No More Learning

Stephen himself, with Thomistic logic, insists on the right true end of sex:
Gramercy, what ofthose Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise. which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we.
Bloom and Stephen, however, are alone in according reverence to
the sacred oxen.
This chapter has a function over and above stylistic display, symbolism, the slow pushing-on with the story. Joyce has amassed a great deal of material which has not been developed, and the time has come to use it. He is concerned here primarily with shapes, forms, styles of writing, but form cannot exist without content. The content, then, may as well come from the odds and ends, the slogans, songs, small obsessions of the day. Thus, when-in this historical survey of English prose-it becomes necessary to imitate the style of the Authorised Version of the Bible, the subject-matter is drawn from those early musings of Stephen on the beach, the wild geese, exiled artists and patriots whom Ireland has forgotten:
Look forth now, my people, upon the land of behest, even from Horeb and from Nebo and from Pisgah, and from the Horns of Hatten unto a land flowing with milk and honey. But thou has suckled me with a bitter milk: my moon and sun thou hast quenched for ever. And thou hast left me alone for ever in the dark ways of my bitterness: and with a kiss of ashes hast thou kissed my mouth.
Stephen's thoughts of the tied-up navel-strings of the world leading back to the ultimate telephone exchange find a reference in a pastiche of Sir Thomas Browne:
And as no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness.
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The point about fertili~is well taken, but Bloom is more important t~an Mr Purefoy: he IS supposed to be all their daddies. With ddliculty, in a blaze ofslang, neologisms, foreign loan-words, pidgin (the language of the future I), we follow Stephen and his fellow- drunks to Burke's. pub, and we follow Bloom solicitously following after. Then we thmk we hear Stephen's voice:
Lynch! Hey? Sign on long o. me. ,Denzille lan~ this way. Change here for Bawdyhouse. We two, she saId, WIll seek the kips where shady Mary is.
We have to seek those kips ourselves before we can COme into the cle~r light of sanity, and even then it is a drunken phantasmagoric samty, the only kind available in Nighttown. It seems strange that we should have to go to the next chapter to find out what has hap- pened in this.
And. yet, of all the episodes of Ulysses, this is the one I should most lIke to have written, and there are many authors who would aip'ee with me. It is an author's chapter, a dazzliug and authoritative dlspla~of w~at. Englis~ can do. Moreover, it is a fulfilment of every author s egonsncal deSIre not merely to add to English literature but to enclo;e what IS already there. Literary history is a line; Joyce wants to s~e l~ a. s a series. of concentric circles, himself the outer ring. Agam, It IS heartenmg to be reminded that literary creation-iu w~atever century-is an act of homage to the oxen of fertility, that writers are the remarkablest progenitors of them all. But it is a pity that Stephen and Bloom have to get lost in the process of glorifying an art that is supposed to be their servant.
10: Men into Swine
THAT 'OXEN OF THE SUN' CHAPTER CELEBRATED FERTILITY, THE
womb, the sober art of medicine. Now everything turns bad. Instead of a maternity hospital, a brothel; instead of mothers, whores. The locomotor apparatus-which syphilis can ruin with tabes dorsalis-and the wayward and dangerous art of magic rule in the land of Circe. In the last chapter rain fell on the earth; now all is mist, twisting the real into the fantastic. It is Mr Bloom's strangest territ? ry and not one he would himself choose. But, we learn, he feels It a fatherly duty to follow out Stephen's night to its crapulous end. Stephen and Lynch-the peripatetic audience of theorising Stephen in A Portrait-have come to Mabbot Street by train from Westland Row;. all other friends-especially Mulligan and Haines, who cadged drmks to the end- have deserted the drunken poet. Drunken poets do well in brothel districts, but Bloom fears disaster for the son he wants to adopt. He is well able to look after him, as well as himself. He has drunk little in Burke's. He carries the flower moly to protect him from sensual enchantment-his recent ejacula- tIOn on the beach, the spiritual presence of his wife (her name is very nearly 'Moly'). The potato he carries in his pocket, a homely talisman for warding off rheumatism, will serve as the outward sigu of these inward graces: it is not romantic, it is something that, with its aura of home and normality, may well ward off a whore's ad- vances. Bloom also has his soap, faithful back-pocket companion of the day's wanderings. To weigh down his pockets further, he buys himself a pig's trotter and a sheep's foot. These are also protective talismans, but they are drawn into the huge animal symbolism of Circe's island. Gree turned Odysseus's companions into swine. Here there is more a zoo than a farm-every form of beast, especially the lowlier forms, will swal10w a man's soul. When man remains man he becomes twisted, stunted, drooling. Only Bloom remains the paragon of animals, Odysseus the untouched of any debasing wand.
