No More Learning

' But what really interests us is not the ingenuity of technique so much as the genuinely heroic qualities that Bloom shows when set among jingoists, cadgers, and
Jew-baiters.
Bloom is feared because he is both Jewish and part-Bungarian-
'44
doubly a foreigner and, moreover, a man allegedly given to un-Irish i
practices, such as selling Bungarian lottery tickets and buying cream
for his wife. He is recognised as uxorious but is also called a 'pishogue
-a half-and-half'. Unlike the Citizen, he does not believe in the use of force to settle arguments and-to a response of contempt which turns to outrage-he dares to preach the doctrine oflove. The paro- dic technique seems to sneer along with the Citizen:
Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A
loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle.
M. B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy eha Pu Chow.
Jumbo the elephant loves Alice the elephant . . . His Majesty the King
loves Her Majesty the Qyeen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.
But Bloom finds himself in trouble for another reason. When he leaves the pub to look for Martin Cunningham in the Courthouse, Lenehan, prince of cadgers, says: '. . . The courthouse is a blind. Be had a few bob on Throwaway and he's gone to gather in the shekels. ' We remember that, quite by accident, Bloom gave Throw- away as a tip for the Ascot Gold Cup to Bantam Lyons, telling him that he could keep his newspaper: 'I was going to throw it away that moment. ' Nobody doubts for one second that this man who is a dark horse himself, possessor of access to secret information (,He's the only man in Dublin has it'), has made a tidy win: it is clearly his duty to push the boat out. But when he comes back he makes no move to order pints all round. Everything is set for a pogrom, and the Citizen is ready to start it. The narrator sums up the general attitude:
Courthouse my eye and your pockets hanging down with gold and silver. Mean bloody scut! Stand us a drink itself Devil a sweet fear! There's a jew for you! All for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat. Hundred to five.
The Citizen says: 'Don't tell anyone', and Martin Cunningham- who is the book's real model of prudence-gets Bloom away, aware of coming trouble. The Citizen bawls: 'Three cheers for Israel! ' and Bloom courageously answers him back:
- Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. . . . Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.
This leads to one of the two solitary acts of violence in the whole of Ulysses, though it is weak and ineffectual enough. The Citizen- 'By Jesus, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By
'45
i
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Fireworks
Jesus, I'll crucify him so' I will' - h{,r1s after Bloom the biscuit-tin from which Garryowen has been devouring crumbs. The sun is in his eyes (i. e. , he is drunk) and so, like Polyphemus, he misses. But the prose at once explodes gigantically:
The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The ob- servatory at Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercal1i's scale, and there is no record extant of a similar seismic dis- turbance in our island since the earthquake of 1534, the year of the rebellion of Silken Thomas. The epicentre . . .
And so on.
What emerges from this brilliant and extremely funny series of
parodies is a sense ofthe falsenessofthe values that the public world tries to impose on the individual. Joyce gives us skits on all kinds of puffed-up writing, from provincial newspaper reportage to Wardour Street English, taking in also technical jargon, monstrous but vacuous catalogues, rituals from which the life has gone, and the sesquipedalian evasiveness of parliamentary answers. It is the lan- guage which the State uses to hide behind when aware ofthe corrup- tion of its enactments (politics, we remember, is the pseudo-art ruling this chapter); it is also the language of romanticism gone bad and turned to sentimentality-pretending to feeling when feeling has fled; it is the postures of little men pretending to be big. The com- munication media inflate language because they dare not be honest and call a spade a spade; popular historical novels falsify the past and simplify the motives which make historical change. Men are influenced by big loud empty words, styes which swell the eyelids and impede vision of the truth. Low as the garrulous narrator is, we can still see him as a creature not really taken in by humbug and, perhaps, ultimately on the side of Bloom rather than the Citizen:
his speech is all deflation.
