. It is also the goddess Kalypso who issues one of the first feminist manifestoes when she complains that, while male gods are allowed to have all kinds of affairs, goddesses are denied such license, and their engagements with mortal men often end in disaster (Od. 5.117–35). Homer scholars may decide whether the above speculations are due to a Joycean distortive twist of mind. Authors like Joyce may well have sharpened our observation for seeing more verbal animation in classical texts than they have been credited with for a long time. After Joyce, Homer may never be quite the same again. Perhaps metempsychosis is injected in reverse.

Index “abfalltree” 142 “absolutely” 243 Achilles 201n Achilles heel 200 Adams, Robert Martin 178n, 189 Addis, William and Thomas Arnold 58n, 220n, 247n adverb 272 “Aeolus” 6, 11, 16, 24n, 25, 30, 34, 35, 42, 52, 59, 90, 97, 103, 113, 116, 119, 120, 137, 140, 147, 148, 155, 156, 169, 179, 188, 189, 226n, 255, 256, 265, 266, 268, 277, 278, 284, 285, 288, 289, 290, 298 “Aeolus” titles in 115, 188 Agamemnon 307 Agenbite of Inwit 28, 96, 308 Aigisthos 303 Akasic (Akashic) Records 59, 60 Alcyone 223, 224, 228–32 alliteration 3, 5, 8, 254–55, 266, 294 Alvarez, Emanuel 77, 118n, 252n ambiguity 111, 187, 210, 229 Anderson, Chester G. 166, 252n annotations 1, 32, 90, 91, 176, 186, 297 Antisthenes 34, 105, 188, 189, 298 Archimedes 102 Ardilaun, Lord 296 Aristotle 56, 65, 82n, 197, 198 Aristotle’s Masterpiece 65 Arius 55, 71, 251n “arsenic” 139, 199, 200 Artifoni, Almidano 211, 230 Arval 300 “As said before” 126, 129, 209 Ascension 239n assonance 5, 255, 294, 314 Athene, Pallas 45, 189, 303–06 Aubert, Jacque (trans.) 3n, 4n, 5n, 8n, 9n, 10n, 11n, 12n, 14n, 33n, 79n, 167n, 168, 170–81, 250n authorial interference 128, 214, 219 Bannon 134–35 baptised 242 Beach, Sylvia 131

“beef to the heels” 134, 174 Bell, Alexander Graham 278 Bell, Alexander Melville 277n, 278 Bell, Charles David 277n Bell’s Standard Elocutionist 277 Benediction 63, 116, 191, 213, 215, 281 Bergan, Alf 29, 62, 177, 178, 214, 280 Best, Richard 263 Bible 31, 99, 197 “biscuit” 67, 74, 245, 289–90 Black Mass 275 blessing 111, 116, 213, 214, 215, 219 “bloody” 22, 29, 41, 47, 49, 53, 66, 74, 96, 106, 107, 211, 213, 214, 215, 219, 220, 221, 280, 282 Bloom, Milly 85, 134, 136, 174, 251 Bloom, Molly 15ff, 44, 48, 49, 50, 62, 67, 75, 83, 84, 107, 119, 126, 131, 133, 139, 148, 161, 162, 163, 199, 200, 207n, 215, 219, 224, 241, 242, 249, 251n, 257, 261, 263, 282, 286, 288, 303, 304, 312 Bloomsday 19, 173, 183, 218 Blumenduft 215n “Boarding House, The” 40, 41, 138, 162 Boardman, Edy 259 Boisen, Morgens (trans.) 172, 179 Bonapfel, Elisabeth 118n Boylan, Hugh (Blazes) 27, 35, 52, 62, 85, 126, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 161, 171, 190, 207, 209, 210, 257, 258, 280, 285, 286 Broch, Herman 94 “brown study” 199, 203 Bruni, Alessandro Francini 244 Budgen, Frank 200, 235, 253, 306n budgets 244 Butcher, Samuel Henry and Andrew Lang 112, 305n, 309, 310n Butterly 197, 270, 312 “Calypso” 31, 89, 112, 161, 185, 209, 285, 304 Carmen arvale 129 Caroll, Lewis 142, 143 catalogue 61, 72, 75, 88, 191, 235, 238, 239, 248, 312 Catechism 186, 234, 235

