No More Learning

His pupils too are oppressed by history. They ask their teacher for a
story, a ghost story, the release through the imagination from the
incubus of the past. Instead, Stephen hears their recitation from Milton's Lycidas, which they have been given to learn by heart. 'Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor': a 'drowned man' motif initiated in the preceding chapter (Mulligan saved a man from drowning) is continued here; it has its obvious Homeric parallel in the many drowned companions o f Odysseus, but it has another func- tion as well-it calls up an aspect of that world of the dead which, like history itself, oppresses the world of the living. The boy Talbot stumbles over the line 'Through the dear might of Him that walked the wave's', and Christ suddenly overshadows history. 'Here also
over these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer's heart and lips and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. ' But Stephen mocks the image away:
Riddle me, riddle me, randy roo My father gave me seeds to sow.
It is Thursday, a half-holiday (without that half-holiday the book would not have been possible), and the boys get ready to dismi" and then reassemble for hockey. First, though, Stephen gins them" riddle:
The cock crew,
The sky was blue:
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
'Tis time for this poor soul To go to heaven.
They cannot answer it, and Stephen's own answer disappoints them:
'The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush. ' But Stephen
means neither a fox nor a grandmother. The mother motif has re-
98
appeared and, when young Sargent comes to Stephen to be helped with his algebra ('He proves by algebra that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather'), it is developed for the length of a whole paragraph. In Sargent Stephen sees the eternal son- 'ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed'-pro- tected from the world that would crush him by a mother's love. 'With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands. ' In face of the dreadful nightmare of history is perhaps amor matris the only true thing in life? But, while he is asking this question, Stephen traces the sym- bols of an algebraic equation for Sargent, and Oriental images are suggested by these 'imps offancy ofthe Moors' - Averroes and Moses Maimonides, 'flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world'. Leopold Bloom, too, at this moment, is drawn towards an ancestral East, as we shall see when we come to the Joycean Odyssey proper. Stephen's mind and Bloom's mind are tuning up for the eventual meeting.
Stephen and Mr Deasy have a session together in the old school- master's study, full ofstale air, old coins and shells, pictures ofhorses on the walls. Mr Deasy is old, and his room stands for history. He himself stands for Nestor, the wise tamer of horses whom Tele- machus first consulted about the whereabouts of his father. He can tell Stephen nothing that will bring him closer to the repossession of his heritage. 'You think me an old fogey and old tory', he says, rightly. He knows of wrongs committed in the past-'a woman brought sin into the world': Helen, for whom the Greeks made a ten years' war on Troy, MacMurrough's wife who brought the strangers to Ireland, the woman who 'brought Parnell low' (here one Homeric parallel is set, like a clue, before us). But history still 'moves
towards one great goal, the manifestation of God'. To Stephen 'history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake' and God is 'a shout in the street'. The young dispossessed heir and the man of ancient wisdom can meet at few points, and Mr Deasy shrewdly guesses that Stephen will not stay long in his school.
But Mr Deasy gives Stephen money-his month's salary-and Stephen, through his journalistic contacts, can do Mr Deasy a good turn. Nestor's castle stood near the mouth of the river Alpheus, the river which Heracles deflected to clean out the Augean stables. Around this river cluster a whole host of bovine associations (the Semitic letters alif, lam, pa form a root meaning 'ox'; the letter alpha is derived from a simple representation of an ox's head). It is
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Telemachus
appropriate, then, that Mr Deasy should be much concerned about foot-and-mouth disease in Ireland and a threatened embargo on Irish cattle. He is writing a letter on the subject for newspaper publication, and he wants Stephen to place it with one of the editors he knows. This ox motif is important. Through its associations with the Oxen of the Sun, which stand for fertility, it suggests a way out of the treadmill of history-the perpetual renewal presented in Vico's theory of history (the basis of Finnegans Wake), already prefigured here in a reference to Vico Road, Dalkey. The young poet dubs himself 'bullockbefriending bard': the ancient knight has given him
a potent symbol.
Only here, though, do Nestor and Telemachus come together.
