No More Learning

Molly's bedroom is a cave, all 'warm yellow twilight'. He serves her with bread and butter and tea and sugar and cream-nymph's food-and learns that Boylan is bringing the programme for the concert tour he is organising. 'La c? darem' (from Don G? ovallni-an appropriate opera in Boylan's connection) is one of the songs that Molly is to sing; the other is 'Love's Old Sweet Song', an ominous title. But almost at once Bloom gives proof of a superiority that,
108
. . Beginning oftheJourney without his having to draw out a single arrow is eventuallv to reduce
Boylan and all such suitors to a heap of ashes. Molly has a book called Ruby: the Przde ofthe Ring (Ruby is another nymph naked and bemg lashed by the ringmaster, hidden in an illustration'among smudged pages); she has met the word 'metempsychosis' there and wants to know Its meamng. BloOI11: knows and tries to explain: 'It's Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls. '
Molly says: '0, rocks! Tell us in plain words', and then Bloom like Mulhgan. . starts Hellenising wild Irish, seeing in Molly some~hing l! ke a remcarnatlOn of the nymph in the picture above the bed ( G[ven. away with the Easter number of Photo Bits: Splendid
masterpIece In ar~ colours'), but not getting very far with his lesson ? ll the true ,meanmg of 'metempsychosis'. There is a smell of burn- mg: the frymg kidney calls: he returns to internal organs. But, ofall the Dublmers who exemplify the call of the flesh, he shows himself to be the most rarefied, almost an intellectual. He is the most meet to be foster-father to a poet.
He is a meat-eater, but no cannibal. He is kind to his cat he deplore~the cru~ltyto performing animals that Ruby: Pride ojthe
~mgbnngs to mmd, he 15 offthIS morning to witness-mourning On hke Stephen-:-the ceremonial interring of the flesh of poor dead Dig: nam. He [s Wise m the ImutatlOns of the body, tolerant. The body is a garm~nt that the soul Can change, following the laws of metem-
psychosis-the nJ:mph Syrinx into a reed, the nymph Daphne into laurel. The body [s a cave for the soul. But, even before the soul can rrugrate, change goes on, uncheckable. Bloom sees the Protean in his daughter, who is changing into her mother: 'Will happen, yes. Prevent. Useless: can't move. '
Bloom, in the cave of his body, his body in the cave of its black
S~ltfo: funerals, n:oves o~tto the cave of the outside jakes, taking with h[m-appropnately, smce he has rece;>tly been suffering from const[panDn-a co~y of, Tttbtts. DefecatIOn [S nothmg to be ashamed of: dung [s a fert[hser. Dlfty clean~. 'Calypso, cave-nymph, follows him even here; he never has his wife long out of his thoughts. He
remembers the bazaar dance when the band played Ponchielli' pance. ofthe Hour; (it. was there that Molly had first met Boylan)~
Evenmg hours, girlS m grey gauze. Night hours then black with daggers and eyemasks. ' Time is ~ procession of nymphs, all veiled, metempsychosed from mormng lUta noon into evening into night then ready t? renew the CJ>:cle of change. But, so the bells ofGeorge'~ church rermnd hun, leaVIng the closet with his work done, time
109
? ? The Labyrinth
Beginning ofthe Journey
sometime must have a stop. The bells toll for thee, as well as for poor dead Dignam. .
In the second chapter we meet Bloom on Sir John Rogerson's Q! ! ay. He has moved south from Eccles Street, towards the sun, giver of life (the presiding organ is the genitals) but taker-away of energy (the Homeric parallel is the Lotus-Eaters). It is abou\ ten o'clock, and the day is warming up nicely. The preceding chapter was concerned with the vigorous arts of money-making, but now the vegetable kingdom rules. The text is crammed with references to flowers, herbs, and the decoctions that the druggists make from these: the sciences of botany and chemistry join languid hands. Everywhere there is a sense oflistlessness, of dolce far niente, and the gentle drag towards the East-here primed by the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company-is renewed. At the same time there is a pull towards the earth's centre: 'Thirtytwo feet per second, per second. Law of falling bodies: per second, per second. ' Bloom saunters to Westland Row post office-ever further south-and, countering the morning's lassitude with a phallic symbol, rolls up his copy of the Freeman into a baton.