318 Catholic 218 Celati, Gianni 6n, 7n, 14n, 35n, 250n, 261n Ceÿx 223, 224, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232 chalice 100, 151 chance 47, 130, 131, 313 Charybdis 306 chiasm 6, 262 Christian 16n, 30, 46, 55, 64, 218, 219, 239 Chrysostomos 124, 125, 157 Church Latin 269 cinematographic 8, 218 “Circe” 10, 16, 22n, 32, 33, 34, 35n, 38n, 48, 51, 57, 70, 71, 72, 84, 89, 90, 101, 102, 113, 114, 124, 140, 147, 148, 154n, 175, 185, 231, 234, 236, 251, 267, 272, 274, 275, 277, 280n, 282, 290, 292 Circean 43, 148, 239 Citizen 22, 29, 30, 36, 37n, 47, 49, 74, 111, 211, 212, 215, 279, 280, 295 Claes, Paul and Mon Nys (trans.) 167n, 172, 175, 177, 181 clichés 113, 226, 249, 290 Cockney rhyming slang 292 Coda 23, 32, 65, 147, 193, 206, 208, 291, 299 coincidence 97, 120, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 141, 142, 143, 194, 197, 200, 201, 202, 207, 231, 266, 269, 285, 304, 307, 312, 315 collusion 52, 110, 138, 160, 161, 162, 209, 270 commentary 297 “conjugial” 92, 114, 219 Conley, Tim 118n Conmee, Father John 2, 3, 10, 26, 64, 65, 117, 137, 190, 220, 221, 238 consonantia 253 consubstantial 55, 71, 172, 251 conversation 18, 28, 42, 73, 108, 112, 132, 133, 268, 278, 285, 286, 288 “Counterparts” 147 Crispi, Luca 19, 22 “Croppy Boy, The” 126, 207, 211, 214 “crossed” 137, 138 cursing 127, 208, 215, 219, 220, 226, 283 “Cyclops” 16, 22, 29, 36, 37, 41, 43, 46, 47, 48, 50, 62, 63, 66, 74, 76, 106, 107, 110, 111, 116, 139, 147, 161, 170, 171, 176, 178n, 185, 186, 190–92, 205, 211–19, 221, 234, 267,

Index 279, 280, 281, 282, 285, 288, 290, 295, 297, 299 Daedalus 1, 97, 229, 269, 291, 297 dangling correlatives 250 Dante 56, 76, 100, 140 Dawson, Dan 26, 202, 256n, 268, 290 De Angelis, Giulio (trans.) 5n, 6n, 7n, 10n, 13n, 14n, 167n, 168, 170, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 179, 181 De Quincey, Thomas 64, 108 “Dead, The” 43, 96, 103, 150, 157, 158, 182 Deane, Seamus 252n Death of Nelson, The” 189 deceit 228 “Deshil Holles Eamus” 129, 205, 265, 299, 300 different 97 Dignam family 31, 50, 131, 186, 198 Dignam, Patrick 28, 63, 116, 140, 154, 191, 213, 241, 281, 298 disguises 227, 298 dislocation 113, 116, 117, 120, 136, 193, 208 Divina Comedia 221 Doran, Bob 41, 67, 138, 212, 280, 290 Doyle, Conan 228 dream 16, 222, 223, 224, 228, 232 Drews, Jörg 297n Dubliners 6, 39, 40, 41, 78, 103, 145, 147, 150, 162, 186, 258, 289, 301 “duumvirate” 240 ecological 142, 192 Eidothea 311 “Elijah is coming” 221 ellipses 35, 40 Ellmann, Richard 130n, 236n, 259n Elocution 277ff elsewhereness 190, 206, 208 Emmet, Robert 207, 211, 212 “Encounter, An” 40 Enoch Arden 228 enumeration 25, 75, 236, 239, 241, 248 epimorph 63 Epiphany 43 “epiphany” 2, 19, 164, 227 epithet 29, 39, 157, 201, 303, 308, 309, 313 Eros 17

