' Bloom saunters to
Westland
Row post office-ever further south-and, countering the morning's lassitude with a phallic symbol, rolls up his copy of the Freeman into a baton.
re-joyce-a-burgess
ThiS makes hIm thmk of a lewd French joke about the Virgin Birth- 'c'est Ie pigeon, l~seph': we cannot be long away from the Divine Incarnation.
But ~hlS.
1Sal~o a way into a lengthy and elliptical reminiscence a?
out hIS time.
m
Paris among the other Irish 'wild geese' (the eXIle theme whIch 102
Telemachus
matches Bloom's sense of estrangement). The literary technique is
brilliant here with its evocation of 'Paris rawly waking, crude sun-
light on her lemon streets'. We can, if we wish, fill out the ellipses with biographical references. As I have already indicated, so much of the remembered, as opposed to enacted, life of Ulysses touches the region of actuality. There is a penumbra surrounding the book, full of signs which lead us out to Joyce's own experience. Fiction itself is Protean, a disguise of real life. Often the interior monologoes of both Bloom and Stephen seem like the iceberg surface, with sub- merged mountains of references we can only reach by forgetting that Ulysses is a work of art and using it as an encyclopaedic guide to real history. Does this invalidate the novel as literature? I think not. True naturalism calls for shadows and mysteries and clues which may or may not be taken up, just as we please. If we cannot understand everything in Ulysses, nor can we understand everything in real life.
Stephen thinks of Kevin Egan, the revolutionary wild goose for- gotten. 'Remembering thee, 0 Sian. ' A faint image of Bloom, that other exile, beckons here. Looking south to the Martello Tower, Stephen reaffirms his loneliness. 'He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes . . . Take all. Keep all. ' The dispos- sessed heir is also the dispossessed father: he sees himself an instant as the ghost in Elsinore, King Hamlet as well as Prince Hamlet. But now the exterior world asserts itself again, though the language in which it is described is no diaphanous veil: 'He climbed over the sedge and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ash- plant in a grike. ' The language draws attention to itself and, as we see at once, rightly. Stephen reminds us that philology is the science which presides here: 'These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted. ' The emphasis is back on reading the signs of nature, looking through nature's symbols, her disguise, for nature's own self. A dog runs across the sand, and Stephen-who, like his creator, fears dogs-comforts himself with 'I have my stick. Sit tight. ' The prose becomes highly contrapuntal, a vision of the Vikings landing (,bark/barque' is an inaudible enharmonic chord) leading Stephen to think of that Northern blood that flows hidden in him, the in- vaders of history, the pretenders of history (the Irish pretend to be 'all kings' sons'), the collapse of his own pretences when he finds himself shaking 'at a cur's yelping'. Behaviour, like history, isall disguises, gifts of Proteus. He tries to be honest with himself: could he, like Mulligan, have saved a man from drowning? No, nor could he save his mother: 'Waters: bitter death: lost. '
103
? ? J:
The Labyrinth
Telemachus
burning scene' he notes a ship sailing into harbour-the returned
wanderer. An old sailor, emblem of completed exile, will preside over his meeting with Bloom at day! s end.
I say 'a sort of victory Over Proteus'. This is no mere fancy. The chaos of primal matter, of the 'phenomenal world, is figured in the chaos of language, ever-changing, hard to pin down. But language, despite the chaos, has, in a manner, pinned down the world outside. It remains for the poet to impose order on language and, by using the to-and-fro rhythms of the tide, to create an image of organic order, achieve the ultimate pinning-down. Already, at the end of the Telemachia, Stephen has come some way towards regaining his in-
heritance: he rules through words, and even Mulligan fears the lancet of his art, while the sea's ruler, Haines, has a mind to make a book of wisdom out of Stephen's sayings. But Stephen, though a
prmce of words, is not yet big enough to write Ulysses. He needs Leopold Bloom.
The disguise theme enfolds the dog, which seems to turn into a
hare a buck a horse a wolf, a calf, a fox, a panther (the waves, und~r the d~g's influ~nce, turTI for an instant into 'herds of sea- morse', Proteus's own flock). A panther. Haines had wakened Stephen the previous night with a shout in his sleep about a black panther. Afterwards, as a kind of soothing ointment, Stephen was granted a dream in which, on a street of harlots, an Onental offered him hospitality. He remembers that dream now. Some hundreds of pages later it will come true. . . .
Cockle-pickers on the sand, trudgmg with thm bags, appear to Stephen as 'red Egyptians' and flavour his monologue with the speech of the gipsies, language ready with a new dlSgUlse of reahty:
White thy fambles, red thy gan
And thy quarrons dainty is. Couch a hogshead with me then. In the darkmans clip and kiss.
But the monologue has been steadily thickening with strange speech-
the sea's own language, the giant words of 'Sir Lout' ('laut' is the Malay word for the sea): 'I'm the bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well boulders, bones for my steppingstones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz odz an Iridzman. ' All the chief European tongues blend, as they are to do later, and more specta~u~arly, in Fin~egans Wake. The terms of heraldry brighten Stephen s Imagery, trymg to hold down the Protean spectrum in fixed and formal colours. And then the welter of language breaks in a poem which Stephen, lacking other paper, writes down on a torn-off end of Mr Deasls letter for the press. It is a symbol of control, of tallli~g Proteus: Put a pm m that chap, will you? My tablets. ' (Hamlet 15 never very dlStant. ) A kind of content comes: Stephen lies at full length on the pomted rocks his 'Hamlet hat' -the wide-brimmed hat he brought back from'Paris-tilted over his eyes. 'Pain is far. ' He recalls a line ~f Fergus's song, the poem of Yeats which Stephen-Joyce set to muSIc and sang while his mother lay close to death, weepmg for the sadness of the words: 'And no more turn aside and brood. ' The image of the drowned man washed up seems to lose some of its ter~or ('Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man'). Hamlet makes Its last appear- ance in the chapter with a recollection of Ophelia's song for a dead father. Stephen, having achieved a sort of victor~ over Prote~s, IS ready for a drink (he is supposed to meet Mulligan and Hames,
flush with his salary, in the Ship at twelve-thirty). He leaves ,the tribute of a little dry snot on a rock-ledge. Before qummg the
104
105
? ? 4: Beginning of the Journey
THE 'PROTEUS' EPISODE WE HAVE JUST CONSIDERED IS A tour de force of linguistic virtuosity. Besides presenting the bewildering Protean variety of the world of matter, and of the resources of lan- guage which are able to tame it, it exhibits the learning and intellec- tual subtlety of Stephen Dedalus so richly that we are forced to accept him as a sort of Homeric hero of the mind. He seems to
enclose the universe of words and ideas; yet, ironically, he does not enclose the lowlier Bloom. Undernourished, dressed in cheap mourn- ing and cast-off shoes, his teeth bad, a nose-picker because he has no handkerchief, he transcends the limitations of the body. He needs, and the book needs, to be brought down to earth. As we commence the Bloom Odyssey proper, we are aware that Stephen stands for the spirit and Bloom for the flesh. The opening of the Telemachia-the narrative 'of young men-was celebrated with the inaugural words of the Mass; when we first meet Mr Bloom-the mature man's
narrative-it is in terms of 'the inner organs of beasts and fowls', the thought of kidneys for breakfast.
This consultation of viscera is a kind of ritual, but it does not lead to high-flown Dedalus themes like those of theology and philol? gy. The science which presides over NO. 7 Eccles Street IS economlCS- the useful art of household management. A kidney is the symbol which controls the chapter-a utilitarian, unpoetic organ which, nevertheless, is to provide the shape of the New Bloomusalem when it is built, later on in the book. The glorification of the body starts
now: physical organs have not been celebrated in the Telemachia. As for Bloom's own name-an anglicisation of the ancestral Hun- garian Virag, which means a flower-it sums up pretty well wha~ its owner stands for: something remarkable but unpretentious spnng- ing out of common earth. The comparative contentment of Bloom in his domestic surroundings, organising breakfast for his wife,
106
giving the cat milk, contrasts with Stephen's divine dissatisfactions
and aspirations. Bloom is, nevertheless, at a higher stage of develop-
ment in certain respects than the young poet: he is close to the
mature Joyce in having achieved paternity (a loved daughter, a son who died in infancy), tolerance, the quiet wisdom of a man who has seen the world. Unlike Odysseus and like Joyce, he prefers cats to dogs.
His wife is Madam Marion (Molly) Tweedy, professional singer.