In the post office there is a letter for him-addressed to 'Henry Flower, Esq. ' Like Odysseus, he is a cunning name-changer, though, unlike Odysseus, he will not move too far from the truth: 'Bloom' and 'Flower' are still 'Virag'. The recruiting posters show soldiers who look half-baked, hypnotised: the lotus eats up even the vigour of the military. The letter is from a woman, but he cannot read it yet. A character from Dubliner" McCoy, accosts him. (In the preceding chapter we have already re-met, in name only, another Dubliners character-Gretta Conroy. ) McCoy's wife is a singer, like Bloom's, but she is only a 'reedy freckled soprano', apt for little ballads but not for 'La ci damn'. McCoy, as Dub/iners tells us, is always borrowing valises for his wife's concert tours, and Bloom's interior monologue refers to this habit. Bloom does not want to talk; he wants to read his letter and he wants to feast his eyes on a high- . class woman who has come out of the Grosvenor. His sexuality is passive: he likes to look. We learn later that he no longer has normal sexual relations with his wife (the guts went out of this side of mar- riage when their son, Rudy, died) and that he practises onanism. The genital image and the lotus image fuse into passivity.
Nevertheless, it is time for the father-son theme to make an appearance in Bloom's Odyssey. It comes, as with Stephen, out of Hamlet. Bloom sees a poster announcing that Mrs Bandman Palmer
no
will play in Leah tonight; last night she played the prince of Den- mark-:'Male imper~onator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia commllted sUlclde? Bloom sees nothing odd in such a theory; later, l~ fantasy, he hImself is to appear as the 'new womanly man'; the ym and yang elements cohere in him as the yoni and lingam, the phallus ~nd the flower) meet as joint rulers of this chapter. Is not Bloom hImself, a man, also a flower? And now the paternity theme is presented in its filial aspect-Nathan, 'who left the house of his father and left the God of his father', and Bloom's father's own comment on that affecting speech from Leah (Mrs Palmer's two plays have equal relevance in the father-son situation): 'Every word is so deep, Leopold. ' An almost female tenderness wells up now in the son whose father sought the ultimate lotus, dying by his own hand.
But the lotus ofthe living calls again. Bloom passes gelded horses,
all passion spent; reflects, going by the cabman's shelter, on the life o~the 'drif~ing cabbies, all weathers, all places, time or setdown, no wlll of thm own'. At last, watched by 'a wise tabby, a blinking sphinx', he is able to read his letter in peace. It is from a certain Martha Clifford, a passionate pen-friend whom he has never met a slushy letter with an odd mistake in it: 'I called you naughty b~y because I do not like that other world. ' At least one edition of Ulysses silently corrected 'world' to 'word', thus ruining that scene
in Nighttown where Stephen's mother' risen from the dead un-
. "
consclOusly quotes Martha: 'I pray for you in my other world. ' It
is one of the minute devices for drawing Stephen and Bloom together.
Enclosed in the letter is Bloom's own r e b u s - a flower dried and with almost no smell. Bloom re-reads, 'weak joy' openi~ghis lips, and Joyce, seeking a direct means of conveying the act of re-reading without actually repeating the whole text of the letter, throws flowers at us: 'Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume. ' Botany is with liS all the time, but now the specific lotus~ eating motif, with Oriental orientation, is renewed through the very name Martha. 'Martha, Mary . . . He is sitting in their house, talking. ' Bloom, a Jew, is not willing to mention the holy name but he unconsciously recognises that Christ is a lotus-symbol: 'Long Ion? long rest. ' Thus he is led to the church of All Hallows, weaving a lIttle fantasy about missionaries, opium, Buddha, joss-sticks,
II!
/
? ? The Labyrinth
Beginning o f the Journey )
Christ's thorns, St Patrick's shamrock, religion lapped up like milk. Ma;s is being said, and the Eucharist emerges for Bloom as the supreme lotus. He is sceptical about all religions, but he concedes a value to this 'bread of angels'-'there's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel'. As for the believers, they are partly summed up in an old man asleep near a confessional: 'Blind faith. Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next year. ' Other lotus themes appear-music, liquo~ (Benedic- tine and Green Chartreuse), eunuchs ('one way out of it'), women,
flowers, incense. When the priest prays: 'Blessed Michael, archangel,
defend us in the hour of conflict', we are reminded of what the
Church still means to another non-believer, Stephen. Stephen will no longer even go through the forms of faith, but Bloom openly admires the strength and organisation of Catholicism.