Index errors

30, 39, 106, 109, 166, 192, 202, 209, 219, 234, 237, 238, 312 Euclid 186–87, 244, 246 “Eumaeus” 18, 25, 28, 30, 34, 43, 51, 52, 53, 56, 63, 66, 81, 83, 99, 103, 104, 107, 109, 121, 123, 124, 144, 159, 160n, 193, 194, 201, 222ff, 234, 235, 236, 240, 243, 251, 265, 266, 282, 283, 291, 292 eutrapelia 196, 197, 198, 202 evasion 160–61 “Eveline” 40, 140, 147 Exile 130, 145, 182n expectation 235, 249, 301 eyes 20, 21, 26, 28, 31, 34, 41, 47, 49, 76, 83, 215, 227, 229, 230, 232, 255, 259, 280, 281, 282 fact 38, 40, 46, 51, 52, 54, 56, 60, 112, 205, 235 “falciform” 12, 61, 241 Fate 20, 39, 41, 131, 132, 135, 139, 228, 303 fiction 39, 43, 68, 104, 131, 135, 136, 232 figura etymologica 270 Finnegans Wake 1, 23, 36, 39, 41, 65, 67, 78, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 113, 114n, 130, 141ff, 163, 182, 184, 186, 187, 192, 196, 198, 202, 203, 204, 232, 244, 277, 290, 301, 302 Fitzpatrick, Samuel A. Ossory 196n Flotow, Friedrich von 207n form 225, 228, 233 Fratres Arvales 300 Freemasons 48, 49 French, Percy 198 Gabler, Hans Walter 166, 239, 244, 252n, 254n gambling 131 Garnett, Edward 76 General Slocum 60 geometry 142, 187, 244, 245, 284 gesture 229, 270, 276, 277 Giacomo Joyce 259n Gibons, Andrew 248, 264 Giedion-Welcker, Carola 130 Gifford, Don and Robert J. Seidman 60, 63, 91, 180 Gilbert, Stuart 167n, 200n, 205n, 235n, 260n, 300

319 “Gloria” 18, 66, 115, 283 “gnomon” 186, 187 “goal” 138 Gogarty, Oliver St. John 273 Gold Cup 27, 50, 63, 84, 108, 110, 131, 133, 192, 290, 291n Goyert, Georg (trans.) 12n, 35, 168ff “Grace” 42, 147, 201n Gregory, Lady 274 Griffith, Arthur 46 Grogan, Mother 274 Grogan, Robert 117, 121n, 122n, 129, 297n Gunn, Michael 272n “Hades” 28, 45, 46, 83, 118, 139, 150, 153, 154, 155, 180, 224, 254, 297 Haines 37, 54, 71, 72, 113, 121, 153, 156, 157, 163, 174, 189, 199, 218, 230, 254, 272, 273 “halcyon days” 231, 232 Hamlet (or Hamlet) 16, 37, 112, 174, 195, 196, 199, 211, 251, 262 Hart, Clive 198n headlines 103, 115, 116, 188, 189, 289, 298 Helen (of Troy) 34, 105, 188, 189, 298, 307, 308 hell 76, 141, 217ff Heraclitus (Heraklitus) 100, 101, 102, 103 heretical 55 Hesiod 38n, 63, 101n Heubeck, Alfred 302n, 305n, 306n History 1, 28, 53ff, 86, 90, 93, 106, 130, 135, 174, 196 histrionics 157, 268ff, 273, 282, 285 Hoekstra, Arie 302n “home” 20, 139, 172, 173, 201, 241 Homer (and Homeric) 6, 12, 24, 25, 29, 34, 38, 45, 58, 68, 69n, 70, 73, 89, 105, 108, 112, 119, 125, 127, 137, 161, 184, 185, 196, 205, 214, 215, 217, 219, 229, 232, 235, 236, 247, 261, 274, 285, 289, 296, 298, 302ff Homeric episode titles 184 Homerule 137, 172, 173 Horace 59, 247 Hospital episode (see “Oxen of the Sun”) Houaiss, Antonio (trans.) 181 House of Key(e)s 120, 137, 155 House of Keys 137