Mr Deasy thunders his false prophecies, particularly about the ruin that the Jews will bring upon England. Ireland is safe, however, both from Jewish conspiracy and guilt about Jewish persecution. His last words explain why: 'She never let them in. ' He apparently does not know of that man in Eccles Street. The fact is that Mr Deasy sees history as a march towards glory, the eventual vision of God, and blames the errors ofhistory on bad women and on Jews. To Stephen, as to Blake, history is barren, 'fabled by the daughters of memory'. The symbols of history which are contained in Mr Deasy's study, neatly arranged like facts in catechisms, are shells and coins. To Stephen coins are to spend, not hoard; shells are mere sounding hollows. Telemachus leaves Nestor unenlightened, except for the possession of that bull-image, symbol of a renewal of life not to be found in shelled, coined history.
The third section of this Telemachia is a lengthy monologue and our first encounter with the really 'difficult' Joyce. The scene is the seashore, the colour is green, the symbol the tide, the hour ap- proaches noon. The Homeric parallel is only indirectly concerned with Telemachus. Menelaus, whom Telemachus consults immedi- ately after his visit to Nestor, himself seeks to consult Proteus, the old sea-god who is unwilling to be consulted and will only prophesy if captured. But he is hard to catch, being adept at changing his form, and it is only with the aid of Eidothea, Proteus's daughter, that Menelaus is able to hold him down and question him. Evidently Proteus, in his very name, suggests some primal force, the very stuff o f life, capable o f expressing itself in many forms. Man's most
fundamental questions-about the nature of life, the heavens, the universe-are posed to a mess of shifting, elusive phenomena; he must learn the gift of reading the signs, of understanding the lan-
100
guage in which life expresses itself. It is philology, the science of language, that presides over this episode of Ulysses.
Stephen is his own Menelaus, walking along Sandycove shore, enquiring into the nature of reality, straining the resources of human language in the process. The signatures he must learn to read are all about-'seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen' (so Mulligan described the sea in the first chapter) 'blue- silver, rust: coloured signs'. Aristotle is invoked, 'maestro di color che sanno' (,master of them who know') according to Dante, to tame and classify the elusive world of matter. Stephen provides his own definitions of the elements in which this world lives and moves. Time is the Nacheinander-one thing coming after another; space is the Nebeneinander-one thing coming next to another. These subsist in the dark (Stephen shuts his eyes) when the world of visible matter has been shut out. Is the world of phenomenon dependent, as Bishop Berkeley thought it was, on the perceiver? Stephen opens his eyes and sees that everything is still there '. aU the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end'. But he had a moment, his eyes closed, of wondering whether evetything might vanish in that dark inter-
lude. One cannot really trust the world of matter.
A couple of Frauenzimmer (Joyce is entitled, in a chapter devoted
to philology, to draw on languages other than English) come down to the beach, one of them 'swinging lourdily her midwife's bag'. Stephen is at once back to the motif of the omphalos, a telephone which will bring one ultimately in touch with 'Edenville'- 'Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one. ' Mr Deasy's bull has reappeared, next to a grosser symbol of fertility. At the end of the line is naked Eve, navelless, 'a belly without blemish'. If the metaphysical path leads Stephen to the 'ineluctable modality of the visible', the navel cord leads him back eventually to Eve's sin, original sin. Out of original sin came the generation of life not by miracle (Adam anaesthetised; the removal of a rib) but in pain. Stephen ponders his own making by two strangers-'the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghost- woman with ashes on her breath'-and is soon back on theology, the relationship between Father and Son, the lifelong war of the heresi- arch Arius on the 'contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality'-a mys- terious God-Christ identification which, in this grotesque term, anticipates the melting of Bloom into Stephen ('Stoom'; 'Blephen')
and Stephen into Bloom.
'Airs romped around him, nipping and eager airs. ' This chapter is
full ofHamlet references, looking forward to the scene in the National 101
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The Labyrinth
Library where this whole father-son theme shall be hamm~red~ut; Stephen hears in imagination his 'consubstantial fat~er5 vOl~e mocking his in-laws, the Gouldings (this is John Joycehlmselfwlth his '0 weeping God, the things I mamed mto . . . HIghly respe~- table gondoliers . . . Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Chnst). Stephen cannot decide whether to VISIt Ius uncle R,ch,e Gouldmg or not but a fine comic picture of him prepares us for an eventual meeti~gwith him-though the meeting is Bloom's, not Stephen's. The Goulding house IS m decay, hke the Dedalus house. Man brings things to decay, and it was a great Dublm bram that went mad with viewing man's wretched folly. Stephen broods o~ SWIft; and the horse motif of the preceding chapter, as well as the equme length of Buck Mulligan's face (noted in the Martello Tm,;er),. re- emerges out of the image of the Houyhn,hnms. At once, the funous dean' and a memory of a priest whom, In A Portrazt, ,so~eof. the boys called Lantern Jaws and others Fox! Camrbell brmg m, a mocking reference to the Mass and, set In It, th~ Imp hypostasIS - hypostasis being the technical tefm for the doctrme of the common
substance of Father and Son. .