Bloom himself is totally undeceived by the shouts and promises
of the politicians. If the world is to be improved it must be by the exercise of individual charity (he has only entered this ambience at all because ofhis desire to perform a charitable act). He uses the word 'love' and is derided for it. He is also derided for seeming to use the very language of inflation which fills the bellies of his enemies- terms like 'phenomenon' and 'mortgag/ee'. But when Bloom uses a word he normally uses it accurately. He comes close to Stephen, if not in imagination or the poetic gift, at least in a desire to rule lan- guage, make it serve truth, and not be ruled by it. He is David against the Philistines as well as against Goliath. He is the real deflator.
146
He wins through at a price. We do not meet him again till nearly
nightfall-eight o'clock-and then he has become passive, convales-
cent, resting alone among the rocks on Sandymount shore. The encounter with violence has shaken this man of peace. But an unex- pected reward awaits him. He is to possess the heart of the king's daughter Nausicaa, and she, in imagination, is to give herself to him. A direct sexual encounter would be vulgar, fit only for lechers like Boylan; what is needed for Bloom is the dignity of ritual, the rite of Onan. By a fine irony his happiness is to be encompassedby the very forces of inflation that have struck at him in the precedmg chapter, only this time we can call inflation by a new name-
tumescence.
Nausicaa is changed, by metempsychosis, into Gerty MacDowell, a sweetly pretty girl given to dreams and the reading of ! ,opular trash for women. It is in terms of this trash that she IS descnbed:
The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid's bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers and ~s white as lemon juice and queen of ointments could make them though 1t was not true that she used to wear kid gloves in bed or take a mi~k footba~h either. Bertha Supple told that once to Edy Boardman, a delIberate he, when she was black out at daggers drawn with Gerty (the girl chums had of course their little tiffs from time to time like the rest of mortals) and she told her not let on whatever she did that it was her that told her or she'd never speak to her again.
The parallel with Homer's princess (who Samuel Butler believed was the authoress ofthe Odyssey) is maintained fairly closely through all the flat whimsy. Nausicaa's race was known for its cult of clean linen and it was to hold a large wash-day that she went down to the shor; where Odysseus, hidden from sight, slept off the weariness of his long sea-tossing. Gerty MacDowell washes no garments now, but references are made to her delight in spotless undies and her
pride in her many sets. She has come down to the seashore with attendant nymphs, most unnymphlike-Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman, together with 'the baby in the pushcar and Tommy a~d Jacky Caffrey, two little curly-headed boys, d;essed m sallor Slilt;' with caps to match and the name H. M. S. BellelSle prmted on both. Nausica. and her attendants played with a ball after the clothes- washing, and it was this ball, over-thrown, that woke up Odysseus. So here 'Master Jacky who was really as bold as brass there was no getting behind that' kicks the ball towards the rocks and . Bloom, who is lying there, throws it back. It is then that Gerty notices our
'47
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Fireworks
dark hero, mature, in mourning, his face wan and drawn, and is
strongly attracted.
She could see at once by his dark eyes ? and his pale intellectual face that he ~a~ a ,foreigner, the image of the photo she had of Martin Harvey, the matmee Idol, only for the moustache which she preferred because she wasn't stage-struck like Winny Rippingham that wanted they two to always dress t~~ same on aCCOli,nt of a play but she could not see whether he had an aqUIlIne nose or a slightly retrousse from where he was sitting.
Gerty is virginal but all woman, like'Mary, star of tbe sea', whose church on Sandymount strand is holding an evening service ('. . . there streamed fortb at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to tbe storm-tossed heart of man'). She is to be worshipped rather than possessed, gazed on in her pure radiance, but she knows that the eye-which, along with the nose, is the dominant organ of the chapter-can be the window which lets passion come raging in. Whentbe Mirus Bazaar fireworks begin and her companions rush off to see them over the housetops, she remains on the beach and feasts Bloom's eyes on a dream o f well- filled hose, a richer, more leisurely, meal than sonnez fa cloche.
We know what happens to Bloom because the fireworks tell us so:
And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and 0 J then the
Roman candle burst and it was like asigh ofO! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, o so lovely! 0 so soft, sweet, soft!