It is ten-fifteen, and the funeral is at eleven. Mter botany, chemistry, or at least a chemist's shop. Bloom has to get a lotion made up for Molly, but he realises that he has left the recipe, as well as his latchkey (hence no easy homecoming if he is late) in his other trousers. In Sweny's shop on Lincoln Place his thoughts naturally turn to herbs, electuaries, simples, love-philtres while the chemist looks up Molly's prescription in his book. Sweet perfumes lull his senses to a mood of sexual abandon. He will go and take a bath in the mosque-shaped Hammam (the East again) and, while in the bath, he will masturbate. In his very first two chapters Bloom, after the burnt offering of the kidney, seems concerned with a total cleansing and a total evacuation of the body's secretions. A clean
Jew, he is a nice contrast to the dirty Christian he will make his son. (Stephen rarely washes and never baths: after all, 'all Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream'. ) Bloom buys some lemon-scented soap.
Today is the day of the Ascot Gold Cup, and Bantam Lyons (another Dubliner, character) sees Bloom's newspaper as Bloom leaves the shop. 'I want to see about that French horse that's fun- ning today', says Lyons. 'Where the bugger is it? ' Bloom decides to give him the newspaper to get rid of him. But, generous and good as he is, some of the -gods are against him. He says: 'I was just going to throw it away. ' Lyons knows and we, who have looked up our copies of Cope's Racegoer', Encyclopaedia, also know that a horse called Throwaway is running in the Ascot Gold Cup. We know, and all Dublin will eventually know, that Throwaway won that race at 100-5. Lyons thinks he has been given a tip: Bloom is a dark horse himself, innocent-seeming but full of guile and secret knowledge.
lIZ
The cunning of Odysseus led to the planting of a dark horse in the Trojan camp: this horse is the means of gaining the exile further hatred from a community that already both fears and despises him. Bloom is prudent and does not gamble; but, when the time comes for spending winnings in bars, who will believe that?
So, through 'heavenly weather' which Bloom, philosophical about
change, knows cannot last, the wanderer proceeds to his bath. The
stream of life can be halted for a moment, be tamed to warmth and the service of cleansing. The image of the Eucharist hovers: 'This i~ my body. ' He foresees it and, at its nub, his flaccid penis-'the hmp father of thousands'-turned into a 'languid floating flower'. But all thi~ is an interlude, with time and history and destiny sus- pended, hIS navel not connecting him with the past (remember Stephen and the omphalos) but a mere harmless 'bud of flesh', a
lotus. After the rest and the cleansing he must engage the dirt and the rewards of life.
II3
? ? ? 5: Hell, Wind, Cannibals
JOYCE DESCRIBED THE TECHNIQUE OF THE LOTUS-EATING CHAPTER
as 'narcissistic', and this explains its occasional references to water- not just the water of Lethe which is cognate with the juice of the lotus-but water as a stroker, warmer and flatterer. So far we have looked at the world, and at the man himself, from out of Bloom's own flesh and guts: 'This is my body. ' What we have learned of Bloom does him credit. He has not hidden himself from us with veils and masks, for his author has not given him that opportunity. He is revealed wholly as a man of average fleshly appetites, kindly curiosity, an optimism tempered by long knowledge of the world (though he is only thirty-eight), strong family feeling, considerable
general benevolence. It is time to meet him in the company of his
fellow-citizens, hut, before launching him on a journey to and through Hades, we ought to note what bodily organ rules over his next adventure. I t is the heart. T h e heart is a pump, so Bloom matter-of-factly notes, that grows rusty and faulty and breaks down. In the graveyard, while Dignam's body is being committed to the earth, he is aware of death as that and no more-the failure of a pump. It is not the opening of a door on to ultimate reality. Though religion is the study woven into this chapter, it is not religion as it was pre- sented in the first episode of the Telemachia, the terror and majesty of theology. Religion to Bloom is priests and prayers, conventional ceremonies performed when the human pump fails and the body is buried, a parcel of useless rubbish.