320 Huxley, Aldous 301 hypostasis 58, 246, 247 I.H.S. 33 identification 73, 227 idle chalice 151 “idle” 39, 151, 152 Ikelos (Icelos) 225, 226, 231 Iliad 101n, 201, 309, 311 incantation 129, 300 incarnation 200 infiltration 121 interior monologue 33, 71, 72, 75, 80, 97, 104, 113, 119, 124n, 125, 127, 139, 150, 167, 168, 210, 213, 249, 256, 265, 297, 299 interpolations 29, 37, 43, 74, 76, 115, 119, 120, 125, 128, 136, 189, 190, 191, 196, 213, 267, 269, 281, 295 Iros 302, 307 “Ithaca” 12, 21, 22, 25, 27, 31, 49, 50, 58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 75, 81, 109, 110, 112, 115, 119, 123n, 148, 179, 185, 202, 234ff, 263, 277, 284 Ivanescu, Mircea (trans.) 168n, 169 Iveagh, Lord 296 “Ivy Day” 41, 147 Jabberwocky 142 James Joyce Archive (JJA) 102, 103, 104, 105n, 168n, 185, 240n, 247, 251 Jameson, Frederic 235, 236n Johnson, Georgina 275 Joyce, Stanislaus 131 Juno 128, 209, 223, 224, 228 Kalypso 161, 207, 243n, 285, 304–5, 308, 316 Kelleher, Cornelius 45, 84, 124, 148, 149, 277 Kernan, Tom 19, 45, 49, 60, 200, 201, 202, 208, 210, 242, 248 Keyes 119, 120, 131, 137, 145, 169, 185 keys 7, 120, 127, 128, 137, 138, 186n, 197, 210, 214, 271 Kiberd, Declan 184 kinetics 100 Kirke 23, 69, 208, 243n, 276 “Kismet” 132 Kyklops 185, 191, 215, 302, 311, 312, 313, 314n Kyora, Sabine et al. 297n

Index lacunae 150, 162 Laertes 303 language 78, 252 Lenehan 26, 27, 34, 35, 47, 50, 62, 63, 64, 67, 78, 79, 85, 106, 108, 110, 111, 126, 133, 156, 157, 193, 197, 207, 210, 219, 221, 254, 258, 269, 271, 279, 288–99, 306 Léon, Paul 131 Lestrygonians 68 “Lestrygonians” 3, 29, 113, 139, 141, 201, 238, 253 lexical note 128 Library chapter (see “Scylla and Charybdis”) Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott 196 Limbo 220 Linat, Carlo 205 “Little Harry Hughes” 115 Little Review 203 logodaedalia 268, 269, 270, 271, 281, 287, 291, 292, 301 Lord’s Prayer 198 “Love and War” 212 Love, Rev. Hugh C. 275 “Love’s Old Sweet Song” 239 Lover, Samuel 104, 122 “Low-Back Car, The” (by Samuel Lover) 104, 122, 124 Lycidas 54, 195 Lyster 262, 263 MacDowell, Gerty 19, 22, 23, 37, 49, 67, 72, 73, 106, 113, 163, 180, 181, 185, 199, 231, 243, 259, 307 Maritana (opera by W.V. Wallace) 101 Martha (opera by Friedrich von Flotow) 132, 207n, 256 McCormack, W.J. and Alistair Stead 236n Melpomene 273 Menelaos 303, 307, 311 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 1, 39, 97, 223, 229, 233, 297 Metamorphosis 15, 39, 108, 206, 231n, 232, 234, 275 metaphor 24, 108, 194, 201, 234, 283, 284 Metempsychosis 145, 162, 163, 200, 231n, 234, 286, 308, 316 Mihálycsa, Erika 169n Miller, Frank Justius 39n, 223n