Tumescence has reached its limit. Bloom, who did not, after all, masturbate in the bath that morning, receives tbe reward of his continence. The tumescent prose comes to an end with Gerty walk- ing off 'with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because, because Gerty MacDowell was . . . ' Bloom's interior monologue, taking over at once, completes the sentence: 'Tight boots? No. She's lame! O! ' And now a long session of detumescent evening musings brings on night and the toughest, yet most magical, part of the book.
The colours of this chapter are blue (for the Blessed Virgin) and grey (for the bitter waters of the sea-this, remember, is Stephen's territory-and the falling dusk). The art fignred here is painting, but this does not quite come off. Joyce's intention is to give the eye (put out in the preceding episode) more than a feast offrillies, but he is temperamentally incapable of being very interested in this organ. Little pictorial episodes follow each other, like lantern-slides, in the
'48
romantic dreams of Gerty: pictures are her substitute for tbonght. Bloom thinks of colours ('depend on the light you see') and re-enacts in memory the tableaux of party charades, but his author's heart is not in it. Joyce is happier with tbe other organ, the nose, and lets Bloom luxuriate in remembered perfumes, especially the perfumes of women. But all women lead home to one-the adulterous Molly.
Has Bloom himself been unfaithful here on Sandymount strand? Technically, no. But he has achieved a sexual conquest more satisfy- ing than any enacted on a strange bed-pleasure without regret or recriminations, no fear of pregnancy, no weeping, no going back, in detumescence, on tumescent promises. 'For this relief much thanks. ' (We can never get away from Hamlet. ) He has done better than Boylan today-an adoring letter and a sort of surrender, and both
from virgins. And this brief auto-erotic session is also an unpremedi- tated preparation for the taking up of his responsibilities later that night. He will follow Stephen to Nighttown, but, being spent of seed, he will not be tempted by female flesh: he will be stern with prostitutes, unseducible. Odysseus was saved from enchantment into a swine because he carried Mercury's gift, the flower moly. Bloom carries this flower in his trousers-'a languid floating flower', no rod to beat him to his knees, gibbering in beast's lust, in tbe house of Circe.
Bloom closes his eyes for a moment at the end of the chapter-
'just for a few'. The interior monologue swoops deeper than ever it
did in full daylight; it touches the borders of dreams and anticipates the sleep langnage of Finnegans Wake:
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 met him pike hoses frillies for Raoul to perfume your wife black hair heave under embon senorita young eyes Mulvey plump years dreams return tail end Agendath swoony lovey showed me her next year in drawers return in her next her next.
One is persuaded that this is how the mind receives its images (little pictures all separate, no gluing of ideas together into logical state- ments) when it approaches sleep. Any reader presented with tbis passage unprepared would be baffled by it. If we have read UI)'Sses without skipping up to this point we shall recognise every single motif-Molly's version of 'metempsychosis" for instance, and the villain ofSweets o/Sin, Raoul, who is identified witb Boylan; Molly's first lover, Mulvey; the bit ofnewspaper (,Agendath Netaim') Bloom picked up in the butcher's that morning. Bloom's own recent sexual
'49
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~bandonand his briefsen~ualityon the street before breakfast, Mully III bed readmg her lover s letter, the phrase 'her heaving embon- point' from Sweets ofS,n-all are fused into a single emblem of desire and its fulfilment. It is a miracle of compression.
But the bats fly, sedng nothing, and Bloom will not come face to face with the fact of his cuckolding. It is left to the cuckoo-clock in the priest's house, where, evening service over, Canon O'Hanlon and Father Conroy and the Reverend John Hughes S. ]. are eating mutton chops with catsup, to proclaim to the world what Bloom now is-Cuckoo Cuckoo Cuckoo, and on to the stroke of nine. The night in which, cuckold or not, he shall beget a son and conquer all the suitors, is now beginning.
