A man spitting back on his plate: half- masticated gristle: no teeth to
chewchewchew
it.
re-joyce-a-burgess
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
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/ 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. The presiding organ must be the lungs, and the built-in art the windy one of rhetoric. The chapter must move not by steps of logic but by the oratorical puffing device of the enthymeme-a type of syllogism (or logical statement) which suppresses its major or minor premise, assuming a truth rather than stating it. Joyce has laborious fun here. He crams the text with examples of rhetorical devices- figures of speech, puns, perversions of language; he also pins us down to the rhetorical craft of journalism by punctuating the action with headlines. These headlines provide a skeletal history of journal- ism. They begin stately-'IN THE HEART OF THE HIBER-
1I8
NIAN METROPOLlS'-and end facetious: 'SOPHIST WAL- LOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP' (even the popular press is drawn into the surge and thun- der of the Odyssey).
Bloom is concerned with arranging for a 'puff' for one of his
advertising clients, Alexander Keyes. 'WE SEE THE CANVAS- SER AT WORK' (canvas-ship-wind). He can have a 'little par' in the Telegraph (an evening paper managed by the Freeman) if he will give a three months' renewal of his advertisement. The ad- vertisement itself is to embody a rebus of two crossed keys, and Bloom has seen a suitable design in a Kilkenny paper: his search for this is, through the National Library, to bring him closer to Stephen. First, though, Keyes himself has to be consulted about the proposed arrangement: Bloom is caught up in a little gale of business. He enters the Telegraph office to telephone, and he finds a number of Dublin characters-Simon Dedalus, Ned Lambert, Professor Mac- Hugh (,professor' very much a courtesy title: the small Latin teacher has blown himself up)-laughing at a piece of windy rhetoric C. . . 'neath the shadows cast o'er its pensive bosom by the overarch- ing leafage of the giants of the forest'). Bloom's interior monologue is full of lEolian references to bladder-bags, gale days, windfalls, 'what's in the wind', weathercocks, 'all blows over" and Professor
MacHugh calls the author of the rhetoric an 'inflated windbag'. A" though driven by violent blasts, all the characters act testily or impatiently or move nimbly. The Editor, lEolus himself, is red and harsh and loud. If, in all this wind, we miss some of the rhetorical tropes, Lenehan the sports writer (one of the two gallants of Dub- liners) is ready to give us easy spoonerisms. 'There's a hurricane? blowing', cries the Editor, and even language is blown and dis- hevelled into 'I hear feetstoops' and 'Clamn dever'.
When Bloom goes off to see Keyes we have one of our rare oppor- tunities of viewing him from the back, 'a file of capering newsboys' in his wake. 'Look at the young guttersnire beron 1 him hue and cry,' says Lenehan, 'and you'll kick. 0 , my rib risible! Taking off his flat spaugs and the walk. Small nines. Steal upon larks. ' This is a typical reaction to Bloom. He can never be treated normally. He is either a figure of fun or a foreign mystery to be admired, feared, rarely trusted. Once he is gone, taking his interior monologue with him, the world grows flatter. The gap can only be filled by another interior monologue: it is time for Stephen, bullock-befriending bard,
"9
? ? ? ? ? ? The Labyrinth
Hell, Wind, Cannibals
to enter with Mr Deasy's letter for the press. He is accompanied by Mr O'Madden Burke: 'Youth led by Experience visits Notoriety. ' Telemachus, young, blushing, has to hold his rhetorical own in the council of mature men, but the time is not yet. He must listen first, aware of his youth. When the Editor asks Stephen to write something for him, adding 'You can do it. I see it in your face', we are back to Conglowes and Father Dolan: 'See it in your face. See it in your eye.
Lazy idle little schemer. '
Bloom tries to re-enter, remotely, by telephone, but the Editor,
changeable as a wind-god should be, says: 'Tell him to go to hell',
unaware that he has been there already. Stephen is on his own, great
gales oforatory blown at him, though in that remembered eloquence of John F. Taylor Bloom's people are brought in as type of all oppressed nations, prototypical Irish. Stephen's thoughts are driven eastwards: 'By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bul- rushes: a man supple in co-mbat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart o f stone. ' Stephen asserts himself, makes himself mature, though not with loud speech: he has money, he suggests a drink. 'Chip of the old block! ' cries the Editor: Stephen is son of the wrong father. And yet the long anecdote he tells on the way to the pub has the 'Promised Land' theme in it-A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or the Parable of the Plums. It is a story of two elderly Dublin women who want to see Dublin from the top of Nelson's pillar. They climb up, provisioned with brawn, panbread, and plums, but t h e n - 'too tired to look up or down or to speak'-eat their plums and spit the stones out between the railings.
Bloom catches the Editor, himself 'caught in a whirl of wild newsboys', as he goes off to drink with Stephen and the rest. He has seen Keyes, and Keyes will give a two months' renewal of his advertisement if he can get his par in the Telegraph Saturday pink. But lEolus was inhospitable when Odysseus returned to him, all the adverse winds released from their bag. Now the Editor is rude. 'What will I tell him, Mr Crawford l' asks Bloom, and Mr Crawford replies: 'Will you tell him he can kiss my arse l' For good measure he adds: 'He can kiss my royal Irish arse. Any time he likes, tell him. ' Bloom, the new Moses, is scorned. The bits of Irish nationalist oratory which have been re-delivered in Stephen's presence were ready enough to draw their analogies from the Egyptian bondage, but a living breathing Jew is rudely slighted. And Stephen is arm in arm with these shiftless Irish citizens who are all wind, off for a drink, having told a very Irish story about a Promised Land with
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plum-stones dribbled all over it. Rhetoric is nothing but an empty
nOlse.