The speed with which Stephen's mind rushes from sub),:ct to
subject, the links of assocIation often bemg . wel~-submerl? ed, IS ap- propriate to a chapter celebrating the qUicksIlver elusIVeness of Proteus: Proteus is the mind, as! well as the pheno,! ,enal world which the mind seeks to comprehend. An obscure SWlftlan r~ference (Dryden's 'Cousin Swift, you wi~l~everbe a poet' becomes ~ou~m Stephen you will never be a samt ) leads on to a self-exammatlOn which c~tsthrough the usual self-delusions put out b~the Protean ego How stupid were his old ambitions-the eplphames left to all the'great libraries of the world, to be read 'after a few thousand
years, a mahamanvantara' (we have met that maham~nvantara-the Indian 'great year'-before: in The Holy Office. It IS one of the motifs that draw us to the East. In a chapter ruled by the sea-tide It is proper to be reminded of the manvantara and the pralaya-the human periods of waking and sleepmg whIch find analogues m the rhythms of the seasons and of the sea itself). .
Stephen walks on, past the Gouldings' decayed resldenc~, ~nd turns north-east towards the Pigeonhouse. ThiS makes hIm thmk of a lewd French joke about the Virgin Birth- 'c'est Ie pigeon, l~seph': we cannot be long away from the Divine Incarnation. But ~hlS. 1Sal~o a way into a lengthy and elliptical reminiscence a? out hIS time. m
Paris among the other Irish 'wild geese' (the eXIle theme whIch 102
Telemachus
matches Bloom's sense of estrangement). The literary technique is
brilliant here with its evocation of 'Paris rawly waking, crude sun-
light on her lemon streets'. We can, if we wish, fill out the ellipses with biographical references. As I have already indicated, so much of the remembered, as opposed to enacted, life of Ulysses touches the region of actuality. There is a penumbra surrounding the book, full of signs which lead us out to Joyce's own experience. Fiction itself is Protean, a disguise of real life. Often the interior monologoes of both Bloom and Stephen seem like the iceberg surface, with sub- merged mountains of references we can only reach by forgetting that Ulysses is a work of art and using it as an encyclopaedic guide to real history. Does this invalidate the novel as literature? I think not. True naturalism calls for shadows and mysteries and clues which may or may not be taken up, just as we please. If we cannot understand everything in Ulysses, nor can we understand everything in real life.
Stephen thinks of Kevin Egan, the revolutionary wild goose for- gotten. 'Remembering thee, 0 Sian. ' A faint image of Bloom, that other exile, beckons here. Looking south to the Martello Tower, Stephen reaffirms his loneliness. 'He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes . . . Take all. Keep all. ' The dispos- sessed heir is also the dispossessed father: he sees himself an instant as the ghost in Elsinore, King Hamlet as well as Prince Hamlet. But now the exterior world asserts itself again, though the language in which it is described is no diaphanous veil: 'He climbed over the sedge and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ash- plant in a grike. ' The language draws attention to itself and, as we see at once, rightly. Stephen reminds us that philology is the science which presides here: 'These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted. ' The emphasis is back on reading the signs of nature, looking through nature's symbols, her disguise, for nature's own self. A dog runs across the sand, and Stephen-who, like his creator, fears dogs-comforts himself with 'I have my stick. Sit tight. ' The prose becomes highly contrapuntal, a vision of the Vikings landing (,bark/barque' is an inaudible enharmonic chord) leading Stephen to think of that Northern blood that flows hidden in him, the in- vaders of history, the pretenders of history (the Irish pretend to be 'all kings' sons'), the collapse of his own pretences when he finds himself shaking 'at a cur's yelping'. Behaviour, like history, isall disguises, gifts of Proteus. He tries to be honest with himself: could he, like Mulligan, have saved a man from drowning? No, nor could he save his mother: 'Waters: bitter death: lost. '
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Telemachus
burning scene' he notes a ship sailing into harbour-the returned
wanderer. An old sailor, emblem of completed exile, will preside over his meeting with Bloom at day! s end.