'Tweedy' suggests the weaving of Penelope, whose . counterpart she
is; it also suggests the double thread of her fabric, for she is part Irish and part Spanish Jewess, born in Gibraltar-where her military father was stationed. We are to meet Molly as Penelope only in the final chapter; here she appears as Calypso, nymph of an island with a great cave at its navel (Gibraltar too has its caves). Now, and throughout the book, her place is bed.
In a sense, Bloom is detained in her abode. As soon as he goes out
to buy his breakfast kidney he is preoccupied with visions of the
East, the far ancestral home. But, as Stephen is unconsciously moving towards him, so he is moving towards Stephen, for Turko the Terrible appears in his thoughts-the very pantomime character whom, so Stephen remembers, his mother used to love. Bloom is an exile, with a certain emptin~ss inside. The science of economics temporarily fills the emptiness-speculations about money in beer, exiles from the county Leitrim blossoming as brewery kings. The butcher's shop he now visits is run by an exile of his own kind- Dlugacz. A girl is ahead of him, buying sausages; Bloom picks up a cut sheet from a newspaper, and he is East again: 'The model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter
sanatorium. ' The economics of farming fill his mind for a space.
Then the sensual, earthy Bloom flowers again quickly: he wants to get his kidney at once, to follow the girl down the street and admire her moving haunches. But he is too late and he tells himself-'Soda- chapped hands. Crusted toenails too'-that the morning desire is marginal.
Walking back home he reads his piece of cut newspaper. There is a planter's company-Agendath Netaim-which, for eight marks, will plant you a dunam of land with Oriental fruits. The East calls again, symbolised in an orange or citron, a tiny rising sun. But we are also concerned with economics: 'Can pay ten down and the balance in yearly instalments. Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. I5? ' The name of the street-'Staytrue' -reminds us, if not Bloom, that
107
Beginning ofthe Journey
? ? The Labyrinth
he has not stayed true to the religion of his fathers. In both senses he is an exile from Jeru. alem. And the kidney he takes home is a pork kidney.
'Citron' recalls other Jewish exiles like himself-the fruit's very
namesake of Saint Kevin's Parade, and either-playing Mastiansky. Then the sun goes in for a moment, the moment when the sea turns into a bowl of bitter waters for Stephen (it is just after eight). Bloom, in a grey horror which sears his flesh, sees the Dead Sea and the dead cities ofa wandering people, his own: 'the grey sunken cunt of the world'. The image is suggested by the sight of an ancient hag clutching a noggin bottle; Stephen, in complement, is reflecting on the dry shrivelled breasts of a woman who gives milk that is not her own. Bloom's depression lifts as the sunlight returns, running to- wards him like a gold girl, a nymph (nymphs, in deference to Calyp- so, rule this chapter). He relates such blue phases to the dysfunction- ing of the body ('Morning mouth bad images'). Bright colours return and the post has come. There is a card for his wife from their daughter Milly, but for himself (she is daddy's girl) there is aletter. There is also a letter for Molly, and he knows who its sender is: 'His quick heart slowed at once. Bold hand. ' Stephen has faced his Antinous; Bloom's Antinous seems already to have conquered without the bending of a bow.
Bloom reads his daughter's letter. Again we find a link with Stephen's world. At the end of the first chapter a young swimmer tells Mulligan that a certain Bannon (with whom Mulligan's brother happens to be staying in Westmeath) has 'found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her. ' The photo girl is Milly. She mentions Bannon in her letter and says that he sings Boylan's song about 'those seaside girls'. Bannon is a link between the two incarna- tions of Antinous-Mulligan's brother on one side, on the other Blazes Boylan, the 'hairy chap' whose letter Molly is at that moment reading. Bloom smiles 'with troubled affection' at the evidence of Milly's growing up. She is another nymph - 'slim legs running up the staircase' -who holds him here on the island of caves.
Molly's bedroom is a cave, all 'warm yellow twilight'. He serves her with bread and butter and tea and sugar and cream-nymph's food-and learns that Boylan is bringing the programme for the concert tour he is organising. 'La c? darem' (from Don G? ovallni-an appropriate opera in Boylan's connection) is one of the songs that Molly is to sing; the other is 'Love's Old Sweet Song', an ominous title. But almost at once Bloom gives proof of a superiority that,
108
. . Beginning oftheJourney without his having to draw out a single arrow is eventuallv to reduce
Boylan and all such suitors to a heap of ashes. Molly has a book called Ruby: the Przde ofthe Ring (Ruby is another nymph naked and bemg lashed by the ringmaster, hidden in an illustration'among smudged pages); she has met the word 'metempsychosis' there and wants to know Its meamng. BloOI11: knows and tries to explain: 'It's Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls. '
Molly says: '0, rocks! Tell us in plain words', and then Bloom like Mulhgan. . starts Hellenising wild Irish, seeing in Molly some~hing l! ke a remcarnatlOn of the nymph in the picture above the bed ( G[ven. away with the Easter number of Photo Bits: Splendid
masterpIece In ar~ colours'), but not getting very far with his lesson ? ll the true ,meanmg of 'metempsychosis'. There is a smell of burn- mg: the frymg kidney calls: he returns to internal organs. But, ofall the Dublmers who exemplify the call of the flesh, he shows himself to be the most rarefied, almost an intellectual. He is the most meet to be foster-father to a poet.
He is a meat-eater, but no cannibal. He is kind to his cat he deplore~the cru~ltyto performing animals that Ruby: Pride ojthe
~mgbnngs to mmd, he 15 offthIS morning to witness-mourning On hke Stephen-:-the ceremonial interring of the flesh of poor dead Dig: nam. He [s Wise m the ImutatlOns of the body, tolerant. The body is a garm~nt that the soul Can change, following the laws of metem-
psychosis-the nJ:mph Syrinx into a reed, the nymph Daphne into laurel. The body [s a cave for the soul. But, even before the soul can rrugrate, change goes on, uncheckable. Bloom sees the Protean in his daughter, who is changing into her mother: 'Will happen, yes. Prevent. Useless: can't move. '
Bloom, in the cave of his body, his body in the cave of its black
S~ltfo: funerals, n:oves o~tto the cave of the outside jakes, taking with h[m-appropnately, smce he has rece;>tly been suffering from const[panDn-a co~y of, Tttbtts. DefecatIOn [S nothmg to be ashamed of: dung [s a fert[hser. Dlfty clean~. 'Calypso, cave-nymph, follows him even here; he never has his wife long out of his thoughts. He
remembers the bazaar dance when the band played Ponchielli' pance. ofthe Hour; (it. was there that Molly had first met Boylan)~
Evenmg hours, girlS m grey gauze. Night hours then black with daggers and eyemasks. ' Time is ~ procession of nymphs, all veiled, metempsychosed from mormng lUta noon into evening into night then ready t? renew the CJ>:cle of change. But, so the bells ofGeorge'~ church rermnd hun, leaVIng the closet with his work done, time
109
? ? The Labyrinth
Beginning ofthe Journey
sometime must have a stop. The bells toll for thee, as well as for poor dead Dignam. .
In the second chapter we meet Bloom on Sir John Rogerson's Q! ! ay. He has moved south from Eccles Street, towards the sun, giver of life (the presiding organ is the genitals) but taker-away of energy (the Homeric parallel is the Lotus-Eaters). It is abou\ ten o'clock, and the day is warming up nicely. The preceding chapter was concerned with the vigorous arts of money-making, but now the vegetable kingdom rules. The text is crammed with references to flowers, herbs, and the decoctions that the druggists make from these: the sciences of botany and chemistry join languid hands. Everywhere there is a sense oflistlessness, of dolce far niente, and the gentle drag towards the East-here primed by the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company-is renewed. At the same time there is a pull towards the earth's centre: 'Thirtytwo feet per second, per second. Law of falling bodies: per second, per second.
' Bloom saunters to Westland Row post office-ever further south-and, countering the morning's lassitude with a phallic symbol, rolls up his copy of the Freeman into a baton.
In the post office there is a letter for him-addressed to 'Henry Flower, Esq. ' Like Odysseus, he is a cunning name-changer, though, unlike Odysseus, he will not move too far from the truth: 'Bloom' and 'Flower' are still 'Virag'. The recruiting posters show soldiers who look half-baked, hypnotised: the lotus eats up even the vigour of the military. The letter is from a woman, but he cannot read it yet. A character from Dubliner" McCoy, accosts him. (In the preceding chapter we have already re-met, in name only, another Dubliners character-Gretta Conroy. ) McCoy's wife is a singer, like Bloom's, but she is only a 'reedy freckled soprano', apt for little ballads but not for 'La ci damn'. McCoy, as Dub/iners tells us, is always borrowing valises for his wife's concert tours, and Bloom's interior monologue refers to this habit. Bloom does not want to talk; he wants to read his letter and he wants to feast his eyes on a high- . class woman who has come out of the Grosvenor. His sexuality is passive: he likes to look. We learn later that he no longer has normal sexual relations with his wife (the guts went out of this side of mar- riage when their son, Rudy, died) and that he practises onanism. The genital image and the lotus image fuse into passivity.