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l\1en into Swine
This chapter is the longest in the book- 142 pages in the 1960 Bodley Head edition. Structurally, it is the most important. We have seen, in the previous episode, how strongly Joyce is feeling the urgency of developing his themes. Among the oxen these themes have been treated within a series of formal frameworks which sug- gests a gigantic musical suite. Imagine an opera of Wagnerian dimensions. Two acts have gone by and innumerable musical themes -though some, perhaps, only half a bar long-have been presented. The third act calls for a survey of musical forms from plainchant to post-Webem serialism. The composer would be a fool ifhe invented new themes, knowing that his audience would not yet have dige~ted the existing ones. And so these latter must appear in new gUlses,
combined in new relationships. Supposing now another act. has to follow. The audience can take neither fresh themes nor formal ingenuity. All it will be able to take is a free fantasy, again based on existing themes. This is pretty well the position at this phase of Ulysses. .
Perhaps sonata-form is a better analogy than opera. In the expos. ,-
tion section o f a movement in sonata-form there are usually two mam
contrasting subjects around which cluster groups of subsidiary themes. In Ulysses we have had the equivalent of these in Bloom and Stephen, each with his many satellites of characteristic preoccupa- tions. The exposition will not make sense until it has been followed by a development section in which the subjects combine, lend each other their subsidiary motifs, swirl about each other in an area of dreamlike fantasy, bump into each other drunkenly, melt into each other on the discovery of previously unguessed affinities. Mter that- in the recapitulation section-they can appear soberly and singly, properly dressed and tidied up, but they cannot be as they were before, in the exposition. They have learned stra? ge thmgs about each other and about themselves, they have had a mght out together. That region of dreams has influenced reality.
The technique of this 'Circe' chapter is concerned les~ with dream than with hallucination. The characters are presented dIrectly to us, in dramatic form, and they meet their fantasies directly. Bloom becomes Lord Mayor of Dublin, gives birth to a number of sons, sees the building of the New Bloomusalem, turns into Ruby, Pride of the Ring, witnesses the end of the world. If he is really seeing these fantasies he is either drunk or drugged. But he is not; he is fully sober. He is exhausted, yes, but not exhausted enough to conjure such visions. The hallucinations, then, are coming from without, are
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summoned by the author's own magic. Such magic is capable of making an apparition of Stephen's dead mother use a locutIOn from Martha Clifford's letter to Bloom, and Bloom and Stephen see, in a mirror, the same cuckolded travesty of Shakespeare burbling a line of Goldsmith. If the phantasmagorias are subjective, then Bloom and Stephen are the same person. It is easier to conclude that this is a genuine free fantasy in the manner of a sonata's development section, that the rapprochement between Stephen and Bloom is something that is made, through magic, to happen extraneously, and that this huge dramatic exercise is not dramatic at all.
Only one real, as opposed to hallucinatoty, event is of any si~ifi- cance. This is the striking down of Stephen by a couple of Bntish soldiers at the end of the section. All flee except Bloom, who then assumes responsibility for him. This could have happened as easily outside Burke's in the previous chapter and Joyce, in the interests of fictional economy, could have saved himself a great deal of work. But it is dangerous now to think in such terms. Havmg come so far with Bloom (and this is Bloom's chapter more than Stephen's), we must go all the way, uncover every conceivable fantasy of which Bloom is capable and see him-like Bottom-in a sort of grisly faity- land. No critic, to my knowledge, has yet invoked A Midsummer Night's Dream as a classical source-the uncommon common man set upon by magic. The usual comparison is with the Walpurgisnacht
scene in Goethe's Faust and Flaubert's Tentation. But Shakespeare is, first as last, the true patron of Ulysses.