I say 'a sort of victory Over Proteus'. This is no mere fancy. The chaos of primal matter, of the 'phenomenal world, is figured in the chaos of language, ever-changing, hard to pin down. But language, despite the chaos, has, in a manner, pinned down the world outside. It remains for the poet to impose order on language and, by using the to-and-fro rhythms of the tide, to create an image of organic order, achieve the ultimate pinning-down. Already, at the end of the Telemachia, Stephen has come some way towards regaining his in-
heritance: he rules through words, and even Mulligan fears the lancet of his art, while the sea's ruler, Haines, has a mind to make a book of wisdom out of Stephen's sayings. But Stephen, though a
prmce of words, is not yet big enough to write Ulysses. He needs Leopold Bloom.
The disguise theme enfolds the dog, which seems to turn into a
hare a buck a horse a wolf, a calf, a fox, a panther (the waves, und~r the d~g's influ~nce, turTI for an instant into 'herds of sea- morse', Proteus's own flock). A panther. Haines had wakened Stephen the previous night with a shout in his sleep about a black panther. Afterwards, as a kind of soothing ointment, Stephen was granted a dream in which, on a street of harlots, an Onental offered him hospitality. He remembers that dream now. Some hundreds of pages later it will come true. . . .
Cockle-pickers on the sand, trudgmg with thm bags, appear to Stephen as 'red Egyptians' and flavour his monologue with the speech of the gipsies, language ready with a new dlSgUlse of reahty:
White thy fambles, red thy gan
And thy quarrons dainty is. Couch a hogshead with me then. In the darkmans clip and kiss.
But the monologue has been steadily thickening with strange speech-
the sea's own language, the giant words of 'Sir Lout' ('laut' is the Malay word for the sea): 'I'm the bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well boulders, bones for my steppingstones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz odz an Iridzman. ' All the chief European tongues blend, as they are to do later, and more specta~u~arly, in Fin~egans Wake. The terms of heraldry brighten Stephen s Imagery, trymg to hold down the Protean spectrum in fixed and formal colours. And then the welter of language breaks in a poem which Stephen, lacking other paper, writes down on a torn-off end of Mr Deasls letter for the press. It is a symbol of control, of tallli~g Proteus: Put a pm m that chap, will you? My tablets. ' (Hamlet 15 never very dlStant. ) A kind of content comes: Stephen lies at full length on the pomted rocks his 'Hamlet hat' -the wide-brimmed hat he brought back from'Paris-tilted over his eyes. 'Pain is far. ' He recalls a line ~f Fergus's song, the poem of Yeats which Stephen-Joyce set to muSIc and sang while his mother lay close to death, weepmg for the sadness of the words: 'And no more turn aside and brood. ' The image of the drowned man washed up seems to lose some of its ter~or ('Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man'). Hamlet makes Its last appear- ance in the chapter with a recollection of Ophelia's song for a dead father. Stephen, having achieved a sort of victor~ over Prote~s, IS ready for a drink (he is supposed to meet Mulligan and Hames,
flush with his salary, in the Ship at twelve-thirty). He leaves ,the tribute of a little dry snot on a rock-ledge. Before qummg the
104
105
? ? 4: Beginning of the Journey
THE 'PROTEUS' EPISODE WE HAVE JUST CONSIDERED IS A tour de force of linguistic virtuosity. Besides presenting the bewildering Protean variety of the world of matter, and of the resources of lan- guage which are able to tame it, it exhibits the learning and intellec- tual subtlety of Stephen Dedalus so richly that we are forced to accept him as a sort of Homeric hero of the mind. He seems to
enclose the universe of words and ideas; yet, ironically, he does not enclose the lowlier Bloom. Undernourished, dressed in cheap mourn- ing and cast-off shoes, his teeth bad, a nose-picker because he has no handkerchief, he transcends the limitations of the body. He needs, and the book needs, to be brought down to earth. As we commence the Bloom Odyssey proper, we are aware that Stephen stands for the spirit and Bloom for the flesh. The opening of the Telemachia-the narrative 'of young men-was celebrated with the inaugural words of the Mass; when we first meet Mr Bloom-the mature man's
narrative-it is in terms of 'the inner organs of beasts and fowls', the thought of kidneys for breakfast.