9: Bullockbefrienders
SHEER GOODNESS OF HEART,AND AKINDOFVICARIOUS MASOCHISM, send Bloom to the Lying-in Hospital in Holies Street at an hour when the pubs are gay and the theatres playing. Mrs Purefoy is trying to give birth and, as Mrs Breen told Bloom at lunchtime, having a hard time of it. Bloom knows her well and, with his capacity for imaginative penetration into the sufferings of women, is anxious to know how long it will be before she delivers. This is his motive for going to Sir Andrew Horne's house of labour and joy, but what comes out of the visit is the first fruitful meeting between himself and Stephen Dedalus. There have been two abortive con- tacts earlier in the day, but now Bloom and Stephen are to sit at the same table. Admittedly there will be the distraction of noisy company, tipsiness and ribaldry, for Stephen is carousing with the medical students in their common-room, but at last the rapproche- ment between body and soul, common sense and imagination is ready for parturition, and this chapter is an important one. Typically, Joyce refuses to let us have too clear a view of what is happening; he flashes an almost intolerable technical brilliance into our eyes, though this is not sheer wantonness. The Homeric correspondence must be kept up, an art or science celebrated, and a fresh literary technique attempted. This, though, is the most consciously virtuoso of all the episodes of Ulysses, and for some readers Joyce will seem to go too far.
Before, as a schoolboy, I smuggled my own copy of Ulysses into England, I was lent the Odyssey Press edition by my history master. This was in two volumes, and he gave me the second volume first. The second volume starts with this maternity hospital chapter, and I was thrown into the most difficult part of the whole book without preparation. But it seemed pretty clear what Joyce was trying to do. He begins with three ritual statements, each intoned three times. 'Deshil Holies Eamus'-let us go to Denzille and Holies Street.
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The Labyrinlh
Bullockbefrienders
'Send us, bright one, light one, Harhorn, quickening and womb-
fruit. ' I took this to be an invocation to Hecate, goddess of the moon and patroness of women in childbirth, but I should have realised that the moon has nothing to do with the 'horhorn'-the phallic erection with which generation starts. The 'bright one' is the sun. The 'harhorn' (I could not know this till 1 had read the 'Sirens' chapter) goes back to Boylan, the musical-comedy presentation of his lust, but Sir Andrew Horne is in the picture too. Finally, we hear the joyful cries of the midwife when a son is born: 'Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! '-three times, of course. Then 1 plunged into the real
difficulties:
has its sexual meaning. As for the series of literary pastiches that
follow they have cunningly embedded in them references to the various stages of the development of the embryo-here comes the eye, here the jawbone and so on. The growth of the embryo is not uniform; some parts lag behind others. Joyce symbolises this in a deliberate harking back to an earlier stage of the language when, in terms of historical progress, there seems no justification for it. Thus, in the course of an Elizabethan pastiche a passage of Anglo-Saxon suddenly appears.
Complexities enough, but we still have the Homeric correspon- dences to deal with. We are given a clue as to what part of the Odyssey finds its parallel here at the very beginning-'Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn . . . ' The 'bright one' is the ? sun, or rather the Sun-god, and 'Horhorn'-a duplicated form-refers to the two-horned oxen of the Sun-god. Odysseus and his men landed famished on the triangular island of Sicily, and-though they knew that this was a blasphemous act-the sailors slaughtered the holy oxen that were guarded there by the daughters of the god- Phaethusa and Lampetie, who find their correspondence in the two nurses of the Lying-in Hospital. All comes clear if we remember that the Oxen of the Sun stand for fertility, and that the medical students in Horne's house blaspheme against it, loudly expressing their belief in the separation ofsex from procreation- 'copulation without popula- tion'. Odysseus's men were struck down by the thunder of Zeus, and Stephen's companions are temporarily daunted by the thunder of the God of the Catholics.
References to triangles in this episode (the red triangle of the label of a bottle of Bass, for instance) keep the island of the Sun-god in our minds, and there are l. engthy references to bulls. We remem- ber that Stephen is a 'bullockbefriending bard', but, if"we have forgotten, somebody comes in with an evening paper in which Mr Deasy's letter about foot-and-mouth disease appears. Bloom is a 'bullockbefriender' in that he is on the side of fertility. He is, after all, a father, and his protective paternalism towards the drunken Stephen is given full scope for expression in the pastiches of prose of a more pious, God-and-fertility-centred, age. The following is in the style of Malory's Morte D'Arthur:
But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had pity ofthe terrorcausing shrieking ofshrill women in their.
labour and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art
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Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive con- cerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction.