Index Milton 54, 195, 223 misinformation 38, 51, 189 modern 191, 231 Moore, Thomas 123, 207n, 255 Morel, Auguste (trans.) 8n, 9n, 10n, 11n, 13n, 167n, 168, 170–81, 250n, 260n, 261n Morpheus 222–33 morphology 233 Moses 30, 111, 153n, 156, 201, 278 Mulligan, Buck 5, 19, 24, 28, 36, 55, 57, 71, 80, 91, 100, 106, 107, 115, 120, 124, 134, 157, 162, 189, 193, 195, 197, 218, 230, 231, 254, 262, 269–75, 283–300 Murphy, D.B. 226 Murray, Lindley 171 Muses 38, 60, 63 music 17, 18, 20, 24, 26, 66, 80, 93, 112, 115, 133, 139, 141, 145, 150, 153, 157, 159, 182, 185, 194, 206–13, 225, 255, 257, 259, 265, 276, 283, 288, 293, 297 “nacheinander” 206 narrative speed 75 narrator 37, 41, 47, 104, 106, 121, 122, 170, 187, 212, 213, 214, 226, 279, 280, 282 “Nausicaa” 19, 20, 22, 67, 72, 107, 174, 180, 186, 203, 205, 212, 216, 227, 231, 234, 259, 288, 292, 299, 307 Nausikaa 89, 185, 292, 304, 305 “nebeneinander” 206 Nelson 97, 175, 209, 278 Neptune 24, 269, 290 “Nestor” 105, 123n, 144, 195, 293 Nietzschean 316 “Nostos” 81, 282 notes 88, 90, 97, 103, 145, 180, 208 Odysseus 23n, 25, 38, 45, 47, 51, 62, 68, 69, 70, 73, 83, 108, 112, 125, 169n, 175, 181n, 183n, 191n, 192, 207, 208, 223, 224n, 225n, 228, 236, 243n, 269, 273, 274, 292, 302–14 Odyssey 23n, 24, 25, 45, 73, 99, 107, 112, 125, 181n, 196, 205, 207, 225n, 228, 249, 273, 302–06, 309–11, 315, 316 Old Testament 30, 110, 185, 284 onomatopoeia 5

321 “organ” 65, 120, 125, 127, 175, 184, 201n, 205, 209, 211, 213 Outis (Nobody) 90n, 215, 302, 311, 313, 314 “Overture” 23, 70, 84, 116, 125, 129, 206, 208, 255, 258, 293 Ovid 1, 39, 41, 97, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 297 “Oxen of the Sun” 27, 32, 36, 37, 63, 64, 65, 66n, 82, 95, 108, 113, 129, 132, 147, 157, 174, 193, 194, 199, 229, 235, 265, 273, 291, 299, 300 “Painful Case, A” 46, 94, 147 painting 83, 261 palindrome 155, 288 Panther(us) 57, 101 parallax 15, 16, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 106, 108, 133, 163n, 176, 179, 192, 193, 214 parallel 15, 206, 245, 246 parenthesis (parenthetical) 61, 69, 72, 118–20, 127, 128, 170, 179, 185, 210, 214, 249, 284 Parnell, Charles Stewart 32, 52, 55, 81, 98, 132, 225, 228 parody 10, 36, 37, 64, 81, 135, 157, 193, 212, 215, 234, 264, 269, 270, 277, 294, 309, 315 paternity 45, 57 Paul, St. 197, 198 “pen” 33, 34, 144, 188, 266, 291, 298 Penelope (wife of Odysseus) 34, 73, 105, 112, 123, 188, 189, 243n, 298, 303, 304, 307, 313 “Penelope” 105, 119, 147, 148, 200, 297 perspective 15, 16, 19, 34, 93, 97, 104, 106, 108, 109, 118, 121, 150, 193, 207, 210, 213, 214, 247, 289, 295 Peter, St. 67, 197, 198, 270, 271 Phantasos 224, 226, 227, 231 “Phil the Fluter’s Ball” (by Percy French) 198 Phobetor 224, 231 Phoenix Park Murders 53 Pinamonti, Giovanni Pietro 218 Plevna, Battle of 242 Plock, Vike 194 Pokorny, Julius 218 “poleax” 195, 196 Polyphemos 89, 185, 312, 313