From the windy lungs to the windy stomach, or rather oesophagus. In the next chapter everybody goes to lunch. The Homeric parallel is to be found in the episode of the Laestrygonians, the cannibals who devoured so many of Odysseus's companions. Bloom and his fellow-citizens are all moved, peristaltically-as food is moved on the long road to digestion-through the great digestive tracts of the city; they are contained in a digestive system, and thus the cannibalistic motif holds well. Bloom's interior monologue is obsessed with food, often regurgitating with more disgust than gusto as he sees the one o'clock Dubliners gorging themselves like little Laestrygonians. And yet, in this welter of eating, we must hang on to some vestiges of human dignity. Bloom sees the ritual aspects of slaughtering and cooking, the blood victim and the burnt offering, and leads us on to the noblest of all human arts through considering the building of altars and the shedding of blood on the foundation of a public edi- fice. Architecture seems to blend strangely with eating, but Bloom finds a connection. These Dublin streets, coiling like intestines, are more than guts through which the citizen-gobbets are sluggishly impelled. They are a pretext for magnificent architectural erec- tions.
But food, food as gutsy excess, dominates Bloom's thoughts- gormandising priests ('I'd like to see them do the black fast Yom Kippur . . . One meal and a collation for fear he'd collapse on the altar'), drunken rats floating on vats of porter ('Drink till they puke again like christians'), nuns frying everything in the best butter. Even the Liffey brings to mind Reuben J. Dodd's son swallowing 'a good bellyful of that sewage', while greedy gulls flap strongly over the water. Bloom, always kind to animals, buys a Banbury cake to feed them. The little rhyme he makes up about them-'The hungry famished gull! Flaps o'er the waters dull' -leads him temporarily to the Hamlet motif (awaiting its full development in the chapter that comes after): 'Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit . . . ' He is not con- cerned about the meaning of the blank verse, however-only, and not with any great curiosity, the form. As for the gulls, they give him no thanks: 'Not even a caw. ' They are typical Dubliners.
The river flows on, rowboat at anchor on its 'treacly swells', and the rowboat advertises Kino's I I /- Trousers. Bloom gives this his professional approval and thinks 'All kind of places are good for ads. ' A quack doctor once stuck up clap-cure posters in public urinals;
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History is presented to Bloom as a sort of cannibalism, time eating cities as well as citizens, architecture itself (,Pyramids . . . built on bread and onions') ,m eater of building slaves but also food for time, leavmg the faeces of rubble and big stones. 'No one is anything. ' Bloom is depressed: 'Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed': the Laestrygonians have got at him.
Mter seeing George Russell (AE) and reflecting that aesthetes eat ethereal food-'only weggebobbles and fruit'-Bloom works towards hunger for lunch through love, an acceptable form of cannibalism: 'Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All kissed, yielded: in deep summer fields, tangled pressed grass . . . ' Joyce, according to his friend Frank Budgen, was fond of the fancy that the fermentation of food into alcoholic liquor derived from love-play. Bloom, a page or so later, is to recall a day with Molly on the hill of Howth: 'Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle.
Joy: I ate it: joy. ' But it is to the twitterings of generalised voices of
love that he enters the Burton restaurant: 'Jack, 10vel-Darling! -
Kiss me, Reggy! -My boy! -Love! '
We have now one of the most realistic evocations of disgust at the act of eating that literature has ever given liS. Meat-eating is, after all, a species of cannibalism: a pig or a rabbit can be, in life, a mem- ber of the family. Here the horror is neo-Hogarthian:
A man with an infant's saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet.
A man spitting back on his plate: half- masticated gristle: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump chop from the gnll . . . Smells ofmen. HIS gorge rose. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarette smoke, reek o. f p~ug, spilt beer, men's beery piss, the stale of ferm~nt '. " . Look on thIS pl~tur. e then on that. Scoffing up stewgravy with soppmg sippets of bread. LIck It off the plate, man! Get out of this.
Cannibalism brings men low: the Laestrygonians have frightful table-manners. Bloom again proves himself a Superior Person. He leaves, appalled, and goes to Davy Byrne's (,moral pub') for a glass of burgundy and a cheese sandwich. Cheese, 'the corpse of milk', can be disgusting when one thinks about it or (,the feety savour') separates smell from taste. Bloom eats with 'relish of disgust', Nosey Flynn's perilous dewdrop at his snout's end not helping. Flynn also, chatting to Bloom about Molly's concert tour and bringing in the name of Blazes Boylan ('0, by God, Blazes is a hairy chap') impairs digestion: 'A warm shock of air heat of mustard hauched on Mr Bloom's heart. He raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock.
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Bloom catches the image of 'some chap with a dose burning him' and then refuses to give shape to a particular horrid thought:
lfhe . . .
O!
Eh?
No . . . No.