Shakespeare's fairies . have comic-fantastic names. Joyc~'s th. ree whores sum up the whole physical world: Zoe stands for ammal hfe, Florry for vegetable life, and Kitty for the mineral kingdom. The presiding sorceress, Circe herself, is Bella Cohen, the brothel- madam, who, in the most masochistic part of ~he ~loom fantasy, becomes a man and changes her name to Bello. These characters, like the brutal British soldiers, are real enough, but they inhabit the same world as the many dead, fictional, and actual-though-absent persons who flutter or gibber in then off again, and they are subj1ect to the same laws. or lackof them. The vision that merely touched the fringes of Gabriel Conroy's consciousness in 'The Dead' is here not just palpable but larger than life: there is only one world, and it
belongs equally to living and dead, to animal, vegetable, mineral and,
for that matter, abstract.
The two soldiers, Privates Compton and Carr (their names taken from personal enemies ofJoyce in Zurich) appear very early, making
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Men into Swine
'a volleyed fart' burst from their mouths and calling 'What ho, parsonl' when they see black-garbed Stephen. In swirling fog, the companions of Gerty MacDowell, together with the sandcastle- building twins Tommy and Jacky Caffrey, are seen, debased, animal- ised. Then Bloom makes his entrance, his interior monologue now an audible soliloquy. His father and mother speak to him, Rudolph Virag a comic stage Jew ('They make you kaput, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps') and Ellen Bloom a pantomime dame. They are hallucinations from the author's brain, not his hero's, but there is nothing vague or shadowy about them. The physical appearance of all the apparitions is most carefully described and their dress
detailed scrupulously. Poor suicidal Virag is described as follows: 'A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the long caftan of an elder in Zion and a smoking cap with magenta tassels. Horned spectacles hang down at the wings of the nose. Yellow poison streaks are on the drawn face. ' Ellen Bloom wears a 'stringed . mobcap, crinoline and bustle, widow Twankey's blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her hair plaited in a crispine net'. Under her 'reef of skirt' there is a 'striped blay petticoat' from which fall out 'a phial, an Agnus Dei,. shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll'.
Of course, this detail is characteristic of a certain kind of drugged vision, but Joyce's concern is with the symbolism of clothes in the context of magic. Clothes are what we. usually see of a person, but they are so easily changed. They are a kind of secondary body. Magic can change the external form of a creature (Circe turns men into swine) but cannot affect the deeper, God-willed, process of metem- psychosis. Bloom is perpetually changing his secondary body-his changes of costume are uncountable- but he remains the same Bloom. Here, encountering his father and mother, he appears in youth's clothes, mud-caked with racing with the harriers: '. . . smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in brown Alpine hat, wearing gent's sterling silver waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one side of him coated with stiffening mud. '
As for the transformation-inta-beasts motif, this is hinted at in
animal imagery (Molly Bloom appears in Oriental dress, with camel,
'plump as a pampered pouter pigeon'; a whore, squeaking, 'flaps her
bat shawl and runs') and also more boldly expressed in terms of actual enchantment. Thus dead Paddy Dignam appears as a beagle with dachshund coat, worming his way down a coalhole; Tom Roch-
160
ford, 'robinredbreasted', executes a 'daredevil salmon leap in the air'. The human locomotor apparatus itself is enchanted.
Bloom's bestial imaginings are brought into open court-society women give hair-raising evidence and promise dire punishments: 'Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. That cat-o'-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him. ' Bloom's masochism shows in joyous tremu- lous nakedness while a newsboy goes by: 'Messenger ofthe Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph with Saint Patrick's Day Supplement. Containing the new addresses of all the cuckolds in Dublin. ' But Bloom is not disqualified from being crowned Leopold the First, 'His Most Catholic Majesty'. The mob turns against him, as it turned against Parnell, and, despite his miracles (including giving birth to 'eight male yellow and white children', each with 'his name printed in legible letters on his shirtfront: Nasodoro, Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindoree, Silversmile, Silberselber, Vifargent, Panargyros'), he is burnt alive by the Dublin Fire Brigade. And, while all this, and more, is going on, he is being taken by Zoe to Bella Cohen's brothel.