But we remember that the word 'heart' has another connotation,
and that this fits Bloom very well. He is body, opposition and com- plement to Stephen Dedalus's intellect, but he is also feeling, warmth, love. Soon we shall see that this is the very quality which marks off Bloom from the rest of weak, irresponsible, cadging Dub- lin, and which-as with so many other great fictional heroes-earns him contempt and something like fear. At the moment, stepping into
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a carriage of the funeral cortege, he is with men who are reasonable
enough citizens, though weak, who may not altogether understand Bloom but who are tolerant of him and his foreignness. His three companions bring Dubliners and A Portrait together: Simon Deda- Ius, Stephen's consubstantial father, irascible, pungent of speech, very much the man we have met before, though older, a widower, far advanced in decay; Martin Cunningham, from 'Grace', a good- ? -atured and intelligent man, as close to Bloom's quality as anyone In the oook; Mr Power, youngish, insipid, given to debts, another of that businessmen's retreat congregation in 'Grace'.
The Homeric parallel is Odysseus's voyage to Hades, the land of the dead. Death is in Bloom's thoughts right from the start-his son's death, his father's. Bu~, the first hint of a new son to fill the vacare! , Stephen Dedalus- 'a lithe young man, clad in mourning, a wide hat' -is seen passing Watery Lane. Mr Dedalus snarls briefly about 'that Mulligan cad' and his wife's people, the 'drunken little costdrawer and Crissie, papa's little lump ofdung, the wise child that knows her own father'. They come to the Dodder, one of the four waterways of Hades, the others being the Liffey and the Grand and Royal Canals. Mr Dedalus resumes his diatribe on Mulligan-'a counter-jumper" son'-and Bloom, reflecting that a father is right to be full, as M. Dedalus is, of his own son, brings the name of the dead child 'littlE
Rudy', to the surface of his interior monologue. His need fa; a son
remains but, young as he and his wife still are, the philoprogenitive
urge is gone (we anticipate the Shakespeare of Stephen's discourse- his son Hamnet dead at eleven, but no second-second-best-son).
They go past the Dogs' Home-a whiff of the Cerberus motif to come-and Bloom remembers his dying father's wish: 'Be good to Athos, Leopold . . . We obey them in the grave. A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Q;tiet brute. Old men's dogs usually are. ' The name 'Athas' suggests 'Argus', Odysseus's dog, and, for a moment, Bloom seems identified with Telemachus. This father-son confusion is germinal to the book. But so, of course, is the suitor theme, and it is not long before Blazes Boylan goes by, 'airing his quiff'. Bloom's interior comment is direct: 'Worst man in Dublin. ' But our present business is with getting to Hades, and we are already
seemg ghosts of great dead men m the form of public statues-Sir Philip Crampton, Farrell, Smith O'Brien, 'the hugecloaked Libera- tor's form'. A story about the son of Reuben J. Dodd, the monev- lender, and his comic attempt at suicide in the Liffey brings~a reference to a boatman (Charon) to whom Dodd gave the obol of a
! I5
)
Hell, Wind, Cannibals
? ? The Lab)"inth
Hell, Wind, Cannibals
florin for saving his son by fishing him out with a pole. And when Mr Dedalus and Mr Power eulogise dead Paddy Dignam, Bloom remembers that he died of drink-'Blazing face: redhot. Too much John Barleycorn'-and we remember that this also happened to Odysseus's companion Elpenor, who fell from the roof of Circe's palace dead drunk. We are approaching the gates of Hell. .
A child's coffin recalls dead Rudy, and at once-father motIf fol- lowing the son - Mr Power talks about the disgrace of having a suicide in the family. Martin Cunningham sees the indiscretion of this in Bloom's presence. When Mr Dedalus says that suicide is cowardice, he is quick with 'It is not for us to judge. ' Bloom inwardly appreci- ates this-'Always a good word to say'-and is led on to pity the hellish torments-in-life that Cunningham undergoes. It is his wife who leads him 'the life of the damned', pawning the furniture every Saturday, drunk, singing 'They call me the jewel of Asia' (a useful Oriental theme for later development in Bloom's fantasy life). Poor Cunningham is both Sisyphus, pushing a colossal burden uphill
only to see it fall down again ('Wear the heart out of a stone, that'), and Ixion ('Shoulder to the wheel') tied to his burning circle. Then we are back with Bloom's own tormented father, 'the redlahelled bottle on the table'.