No, no. I don't believe it. He wouldn't surely? No, no.
The hour is approaching for the knocking on the door of Blazes Boylan, the rehearsal of 'Love's Old Sweet Song'. Bloom escapes back into meditations on words-'parallax', Molly's folk-etymologi- sing of 'metempsychosis' (met him pikehoses)-and, through seeing five men advertising H. E. L. Y. S. on their five tall white hats, the safe world of advertising, though food (Plumtree's potted meat under the obituaries, 'cold meat department') is never very far away.
He meets Mrs Breen, an old friend of Molly's, who tells him,
among other things, that another friend, Mrs Mina Purefoy, is in
the lying-in hospital in HolIes Street-'Dr Horne got her in. She's
three days bad now. ' This is important, for it will send Bloom, ever kind-hearted, to visit the hospital and thus become irrevocably in- volved in Stephen's future: Stephen, drunken poet, temporarily moneyed, will be carousing there with medical students. Nor is this concern about Mrs Purefoy's confinement a mere plot-device. Bloom, in his womanly way, feels for women in labour: in the night- mare of the brothel scene he will undergo labour himself and give birth to grown-up sonS. It is an aspect of his maternal paternality.
Food, food, food. Constables march from College Street, off to
their beats, in goose-step, fat soup under their belts; others make their way, marching, to the station, 'bound for their troughs'. These constables stand for the digestive process-the march of the food down the gullet, the entry of the nutriment into the blood-stream, dispersed then-as these about the city-into the various organs of the body. The decay and renewal of the body's parts, already pre- figured in some of the images of the graveyard scene, is given more general treatment here:
Things go on same; day after day; squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out . . . Dignam carted off. Mirra Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.
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He thinks that 'tonight' may possibly be the translation of 'teco'. But 'teco' means 'with you', and it is hidden from Bloom that he will be taking a late collation with somebody important. Still, Bloom is never far wrong about anything, and this meeting will in fact give the night its meaning. ' ,
Food moves down the gullet into darkness. The caecum is an intestinal sac mth a blind end. It is appropriate that Bloom should try and make himself blind about what is going to happen that after- noon In Eccles Street ('Today. Today. Not think') and that he should help a blind young man across the road. But then he has to wrestle with an atrack of seeing that sends him into frightful con- fusion. 'Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is. ' Blazes Boylan. Bloom turns his eyes up to the eternal glory of pseudo-Greek architectnre, making for the Museum gate. He fiddles
in his pockets fnssily, trying not to see or be seen by Boylan. He enters the abode of learning and Greek goddesses, temporarily safe from the grinding and digesting and chewing and spewing of the gutsy world.
Two . . . Time going on. Hands moving. ' (La ci damn fa mana. ) 'Two. Not yet. ' But not long to go now.
Before Bloom leaves the bar to reply to the quiet message from his bladder he allows the main themes of the chapter to coalesce. The process of ingesting, digesting, excreting is low-'food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never looked. I'll look today. Keeper won't see. Bend down let something fall see if she. ' The architecture of the Library Museum is embellished by the statues of naked goddesses. Bloom thinks,
though he cannot be sure, that these immortals have no back pas- sages. This afternoon he will know for certain. There is a world beyond the endless peristalsis, the moving forward in circles, which men have to suffer. 'Nectar, imagine it drinking electricity: gods' food. ' He yearns towards it through idealised forms of his own "ife: 'Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires. '
While he is out he is discussed. Davy Byrne-a landlord, one who must speak well of everyone-says that he is a 'decent quiet man. I often saw him in here and I never once saw him, you know, over the line. ' Nosey Flynn gives Bloom the regular Dublin tribute of respect (he is generous, prudent) and suspicion (he is a freemason, he will never put anything in writing). And then Paddy Leonard and Ban- tam Lyons come in, accompanied by Tom Rochford who has (it is high time somebody had it) dyspepsia. Talk about the Ascot Gold Cup and Bantam Lyons's smug winking over the tip he has had ('I'm going to plunge five bob on my own') coincides with Bloom's
reappearance. 'That's the man now that gave it to me', whispers Bantam Lyons. Though Paddy Leonard goes 'Prrwht! ' in scorn we can feel the tension between Bloom and his fellow-citizens beginning to tighten.