This consultation of viscera is a kind of ritual, but it does not lead to high-flown Dedalus themes like those of theology and philol? gy. The science which presides over NO. 7 Eccles Street IS economlCS- the useful art of household management. A kidney is the symbol which controls the chapter-a utilitarian, unpoetic organ which, nevertheless, is to provide the shape of the New Bloomusalem when it is built, later on in the book. The glorification of the body starts
now: physical organs have not been celebrated in the Telemachia. As for Bloom's own name-an anglicisation of the ancestral Hun- garian Virag, which means a flower-it sums up pretty well wha~ its owner stands for: something remarkable but unpretentious spnng- ing out of common earth.
The comparative contentment of Bloom in his domestic surroundings, organising breakfast for his wife,
106
giving the cat milk, contrasts with Stephen's divine dissatisfactions
and aspirations. Bloom is, nevertheless, at a higher stage of develop-
ment in certain respects than the young poet: he is close to the
mature Joyce in having achieved paternity (a loved daughter, a son who died in infancy), tolerance, the quiet wisdom of a man who has seen the world. Unlike Odysseus and like Joyce, he prefers cats to dogs.
His wife is Madam Marion (Molly) Tweedy, professional singer.
'Tweedy' suggests the weaving of Penelope, whose . counterpart she
is; it also suggests the double thread of her fabric, for she is part Irish and part Spanish Jewess, born in Gibraltar-where her military father was stationed. We are to meet Molly as Penelope only in the final chapter; here she appears as Calypso, nymph of an island with a great cave at its navel (Gibraltar too has its caves). Now, and throughout the book, her place is bed.
In a sense, Bloom is detained in her abode. As soon as he goes out
to buy his breakfast kidney he is preoccupied with visions of the
East, the far ancestral home. But, as Stephen is unconsciously moving towards him, so he is moving towards Stephen, for Turko the Terrible appears in his thoughts-the very pantomime character whom, so Stephen remembers, his mother used to love. Bloom is an exile, with a certain emptin~ss inside. The science of economics temporarily fills the emptiness-speculations about money in beer, exiles from the county Leitrim blossoming as brewery kings. The butcher's shop he now visits is run by an exile of his own kind- Dlugacz. A girl is ahead of him, buying sausages; Bloom picks up a cut sheet from a newspaper, and he is East again: 'The model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter
sanatorium. ' The economics of farming fill his mind for a space.
Then the sensual, earthy Bloom flowers again quickly: he wants to get his kidney at once, to follow the girl down the street and admire her moving haunches. But he is too late and he tells himself-'Soda- chapped hands. Crusted toenails too'-that the morning desire is marginal.
Walking back home he reads his piece of cut newspaper. There is a planter's company-Agendath Netaim-which, for eight marks, will plant you a dunam of land with Oriental fruits. The East calls again, symbolised in an orange or citron, a tiny rising sun. But we are also concerned with economics: 'Can pay ten down and the balance in yearly instalments. Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. I5? ' The name of the street-'Staytrue' -reminds us, if not Bloom, that
107
Beginning ofthe Journey
? ? The Labyrinth
he has not stayed true to the religion of his fathers. In both senses he is an exile from Jeru. alem. And the kidney he takes home is a pork kidney.
'Citron' recalls other Jewish exiles like himself-the fruit's very
namesake of Saint Kevin's Parade, and either-playing Mastiansky. Then the sun goes in for a moment, the moment when the sea turns into a bowl of bitter waters for Stephen (it is just after eight). Bloom, in a grey horror which sears his flesh, sees the Dead Sea and the dead cities ofa wandering people, his own: 'the grey sunken cunt of the world'. The image is suggested by the sight of an ancient hag clutching a noggin bottle; Stephen, in complement, is reflecting on the dry shrivelled breasts of a woman who gives milk that is not her own. Bloom's depression lifts as the sunlight returns, running to- wards him like a gold girl, a nymph (nymphs, in deference to Calyp- so, rule this chapter). He relates such blue phases to the dysfunction- ing of the body ('Morning mouth bad images'). Bright colours return and the post has come. There is a card for his wife from their daughter Milly, but for himself (she is daddy's girl) there is aletter. There is also a letter for Molly, and he knows who its sender is: 'His quick heart slowed at once. Bold hand. ' Stephen has faced his Antinous; Bloom's Antinous seems already to have conquered without the bending of a bow.