Stephen and Lynch are ! here, as well as Zoe's 'two sister whores'.
Florry has, appropriately,' a stye on her eyelid, and Stephen tells us
where we are, tipsily erudite about 'priests haihooping round David's
that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar'. The perversion of the Christian rite in an eventual Black Mass is prefigured here. There are fresh apparitions, including an astonishing one o f Bloom's grandfather-a sort of f1y;ng weasel that comes down the chimney- before Bella Cohen, massive whoremistress, enters. Almost at once she turns into Bello, all aromatic he-man, and Bloom becomes a shuddering female. But, female or not, he is still taunted for his lack of manhood:
BELLO: . . . Can you do a man's job?
BLOOM: Eccles street . . .
BELLO: (Sarcastically) I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world but
there's a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my gay young fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts allover it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you 1Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! He's no eunuch.
Bloom's humiliation knows no limits, but it is a humiliation he secretly-here,ofcourse,notatallsecretly-desires. Soonthepractical man reasserts himself, shakes off the hallucinations, and stops
Stephen from giving all his money to the whores. But the masochist ,6,
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Men into Swine
cannot hide for long. Bloom, dressed as a flunkey, an antlered hatstand on his head, acquiesces in his cuckolding, watching Boylan and Molly in the act, urging them on to the laughter of the whores and the ecstasy of the two Sirens from the Ormond. And then:
(Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection o/the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall. )
SHAKESPEARE: (In dignified ventriloquy) 'Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the
vacant mind. (To Bloom) Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible. Gaze. (He crow, with a black capon', laugh) ! agogo! How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymomun. Iagogogo!
That vision is not possible, apparently, to either Stephen or Bloom alone-only to both together.
Stephen 'gabbles, with marionette jerks', a broken English pros-
pectus of the delights of Paris night-life: '. . . Enter gentlemen to see in mirrors every positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omelette on the belly piece de Shakespeare. ' All Stephen's dignity is gone, the intellectual imagination has been replaced by a grotesque leer. Both he and Bloom have sunk to the bottom. What is needed now is the horrid consummation o f everything in a Dance of Death.
The pianola plays 'My Girl's a Yorkshire Girl' and living creatures whirl with dead, the dance ending in the sudden shocking rising from the grave of Stephen's mother 'in leper grey with a wreath of faded orange blossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with grave mould . . . She fixes her bluecircled hol- low eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word . . . ' A choir of virgins and confessors sings without voice, while Buck Mulligan, in jester's dress on top of a tower, weeps molten butter into a split scone. Grotesquely terrible though it is, this hallucination loses something by coming after so many others: our capacity for being harrowed is somewhat blunted by this time. But Stephen's mother, after using words associated with Bloom- 'More women than men in the world' and 'I pray for you in "my other world' -identifies herself with the suffering Christ and, crying 'Beware! God's hand1', makes a 'green crab with malignant red eyes' stick its claws in Stephen's heart. Stephen shrieks his non serviam, turns himself into Siegfried so that his ashplant becomes the
sword Nothung, and smashes the chandelier of the brothel parlour. In trying to kill the butcher God, Stephen destroys both time and space-the nightmare of history and the noise in the street
162
(back to the 'Nestor' chapter) shatter in glass and toppling masonry. Stephen dashes into the street to meet a fresh mixture ofactuality and fantasy, Bloom following swiftly after. The noise which is God is not there, but the British State, in the shape of Privates Carr and Compton, is waiting. The soldiers are ttuculent, accusing Stephen of insulting their girl-friend (who happens to be also Gerty Mac-
Dowell's). Stephen, like Bloom, preaches pacifism, despite the voices that cry revenge for Ireland's wrongs. The milkwoman. of the first chapter of the book appears as 'Old Gummy Granny', but Stephen recognises 'the old sow that eats her farrow'. Edward the Seventh preaches peace more grotesquely and insincerely than Stephen, an entente cordiale bucket labelled 'Defense d'uriner' in his hand, masonic
. robes over a white jersey stitched with an image of the Sacred Heart. The Citizen confronts Major Tweedy, Molly Bloom's father; the dead of Dublin rise; witches ride the air; Armageddon is sanctified with a Black Mass. Then language cracks into violent obscenity:
PRIVATE CARR: (With firocious articulation) I'll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! I'll wring the bastard fucker's bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!