Nevertheless, it is time for the father-son theme to make an appearance in Bloom's Odyssey. It comes, as with Stephen, out of Hamlet. Bloom sees a poster announcing that Mrs Bandman Palmer
no
will play in Leah tonight; last night she played the prince of Den- mark-:'Male imper~onator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia commllted sUlclde? Bloom sees nothing odd in such a theory; later, l~ fantasy, he hImself is to appear as the 'new womanly man'; the ym and yang elements cohere in him as the yoni and lingam, the phallus ~nd the flower) meet as joint rulers of this chapter. Is not Bloom hImself, a man, also a flower? And now the paternity theme is presented in its filial aspect-Nathan, 'who left the house of his father and left the God of his father', and Bloom's father's own comment on that affecting speech from Leah (Mrs Palmer's two plays have equal relevance in the father-son situation): 'Every word is so deep, Leopold. ' An almost female tenderness wells up now in the son whose father sought the ultimate lotus, dying by his own hand.
But the lotus ofthe living calls again. Bloom passes gelded horses,
all passion spent; reflects, going by the cabman's shelter, on the life o~the 'drif~ing cabbies, all weathers, all places, time or setdown, no wlll of thm own'. At last, watched by 'a wise tabby, a blinking sphinx', he is able to read his letter in peace. It is from a certain Martha Clifford, a passionate pen-friend whom he has never met a slushy letter with an odd mistake in it: 'I called you naughty b~y because I do not like that other world. ' At least one edition of Ulysses silently corrected 'world' to 'word', thus ruining that scene
in Nighttown where Stephen's mother' risen from the dead un-
. "
consclOusly quotes Martha: 'I pray for you in my other world. ' It
is one of the minute devices for drawing Stephen and Bloom together.
Enclosed in the letter is Bloom's own r e b u s - a flower dried and with almost no smell. Bloom re-reads, 'weak joy' openi~ghis lips, and Joyce, seeking a direct means of conveying the act of re-reading without actually repeating the whole text of the letter, throws flowers at us: 'Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume. ' Botany is with liS all the time, but now the specific lotus~ eating motif, with Oriental orientation, is renewed through the very name Martha. 'Martha, Mary . . . He is sitting in their house, talking. ' Bloom, a Jew, is not willing to mention the holy name but he unconsciously recognises that Christ is a lotus-symbol: 'Long Ion? long rest. ' Thus he is led to the church of All Hallows, weaving a lIttle fantasy about missionaries, opium, Buddha, joss-sticks,
II!
/
? ? The Labyrinth
Beginning o f the Journey )
Christ's thorns, St Patrick's shamrock, religion lapped up like milk. Ma;s is being said, and the Eucharist emerges for Bloom as the supreme lotus. He is sceptical about all religions, but he concedes a value to this 'bread of angels'-'there's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel'. As for the believers, they are partly summed up in an old man asleep near a confessional: 'Blind faith. Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next year. ' Other lotus themes appear-music, liquo~ (Benedic- tine and Green Chartreuse), eunuchs ('one way out of it'), women,
flowers, incense. When the priest prays: 'Blessed Michael, archangel,
defend us in the hour of conflict', we are reminded of what the
Church still means to another non-believer, Stephen. Stephen will no longer even go through the forms of faith, but Bloom openly admires the strength and organisation of Catholicism.
It is ten-fifteen, and the funeral is at eleven. Mter botany, chemistry, or at least a chemist's shop. Bloom has to get a lotion made up for Molly, but he realises that he has left the recipe, as well as his latchkey (hence no easy homecoming if he is late) in his other trousers. In Sweny's shop on Lincoln Place his thoughts naturally turn to herbs, electuaries, simples, love-philtres while the chemist looks up Molly's prescription in his book. Sweet perfumes lull his senses to a mood of sexual abandon. He will go and take a bath in the mosque-shaped Hammam (the East again) and, while in the bath, he will masturbate. In his very first two chapters Bloom, after the burnt offering of the kidney, seems concerned with a total cleansing and a total evacuation of the body's secretions. A clean
Jew, he is a nice contrast to the dirty Christian he will make his son. (Stephen rarely washes and never baths: after all, 'all Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream'. ) Bloom buys some lemon-scented soap.
Today is the day of the Ascot Gold Cup, and Bantam Lyons (another Dubliner, character) sees Bloom's newspaper as Bloom leaves the shop. 'I want to see about that French horse that's fun- ning today', says Lyons. 'Where the bugger is it? ' Bloom decides to give him the newspaper to get rid of him. But, generous and good as he is, some of the -gods are against him. He says: 'I was just going to throw it away. ' Lyons knows and we, who have looked up our copies of Cope's Racegoer', Encyclopaedia, also know that a horse called Throwaway is running in the Ascot Gold Cup. We know, and all Dublin will eventually know, that Throwaway won that race at 100-5. Lyons thinks he has been given a tip: Bloom is a dark horse himself, innocent-seeming but full of guile and secret knowledge.
lIZ
The cunning of Odysseus led to the planting of a dark horse in the Trojan camp: this horse is the means of gaining the exile further hatred from a community that already both fears and despises him. Bloom is prudent and does not gamble; but, when the time comes for spending winnings in bars, who will believe that?
So, through 'heavenly weather' which Bloom, philosophical about
change, knows cannot last, the wanderer proceeds to his bath. The
stream of life can be halted for a moment, be tamed to warmth and the service of cleansing. The image of the Eucharist hovers: 'This i~ my body. ' He foresees it and, at its nub, his flaccid penis-'the hmp father of thousands'-turned into a 'languid floating flower'. But all thi~ is an interlude, with time and history and destiny sus- pended, hIS navel not connecting him with the past (remember Stephen and the omphalos) but a mere harmless 'bud of flesh', a
lotus. After the rest and the cleansing he must engage the dirt and the rewards of life.
II3
? ? ? 5: Hell, Wind, Cannibals
JOYCE DESCRIBED THE TECHNIQUE OF THE LOTUS-EATING CHAPTER
as 'narcissistic', and this explains its occasional references to water- not just the water of Lethe which is cognate with the juice of the lotus-but water as a stroker, warmer and flatterer. So far we have looked at the world, and at the man himself, from out of Bloom's own flesh and guts: 'This is my body. ' What we have learned of Bloom does him credit. He has not hidden himself from us with veils and masks, for his author has not given him that opportunity. He is revealed wholly as a man of average fleshly appetites, kindly curiosity, an optimism tempered by long knowledge of the world (though he is only thirty-eight), strong family feeling, considerable
general benevolence. It is time to meet him in the company of his
fellow-citizens, hut, before launching him on a journey to and through Hades, we ought to note what bodily organ rules over his next adventure. I t is the heart. T h e heart is a pump, so Bloom matter-of-factly notes, that grows rusty and faulty and breaks down. In the graveyard, while Dignam's body is being committed to the earth, he is aware of death as that and no more-the failure of a pump. It is not the opening of a door on to ultimate reality. Though religion is the study woven into this chapter, it is not religion as it was pre- sented in the first episode of the Telemachia, the terror and majesty of theology. Religion to Bloom is priests and prayers, conventional ceremonies performed when the human pump fails and the body is buried, a parcel of useless rubbish.
But we remember that the word 'heart' has another connotation,
and that this fits Bloom very well. He is body, opposition and com- plement to Stephen Dedalus's intellect, but he is also feeling, warmth, love. Soon we shall see that this is the very quality which marks off Bloom from the rest of weak, irresponsible, cadging Dub- lin, and which-as with so many other great fictional heroes-earns him contempt and something like fear. At the moment, stepping into
"4
a carriage of the funeral cortege, he is with men who are reasonable
enough citizens, though weak, who may not altogether understand Bloom but who are tolerant of him and his foreignness. His three companions bring Dubliners and A Portrait together: Simon Deda- Ius, Stephen's consubstantial father, irascible, pungent of speech, very much the man we have met before, though older, a widower, far advanced in decay; Martin Cunningham, from 'Grace', a good- ? -atured and intelligent man, as close to Bloom's quality as anyone In the oook; Mr Power, youngish, insipid, given to debts, another of that businessmen's retreat congregation in 'Grace'.