Gibberish? Possibly, but Latin gibberish-an attemptto turn English into a limping, lumpish travesty of Latin. Why? The answer came after three ghastly paragraphs in this style, Bloom to the rescue:
Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's oncoming. Of Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.
No Latin here-indeed, nothing but Anglo-Saxon. Joyce's purpose became clear. The Latin stood for the feminine element-here shapeless and unfertilised-in the English language; the Anglo- Saxon represented the masculine. One would have to fertilise the other before English as we know it could come to birth. From then on the technique explained itself: a sort of history of English prose from Anglo-Saxon to the present day seemed to indicate growth- surely, the growth of the embryo in the womb? Then the language of the future could be born-a hybrid giant.
When 1 eventually read Stuart Gilbert's commentary on Ulysses I discovered that 1 had not gone far enough. Now 1 know that it is Bloom himself who stands for the fertilising principle: he enters, phallus-like, the house of all-woman; even the taking off of his hat
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Bullockbefrienders
When Joyce reaches the age of romanticism he becomes more ambi-
tious, making a rich De Qyincey vision out of a word that Bloom has half-heartedly puzzled ahout all day ('Parallax stalks behind and ~oads them . . . '), that butcher's-shop slip of newspaper ('Agendath IS a waste land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa'), Bloom's pen-friend, daughter, and wife ('And 10, wonder of metem- psychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride . . . Martha, thou lost one'- a reference to 'M'appari', sung that afternoon by Simon Dedalus- 'Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant'). At the same time Joyce keeps his eye on the fertility theme in its Homeric aspect- 'Alpha, a ruby and trjangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus' (there is your Bass labell-and does not forget the 'moving moaning multitude, murderers of the sun'. It is a brilliant performance.
But the mere fact that Joyce has to find static material for his literary pastiches (ideas, images, motifs) in order to fill up the nine months of gestation and nine hundred years of linguistic history makes us doubtful about the validity of his technique. He seems to be forgetting about Bloom and Stephen; they have been subordinated to a mere display of ingenuity-that at least is what we are inclined to object. On the other hand, it is right that we see them both under as many social and mythical aspects as possible, and this Can only be done by a kind of metempsychosis-Stephen and Bloom through the ages, wearing a whole museum of dress, using the whole of English speech as a sort of Oxtail Book of English Prose might present it, becoming the heroes of every major English writer from King
Alfred to Carlyle. And yet the ghosts of these writers-as conjured
in that drunken common-roam-are not concerned at all with these
heroes, only with the orts and oifal of their thoughts and speech. The
dress remains fancy dress, the whole thing is a pageant-charade.
Joyce has to go to his bulls-tauric, papal, Irish-for the Swiftian climax of the chapter, and to concoct masterly dishes of mere kitchen scraps for the rest. When, at last, Mrs Purefoy's child is born (naturally, we have been bludgeoned by sheer technique into for- getting all about this) Bloom makes an important decision which it is all too easy to miss in the general flurry:
By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed and no? botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering aUincluding most farraginous chronicle. Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarship and all Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore.
155
could save so dark is destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of heart for that evil hap and for his burial did him on a fair corselet of lamb's wool, the flower of the flock, lest he might perish utterly and lie akeled (for it was then about the midst of the winter) and now sir Leopold that had of his body no manchild for an heir looked upon him his friend's son and was shut up in 'sorrow for his forepassed happiness and as sad as he was that him failed a son of such gentle courage (for all accounted him of real parts) so grieved he also in no less measure for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and murdered his goods with whores.
Stephen himself, with Thomistic logic, insists on the right true end of sex:
Gramercy, what ofthose Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise. which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we.
Bloom and Stephen, however, are alone in according reverence to
the sacred oxen.