But Bloom has now left the pub and we go with him. In the urinal that busy internal monologue has been ticking away, unheard of us and the author; we re-enter it in medias res: 'Something green it would have to be: spinach say. Then with those Rontgen rays searchlight you could,' A dog vomits 'a sick knuckly cud' and laps it up again. 'Surfeit. Returned with thanks having fully digested the contents. ' Lunch is ended; it is the hour for digestion, rumination, defecation (Bloom passes closestools in the window of a plumber, William Miller-an appropriate grinding name). The next meal will be supper. Bloom, his sound-track back on Don Giovanni, skips 'La ci darem' and moves on to 'Don Giovanni, a cenar teeo m'invitasti': 'Don Giovanni, thou hast me invited to come to supper tonight. '
124
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? ? 6: He Proves by Algebra
WE HAVE BEEN OPPRESSED BY GUTS, BY VISCERAL ORGIES. THE time has come for the brain to assert itself. T o a writer the brain'5 greatest achievement is literature, and the . greates~ na~e in all literature is William Shakespeare. The most mterestmg-If not the greatest-play of Shakespeare is Hamlet. The afternoon hour has struck for Stephen's promised disquisition on the meani~g of :hat play. The scene is the National Library and the techmque ~s a
dialectical one a moving towards truth-or at least plauslblhty- through the S~craticmethod of question and answer or proposition and counter-proposition. The Homenc parallel IS Scylla and Charyb- dis the rock and the whirlpool. The lines hold by the loosest of thr~ads the classical reference is fanciful rather than imaginative. And ye;, in a chapter dominated by Stephen D;dalus, ~magination burns as it has burned only once before-m the Proteus sectIOn. It is right to be reminded of that section and its presiding. art-philo- logy. Without language there IS no hterature; Wlth? ut a ht~ratureno
language can survive its speakers. It 1~ thIs fact m relatIOn to the Irish revival that John Eglmton (the edItor . of Dana, presented here under his own name) implies at the begmmng:
-Our young Irish bards have yet to create a figure which the world will
set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though I admue hIm, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.
It is Stephen's cue. . .
But the Qyaker librarian, Lyster, has already, m hls vague ,:ay,
opened the door to Shakespearian . discussion a~d at. the same. time hinted at the Scylla-Charybdis motIf. In Goethe s Wtlhelm MetSter- 'a great poet on a great brother poet'-the soul taking ar~sagainst a sea of troubles also comes to gnef agamst hard facts: whIrlpool and rock. George Russell (AE) is he,re t? O, full of s~i:ling,mystici~m about 'formless spiritual essences whlch, he says, It IS art s functtOn
126
to reveal. Stephen is all for then;"d basic rock of biographical fact: the solution to the problem of interpreting art lies in the life of the artist-at least, this is true of Shakespeare. Russell offers Plato's world of universals (Charybdis the whirlpool); Stephen prefers to steer close to hard rocky Scyllan Aristotle. What is wrong, his interior monologue seems to tell him, with the Irish art which Russell exemplifies is its wishy-washy whirly theosophical insub- stantiality. When Best (another historical character) comes in, it is to state that English Haines, that precious stone set in a silver sea, is waxing enthusiastic about Hyde's Lovesongs ~fCo1Znacht-swirling watery lyrics. But Russell's reference to Mallarme (France's 'finest flower of corruption') leads Best to mention the Mallarme prose- poem on Hamlet-'HAMLET ou LE DISTRAIT'-so a French provincial theatre advertised it-'Piece de Shakespeare'. Stephen translates 'Le Distrait' as 'The absentminded beggar'. Then he is off on the dangerous voyage of his Hamlet theory.
The whirlpool is figured in Stephen's interior monologue. He has been drinking, he bas had no lunch: thoughts and sensations swirl. But his speech is incisive and his facts are rock-solid. It is only his conclusions from the facts which fail to convince his auditors. He says, in effect, that it is wrong to identify Shakespeare with Hamlet, 'ineffectual dreamer' (Lyster's words). Hamlet is Hamnet, Shake- speare's own dead son; Shakespeare is the ghost, the wronged hus- band, deposed king; Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway, is the guilty queen. Russell, naturally, objects to this 'prying into the family life of a great man'. Stephen, steering by the rock of hard cash, remem- bers that he owes Russell a pound-'A. E. LO. U. '-and does not contradict him. But when Eglinton says that Ann Hathaway has no place in Shakespeare's works, that 'she died, for literature at least, before she was born', Stephen is quick and rude with his retorts. Ann was a wife and a mother (he thinks an instant of his own mother and his own guilt-'Who brought me into this world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers'), and if Shakespeare made an error in marrying her, then it was a volitional error, 'a portal of discovery' .
What, in fact, can an artist learn from a mother and a wife?
Socrates, remarks Eglinton, had a shrew-wife like Shakespeare; what useful 'portal of discovery' could she be? Stephen at once replies that he may have learned dialectic from her and from his midwife mother how to bring thoughts into the world. Fanciful but brilliant. And then we are back in the schoolroom, Stephen teaching
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He Prows by Algebra
? ? ? ? ? The Labyrinth
/ He Proves by Algebra
father who has steered beyond the whirlpool and the rock of passion to become a ghost, a shadow finding life in 'the heart of him who is the substance . . . the son consubstantial with the father'.
We approach the whirlpool of theology, as Buck Mulligan- loudly shouting 'Amen! ' from the doorway-is quick to remind us. 'You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? ' he says to Stephen. Mulligan, as we remember, is of the 'brood of mockers', and Stephen's interior monologue at once embarks on a grotesque credo about 'He Who Himselfbegot . . . sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self. ' But the librarian thinks that Stephen himself may be a mocker who has presented a mere paradox, though one can never be sure: 'The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious. ' We are led away, through Mulligan, from Shakespeare to Synge and are ready to forget about the father-son hypostasis. And then the eternal father himself appears, offstage, Bloom asking for the files of the Kilkenny People to find that design for the House of Keyes. 'A patient silhouette waited, listening. ' Suddenly all the literary brilliance echoes hollowly. We remember Bloom's warmth and solidity, a fatherly substance, no ghost.