The Homeric parallel is Odysseus's voyage to Hades, the land of the dead. Death is in Bloom's thoughts right from the start-his son's death, his father's. Bu~, the first hint of a new son to fill the vacare! , Stephen Dedalus- 'a lithe young man, clad in mourning, a wide hat' -is seen passing Watery Lane. Mr Dedalus snarls briefly about 'that Mulligan cad' and his wife's people, the 'drunken little costdrawer and Crissie, papa's little lump ofdung, the wise child that knows her own father'. They come to the Dodder, one of the four waterways of Hades, the others being the Liffey and the Grand and Royal Canals. Mr Dedalus resumes his diatribe on Mulligan-'a counter-jumper" son'-and Bloom, reflecting that a father is right to be full, as M. Dedalus is, of his own son, brings the name of the dead child 'littlE
Rudy', to the surface of his interior monologue. His need fa; a son
remains but, young as he and his wife still are, the philoprogenitive
urge is gone (we anticipate the Shakespeare of Stephen's discourse- his son Hamnet dead at eleven, but no second-second-best-son).
They go past the Dogs' Home-a whiff of the Cerberus motif to come-and Bloom remembers his dying father's wish: 'Be good to Athos, Leopold . . . We obey them in the grave. A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Q;tiet brute. Old men's dogs usually are. ' The name 'Athas' suggests 'Argus', Odysseus's dog, and, for a moment, Bloom seems identified with Telemachus. This father-son confusion is germinal to the book. But so, of course, is the suitor theme, and it is not long before Blazes Boylan goes by, 'airing his quiff'. Bloom's interior comment is direct: 'Worst man in Dublin. ' But our present business is with getting to Hades, and we are already
seemg ghosts of great dead men m the form of public statues-Sir Philip Crampton, Farrell, Smith O'Brien, 'the hugecloaked Libera- tor's form'. A story about the son of Reuben J. Dodd, the monev- lender, and his comic attempt at suicide in the Liffey brings~a reference to a boatman (Charon) to whom Dodd gave the obol of a
! I5
)
Hell, Wind, Cannibals
? ? The Lab)"inth
Hell, Wind, Cannibals
florin for saving his son by fishing him out with a pole. And when Mr Dedalus and Mr Power eulogise dead Paddy Dignam, Bloom remembers that he died of drink-'Blazing face: redhot. Too much John Barleycorn'-and we remember that this also happened to Odysseus's companion Elpenor, who fell from the roof of Circe's palace dead drunk. We are approaching the gates of Hell. .
A child's coffin recalls dead Rudy, and at once-father motIf fol- lowing the son - Mr Power talks about the disgrace of having a suicide in the family. Martin Cunningham sees the indiscretion of this in Bloom's presence. When Mr Dedalus says that suicide is cowardice, he is quick with 'It is not for us to judge. ' Bloom inwardly appreci- ates this-'Always a good word to say'-and is led on to pity the hellish torments-in-life that Cunningham undergoes. It is his wife who leads him 'the life of the damned', pawning the furniture every Saturday, drunk, singing 'They call me the jewel of Asia' (a useful Oriental theme for later development in Bloom's fantasy life). Poor Cunningham is both Sisyphus, pushing a colossal burden uphill
only to see it fall down again ('Wear the heart out of a stone, that'), and Ixion ('Shoulder to the wheel') tied to his burning circle. Then we are back with Bloom's own tormented father, 'the redlahelled bottle on the table'.
We are given, still rolling hellwards, plenty of reminders that life has to go on, in spite of other people's deaths-the Gordon Bennett race in Germany, a barrel-organ playing 'Has anybody here seen Kelly? ' But the Mater Misericordiae, at the top oLBloom's Own street, brings death back to mind with its ward for incurables: Bloom temporarily forgets that a hospital's function is to heal. He thinks of old Mrs Riordan dying in Our Lady's Hospice. She was, we re- member, Stephen's governess Dante: another small stitch in the fabric of Bloom-Stephen rapprochement. And then when a drove of cattle appears-'Roast beef for old England'-we know we are look- ing at the ghostly herd of Orion, Orion himself shouting 'Huuuh I Out of that I' as he cracks flanks with his switch (bronze mace in the Odyssey). Death and hell forever supervene on life.
The Royal Canal, and another Charon on his barge. The dead figures of the stonecutter's yard, mutely appealing to cross to the further bank. An old tramp, another Sisyphus, condemned to pound- ing Ireland's hills for ever. The house where Childs was alleged to have murdered his brother. More statues among the poplars of Prospects-'white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sus- taining vain gestures on the air'. They have arrived at the doors of
II6
Hades. A hawker is selling sirr? el cakes. Bloom thinks: 'Cakes for the dead. Dogbiscuits. ' The dog Cerberus had to be fed with such dainties. Paddy Dignam's corpse, like the soul of Elpenor, has arrived in Hades before them. Here is a 'leanjawed harpy', one of the mourners. Bloom reflects, thinking of Dignam's widow, 'There are more women than men in the world'-a tag to be taken up later that day by the ghost of Stephen's mother. And now comes Cerberus himself, the priest who is 'bully about the muzzle', 'with a belly on him like a poisoned pup'. He shakes holy water over the coffin, the water of Lethe. The one word 'sleep' comes to Bloom's mind. And all the time he is aware of the city of the dead, of which Glasnevin Cemetery is but a suburb, taking in its fresh batches every day. A, with Gabriel Conroy in 'The Dead', there comes this image of the other world as, paradoxically, having a life of its own.
Mr Kernan, an Ulsterman from Dub/iners, tells Bloom that the vernacular is more powerful than any Latin in a service for the dead: '/ am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's inmost heart. ' (That word 'heart' appears again and again. ) The rationalist Bloom tells himself: 'The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. ' But still, central to the philosophy of Joyce's novels, the two worlds intermingle. John Henry Menton, the solicitor, whom Bloom once beat at bowls, praises Molly Bloom-'a finelooking woman'-to Ned Lambert, but asks: 'What did she marry a coon like that for? ' When Bloom, at the end of this chapter, points out to him that his hat has a dinge in it, Menton snubs him, ('How grand we are this morning', thinks Bloom. ) His haughtiness is the haughti- ness of dead Ajax in the Odyssey. At the same time, the genuinely dead-Daniel O'Connell and Parnell-join the Greek fellowship as Heracles and Agamemnon. The lord ofHades is another O'ConneU- John-who is very much alive: he has married a fertility ? goddess (like Persephone) who has given him eight children. Everybody wants to be on good terms with him: it would not do to get on the wrong side of Pluto. If we have been looking for Tantalus-hunger- ing and thirsting amid sustenance that flies away or turns to dust as soon as he tries to snapat it-it is O'Connell himselfwho supplies his tortures. He makes love near the tombstones, and this must be 'tantalising for the poor dead'. As for Prometheus, whose liver was exposed to the eternal pecking of vultures, we must find his analo~e in the statue of Christ pointing to his Sacred Heart, at whIch the sms of the world nibble.
The Homeric parallel is worked out at considerable length in this "7
? ? The Labyrinth
/ Hell, Wind, Cannibals
chapter, but it is no mere game. It lends a kind ofsempiternal dig- nity to the naturalism of this cemetery scene; it binds together sundry broodings on death. Alone among the C,tholic mourners, Bloom has no confidence in the doctrine of personal immortality. He faces up to the facts of death, proclaims to himself that there is still plenty of living to be done before the dark iron-cheeked god gets him. Still, every man yearns for immortality and Bloom has lost his chance of gaining it through a son of his own loins. The prophet
Tiresias-whom Odysseus went to consult in Hades-says nothing to . Bloom in his disguise as Robert Emmet. All that Bloom meets is death, the failure of a pump-death, death, and more death. Having meditated with him on man's inescapable tragi-comic end, there is little need for us to meditate again. The last drop has been wrung out of the subject, and the sensation of 'going under' has never so thoroughly been expressed: everything gapes and yawns (even a tramp's boot) and even the road is up, exposing the rusty pumps of the living city. Bloom comes through the dank confrontation, as he comes through everything, very well. Death is not going to get him 'this Innings'. . As for the future life, that is already in preparation for him: he will contrive his immortality through contact with the intellectual imagination-the poet who will, when he is Bloom's own age, start setting down this chronicle. In an age feverish for records,
we have no record of the death of Bloom.