Bloom reads his daughter's letter. Again we find a link with Stephen's world. At the end of the first chapter a young swimmer tells Mulligan that a certain Bannon (with whom Mulligan's brother happens to be staying in Westmeath) has 'found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her. ' The photo girl is Milly. She mentions Bannon in her letter and says that he sings Boylan's song about 'those seaside girls'. Bannon is a link between the two incarna- tions of Antinous-Mulligan's brother on one side, on the other Blazes Boylan, the 'hairy chap' whose letter Molly is at that moment reading. Bloom smiles 'with troubled affection' at the evidence of Milly's growing up. She is another nymph - 'slim legs running up the staircase' -who holds him here on the island of caves.
Molly's bedroom is a cave, all 'warm yellow twilight'. He serves her with bread and butter and tea and sugar and cream-nymph's food-and learns that Boylan is bringing the programme for the concert tour he is organising. 'La c? darem' (from Don G? ovallni-an appropriate opera in Boylan's connection) is one of the songs that Molly is to sing; the other is 'Love's Old Sweet Song', an ominous title. But almost at once Bloom gives proof of a superiority that,
108
. . Beginning oftheJourney without his having to draw out a single arrow is eventuallv to reduce
Boylan and all such suitors to a heap of ashes. Molly has a book called Ruby: the Przde ofthe Ring (Ruby is another nymph naked and bemg lashed by the ringmaster, hidden in an illustration'among smudged pages); she has met the word 'metempsychosis' there and wants to know Its meamng. BloOI11: knows and tries to explain: 'It's Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls. '
Molly says: '0, rocks! Tell us in plain words', and then Bloom like Mulhgan. . starts Hellenising wild Irish, seeing in Molly some~hing l! ke a remcarnatlOn of the nymph in the picture above the bed ( G[ven. away with the Easter number of Photo Bits: Splendid
masterpIece In ar~ colours'), but not getting very far with his lesson ? ll the true ,meanmg of 'metempsychosis'. There is a smell of burn- mg: the frymg kidney calls: he returns to internal organs. But, ofall the Dublmers who exemplify the call of the flesh, he shows himself to be the most rarefied, almost an intellectual. He is the most meet to be foster-father to a poet.
He is a meat-eater, but no cannibal. He is kind to his cat he deplore~the cru~ltyto performing animals that Ruby: Pride ojthe
~mgbnngs to mmd, he 15 offthIS morning to witness-mourning On hke Stephen-:-the ceremonial interring of the flesh of poor dead Dig: nam. He [s Wise m the ImutatlOns of the body, tolerant. The body is a garm~nt that the soul Can change, following the laws of metem-
psychosis-the nJ:mph Syrinx into a reed, the nymph Daphne into laurel. The body [s a cave for the soul. But, even before the soul can rrugrate, change goes on, uncheckable. Bloom sees the Protean in his daughter, who is changing into her mother: 'Will happen, yes. Prevent. Useless: can't move. '
Bloom, in the cave of his body, his body in the cave of its black
S~ltfo: funerals, n:oves o~tto the cave of the outside jakes, taking with h[m-appropnately, smce he has rece;>tly been suffering from const[panDn-a co~y of, Tttbtts. DefecatIOn [S nothmg to be ashamed of: dung [s a fert[hser. Dlfty clean~. 'Calypso, cave-nymph, follows him even here; he never has his wife long out of his thoughts. He
remembers the bazaar dance when the band played Ponchielli' pance. ofthe Hour; (it. was there that Molly had first met Boylan)~
Evenmg hours, girlS m grey gauze. Night hours then black with daggers and eyemasks. ' Time is ~ procession of nymphs, all veiled, metempsychosed from mormng lUta noon into evening into night then ready t? renew the CJ>:cle of change. But, so the bells ofGeorge'~ church rermnd hun, leaVIng the closet with his work done, time
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Beginning ofthe Journey
sometime must have a stop. The bells toll for thee, as well as for poor dead Dignam. .
In the second chapter we meet Bloom on Sir John Rogerson's Q! ! ay. He has moved south from Eccles Street, towards the sun, giver of life (the presiding organ is the genitals) but taker-away of energy (the Homeric parallel is the Lotus-Eaters). It is abou\ ten o'clock, and the day is warming up nicely. The preceding chapter was concerned with the vigorous arts of money-making, but now the vegetable kingdom rules. The text is crammed with references to flowers, herbs, and the decoctions that the druggists make from these: the sciences of botany and chemistry join languid hands. Everywhere there is a sense oflistlessness, of dolce far niente, and the gentle drag towards the East-here primed by the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company-is renewed. At the same time there is a pull towards the earth's centre: 'Thirtytwo feet per second, per second. Law of falling bodies: per second, per second. ' Bloom saunters to Westland Row post office-ever further south-and, countering the morning's lassitude with a phallic symbol, rolls up his copy of the Freeman into a baton.