The mocker mocks. Mulligan cries, 'The sheeny I What's his name? Ikey Moses? ' Bloom has left his card; Stephen hears his name forthe first time.
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. The presiding organ must be the lungs, and the built-in art the windy one of rhetoric. The chapter must move not by steps of logic but by the oratorical puffing device of the enthymeme-a type of syllogism (or logical statement) which suppresses its major or minor premise, assuming a truth rather than stating it. Joyce has laborious fun here. He crams the text with examples of rhetorical devices- figures of speech, puns, perversions of language; he also pins us down to the rhetorical craft of journalism by punctuating the action with headlines. These headlines provide a skeletal history of journal- ism. They begin stately-'IN THE HEART OF THE HIBER-
1I8
NIAN METROPOLlS'-and end facetious: 'SOPHIST WAL- LOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP' (even the popular press is drawn into the surge and thun- der of the Odyssey).
Bloom is concerned with arranging for a 'puff' for one of his
advertising clients, Alexander Keyes. 'WE SEE THE CANVAS- SER AT WORK' (canvas-ship-wind). He can have a 'little par' in the Telegraph (an evening paper managed by the Freeman) if he will give a three months' renewal of his advertisement. The ad- vertisement itself is to embody a rebus of two crossed keys, and Bloom has seen a suitable design in a Kilkenny paper: his search for this is, through the National Library, to bring him closer to Stephen. First, though, Keyes himself has to be consulted about the proposed arrangement: Bloom is caught up in a little gale of business. He enters the Telegraph office to telephone, and he finds a number of Dublin characters-Simon Dedalus, Ned Lambert, Professor Mac- Hugh (,professor' very much a courtesy title: the small Latin teacher has blown himself up)-laughing at a piece of windy rhetoric C. . . 'neath the shadows cast o'er its pensive bosom by the overarch- ing leafage of the giants of the forest'). Bloom's interior monologue is full of lEolian references to bladder-bags, gale days, windfalls, 'what's in the wind', weathercocks, 'all blows over" and Professor
MacHugh calls the author of the rhetoric an 'inflated windbag'. A" though driven by violent blasts, all the characters act testily or impatiently or move nimbly. The Editor, lEolus himself, is red and harsh and loud. If, in all this wind, we miss some of the rhetorical tropes, Lenehan the sports writer (one of the two gallants of Dub- liners) is ready to give us easy spoonerisms. 'There's a hurricane? blowing', cries the Editor, and even language is blown and dis- hevelled into 'I hear feetstoops' and 'Clamn dever'.
When Bloom goes off to see Keyes we have one of our rare oppor- tunities of viewing him from the back, 'a file of capering newsboys' in his wake. 'Look at the young guttersnire beron 1 him hue and cry,' says Lenehan, 'and you'll kick. 0 , my rib risible! Taking off his flat spaugs and the walk. Small nines. Steal upon larks. ' This is a typical reaction to Bloom. He can never be treated normally. He is either a figure of fun or a foreign mystery to be admired, feared, rarely trusted. Once he is gone, taking his interior monologue with him, the world grows flatter. The gap can only be filled by another interior monologue: it is time for Stephen, bullock-befriending bard,
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Hell, Wind, Cannibals
to enter with Mr Deasy's letter for the press. He is accompanied by Mr O'Madden Burke: 'Youth led by Experience visits Notoriety. ' Telemachus, young, blushing, has to hold his rhetorical own in the council of mature men, but the time is not yet. He must listen first, aware of his youth. When the Editor asks Stephen to write something for him, adding 'You can do it. I see it in your face', we are back to Conglowes and Father Dolan: 'See it in your face. See it in your eye.
Lazy idle little schemer. '
Bloom tries to re-enter, remotely, by telephone, but the Editor,
changeable as a wind-god should be, says: 'Tell him to go to hell',
unaware that he has been there already. Stephen is on his own, great
gales oforatory blown at him, though in that remembered eloquence of John F. Taylor Bloom's people are brought in as type of all oppressed nations, prototypical Irish. Stephen's thoughts are driven eastwards: 'By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bul- rushes: a man supple in co-mbat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart o f stone. ' Stephen asserts himself, makes himself mature, though not with loud speech: he has money, he suggests a drink. 'Chip of the old block! ' cries the Editor: Stephen is son of the wrong father. And yet the long anecdote he tells on the way to the pub has the 'Promised Land' theme in it-A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or the Parable of the Plums. It is a story of two elderly Dublin women who want to see Dublin from the top of Nelson's pillar. They climb up, provisioned with brawn, panbread, and plums, but t h e n - 'too tired to look up or down or to speak'-eat their plums and spit the stones out between the railings.
Bloom catches the Editor, himself 'caught in a whirl of wild newsboys', as he goes off to drink with Stephen and the rest. He has seen Keyes, and Keyes will give a two months' renewal of his advertisement if he can get his par in the Telegraph Saturday pink. But lEolus was inhospitable when Odysseus returned to him, all the adverse winds released from their bag. Now the Editor is rude. 'What will I tell him, Mr Crawford l' asks Bloom, and Mr Crawford replies: 'Will you tell him he can kiss my arse l' For good measure he adds: 'He can kiss my royal Irish arse. Any time he likes, tell him. ' Bloom, the new Moses, is scorned. The bits of Irish nationalist oratory which have been re-delivered in Stephen's presence were ready enough to draw their analogies from the Egyptian bondage, but a living breathing Jew is rudely slighted. And Stephen is arm in arm with these shiftless Irish citizens who are all wind, off for a drink, having told a very Irish story about a Promised Land with
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plum-stones dribbled all over it. Rhetoric is nothing but an empty
nOlse.