322 polytropos 99, 125, 191n, 273, 303 Pomes Penyeach 183 Pope, Alexander 36 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A 29n, 40, 73, 76, 77, 78, 93, 97, 103, 106, 107, 118, 130, 145, 146, 164, 166, 217, 218, 219, 229, 252, 253, 257, 258, 271 Poseidon 101, 191n, 269, 304 Pound, Ezra 2, 93, 131, 294 Prelude 208 prix de Paris 105, 189 Proteus 95, 232, 311, 312 “Proteus” 16, 56, 82, 95, 96, 136, 147, 288, 298, 312 purgatory 217, 220, 221 Pythagoras 163n, 231n Queen Victoria 42, 212, 296 question marks 120, 155, 156 Quinet, Edgar 86 Quintilian 118 quotation 10, 24, 56, 101, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 174, 195, 197, 198, 287, 291, 312 race (horse) 27, 63, 64, 84, 108, 110, 111, 131, 133, 138, 201, 290, 291 Reader’s Edition 60n, 61n, 129, 237–40, 244, 247 realism 1, 64, 81, 110, 112, 209, 235, 270 Reid, Forrest 2, 294n “reincarnation” 15, 200 repetition 265, 300 retrospective arrangement 24, 82, 172, 208 Rhetorics (Aristotle) 197 Rhetorics 120, 156, 277, 279 rhymes 90, 140, 141, 312 Ribbonmen 279 riddle 34, 35, 138, 156, 289 Rip van Winkle 20, 228 Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich 183n, 314n “Rose of Castile, The” 35, 138, 207, 255, 289, 302 Rose, Danis 129, 237 rumour 1, 38ff, 111, 133, 229, 249, 291n Russell, George (AE) 113, 132 Sanskrit 191 Schema 95, 184, 201n, 234, 235, 312

Index Scholes, Robert 187, 258n Science 235, 245 “Scylla and Charybdis” 16, 29, 62, 115, 138, 260, 262, 265, 273, 300 séance 63, 116, 191, 213, 281 self-reflexive 95, 128, 210 Senn, Fritz 69n, 85n, 118n, 197n, 205n, 230n, 248n, 278n, 297n “sesquipedalian” 58, 59, 246, 247, 248 Shakespeare 10, 16, 34, 62, 93, 100, 105, 112, 114, 128, 138, 174, 189, 195, 196, 197, 209, 217, 218, 219, 220, 226, 227, 249, 263, 273, 274, 291, 293, 301 Sherlock Holmes 52, 228 side effect 182–204 silence 10, 28, 147–65, 289, 291 similarity 141, 225, 228, 312 simultaneity 11, 12, 138, 208 Sinbad the Sailor 228, 244 “Sirens” 7, 2, 11, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 35, 36, 67, 70, 78, 80, 84, 85, 93, 97, 103, 104, 113, 116, 125, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 138, 139, 147, 153n, 158, 175, 190, 205, 206–16, 234, 255, 257, 258, 260, 263, 265, 266, 267, 288, 293, 299, 315 “Sisters, The” 39, 40, 93, 150, 153, 160, 186, 187, 203, 244 Skeat, Walter 96, 233 Skin-the-Goat 46, 53, 283n Skoumal, Aloys (trans.) 169–71, 176, 179 Socrates 113 Somnus 222, 223, 227, 228, 232 “Songs of O’Ruark, The” (see also Thomas Moore) 123 spelling 46, 98, 147, 155, 164, 187, 191, 195, 237, 275, 300 stage directions 10, 149, 154n, 274, 277, 285 Staples, Hugh B. 279 “stately” 5, 26, 100, 137, 145, 262 Stephen Hero 58n, 103, 182, 229, 247 stereotypes 66, 226, 249, 290 Subirat, Salas (trans.) 167n, 171, 175–79 superstition 44n, 49, 50, 58, 109 swearing 219, 225 Swedenborg, Emanuel 114, 219 Sweny’s 110, 111, 183 Swinburne, Algernon (Algy) Charles 24, 107, 287