In the post office there is a letter for him-addressed to 'Henry Flower, Esq. ' Like Odysseus, he is a cunning name-changer, though, unlike Odysseus, he will not move too far from the truth: 'Bloom' and 'Flower' are still 'Virag'. The recruiting posters show soldiers who look half-baked, hypnotised: the lotus eats up even the vigour of the military. The letter is from a woman, but he cannot read it yet. A character from Dubliner" McCoy, accosts him. (In the preceding chapter we have already re-met, in name only, another Dubliners character-Gretta Conroy. ) McCoy's wife is a singer, like Bloom's, but she is only a 'reedy freckled soprano', apt for little ballads but not for 'La ci damn'. McCoy, as Dub/iners tells us, is always borrowing valises for his wife's concert tours, and Bloom's interior monologue refers to this habit. Bloom does not want to talk; he wants to read his letter and he wants to feast his eyes on a high- . class woman who has come out of the Grosvenor. His sexuality is passive: he likes to look. We learn later that he no longer has normal sexual relations with his wife (the guts went out of this side of mar- riage when their son, Rudy, died) and that he practises onanism. The genital image and the lotus image fuse into passivity.
Nevertheless, it is time for the father-son theme to make an appearance in Bloom's Odyssey. It comes, as with Stephen, out of Hamlet. Bloom sees a poster announcing that Mrs Bandman Palmer
no
will play in Leah tonight; last night she played the prince of Den- mark-:'Male imper~onator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia commllted sUlclde? Bloom sees nothing odd in such a theory; later, l~ fantasy, he hImself is to appear as the 'new womanly man'; the ym and yang elements cohere in him as the yoni and lingam, the phallus ~nd the flower) meet as joint rulers of this chapter. Is not Bloom hImself, a man, also a flower? And now the paternity theme is presented in its filial aspect-Nathan, 'who left the house of his father and left the God of his father', and Bloom's father's own comment on that affecting speech from Leah (Mrs Palmer's two plays have equal relevance in the father-son situation): 'Every word is so deep, Leopold. ' An almost female tenderness wells up now in the son whose father sought the ultimate lotus, dying by his own hand.
But the lotus ofthe living calls again. Bloom passes gelded horses,
all passion spent; reflects, going by the cabman's shelter, on the life o~the 'drif~ing cabbies, all weathers, all places, time or setdown, no wlll of thm own'. At last, watched by 'a wise tabby, a blinking sphinx', he is able to read his letter in peace. It is from a certain Martha Clifford, a passionate pen-friend whom he has never met a slushy letter with an odd mistake in it: 'I called you naughty b~y because I do not like that other world. ' At least one edition of Ulysses silently corrected 'world' to 'word', thus ruining that scene
in Nighttown where Stephen's mother' risen from the dead un-
. "
consclOusly quotes Martha: 'I pray for you in my other world. ' It
is one of the minute devices for drawing Stephen and Bloom together.
Enclosed in the letter is Bloom's own r e b u s - a flower dried and with almost no smell. Bloom re-reads, 'weak joy' openi~ghis lips, and Joyce, seeking a direct means of conveying the act of re-reading without actually repeating the whole text of the letter, throws flowers at us: 'Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume. ' Botany is with liS all the time, but now the specific lotus~ eating motif, with Oriental orientation, is renewed through the very name Martha. 'Martha, Mary . . . He is sitting in their house, talking. ' Bloom, a Jew, is not willing to mention the holy name but he unconsciously recognises that Christ is a lotus-symbol: 'Long Ion? long rest. ' Thus he is led to the church of All Hallows, weaving a lIttle fantasy about missionaries, opium, Buddha, joss-sticks,
II!