This chapter has a function over and above stylistic display, symbolism, the slow pushing-on with the story. Joyce has amassed a great deal of material which has not been developed, and the time has come to use it. He is concerned here primarily with shapes, forms, styles of writing, but form cannot exist without content. The content, then, may as well come from the odds and ends, the slogans, songs, small obsessions of the day. Thus, when-in this historical survey of English prose-it becomes necessary to imitate the style of the Authorised Version of the Bible, the subject-matter is drawn from those early musings of Stephen on the beach, the wild geese, exiled artists and patriots whom Ireland has forgotten:
Look forth now, my people, upon the land of behest, even from Horeb and from Nebo and from Pisgah, and from the Horns of Hatten unto a land flowing with milk and honey. But thou has suckled me with a bitter milk: my moon and sun thou hast quenched for ever. And thou hast left me alone for ever in the dark ways of my bitterness: and with a kiss of ashes hast thou kissed my mouth.
Stephen's thoughts of the tied-up navel-strings of the world leading back to the ultimate telephone exchange find a reference in a pastiche of Sir Thomas Browne:
And as no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness.
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The point about fertili~is well taken, but Bloom is more important t~an Mr Purefoy: he IS supposed to be all their daddies. With ddliculty, in a blaze ofslang, neologisms, foreign loan-words, pidgin (the language of the future I), we follow Stephen and his fellow- drunks to Burke's. pub, and we follow Bloom solicitously following after. Then we thmk we hear Stephen's voice:
Lynch! Hey? Sign on long o. me. ,Denzille lan~ this way. Change here for Bawdyhouse. We two, she saId, WIll seek the kips where shady Mary is.
We have to seek those kips ourselves before we can COme into the cle~r light of sanity, and even then it is a drunken phantasmagoric samty, the only kind available in Nighttown. It seems strange that we should have to go to the next chapter to find out what has hap- pened in this.
And. yet, of all the episodes of Ulysses, this is the one I should most lIke to have written, and there are many authors who would aip'ee with me. It is an author's chapter, a dazzliug and authoritative dlspla~of w~at. Englis~ can do. Moreover, it is a fulfilment of every author s egonsncal deSIre not merely to add to English literature but to enclo;e what IS already there. Literary history is a line; Joyce wants to s~e l~ a. s a series. of concentric circles, himself the outer ring. Agam, It IS heartenmg to be reminded that literary creation-iu w~atever century-is an act of homage to the oxen of fertility, that writers are the remarkablest progenitors of them all. But it is a pity that Stephen and Bloom have to get lost in the process of glorifying an art that is supposed to be their servant.
10: Men into Swine
THAT 'OXEN OF THE SUN' CHAPTER CELEBRATED FERTILITY, THE
womb, the sober art of medicine. Now everything turns bad. Instead of a maternity hospital, a brothel; instead of mothers, whores. The locomotor apparatus-which syphilis can ruin with tabes dorsalis-and the wayward and dangerous art of magic rule in the land of Circe. In the last chapter rain fell on the earth; now all is mist, twisting the real into the fantastic. It is Mr Bloom's strangest territ? ry and not one he would himself choose. But, we learn, he feels It a fatherly duty to follow out Stephen's night to its crapulous end. Stephen and Lynch-the peripatetic audience of theorising Stephen in A Portrait-have come to Mabbot Street by train from Westland Row;. all other friends-especially Mulligan and Haines, who cadged drmks to the end- have deserted the drunken poet. Drunken poets do well in brothel districts, but Bloom fears disaster for the son he wants to adopt. He is well able to look after him, as well as himself. He has drunk little in Burke's. He carries the flower moly to protect him from sensual enchantment-his recent ejacula- tIOn on the beach, the spiritual presence of his wife (her name is very nearly 'Moly'). The potato he carries in his pocket, a homely talisman for warding off rheumatism, will serve as the outward sigu of these inward graces: it is not romantic, it is something that, with its aura of home and normality, may well ward off a whore's ad- vances. Bloom also has his soap, faithful back-pocket companion of the day's wanderings. To weigh down his pockets further, he buys himself a pig's trotter and a sheep's foot. These are also protective talismans, but they are drawn into the huge animal symbolism of Circe's island. Gree turned Odysseus's companions into swine. Here there is more a zoo than a farm-every form of beast, especially the lowlier forms, will swal10w a man's soul. When man remains man he becomes twisted, stunted, drooling. Only Bloom remains the paragon of animals, Odysseus the untouched of any debasing wand.