We are given, still rolling hellwards, plenty of reminders that life has to go on, in spite of other people's deaths-the Gordon Bennett race in Germany, a barrel-organ playing 'Has anybody here seen Kelly? ' But the Mater Misericordiae, at the top oLBloom's Own street, brings death back to mind with its ward for incurables: Bloom temporarily forgets that a hospital's function is to heal. He thinks of old Mrs Riordan dying in Our Lady's Hospice. She was, we re- member, Stephen's governess Dante: another small stitch in the fabric of Bloom-Stephen rapprochement. And then when a drove of cattle appears-'Roast beef for old England'-we know we are look- ing at the ghostly herd of Orion, Orion himself shouting 'Huuuh I Out of that I' as he cracks flanks with his switch (bronze mace in the Odyssey). Death and hell forever supervene on life.
The Royal Canal, and another Charon on his barge.
The dead figures of the stonecutter's yard, mutely appealing to cross to the further bank. An old tramp, another Sisyphus, condemned to pound- ing Ireland's hills for ever. The house where Childs was alleged to have murdered his brother. More statues among the poplars of Prospects-'white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sus- taining vain gestures on the air'. They have arrived at the doors of
II6
Hades. A hawker is selling sirr? el cakes. Bloom thinks: 'Cakes for the dead. Dogbiscuits. ' The dog Cerberus had to be fed with such dainties. Paddy Dignam's corpse, like the soul of Elpenor, has arrived in Hades before them. Here is a 'leanjawed harpy', one of the mourners. Bloom reflects, thinking of Dignam's widow, 'There are more women than men in the world'-a tag to be taken up later that day by the ghost of Stephen's mother. And now comes Cerberus himself, the priest who is 'bully about the muzzle', 'with a belly on him like a poisoned pup'. He shakes holy water over the coffin, the water of Lethe. The one word 'sleep' comes to Bloom's mind. And all the time he is aware of the city of the dead, of which Glasnevin Cemetery is but a suburb, taking in its fresh batches every day. A, with Gabriel Conroy in 'The Dead', there comes this image of the other world as, paradoxically, having a life of its own.
Mr Kernan, an Ulsterman from Dub/iners, tells Bloom that the vernacular is more powerful than any Latin in a service for the dead: '/ am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's inmost heart. ' (That word 'heart' appears again and again. ) The rationalist Bloom tells himself: 'The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. ' But still, central to the philosophy of Joyce's novels, the two worlds intermingle. John Henry Menton, the solicitor, whom Bloom once beat at bowls, praises Molly Bloom-'a finelooking woman'-to Ned Lambert, but asks: 'What did she marry a coon like that for? ' When Bloom, at the end of this chapter, points out to him that his hat has a dinge in it, Menton snubs him, ('How grand we are this morning', thinks Bloom. ) His haughtiness is the haughti- ness of dead Ajax in the Odyssey. At the same time, the genuinely dead-Daniel O'Connell and Parnell-join the Greek fellowship as Heracles and Agamemnon. The lord ofHades is another O'ConneU- John-who is very much alive: he has married a fertility ? goddess (like Persephone) who has given him eight children. Everybody wants to be on good terms with him: it would not do to get on the wrong side of Pluto. If we have been looking for Tantalus-hunger- ing and thirsting amid sustenance that flies away or turns to dust as soon as he tries to snapat it-it is O'Connell himselfwho supplies his tortures. He makes love near the tombstones, and this must be 'tantalising for the poor dead'. As for Prometheus, whose liver was exposed to the eternal pecking of vultures, we must find his analo~e in the statue of Christ pointing to his Sacred Heart, at whIch the sms of the world nibble.
The Homeric parallel is worked out at considerable length in this "7
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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,
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? ? ? ? ? ? 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
120
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;
121
? ? ? ? The Labyri1lth
) Hell, Wind, Cannibals
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?