Bloom the appeaser, the man of good will and calm sense, fails to stop Carr from hitting Stephen in the face. Stephen lies stunned, the crowd clears on the coming of the police, and Bloom assumes responsibility for the dead-out poet. It is the big moment of the book.
Stephen, more drunk than hurt, murmurs words of the song he sang for his dying mother-'Who . . . drive . . . Fergns now. And pierce . . . wood's woven shade? . . . ' Bloom does not understand: 'Fergnson, I think I caught. A girl. Some girl. ' Then he too murmurs words of magical import: '. . . swear that I will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any part or parts, art or arts . . . in the rough sands of the sea . . . a cabletow's length from the shore . . . where the tide ebbs . . . and flows . . . ' The imposed magic ofthe sorceress has dissolved. The stumbling and capering and gibbering of men turned to animals is no more; there is a great nocturnal stillness.
Stephen and Bloom must, if they want magic, now make their own. Stephen is a poet, his art is magical. Bloom is a mason, member of an honourable and secret craft. He stands gnarding Stephen, 'his fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master'. At once, as by the conjuration of a white and wholesome sorcery, the final vision of the night takes shape. It is of Rudy, Bloom's dead son as he might have . 163
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been had he reached eleven years (he would have been just that now), not eleven days. Bloom, wonderstruck, calls his name inaudibly. But Rudy is a fairy boy, 'a changeling, kidnapped'; he reads Hebrew, kissing the page, smiling, unseeing. The forces of life waited on Stephen's dead mother; the trappings ofdeath have been transmuted here to the fanciful dress ofresurrection- the glass and bronze ofthe little coffin have become 'glass shoes and a little bronze helmet'; the white coverlet oflamb's wool that Molly made to keep her son warm in his coffin has turned to a 'white lambkin' peeping out of his waistcoat pocket; the dead delicate mauve face is a live delicate mauve face. In his Eton suit, drawn from his impossibled future, Rudy hovers above recumbent Stephen. Only the hardest-hearted
of readers will withhold his tears.
II: Home is the Sailor
'CIRCE' ENDS THE ODYSSEY PROPER; NOW WE MUST HAVE THE Nostos, the going home. In a sense, this is less a return than a fresh start, since Bloom will be going home with Stephen and three lives will now be modified for ever. We see now another reason for the massive musical development of themes in the hallucinations of the brothel district: Joyce wanted to 'work them out' in both senses of the term-purge them by magicalising them. The extent to which he has done this is best seen, or heard, in the bit of surrealism which represents the pianola-version of 'My Girl's a Yorkshire Girl' (Stephen's 'Dance of death'). Let us look back a little.