323

Index symbol 108, 120, 137, 145, 155, 182, 183, 184, 236, 246 symbolism 112, 182 synaptic 145, 194 synesthesia 13, 14, 80, 141 Synge, John Millington 273 syntax 13, 73, 167, 169, 297 Szentkuthy, Miklós (trans.) 168n, 169, 170 tangent 98, 106n, 186, 192, 291n Taxil, Leo 57 Taylor’s speech 59, 135 Telemachos 45, 112, 303, 307, 309, 314, 315 “Telemachus” 31, 156, 162, 230, 231, 272, 274 “tender Achilles” 200n, 201 Terrinoni, Enrico (trans.) 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 79n textual memory 126, 128 Thalia 273 Thanatos 17 Thaumas 228 thematic overlays 139 Thomas, St. 273 Thousand and One Nights, A 236 throwaway (handbill) 13, 27, 110, 111, 133, 144, 172, 192, 221 Throwaway (horse) 27, 50, 63, 67, 94, 110, 133, 172, 192, 201, 214, 221, 290 Tichborne case 227 time 68–91 Tindall, William York 179n “tooraloom” 84, 124, 149 Tortosa, Francisco Garcia and Maris Luisa Venegas (trans.) 33n, 167n, 170, 171, 172, 175, 176, 179, 181 translation 3–14, 29, 30, 31, 77, 79, 86, 94, 96, 99, 105, 122, 136, 139, 152n, 166–83, 193, 202, 223, 240, 250n, 259, 260, 276, 295, 305, 307, 308, 309, 313, 314, 315 translocations 206, 207

transmigration 15, 163n, 200, 231n Tucholsky, Kurt 94, 95n Twelfth Night 262 “Two Gallants” 67, 258, 289, 290 “U. p: up” 140, 178, 214, 280 Ulysses (title) 43, 93, 145, 183n “Ulysses in Dublin” 103 “urine” 262 Valverde, José Maria (trans.) 25n, 170n, 179 Vandenbergh, John 172 Vichnar, David 169n Virgil 95, 195 voglio 161 voice 13, 20, 25, 48, 65, 71, 80, 84, 106, 113, 115, 120, 138, 141, 149, 153, 155, 162, 186, 196, 197, 211, 213, 224, 226, 229, 230, 231, 232, 251n, 275, 276 walk 33, 113, 229, 262 Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language 163n, 231n Wallace, W.V. 101 wander 76, 179, 184, 229, 303, 309–11 “Wandering Rocks” 23, 24, 25, 64, 65, 67, 96, 116, 117, 125, 126, 132, 133, 136, 137, 147, 148, 189, 203, 205–11, 217–21, 291n Weaver, Harriet 131 Wollschläger, Hans (trans.) 4n, 5n, 6n, 9n, 10n, 11n, 13n, 14n, 33n, 79n, 168n, 169, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 250n, 260n Xenophon

24, 25, 107

Yeats, William Butler 287 Zeus

30, 149, 218, 273, 274,

45, 101, 112, 303, 304, 309, 311, 314