But, after the funeral, life calls again, the claims of the living and a living are reasserted. Bloom is an advertising canvasser, a job on the outermost fringes of the vocation of letters; Stephen, a poet, is at the very heart ofliterature. Both meet-or nearly meet-in the one area that will accept them both-journalism. After the dead colours white and black, the living colour red-colour of blood and sensa- tionalism-gushes out in the scene set in the office of the Freeman's Journal and National Press. This is the home of lEolus, the wind- god.
Paris among the other Irish 'wild geese' (the eXIle theme whIch 102
Telemachus
matches Bloom's sense of estrangement). The literary technique is
brilliant here with its evocation of 'Paris rawly waking, crude sun-
light on her lemon streets'. We can, if we wish, fill out the ellipses with biographical references. As I have already indicated, so much of the remembered, as opposed to enacted, life of Ulysses touches the region of actuality. There is a penumbra surrounding the book, full of signs which lead us out to Joyce's own experience. Fiction itself is Protean, a disguise of real life. Often the interior monologoes of both Bloom and Stephen seem like the iceberg surface, with sub- merged mountains of references we can only reach by forgetting that Ulysses is a work of art and using it as an encyclopaedic guide to real history. Does this invalidate the novel as literature? I think not. True naturalism calls for shadows and mysteries and clues which may or may not be taken up, just as we please. If we cannot understand everything in Ulysses, nor can we understand everything in real life.
Stephen thinks of Kevin Egan, the revolutionary wild goose for- gotten. 'Remembering thee, 0 Sian. ' A faint image of Bloom, that other exile, beckons here. Looking south to the Martello Tower, Stephen reaffirms his loneliness. 'He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes . . . Take all. Keep all. ' The dispos- sessed heir is also the dispossessed father: he sees himself an instant as the ghost in Elsinore, King Hamlet as well as Prince Hamlet. But now the exterior world asserts itself again, though the language in which it is described is no diaphanous veil: 'He climbed over the sedge and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ash- plant in a grike. ' The language draws attention to itself and, as we see at once, rightly. Stephen reminds us that philology is the science which presides here: 'These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted. ' The emphasis is back on reading the signs of nature, looking through nature's symbols, her disguise, for nature's own self. A dog runs across the sand, and Stephen-who, like his creator, fears dogs-comforts himself with 'I have my stick. Sit tight. ' The prose becomes highly contrapuntal, a vision of the Vikings landing (,bark/barque' is an inaudible enharmonic chord) leading Stephen to think of that Northern blood that flows hidden in him, the in- vaders of history, the pretenders of history (the Irish pretend to be 'all kings' sons'), the collapse of his own pretences when he finds himself shaking 'at a cur's yelping'. Behaviour, like history, isall disguises, gifts of Proteus. He tries to be honest with himself: could he, like Mulligan, have saved a man from drowning? No, nor could he save his mother: 'Waters: bitter death: lost. '
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? ? J:
The Labyrinth
Telemachus
burning scene' he notes a ship sailing into harbour-the returned
wanderer. An old sailor, emblem of completed exile, will preside over his meeting with Bloom at day! s end.
I say 'a sort of victory Over Proteus'. This is no mere fancy. The chaos of primal matter, of the 'phenomenal world, is figured in the chaos of language, ever-changing, hard to pin down. But language, despite the chaos, has, in a manner, pinned down the world outside. It remains for the poet to impose order on language and, by using the to-and-fro rhythms of the tide, to create an image of organic order, achieve the ultimate pinning-down. Already, at the end of the Telemachia, Stephen has come some way towards regaining his in-
heritance: he rules through words, and even Mulligan fears the lancet of his art, while the sea's ruler, Haines, has a mind to make a book of wisdom out of Stephen's sayings. But Stephen, though a
prmce of words, is not yet big enough to write Ulysses. He needs Leopold Bloom.
The disguise theme enfolds the dog, which seems to turn into a
hare a buck a horse a wolf, a calf, a fox, a panther (the waves, und~r the d~g's influ~nce, turTI for an instant into 'herds of sea- morse', Proteus's own flock). A panther. Haines had wakened Stephen the previous night with a shout in his sleep about a black panther. Afterwards, as a kind of soothing ointment, Stephen was granted a dream in which, on a street of harlots, an Onental offered him hospitality. He remembers that dream now. Some hundreds of pages later it will come true. . . .
Cockle-pickers on the sand, trudgmg with thm bags, appear to Stephen as 'red Egyptians' and flavour his monologue with the speech of the gipsies, language ready with a new dlSgUlse of reahty:
White thy fambles, red thy gan
And thy quarrons dainty is. Couch a hogshead with me then. In the darkmans clip and kiss.
But the monologue has been steadily thickening with strange speech-
the sea's own language, the giant words of 'Sir Lout' ('laut' is the Malay word for the sea): 'I'm the bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well boulders, bones for my steppingstones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz odz an Iridzman. ' All the chief European tongues blend, as they are to do later, and more specta~u~arly, in Fin~egans Wake. The terms of heraldry brighten Stephen s Imagery, trymg to hold down the Protean spectrum in fixed and formal colours. And then the welter of language breaks in a poem which Stephen, lacking other paper, writes down on a torn-off end of Mr Deasls letter for the press. It is a symbol of control, of tallli~g Proteus: Put a pm m that chap, will you? My tablets. ' (Hamlet 15 never very dlStant. ) A kind of content comes: Stephen lies at full length on the pomted rocks his 'Hamlet hat' -the wide-brimmed hat he brought back from'Paris-tilted over his eyes. 'Pain is far. ' He recalls a line ~f Fergus's song, the poem of Yeats which Stephen-Joyce set to muSIc and sang while his mother lay close to death, weepmg for the sadness of the words: 'And no more turn aside and brood. ' The image of the drowned man washed up seems to lose some of its ter~or ('Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man'). Hamlet makes Its last appear- ance in the chapter with a recollection of Ophelia's song for a dead father. Stephen, having achieved a sort of victor~ over Prote~s, IS ready for a drink (he is supposed to meet Mulligan and Hames,
flush with his salary, in the Ship at twelve-thirty). He leaves ,the tribute of a little dry snot on a rock-ledge. Before qummg the
104
105
? ? 4: Beginning of the Journey
THE 'PROTEUS' EPISODE WE HAVE JUST CONSIDERED IS A tour de force of linguistic virtuosity. Besides presenting the bewildering Protean variety of the world of matter, and of the resources of lan- guage which are able to tame it, it exhibits the learning and intellec- tual subtlety of Stephen Dedalus so richly that we are forced to accept him as a sort of Homeric hero of the mind. He seems to
enclose the universe of words and ideas; yet, ironically, he does not enclose the lowlier Bloom. Undernourished, dressed in cheap mourn- ing and cast-off shoes, his teeth bad, a nose-picker because he has no handkerchief, he transcends the limitations of the body. He needs, and the book needs, to be brought down to earth. As we commence the Bloom Odyssey proper, we are aware that Stephen stands for the spirit and Bloom for the flesh. The opening of the Telemachia-the narrative 'of young men-was celebrated with the inaugural words of the Mass; when we first meet Mr Bloom-the mature man's
narrative-it is in terms of 'the inner organs of beasts and fowls', the thought of kidneys for breakfast.
This consultation of viscera is a kind of ritual, but it does not lead to high-flown Dedalus themes like those of theology and philol? gy. The science which presides over NO. 7 Eccles Street IS economlCS- the useful art of household management. A kidney is the symbol which controls the chapter-a utilitarian, unpoetic organ which, nevertheless, is to provide the shape of the New Bloomusalem when it is built, later on in the book. The glorification of the body starts
now: physical organs have not been celebrated in the Telemachia. As for Bloom's own name-an anglicisation of the ancestral Hun- garian Virag, which means a flower-it sums up pretty well wha~ its owner stands for: something remarkable but unpretentious spnng- ing out of common earth. The comparative contentment of Bloom in his domestic surroundings, organising breakfast for his wife,
106
giving the cat milk, contrasts with Stephen's divine dissatisfactions
and aspirations. Bloom is, nevertheless, at a higher stage of develop-
ment in certain respects than the young poet: he is close to the
mature Joyce in having achieved paternity (a loved daughter, a son who died in infancy), tolerance, the quiet wisdom of a man who has seen the world. Unlike Odysseus and like Joyce, he prefers cats to dogs.
His wife is Madam Marion (Molly) Tweedy, professional singer.
'Tweedy' suggests the weaving of Penelope, whose . counterpart she
is; it also suggests the double thread of her fabric, for she is part Irish and part Spanish Jewess, born in Gibraltar-where her military father was stationed. We are to meet Molly as Penelope only in the final chapter; here she appears as Calypso, nymph of an island with a great cave at its navel (Gibraltar too has its caves). Now, and throughout the book, her place is bed.