In the 'Wandering Rocks' episode Dilly Dedalus, Stephen's sister, sees and hears 'the lacquey by the door of Dillon's auction-rooms' shake his handbell : 'Bar. ng! ' then 'Bang! ' then, after a feeble shaking in response to Mr Dedalus's curse, a loud bang again. In the same episode a one-legged sailor swings his way to Eccles Street, singing, receiving an alms from Molly Bloom. Corny Kelleher, at the same time, 'closed his long daybook and glanced with his drooping eye at a pine coffinlid sentried in a corner'. In the 'lEolus' chapter Stephen told the story of the two 'Frauenzimmer' (this takes us back also to the 'Proteus' scene) climbing to the top of the 'onehandled adul- terer's' column and spitting down plum-stones. Bloom, near the beginning of his odyssey, saw the poster of a cycle race showing a 'cyclist doubled up like a cod in a pot'. In the 'Cyclops' episode one ofthe parodies presents the Provost-Marshal weeping over a beautiful
girl to whom a man due for hanging has said farewell: 'Blimey it makes me kind of bleeding cry, straight, it does, when I see her cause I thinks of myoid mashtub what's waiting for me down Limehouse way. ' Add Father Conmee, the Rev. Love (a minor character of the 'Wandering Rocks'), Stephen's 'Proteus' memory of exiled Kevin Egan's lighting a 'gunpowder' cigarette with 'a blue fuse match',
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odd beast-themes, drum-beats, and the words of 'My Girl's a
Yorkshire Girl', and you end up with the following:
(Bang fresh barang bang oflacquey's qell, ~orse, nag, steer, pigtings, Cont11;ee on Christass lame crutch and leg sador m cockboat armfolded Topepul/tng hitching stamp hornpipe through and through, Baraabum J On nags, hogs, bel/horses, Gadarene swine, Corny in coffin: Steel shark stone. onehan~/ed Nelson two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstamed from pram falling bawltng. Gum, he's a champion. Puschlue peer from bar~el re~. evensong Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dtlly with snowcake no fancy clothes. Then in last wiswitchhack lumbertng up a! ,d down bump masktub sort ofviceroy ard reine relish [or tub/umber bumpshtre rost. Barabum 1)
A fundamental rule of sonata-form is this: never present a tune or a theme, however lowly or fragmentary, unless rou intend ~o repeat it at a- later stage-or, preferab~y, transform It, develop It,
combine it with other thematIc matenal. Joyce has fulfilled that, even to the extent of realising the comic possibilities of a mere name-as when, just before the Black Mass, we re-encounter the librarian of 'Scylla and Charybdis' like this: 'Quakerlyster ~lasters blisters'. Ulysses differs from other novels in emphaslsmg the Impor- tance o f musical pattern. If, writing straightforward. fictIOn, I prese,nt
my hero in the first chapter scratchi~g~isnose, that. Is mere naturahs- tic detail. To Joyce it would be slgmficant, not m terms of sym- bolism but in terms of a growing tapestry-a little figure that, worked into one comer of the carpet, must eventually appear in another comer for the sake of forrr. al balance. Music is a sort of tapestry realised in the medium of time. Time changes things;,h~nce the
balance achieved by identical repetition of the same motIf IS out of place; there has to be a transformation, however slight. Another way of looking at this techmcal pecuhanty of Ulysses calls on a larger symbolism, that which encloses th~ whole book. Thtoughout ~he whole period of Odysseus's wandermg,. Penelop~ has been weavmg during the day, unravelling at night. Nlghttown IS the place for un- ravelling: the complex fabric of ~e. book,. as woven from t~e Telemachia to the 'Oxen of the Sun episode, IS detroyed by magic, and we see ['. miliar elements of the pattern dissolving. Soon there
is nothing left. Penelope's trick has been found out. The essen~eof the Nostos is a kind of nakedness-no more clothes, very few tncks, all disguises tentative and easily seen through. .
The nakedness of this home-troped tnlogy takes a trIO of forms. First Stephen and Bloom go together to a cabman's shelter fo; a bun ;nd a cup of coffee. Theyare tired; wit and even understandmg
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Home is the Sailor
go to sleep; they are a couple ofmen-one near middle age, the other
very young-with little of importance or even interest to say to each other: they are stripped to mere paradigm. The prose-style is past playing tricks of virtuosity; it is limp and clumsy though it pretends to brightness; it is fit only for a provincial newspaper or for the waste-paper basket. Our two noctambules (as they are archly called) go to NO. 7 Eccles Street for more talk and a temperance nightcap; here the nakedness is of another kind-a bare skeletal catechism in which everything is reduced to factual statistics. The final disrobing is, appropriately, conducted by Molly Bloom-no more civilised disguises, the pretensions ofmen exploded. All clothes off, we submit to this Eternal Woman who is also Mother Earth. The protean forms that life takes on dissolve utterly. We end with one word only: 'yes'.