From the windy lungs to the windy stomach, or rather oesophagus. In the next chapter everybody goes to lunch. The Homeric parallel is to be found in the episode of the Laestrygonians, the cannibals who devoured so many of Odysseus's companions. Bloom and his fellow-citizens are all moved, peristaltically-as food is moved on the long road to digestion-through the great digestive tracts of the city; they are contained in a digestive system, and thus the cannibalistic motif holds well. Bloom's interior monologue is obsessed with food, often regurgitating with more disgust than gusto as he sees the one o'clock Dubliners gorging themselves like little Laestrygonians. And yet, in this welter of eating, we must hang on to some vestiges of human dignity. Bloom sees the ritual aspects of slaughtering and cooking, the blood victim and the burnt offering, and leads us on to the noblest of all human arts through considering the building of altars and the shedding of blood on the foundation of a public edi- fice. Architecture seems to blend strangely with eating, but Bloom finds a connection. These Dublin streets, coiling like intestines, are more than guts through which the citizen-gobbets are sluggishly impelled. They are a pretext for magnificent architectural erec- tions.
But food, food as gutsy excess, dominates Bloom's thoughts- gormandising priests ('I'd like to see them do the black fast Yom Kippur . . . One meal and a collation for fear he'd collapse on the altar'), drunken rats floating on vats of porter ('Drink till they puke again like christians'), nuns frying everything in the best butter. Even the Liffey brings to mind Reuben J. Dodd's son swallowing 'a good bellyful of that sewage', while greedy gulls flap strongly over the water. Bloom, always kind to animals, buys a Banbury cake to feed them. The little rhyme he makes up about them-'The hungry famished gull! Flaps o'er the waters dull' -leads him temporarily to the Hamlet motif (awaiting its full development in the chapter that comes after): 'Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit . . . ' He is not con- cerned about the meaning of the blank verse, however-only, and not with any great curiosity, the form. As for the gulls, they give him no thanks: 'Not even a caw. ' They are typical Dubliners.
The river flows on, rowboat at anchor on its 'treacly swells', and the rowboat advertises Kino's I I /- Trousers. Bloom gives this his professional approval and thinks 'All kind of places are good for ads. ' A quack doctor once stuck up clap-cure posters in public urinals;
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History is presented to Bloom as a sort of cannibalism, time eating cities as well as citizens, architecture itself (,Pyramids . . . built on bread and onions') ,m eater of building slaves but also food for time, leavmg the faeces of rubble and big stones. 'No one is anything. ' Bloom is depressed: 'Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed': the Laestrygonians have got at him.
Mter seeing George Russell (AE) and reflecting that aesthetes eat ethereal food-'only weggebobbles and fruit'-Bloom works towards hunger for lunch through love, an acceptable form of cannibalism: 'Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All kissed, yielded: in deep summer fields, tangled pressed grass . . . ' Joyce, according to his friend Frank Budgen, was fond of the fancy that the fermentation of food into alcoholic liquor derived from love-play. Bloom, a page or so later, is to recall a day with Molly on the hill of Howth: 'Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle.
Joy: I ate it: joy. ' But it is to the twitterings of generalised voices of
love that he enters the Burton restaurant: 'Jack, 10vel-Darling! -
Kiss me, Reggy! -My boy! -Love! '
We have now one of the most realistic evocations of disgust at the act of eating that literature has ever given liS. Meat-eating is, after all, a species of cannibalism: a pig or a rabbit can be, in life, a mem- ber of the family. Here the horror is neo-Hogarthian:
A man with an infant's saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet.
A man spitting back on his plate: half- masticated gristle: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump chop from the gnll . . . Smells ofmen. HIS gorge rose. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarette smoke, reek o. f p~ug, spilt beer, men's beery piss, the stale of ferm~nt '. " . Look on thIS pl~tur. e then on that. Scoffing up stewgravy with soppmg sippets of bread. LIck It off the plate, man! Get out of this.
Cannibalism brings men low: the Laestrygonians have frightful table-manners. Bloom again proves himself a Superior Person. He leaves, appalled, and goes to Davy Byrne's (,moral pub') for a glass of burgundy and a cheese sandwich. Cheese, 'the corpse of milk', can be disgusting when one thinks about it or (,the feety savour') separates smell from taste. Bloom eats with 'relish of disgust', Nosey Flynn's perilous dewdrop at his snout's end not helping. Flynn also, chatting to Bloom about Molly's concert tour and bringing in the name of Blazes Boylan ('0, by God, Blazes is a hairy chap') impairs digestion: 'A warm shock of air heat of mustard hauched on Mr Bloom's heart. He raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock.
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Bloom catches the image of 'some chap with a dose burning him' and then refuses to give shape to a particular horrid thought:
lfhe . . .
O!
Eh?
No . . . No.
No, no. I don't believe it. He wouldn't surely? No, no.