In a sense, Bloom is detained in her abode. As soon as he goes out
to buy his breakfast kidney he is preoccupied with visions of the
East, the far ancestral home. But, as Stephen is unconsciously moving towards him, so he is moving towards Stephen, for Turko the Terrible appears in his thoughts-the very pantomime character whom, so Stephen remembers, his mother used to love. Bloom is an exile, with a certain emptin~ss inside. The science of economics temporarily fills the emptiness-speculations about money in beer, exiles from the county Leitrim blossoming as brewery kings. The butcher's shop he now visits is run by an exile of his own kind- Dlugacz. A girl is ahead of him, buying sausages; Bloom picks up a cut sheet from a newspaper, and he is East again: 'The model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter
sanatorium. ' The economics of farming fill his mind for a space.
Then the sensual, earthy Bloom flowers again quickly: he wants to get his kidney at once, to follow the girl down the street and admire her moving haunches. But he is too late and he tells himself-'Soda- chapped hands. Crusted toenails too'-that the morning desire is marginal.
Walking back home he reads his piece of cut newspaper. There is a planter's company-Agendath Netaim-which, for eight marks, will plant you a dunam of land with Oriental fruits. The East calls again, symbolised in an orange or citron, a tiny rising sun. But we are also concerned with economics: 'Can pay ten down and the balance in yearly instalments. Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. I5? ' The name of the street-'Staytrue' -reminds us, if not Bloom, that
107
Beginning ofthe Journey
? ? The Labyrinth
he has not stayed true to the religion of his fathers. In both senses he is an exile from Jeru. alem. And the kidney he takes home is a pork kidney.
'Citron' recalls other Jewish exiles like himself-the fruit's very
namesake of Saint Kevin's Parade, and either-playing Mastiansky. Then the sun goes in for a moment, the moment when the sea turns into a bowl of bitter waters for Stephen (it is just after eight). Bloom, in a grey horror which sears his flesh, sees the Dead Sea and the dead cities ofa wandering people, his own: 'the grey sunken cunt of the world'. The image is suggested by the sight of an ancient hag clutching a noggin bottle; Stephen, in complement, is reflecting on the dry shrivelled breasts of a woman who gives milk that is not her own. Bloom's depression lifts as the sunlight returns, running to- wards him like a gold girl, a nymph (nymphs, in deference to Calyp- so, rule this chapter). He relates such blue phases to the dysfunction- ing of the body ('Morning mouth bad images'). Bright colours return and the post has come. There is a card for his wife from their daughter Milly, but for himself (she is daddy's girl) there is aletter. There is also a letter for Molly, and he knows who its sender is: 'His quick heart slowed at once. Bold hand. ' Stephen has faced his Antinous; Bloom's Antinous seems already to have conquered without the bending of a bow.
Bloom reads his daughter's letter. Again we find a link with Stephen's world. At the end of the first chapter a young swimmer tells Mulligan that a certain Bannon (with whom Mulligan's brother happens to be staying in Westmeath) has 'found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her. ' The photo girl is Milly. She mentions Bannon in her letter and says that he sings Boylan's song about 'those seaside girls'. Bannon is a link between the two incarna- tions of Antinous-Mulligan's brother on one side, on the other Blazes Boylan, the 'hairy chap' whose letter Molly is at that moment reading. Bloom smiles 'with troubled affection' at the evidence of Milly's growing up. She is another nymph - 'slim legs running up the staircase' -who holds him here on the island of caves.
Molly's bedroom is a cave, all 'warm yellow twilight'. He serves her with bread and butter and tea and sugar and cream-nymph's food-and learns that Boylan is bringing the programme for the concert tour he is organising. 'La c? darem' (from Don G? ovallni-an appropriate opera in Boylan's connection) is one of the songs that Molly is to sing; the other is 'Love's Old Sweet Song', an ominous title. But almost at once Bloom gives proof of a superiority that,
108
. . Beginning oftheJourney without his having to draw out a single arrow is eventuallv to reduce
Boylan and all such suitors to a heap of ashes. Molly has a book called Ruby: the Przde ofthe Ring (Ruby is another nymph naked and bemg lashed by the ringmaster, hidden in an illustration'among smudged pages); she has met the word 'metempsychosis' there and wants to know Its meamng. BloOI11: knows and tries to explain: 'It's Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls. '
Molly says: '0, rocks! Tell us in plain words', and then Bloom like Mulhgan. . starts Hellenising wild Irish, seeing in Molly some~hing l! ke a remcarnatlOn of the nymph in the picture above the bed ( G[ven. away with the Easter number of Photo Bits: Splendid
masterpIece In ar~ colours'), but not getting very far with his lesson ? ll the true ,meanmg of 'metempsychosis'. There is a smell of burn- mg: the frymg kidney calls: he returns to internal organs. But, ofall the Dublmers who exemplify the call of the flesh, he shows himself to be the most rarefied, almost an intellectual. He is the most meet to be foster-father to a poet.
He is a meat-eater, but no cannibal. He is kind to his cat he deplore~the cru~ltyto performing animals that Ruby: Pride ojthe
~mgbnngs to mmd, he 15 offthIS morning to witness-mourning On hke Stephen-:-the ceremonial interring of the flesh of poor dead Dig: nam. He [s Wise m the ImutatlOns of the body, tolerant. The body is a garm~nt that the soul Can change, following the laws of metem-
psychosis-the nJ:mph Syrinx into a reed, the nymph Daphne into laurel. The body [s a cave for the soul. But, even before the soul can rrugrate, change goes on, uncheckable. Bloom sees the Protean in his daughter, who is changing into her mother: 'Will happen, yes. Prevent. Useless: can't move. '
Bloom, in the cave of his body, his body in the cave of its black
S~ltfo: funerals, n:oves o~tto the cave of the outside jakes, taking with h[m-appropnately, smce he has rece;>tly been suffering from const[panDn-a co~y of, Tttbtts. DefecatIOn [S nothmg to be ashamed of: dung [s a fert[hser. Dlfty clean~. 'Calypso, cave-nymph, follows him even here; he never has his wife long out of his thoughts. He
remembers the bazaar dance when the band played Ponchielli' pance. ofthe Hour; (it. was there that Molly had first met Boylan)~
Evenmg hours, girlS m grey gauze. Night hours then black with daggers and eyemasks. ' Time is ~ procession of nymphs, all veiled, metempsychosed from mormng lUta noon into evening into night then ready t? renew the CJ>:cle of change. But, so the bells ofGeorge'~ church rermnd hun, leaVIng the closet with his work done, time
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Beginning ofthe Journey
sometime must have a stop. The bells toll for thee, as well as for poor dead Dignam. .
In the second chapter we meet Bloom on Sir John Rogerson's Q! ! ay. He has moved south from Eccles Street, towards the sun, giver of life (the presiding organ is the genitals) but taker-away of energy (the Homeric parallel is the Lotus-Eaters). It is abou\ ten o'clock, and the day is warming up nicely. The preceding chapter was concerned with the vigorous arts of money-making, but now the vegetable kingdom rules. The text is crammed with references to flowers, herbs, and the decoctions that the druggists make from these: the sciences of botany and chemistry join languid hands. Everywhere there is a sense oflistlessness, of dolce far niente, and the gentle drag towards the East-here primed by the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company-is renewed. At the same time there is a pull towards the earth's centre: 'Thirtytwo feet per second, per second. Law of falling bodies: per second, per second.
' Bloom saunters to Westland Row post office-ever further south-and, countering the morning's lassitude with a phallic symbol, rolls up his copy of the Freeman into a baton.
In the post office there is a letter for him-addressed to 'Henry Flower, Esq. ' Like Odysseus, he is a cunning name-changer, though, unlike Odysseus, he will not move too far from the truth: 'Bloom' and 'Flower' are still 'Virag'. The recruiting posters show soldiers who look half-baked, hypnotised: the lotus eats up even the vigour of the military. The letter is from a woman, but he cannot read it yet. A character from Dubliner" McCoy, accosts him. (In the preceding chapter we have already re-met, in name only, another Dubliners character-Gretta Conroy. ) McCoy's wife is a singer, like Bloom's, but she is only a 'reedy freckled soprano', apt for little ballads but not for 'La ci damn'. McCoy, as Dub/iners tells us, is always borrowing valises for his wife's concert tours, and Bloom's interior monologue refers to this habit. Bloom does not want to talk; he wants to read his letter and he wants to feast his eyes on a high- . class woman who has come out of the Grosvenor. His sexuality is passive: he likes to look. We learn later that he no longer has normal sexual relations with his wife (the guts went out of this side of mar- riage when their son, Rudy, died) and that he practises onanism. The genital image and the lotus image fuse into passivity.