/
? ? The Labyrinth
Beginning o f the Journey )
Christ's thorns, St Patrick's shamrock, religion lapped up like milk. Ma;s is being said, and the Eucharist emerges for Bloom as the supreme lotus. He is sceptical about all religions, but he concedes a value to this 'bread of angels'-'there's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel'. As for the believers, they are partly summed up in an old man asleep near a confessional: 'Blind faith. Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next year. ' Other lotus themes appear-music, liquo~ (Benedic- tine and Green Chartreuse), eunuchs ('one way out of it'), women,
flowers, incense. When the priest prays: 'Blessed Michael, archangel,
defend us in the hour of conflict', we are reminded of what the
Church still means to another non-believer, Stephen. Stephen will no longer even go through the forms of faith, but Bloom openly admires the strength and organisation of Catholicism.
It is ten-fifteen, and the funeral is at eleven. Mter botany, chemistry, or at least a chemist's shop. Bloom has to get a lotion made up for Molly, but he realises that he has left the recipe, as well as his latchkey (hence no easy homecoming if he is late) in his other trousers. In Sweny's shop on Lincoln Place his thoughts naturally turn to herbs, electuaries, simples, love-philtres while the chemist looks up Molly's prescription in his book. Sweet perfumes lull his senses to a mood of sexual abandon. He will go and take a bath in the mosque-shaped Hammam (the East again) and, while in the bath, he will masturbate. In his very first two chapters Bloom, after the burnt offering of the kidney, seems concerned with a total cleansing and a total evacuation of the body's secretions. A clean
Jew, he is a nice contrast to the dirty Christian he will make his son. (Stephen rarely washes and never baths: after all, 'all Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream'. ) Bloom buys some lemon-scented soap.
Today is the day of the Ascot Gold Cup, and Bantam Lyons (another Dubliner, character) sees Bloom's newspaper as Bloom leaves the shop. 'I want to see about that French horse that's fun- ning today', says Lyons. 'Where the bugger is it? ' Bloom decides to give him the newspaper to get rid of him. But, generous and good as he is, some of the -gods are against him. He says: 'I was just going to throw it away. ' Lyons knows and we, who have looked up our copies of Cope's Racegoer', Encyclopaedia, also know that a horse called Throwaway is running in the Ascot Gold Cup. We know, and all Dublin will eventually know, that Throwaway won that race at 100-5. Lyons thinks he has been given a tip: Bloom is a dark horse himself, innocent-seeming but full of guile and secret knowledge.
lIZ
The cunning of Odysseus led to the planting of a dark horse in the Trojan camp: this horse is the means of gaining the exile further hatred from a community that already both fears and despises him. Bloom is prudent and does not gamble; but, when the time comes for spending winnings in bars, who will believe that?
So, through 'heavenly weather' which Bloom, philosophical about
change, knows cannot last, the wanderer proceeds to his bath. The
stream of life can be halted for a moment, be tamed to warmth and the service of cleansing. The image of the Eucharist hovers: 'This i~ my body. ' He foresees it and, at its nub, his flaccid penis-'the hmp father of thousands'-turned into a 'languid floating flower'. But all thi~ is an interlude, with time and history and destiny sus- pended, hIS navel not connecting him with the past (remember Stephen and the omphalos) but a mere harmless 'bud of flesh', a
lotus. After the rest and the cleansing he must engage the dirt and the rewards of life.
II3
? ? ? 5: Hell, Wind, Cannibals
JOYCE DESCRIBED THE TECHNIQUE OF THE LOTUS-EATING CHAPTER
as 'narcissistic', and this explains its occasional references to water- not just the water of Lethe which is cognate with the juice of the lotus-but water as a stroker, warmer and flatterer. So far we have looked at the world, and at the man himself, from out of Bloom's own flesh and guts: 'This is my body. ' What we have learned of Bloom does him credit. He has not hidden himself from us with veils and masks, for his author has not given him that opportunity. He is revealed wholly as a man of average fleshly appetites, kindly curiosity, an optimism tempered by long knowledge of the world (though he is only thirty-eight), strong family feeling, considerable
general benevolence. It is time to meet him in the company of his
fellow-citizens, hut, before launching him on a journey to and through Hades, we ought to note what bodily organ rules over his next adventure. I t is the heart. T h e heart is a pump, so Bloom matter-of-factly notes, that grows rusty and faulty and breaks down. In the graveyard, while Dignam's body is being committed to the earth, he is aware of death as that and no more-the failure of a pump. It is not the opening of a door on to ultimate reality. Though religion is the study woven into this chapter, it is not religion as it was pre- sented in the first episode of the Telemachia, the terror and majesty of theology. Religion to Bloom is priests and prayers, conventional ceremonies performed when the human pump fails and the body is buried, a parcel of useless rubbish.