The hour is approaching for the knocking on the door of Blazes Boylan, the rehearsal of 'Love's Old Sweet Song'. Bloom escapes back into meditations on words-'parallax', Molly's folk-etymologi- sing of 'metempsychosis' (met him pikehoses)-and, through seeing five men advertising H. E. L. Y. S. on their five tall white hats, the safe world of advertising, though food (Plumtree's potted meat under the obituaries, 'cold meat department') is never very far away.
He meets Mrs Breen, an old friend of Molly's, who tells him,
among other things, that another friend, Mrs Mina Purefoy, is in
the lying-in hospital in HolIes Street-'Dr Horne got her in. She's
three days bad now. ' This is important, for it will send Bloom, ever kind-hearted, to visit the hospital and thus become irrevocably in- volved in Stephen's future: Stephen, drunken poet, temporarily moneyed, will be carousing there with medical students. Nor is this concern about Mrs Purefoy's confinement a mere plot-device. Bloom, in his womanly way, feels for women in labour: in the night- mare of the brothel scene he will undergo labour himself and give birth to grown-up sonS. It is an aspect of his maternal paternality.
Food, food, food. Constables march from College Street, off to
their beats, in goose-step, fat soup under their belts; others make their way, marching, to the station, 'bound for their troughs'. These constables stand for the digestive process-the march of the food down the gullet, the entry of the nutriment into the blood-stream, dispersed then-as these about the city-into the various organs of the body. The decay and renewal of the body's parts, already pre- figured in some of the images of the graveyard scene, is given more general treatment here:
Things go on same; day after day; squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out . . . Dignam carted off. Mirra Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.
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He thinks that 'tonight' may possibly be the translation of 'teco'. But 'teco' means 'with you', and it is hidden from Bloom that he will be taking a late collation with somebody important. Still, Bloom is never far wrong about anything, and this meeting will in fact give the night its meaning. ' ,
Food moves down the gullet into darkness. The caecum is an intestinal sac mth a blind end. It is appropriate that Bloom should try and make himself blind about what is going to happen that after- noon In Eccles Street ('Today. Today. Not think') and that he should help a blind young man across the road. But then he has to wrestle with an atrack of seeing that sends him into frightful con- fusion. 'Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is. ' Blazes Boylan. Bloom turns his eyes up to the eternal glory of pseudo-Greek architectnre, making for the Museum gate. He fiddles
in his pockets fnssily, trying not to see or be seen by Boylan. He enters the abode of learning and Greek goddesses, temporarily safe from the grinding and digesting and chewing and spewing of the gutsy world.
Two . . . Time going on. Hands moving. ' (La ci damn fa mana. ) 'Two. Not yet. ' But not long to go now.
Before Bloom leaves the bar to reply to the quiet message from his bladder he allows the main themes of the chapter to coalesce. The process of ingesting, digesting, excreting is low-'food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never looked. I'll look today. Keeper won't see. Bend down let something fall see if she. ' The architecture of the Library Museum is embellished by the statues of naked goddesses. Bloom thinks,
though he cannot be sure, that these immortals have no back pas- sages. This afternoon he will know for certain. There is a world beyond the endless peristalsis, the moving forward in circles, which men have to suffer. 'Nectar, imagine it drinking electricity: gods' food. ' He yearns towards it through idealised forms of his own "ife: 'Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires. '
While he is out he is discussed. Davy Byrne-a landlord, one who must speak well of everyone-says that he is a 'decent quiet man. I often saw him in here and I never once saw him, you know, over the line. ' Nosey Flynn gives Bloom the regular Dublin tribute of respect (he is generous, prudent) and suspicion (he is a freemason, he will never put anything in writing). And then Paddy Leonard and Ban- tam Lyons come in, accompanied by Tom Rochford who has (it is high time somebody had it) dyspepsia. Talk about the Ascot Gold Cup and Bantam Lyons's smug winking over the tip he has had ('I'm going to plunge five bob on my own') coincides with Bloom's
reappearance. 'That's the man now that gave it to me', whispers Bantam Lyons. Though Paddy Leonard goes 'Prrwht! ' in scorn we can feel the tension between Bloom and his fellow-citizens beginning to tighten.
But Bloom has now left the pub and we go with him. In the urinal that busy internal monologue has been ticking away, unheard of us and the author; we re-enter it in medias res: 'Something green it would have to be: spinach say. Then with those Rontgen rays searchlight you could,' A dog vomits 'a sick knuckly cud' and laps it up again. 'Surfeit. Returned with thanks having fully digested the contents. ' Lunch is ended; it is the hour for digestion, rumination, defecation (Bloom passes closestools in the window of a plumber, William Miller-an appropriate grinding name). The next meal will be supper. Bloom, his sound-track back on Don Giovanni, skips 'La ci darem' and moves on to 'Don Giovanni, a cenar teeo m'invitasti': 'Don Giovanni, thou hast me invited to come to supper tonight. '
124
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? ? 6: He Proves by Algebra
WE HAVE BEEN OPPRESSED BY GUTS, BY VISCERAL ORGIES. THE time has come for the brain to assert itself. T o a writer the brain'5 greatest achievement is literature, and the . greates~ na~e in all literature is William Shakespeare. The most mterestmg-If not the greatest-play of Shakespeare is Hamlet. The afternoon hour has struck for Stephen's promised disquisition on the meani~g of :hat play. The scene is the National Library and the techmque ~s a
dialectical one a moving towards truth-or at least plauslblhty- through the S~craticmethod of question and answer or proposition and counter-proposition. The Homenc parallel IS Scylla and Charyb- dis the rock and the whirlpool. The lines hold by the loosest of thr~ads the classical reference is fanciful rather than imaginative. And ye;, in a chapter dominated by Stephen D;dalus, ~magination burns as it has burned only once before-m the Proteus sectIOn. It is right to be reminded of that section and its presiding. art-philo- logy. Without language there IS no hterature; Wlth? ut a ht~ratureno
language can survive its speakers. It 1~ thIs fact m relatIOn to the Irish revival that John Eglmton (the edItor . of Dana, presented here under his own name) implies at the begmmng:
-Our young Irish bards have yet to create a figure which the world will
set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though I admue hIm, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.