Nevertheless, it is time for the father-son theme to make an appearance in Bloom's Odyssey. It comes, as with Stephen, out of Hamlet. Bloom sees a poster announcing that Mrs Bandman Palmer
no
will play in Leah tonight; last night she played the prince of Den- mark-:'Male imper~onator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia commllted sUlclde? Bloom sees nothing odd in such a theory; later, l~ fantasy, he hImself is to appear as the 'new womanly man'; the ym and yang elements cohere in him as the yoni and lingam, the phallus ~nd the flower) meet as joint rulers of this chapter. Is not Bloom hImself, a man, also a flower? And now the paternity theme is presented in its filial aspect-Nathan, 'who left the house of his father and left the God of his father', and Bloom's father's own comment on that affecting speech from Leah (Mrs Palmer's two plays have equal relevance in the father-son situation): 'Every word is so deep, Leopold. ' An almost female tenderness wells up now in the son whose father sought the ultimate lotus, dying by his own hand.
But the lotus ofthe living calls again. Bloom passes gelded horses,
all passion spent; reflects, going by the cabman's shelter, on the life o~the 'drif~ing cabbies, all weathers, all places, time or setdown, no wlll of thm own'. At last, watched by 'a wise tabby, a blinking sphinx', he is able to read his letter in peace. It is from a certain Martha Clifford, a passionate pen-friend whom he has never met a slushy letter with an odd mistake in it: 'I called you naughty b~y because I do not like that other world. ' At least one edition of Ulysses silently corrected 'world' to 'word', thus ruining that scene
in Nighttown where Stephen's mother' risen from the dead un-
. "
consclOusly quotes Martha: 'I pray for you in my other world. ' It
is one of the minute devices for drawing Stephen and Bloom together.
Enclosed in the letter is Bloom's own r e b u s - a flower dried and with almost no smell. Bloom re-reads, 'weak joy' openi~ghis lips, and Joyce, seeking a direct means of conveying the act of re-reading without actually repeating the whole text of the letter, throws flowers at us: 'Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume. ' Botany is with liS all the time, but now the specific lotus~ eating motif, with Oriental orientation, is renewed through the very name Martha. 'Martha, Mary . . . He is sitting in their house, talking. ' Bloom, a Jew, is not willing to mention the holy name but he unconsciously recognises that Christ is a lotus-symbol: 'Long Ion? long rest. ' Thus he is led to the church of All Hallows, weaving a lIttle fantasy about missionaries, opium, Buddha, joss-sticks,
II!
/
? ? The Labyrinth
Beginning o f the Journey )
Christ's thorns, St Patrick's shamrock, religion lapped up like milk. Ma;s is being said, and the Eucharist emerges for Bloom as the supreme lotus. He is sceptical about all religions, but he concedes a value to this 'bread of angels'-'there's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel'. As for the believers, they are partly summed up in an old man asleep near a confessional: 'Blind faith. Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next year. ' Other lotus themes appear-music, liquo~ (Benedic- tine and Green Chartreuse), eunuchs ('one way out of it'), women,
flowers, incense. When the priest prays: 'Blessed Michael, archangel,
defend us in the hour of conflict', we are reminded of what the
Church still means to another non-believer, Stephen. Stephen will no longer even go through the forms of faith, but Bloom openly admires the strength and organisation of Catholicism.
It is ten-fifteen, and the funeral is at eleven. Mter botany, chemistry, or at least a chemist's shop. Bloom has to get a lotion made up for Molly, but he realises that he has left the recipe, as well as his latchkey (hence no easy homecoming if he is late) in his other trousers. In Sweny's shop on Lincoln Place his thoughts naturally turn to herbs, electuaries, simples, love-philtres while the chemist looks up Molly's prescription in his book. Sweet perfumes lull his senses to a mood of sexual abandon. He will go and take a bath in the mosque-shaped Hammam (the East again) and, while in the bath, he will masturbate. In his very first two chapters Bloom, after the burnt offering of the kidney, seems concerned with a total cleansing and a total evacuation of the body's secretions. A clean
Jew, he is a nice contrast to the dirty Christian he will make his son. (Stephen rarely washes and never baths: after all, 'all Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream'. ) Bloom buys some lemon-scented soap.
Today is the day of the Ascot Gold Cup, and Bantam Lyons (another Dubliner, character) sees Bloom's newspaper as Bloom leaves the shop. 'I want to see about that French horse that's fun- ning today', says Lyons. 'Where the bugger is it? ' Bloom decides to give him the newspaper to get rid of him. But, generous and good as he is, some of the -gods are against him. He says: 'I was just going to throw it away. ' Lyons knows and we, who have looked up our copies of Cope's Racegoer', Encyclopaedia, also know that a horse called Throwaway is running in the Ascot Gold Cup. We know, and all Dublin will eventually know, that Throwaway won that race at 100-5. Lyons thinks he has been given a tip: Bloom is a dark horse himself, innocent-seeming but full of guile and secret knowledge.
lIZ
The cunning of Odysseus led to the planting of a dark horse in the Trojan camp: this horse is the means of gaining the exile further hatred from a community that already both fears and despises him. Bloom is prudent and does not gamble; but, when the time comes for spending winnings in bars, who will believe that?
So, through 'heavenly weather' which Bloom, philosophical about
change, knows cannot last, the wanderer proceeds to his bath. The
stream of life can be halted for a moment, be tamed to warmth and the service of cleansing. The image of the Eucharist hovers: 'This i~ my body. ' He foresees it and, at its nub, his flaccid penis-'the hmp father of thousands'-turned into a 'languid floating flower'. But all thi~ is an interlude, with time and history and destiny sus- pended, hIS navel not connecting him with the past (remember Stephen and the omphalos) but a mere harmless 'bud of flesh', a
lotus. After the rest and the cleansing he must engage the dirt and the rewards of life.
II3
? ? ? 5: Hell, Wind, Cannibals
JOYCE DESCRIBED THE TECHNIQUE OF THE LOTUS-EATING CHAPTER
as 'narcissistic', and this explains its occasional references to water- not just the water of Lethe which is cognate with the juice of the lotus-but water as a stroker, warmer and flatterer. So far we have looked at the world, and at the man himself, from out of Bloom's own flesh and guts: 'This is my body. ' What we have learned of Bloom does him credit. He has not hidden himself from us with veils and masks, for his author has not given him that opportunity. He is revealed wholly as a man of average fleshly appetites, kindly curiosity, an optimism tempered by long knowledge of the world (though he is only thirty-eight), strong family feeling, considerable
general benevolence. It is time to meet him in the company of his
fellow-citizens, hut, before launching him on a journey to and through Hades, we ought to note what bodily organ rules over his next adventure. I t is the heart. T h e heart is a pump, so Bloom matter-of-factly notes, that grows rusty and faulty and breaks down. In the graveyard, while Dignam's body is being committed to the earth, he is aware of death as that and no more-the failure of a pump. It is not the opening of a door on to ultimate reality. Though religion is the study woven into this chapter, it is not religion as it was pre- sented in the first episode of the Telemachia, the terror and majesty of theology. Religion to Bloom is priests and prayers, conventional ceremonies performed when the human pump fails and the body is buried, a parcel of useless rubbish.
But we remember that the word 'heart' has another connotation,
and that this fits Bloom very well. He is body, opposition and com- plement to Stephen Dedalus's intellect, but he is also feeling, warmth, love. Soon we shall see that this is the very quality which marks off Bloom from the rest of weak, irresponsible, cadging Dub- lin, and which-as with so many other great fictional heroes-earns him contempt and something like fear. At the moment, stepping into
"4
a carriage of the funeral cortege, he is with men who are reasonable
enough citizens, though weak, who may not altogether understand Bloom but who are tolerant of him and his foreignness. His three companions bring Dubliners and A Portrait together: Simon Deda- Ius, Stephen's consubstantial father, irascible, pungent of speech, very much the man we have met before, though older, a widower, far advanced in decay; Martin Cunningham, from 'Grace', a good- ? -atured and intelligent man, as close to Bloom's quality as anyone In the oook; Mr Power, youngish, insipid, given to debts, another of that businessmen's retreat congregation in 'Grace'.