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l\1en into Swine
This chapter is the longest in the book- 142 pages in the 1960 Bodley Head edition. Structurally, it is the most important. We have seen, in the previous episode, how strongly Joyce is feeling the urgency of developing his themes. Among the oxen these themes have been treated within a series of formal frameworks which sug- gests a gigantic musical suite. Imagine an opera of Wagnerian dimensions. Two acts have gone by and innumerable musical themes -though some, perhaps, only half a bar long-have been presented. The third act calls for a survey of musical forms from plainchant to post-Webem serialism. The composer would be a fool ifhe invented new themes, knowing that his audience would not yet have dige~ted the existing ones. And so these latter must appear in new gUlses,
combined in new relationships. Supposing now another act. has to follow. The audience can take neither fresh themes nor formal ingenuity. All it will be able to take is a free fantasy, again based on existing themes. This is pretty well the position at this phase of Ulysses. .
Perhaps sonata-form is a better analogy than opera. In the expos. ,-
tion section o f a movement in sonata-form there are usually two mam
contrasting subjects around which cluster groups of subsidiary themes. In Ulysses we have had the equivalent of these in Bloom and Stephen, each with his many satellites of characteristic preoccupa- tions. The exposition will not make sense until it has been followed by a development section in which the subjects combine, lend each other their subsidiary motifs, swirl about each other in an area of dreamlike fantasy, bump into each other drunkenly, melt into each other on the discovery of previously unguessed affinities. Mter that- in the recapitulation section-they can appear soberly and singly, properly dressed and tidied up, but they cannot be as they were before, in the exposition. They have learned stra? ge thmgs about each other and about themselves, they have had a mght out together. That region of dreams has influenced reality.
The technique of this 'Circe' chapter is concerned les~ with dream than with hallucination. The characters are presented dIrectly to us, in dramatic form, and they meet their fantasies directly. Bloom becomes Lord Mayor of Dublin, gives birth to a number of sons, sees the building of the New Bloomusalem, turns into Ruby, Pride of the Ring, witnesses the end of the world. If he is really seeing these fantasies he is either drunk or drugged. But he is not; he is fully sober. He is exhausted, yes, but not exhausted enough to conjure such visions. The hallucinations, then, are coming from without, are
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summoned by the author's own magic. Such magic is capable of making an apparition of Stephen's dead mother use a locutIOn from Martha Clifford's letter to Bloom, and Bloom and Stephen see, in a mirror, the same cuckolded travesty of Shakespeare burbling a line of Goldsmith. If the phantasmagorias are subjective, then Bloom and Stephen are the same person. It is easier to conclude that this is a genuine free fantasy in the manner of a sonata's development section, that the rapprochement between Stephen and Bloom is something that is made, through magic, to happen extraneously, and that this huge dramatic exercise is not dramatic at all.
Only one real, as opposed to hallucinatoty, event is of any si~ifi- cance. This is the striking down of Stephen by a couple of Bntish soldiers at the end of the section. All flee except Bloom, who then assumes responsibility for him. This could have happened as easily outside Burke's in the previous chapter and Joyce, in the interests of fictional economy, could have saved himself a great deal of work. But it is dangerous now to think in such terms. Havmg come so far with Bloom (and this is Bloom's chapter more than Stephen's), we must go all the way, uncover every conceivable fantasy of which Bloom is capable and see him-like Bottom-in a sort of grisly faity- land. No critic, to my knowledge, has yet invoked A Midsummer Night's Dream as a classical source-the uncommon common man set upon by magic. The usual comparison is with the Walpurgisnacht
scene in Goethe's Faust and Flaubert's Tentation. But Shakespeare is, first as last, the true patron of Ulysses.