It is Stephen's cue. . .
But the Qyaker librarian, Lyster, has already, m hls vague ,:ay,
opened the door to Shakespearian . discussion a~d at. the same. time hinted at the Scylla-Charybdis motIf. In Goethe s Wtlhelm MetSter- 'a great poet on a great brother poet'-the soul taking ar~sagainst a sea of troubles also comes to gnef agamst hard facts: whIrlpool and rock. George Russell (AE) is he,re t? O, full of s~i:ling,mystici~m about 'formless spiritual essences whlch, he says, It IS art s functtOn
126
to reveal. Stephen is all for then;"d basic rock of biographical fact: the solution to the problem of interpreting art lies in the life of the artist-at least, this is true of Shakespeare. Russell offers Plato's world of universals (Charybdis the whirlpool); Stephen prefers to steer close to hard rocky Scyllan Aristotle. What is wrong, his interior monologue seems to tell him, with the Irish art which Russell exemplifies is its wishy-washy whirly theosophical insub- stantiality. When Best (another historical character) comes in, it is to state that English Haines, that precious stone set in a silver sea, is waxing enthusiastic about Hyde's Lovesongs ~fCo1Znacht-swirling watery lyrics. But Russell's reference to Mallarme (France's 'finest flower of corruption') leads Best to mention the Mallarme prose- poem on Hamlet-'HAMLET ou LE DISTRAIT'-so a French provincial theatre advertised it-'Piece de Shakespeare'. Stephen translates 'Le Distrait' as 'The absentminded beggar'. Then he is off on the dangerous voyage of his Hamlet theory.
The whirlpool is figured in Stephen's interior monologue. He has been drinking, he bas had no lunch: thoughts and sensations swirl. But his speech is incisive and his facts are rock-solid. It is only his conclusions from the facts which fail to convince his auditors. He says, in effect, that it is wrong to identify Shakespeare with Hamlet, 'ineffectual dreamer' (Lyster's words). Hamlet is Hamnet, Shake- speare's own dead son; Shakespeare is the ghost, the wronged hus- band, deposed king; Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway, is the guilty queen. Russell, naturally, objects to this 'prying into the family life of a great man'. Stephen, steering by the rock of hard cash, remem- bers that he owes Russell a pound-'A. E. LO. U. '-and does not contradict him. But when Eglinton says that Ann Hathaway has no place in Shakespeare's works, that 'she died, for literature at least, before she was born', Stephen is quick and rude with his retorts. Ann was a wife and a mother (he thinks an instant of his own mother and his own guilt-'Who brought me into this world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers'), and if Shakespeare made an error in marrying her, then it was a volitional error, 'a portal of discovery' .
What, in fact, can an artist learn from a mother and a wife?
Socrates, remarks Eglinton, had a shrew-wife like Shakespeare; what useful 'portal of discovery' could she be? Stephen at once replies that he may have learned dialectic from her and from his midwife mother how to bring thoughts into the world. Fanciful but brilliant. And then we are back in the schoolroom, Stephen teaching
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He Prows by Algebra
? ? ? ? ? The Labyrinth
/ He Proves by Algebra
father who has steered beyond the whirlpool and the rock of passion to become a ghost, a shadow finding life in 'the heart of him who is the substance . . . the son consubstantial with the father'.
We approach the whirlpool of theology, as Buck Mulligan- loudly shouting 'Amen! ' from the doorway-is quick to remind us. 'You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? ' he says to Stephen. Mulligan, as we remember, is of the 'brood of mockers', and Stephen's interior monologue at once embarks on a grotesque credo about 'He Who Himselfbegot . . . sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self. ' But the librarian thinks that Stephen himself may be a mocker who has presented a mere paradox, though one can never be sure: 'The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious. ' We are led away, through Mulligan, from Shakespeare to Synge and are ready to forget about the father-son hypostasis. And then the eternal father himself appears, offstage, Bloom asking for the files of the Kilkenny People to find that design for the House of Keyes. 'A patient silhouette waited, listening. ' Suddenly all the literary brilliance echoes hollowly. We remember Bloom's warmth and solidity, a fatherly substance, no ghost.
The mocker mocks. Mulligan cries, 'The sheeny I What's his name? Ikey Moses? ' Bloom has left his card; Stephen hears his name forthe first time.