The Homeric parallel is Odysseus's voyage to Hades, the land of the dead. Death is in Bloom's thoughts right from the start-his son's death, his father's. Bu~, the first hint of a new son to fill the vacare! , Stephen Dedalus- 'a lithe young man, clad in mourning, a wide hat' -is seen passing Watery Lane. Mr Dedalus snarls briefly about 'that Mulligan cad' and his wife's people, the 'drunken little costdrawer and Crissie, papa's little lump ofdung, the wise child that knows her own father'. They come to the Dodder, one of the four waterways of Hades, the others being the Liffey and the Grand and Royal Canals. Mr Dedalus resumes his diatribe on Mulligan-'a counter-jumper" son'-and Bloom, reflecting that a father is right to be full, as M. Dedalus is, of his own son, brings the name of the dead child 'littlE
Rudy', to the surface of his interior monologue. His need fa; a son
remains but, young as he and his wife still are, the philoprogenitive
urge is gone (we anticipate the Shakespeare of Stephen's discourse- his son Hamnet dead at eleven, but no second-second-best-son).
They go past the Dogs' Home-a whiff of the Cerberus motif to come-and Bloom remembers his dying father's wish: 'Be good to Athos, Leopold . . . We obey them in the grave. A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Q;tiet brute. Old men's dogs usually are. ' The name 'Athas' suggests 'Argus', Odysseus's dog, and, for a moment, Bloom seems identified with Telemachus. This father-son confusion is germinal to the book. But so, of course, is the suitor theme, and it is not long before Blazes Boylan goes by, 'airing his quiff'. Bloom's interior comment is direct: 'Worst man in Dublin. ' But our present business is with getting to Hades, and we are already
seemg ghosts of great dead men m the form of public statues-Sir Philip Crampton, Farrell, Smith O'Brien, 'the hugecloaked Libera- tor's form'. A story about the son of Reuben J. Dodd, the monev- lender, and his comic attempt at suicide in the Liffey brings~a reference to a boatman (Charon) to whom Dodd gave the obol of a
! I5
)
Hell, Wind, Cannibals
? ? The Lab)"inth
Hell, Wind, Cannibals
florin for saving his son by fishing him out with a pole. And when Mr Dedalus and Mr Power eulogise dead Paddy Dignam, Bloom remembers that he died of drink-'Blazing face: redhot. Too much John Barleycorn'-and we remember that this also happened to Odysseus's companion Elpenor, who fell from the roof of Circe's palace dead drunk. We are approaching the gates of Hell. .
A child's coffin recalls dead Rudy, and at once-father motIf fol- lowing the son - Mr Power talks about the disgrace of having a suicide in the family. Martin Cunningham sees the indiscretion of this in Bloom's presence. When Mr Dedalus says that suicide is cowardice, he is quick with 'It is not for us to judge. ' Bloom inwardly appreci- ates this-'Always a good word to say'-and is led on to pity the hellish torments-in-life that Cunningham undergoes. It is his wife who leads him 'the life of the damned', pawning the furniture every Saturday, drunk, singing 'They call me the jewel of Asia' (a useful Oriental theme for later development in Bloom's fantasy life). Poor Cunningham is both Sisyphus, pushing a colossal burden uphill
only to see it fall down again ('Wear the heart out of a stone, that'), and Ixion ('Shoulder to the wheel') tied to his burning circle. Then we are back with Bloom's own tormented father, 'the redlahelled bottle on the table'.
We are given, still rolling hellwards, plenty of reminders that life has to go on, in spite of other people's deaths-the Gordon Bennett race in Germany, a barrel-organ playing 'Has anybody here seen Kelly? ' But the Mater Misericordiae, at the top oLBloom's Own street, brings death back to mind with its ward for incurables: Bloom temporarily forgets that a hospital's function is to heal. He thinks of old Mrs Riordan dying in Our Lady's Hospice. She was, we re- member, Stephen's governess Dante: another small stitch in the fabric of Bloom-Stephen rapprochement. And then when a drove of cattle appears-'Roast beef for old England'-we know we are look- ing at the ghostly herd of Orion, Orion himself shouting 'Huuuh I Out of that I' as he cracks flanks with his switch (bronze mace in the Odyssey). Death and hell forever supervene on life.
The Royal Canal, and another Charon on his barge. The dead figures of the stonecutter's yard, mutely appealing to cross to the further bank. An old tramp, another Sisyphus, condemned to pound- ing Ireland's hills for ever. The house where Childs was alleged to have murdered his brother. More statues among the poplars of Prospects-'white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sus- taining vain gestures on the air'. They have arrived at the doors of
II6
Hades. A hawker is selling sirr? el cakes. Bloom thinks: 'Cakes for the dead. Dogbiscuits. ' The dog Cerberus had to be fed with such dainties. Paddy Dignam's corpse, like the soul of Elpenor, has arrived in Hades before them. Here is a 'leanjawed harpy', one of the mourners. Bloom reflects, thinking of Dignam's widow, 'There are more women than men in the world'-a tag to be taken up later that day by the ghost of Stephen's mother. And now comes Cerberus himself, the priest who is 'bully about the muzzle', 'with a belly on him like a poisoned pup'. He shakes holy water over the coffin, the water of Lethe. The one word 'sleep' comes to Bloom's mind. And all the time he is aware of the city of the dead, of which Glasnevin Cemetery is but a suburb, taking in its fresh batches every day. A, with Gabriel Conroy in 'The Dead', there comes this image of the other world as, paradoxically, having a life of its own.
Mr Kernan, an Ulsterman from Dub/iners, tells Bloom that the vernacular is more powerful than any Latin in a service for the dead: '/ am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's inmost heart. ' (That word 'heart' appears again and again. ) The rationalist Bloom tells himself: 'The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. ' But still, central to the philosophy of Joyce's novels, the two worlds intermingle. John Henry Menton, the solicitor, whom Bloom once beat at bowls, praises Molly Bloom-'a finelooking woman'-to Ned Lambert, but asks: 'What did she marry a coon like that for? ' When Bloom, at the end of this chapter, points out to him that his hat has a dinge in it, Menton snubs him, ('How grand we are this morning', thinks Bloom. ) His haughtiness is the haughti- ness of dead Ajax in the Odyssey. At the same time, the genuinely dead-Daniel O'Connell and Parnell-join the Greek fellowship as Heracles and Agamemnon. The lord ofHades is another O'ConneU- John-who is very much alive: he has married a fertility ? goddess (like Persephone) who has given him eight children. Everybody wants to be on good terms with him: it would not do to get on the wrong side of Pluto. If we have been looking for Tantalus-hunger- ing and thirsting amid sustenance that flies away or turns to dust as soon as he tries to snapat it-it is O'Connell himselfwho supplies his tortures. He makes love near the tombstones, and this must be 'tantalising for the poor dead'. As for Prometheus, whose liver was exposed to the eternal pecking of vultures, we must find his analo~e in the statue of Christ pointing to his Sacred Heart, at whIch the sms of the world nibble.
The Homeric parallel is worked out at considerable length in this "7
? ? The Labyrinth
/ Hell, Wind, Cannibals
chapter, but it is no mere game. It lends a kind ofsempiternal dig- nity to the naturalism of this cemetery scene; it binds together sundry broodings on death. Alone among the C,tholic mourners, Bloom has no confidence in the doctrine of personal immortality. He faces up to the facts of death, proclaims to himself that there is still plenty of living to be done before the dark iron-cheeked god gets him. Still, every man yearns for immortality and Bloom has lost his chance of gaining it through a son of his own loins. The prophet
Tiresias-whom Odysseus went to consult in Hades-says nothing to . Bloom in his disguise as Robert Emmet. All that Bloom meets is death, the failure of a pump-death, death, and more death. Having meditated with him on man's inescapable tragi-comic end, there is little need for us to meditate again. The last drop has been wrung out of the subject, and the sensation of 'going under' has never so thoroughly been expressed: everything gapes and yawns (even a tramp's boot) and even the road is up, exposing the rusty pumps of the living city. Bloom comes through the dank confrontation, as he comes through everything, very well. Death is not going to get him 'this Innings'. . As for the future life, that is already in preparation for him: he will contrive his immortality through contact with the intellectual imagination-the poet who will, when he is Bloom's own age, start setting down this chronicle. In an age feverish for records,
we have no record of the death of Bloom.
But, after the funeral, life calls again, the claims of the living and a living are reasserted. Bloom is an advertising canvasser, a job on the outermost fringes of the vocation of letters; Stephen, a poet, is at the very heart ofliterature. Both meet-or nearly meet-in the one area that will accept them both-journalism. After the dead colours white and black, the living colour red-colour of blood and sensa- tionalism-gushes out in the scene set in the office of the Freeman's Journal and National Press. This is the home of lEolus, the wind- god.