Shakespeare's fairies . have comic-fantastic names. Joyc~'s th. ree whores sum up the whole physical world: Zoe stands for ammal hfe, Florry for vegetable life, and Kitty for the mineral kingdom. The presiding sorceress, Circe herself, is Bella Cohen, the brothel- madam, who, in the most masochistic part of ~he ~loom fantasy, becomes a man and changes her name to Bello. These characters, like the brutal British soldiers, are real enough, but they inhabit the same world as the many dead, fictional, and actual-though-absent persons who flutter or gibber in then off again, and they are subj1ect to the same laws. or lackof them. The vision that merely touched the fringes of Gabriel Conroy's consciousness in 'The Dead' is here not just palpable but larger than life: there is only one world, and it
belongs equally to living and dead, to animal, vegetable, mineral and,
for that matter, abstract.
The two soldiers, Privates Compton and Carr (their names taken from personal enemies ofJoyce in Zurich) appear very early, making
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? ? ? ? The Labyrinth
Men into Swine
'a volleyed fart' burst from their mouths and calling 'What ho, parsonl' when they see black-garbed Stephen. In swirling fog, the companions of Gerty MacDowell, together with the sandcastle- building twins Tommy and Jacky Caffrey, are seen, debased, animal- ised. Then Bloom makes his entrance, his interior monologue now an audible soliloquy. His father and mother speak to him, Rudolph Virag a comic stage Jew ('They make you kaput, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps') and Ellen Bloom a pantomime dame. They are hallucinations from the author's brain, not his hero's, but there is nothing vague or shadowy about them. The physical appearance of all the apparitions is most carefully described and their dress
detailed scrupulously. Poor suicidal Virag is described as follows: 'A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the long caftan of an elder in Zion and a smoking cap with magenta tassels. Horned spectacles hang down at the wings of the nose. Yellow poison streaks are on the drawn face. ' Ellen Bloom wears a 'stringed . mobcap, crinoline and bustle, widow Twankey's blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her hair plaited in a crispine net'. Under her 'reef of skirt' there is a 'striped blay petticoat' from which fall out 'a phial, an Agnus Dei,. shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll'.
Of course, this detail is characteristic of a certain kind of drugged vision, but Joyce's concern is with the symbolism of clothes in the context of magic. Clothes are what we. usually see of a person, but they are so easily changed. They are a kind of secondary body. Magic can change the external form of a creature (Circe turns men into swine) but cannot affect the deeper, God-willed, process of metem- psychosis. Bloom is perpetually changing his secondary body-his changes of costume are uncountable- but he remains the same Bloom. Here, encountering his father and mother, he appears in youth's clothes, mud-caked with racing with the harriers: '. . . smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in brown Alpine hat, wearing gent's sterling silver waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one side of him coated with stiffening mud. '
As for the transformation-inta-beasts motif, this is hinted at in
animal imagery (Molly Bloom appears in Oriental dress, with camel,
'plump as a pampered pouter pigeon'; a whore, squeaking, 'flaps her
bat shawl and runs') and also more boldly expressed in terms of actual enchantment. Thus dead Paddy Dignam appears as a beagle with dachshund coat, worming his way down a coalhole; Tom Roch-
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ford, 'robinredbreasted', executes a 'daredevil salmon leap in the air'. The human locomotor apparatus itself is enchanted.
Bloom's bestial imaginings are brought into open court-society women give hair-raising evidence and promise dire punishments: 'Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. That cat-o'-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him. ' Bloom's masochism shows in joyous tremu- lous nakedness while a newsboy goes by: 'Messenger ofthe Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph with Saint Patrick's Day Supplement. Containing the new addresses of all the cuckolds in Dublin. ' But Bloom is not disqualified from being crowned Leopold the First, 'His Most Catholic Majesty'. The mob turns against him, as it turned against Parnell, and, despite his miracles (including giving birth to 'eight male yellow and white children', each with 'his name printed in legible letters on his shirtfront: Nasodoro, Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindoree, Silversmile, Silberselber, Vifargent, Panargyros'), he is burnt alive by the Dublin Fire Brigade. And, while all this, and more, is going on, he is being taken by Zoe to Bella Cohen's brothel.
Stephen and Lynch are ! here, as well as Zoe's 'two sister whores'.