In Joyce, though, any direct statement has to be qualified, and
metempsychosis teaches us that even nakedness may be a disguise. We strip so much away in the Nostos, but we do not discard the sense of a complex pattern. The end looks back to the beginning, and the Telemachia and Nostos exactly balance each other. The first chapter of the first section was a young man's narrative in which only one character (the milkwoman) was old. The first chapter of the last section is a narrative in which only old and middle-aged men figure, save for one character only-the young Stephen. The middle chapter of the Telemachia was a personal catechism; the middle chapter of the Nostos is an impersonal one. The final chapter of each section is a long monologue: in the Telemachia it was male (Stephen on the beach); in the Nostos it is female (Molly in bed). We end with the artist, then, the shaper; even the earth-mother is subject to the divine imagination. Or is she? Penelope is a weaver. Art may be one ofthe toys that the earth-mother gives to her children to keep them quiet-a sort of parody of reality.
Let. us go back to the beginning of the Nostos. The Homeric counferpart is the meeting between Odysseus and Telemachus in the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus. The element of deceit, of dis- guise, is fundamental, since Odysseus must not be recognised by any of the suitors he has come to Ithaca to quell. But, in this atmo- sphere of near-nakedness, Joyce cannot allow Bloom to be deceitful. Lies, false pretences abound in his 'Eumaeus' chapter, but they are all subjects of thought and conversation, hidden motifs, or else they
are practised by characters who get in the way of, rather than assist, this coming together of poet and advertising broker. And
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the prose-style itself, though it prete? ds to wide-awakeness, is flat,
weary, stale-one-in-the-mornmg wntmg:
Mr Bloom and Stephen entered the cabman's shelt:! , an unpretentiou~ wooden structure, where, prior to then, he had rarely, I f ever; been befor~, the former having previously whispered to the latter a few hl~tsan~ntthe keeper of it said to be the once famous Skin-the-Goat Fltzh~rns, t. e . . "ble 1 'though he wouldn't vouch for the actual facts, whIch qUIte mo:ls~~ly there was not one vestige of truth in. A few moments later saw ~urtwo noctambules safely seated in a discreet c~r? -er,only ~obe greeted
by_stares from the decidedly miscellaneous collectIon of waIfs and straYd and other nondescript specimens ofthe genus hO. mo, already therhengage
in eating and drinking, diversified by . co~versatlOn, for whom t ey seem- ingly formed an object of marked cunOSlty.
There is a horrid and riveting fascination about this: it holds us with
its lacklustre eye. The muscularity of ImagmatlOn. ls. spent, and only
the nerves function now (the nerves are the presldmg organ of the body). And yet a vigorous art is celebrated qmetly here-that o~
navigation, appropriate to the Hom~rlcth~meof the returned wan derer. All day long we have been mternuttently aware ofa three- masted schooner called the Rosevean sailing home from Bridgwater with a cargo of bricks. She is in haven at last, and one of her crew- W. B. Murphy-is in the cabman's shelter t? lie about hiS voyages
and shore-adventures (rather like O'Casey s Paycock): He has a monopoly of the vigour which is needed for ". nagmaMn, and he holds the chapter together. He is a sort of parodic Odysseus. . .
This ancient mariner holds our attentIOn as any. bore or har Wl;t
when we are too weary to resist. He says that he knows Stephen,s father ('He's Irish . . . All Irish. ' Stephen sa~sdrily: 'All too Irish) and insists that he saw him once m a Circus 1TI Stockholm s~ootmg
eggs off bottles over his shoulder-left-handed,. too. ThiS left- handedness has its own significance. We keep meetmg references ~o
left-handedness throughout the chapter, and Corley (one of t e 'Two Gallants' of Dubliners) seems to be introduced only because he is alleged to be a bend-sinister scion ofa noble f~mlly. The. left hand is the false hand, literally sinister and metaphOrically deceitful. Im- postors, pretenders, fit in well with the theme of return from wan-
dering and they are an important element 1TI the conversation. ~ man l~ng believed dead, comes back; how can we know that he'ls who' he says he is? And if (as one of the cabbies believes IS all too
Home is the Sailor possible) Parnell should return to Ireland, Bloom for one thinks it
'highly inadvisable':
. . . as regards return, you were a lucky dog i f they didn't set the terrier at you directly you got back. Then a lot of shillyshally usually followed.