tephen,
fulfilling
the book's pattern, does so fancifully.
re-joyce-a-burgess
Keeper won't see.
Bend down let something fall see if she.
' The architecture of the Library Museum is embellished by the statues of naked goddesses.
Bloom thinks,
though he cannot be sure, that these immortals have no back pas- sages. This afternoon he will know for certain. There is a world beyond the endless peristalsis, the moving forward in circles, which men have to suffer. 'Nectar, imagine it drinking electricity: gods' food. ' He yearns towards it through idealised forms of his own "ife: 'Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires. '
While he is out he is discussed. Davy Byrne-a landlord, one who must speak well of everyone-says that he is a 'decent quiet man. I often saw him in here and I never once saw him, you know, over the line. ' Nosey Flynn gives Bloom the regular Dublin tribute of respect (he is generous, prudent) and suspicion (he is a freemason, he will never put anything in writing). And then Paddy Leonard and Ban- tam Lyons come in, accompanied by Tom Rochford who has (it is high time somebody had it) dyspepsia. Talk about the Ascot Gold Cup and Bantam Lyons's smug winking over the tip he has had ('I'm going to plunge five bob on my own') coincides with Bloom's
reappearance. 'That's the man now that gave it to me', whispers Bantam Lyons. Though Paddy Leonard goes 'Prrwht! ' in scorn we can feel the tension between Bloom and his fellow-citizens beginning to tighten.
But Bloom has now left the pub and we go with him. In the urinal that busy internal monologue has been ticking away, unheard of us and the author; we re-enter it in medias res: 'Something green it would have to be: spinach say. Then with those Rontgen rays searchlight you could,' A dog vomits 'a sick knuckly cud' and laps it up again. 'Surfeit. Returned with thanks having fully digested the contents. ' Lunch is ended; it is the hour for digestion, rumination, defecation (Bloom passes closestools in the window of a plumber, William Miller-an appropriate grinding name). The next meal will be supper. Bloom, his sound-track back on Don Giovanni, skips 'La ci darem' and moves on to 'Don Giovanni, a cenar teeo m'invitasti': 'Don Giovanni, thou hast me invited to come to supper tonight. '
124
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? ? 6: He Proves by Algebra
WE HAVE BEEN OPPRESSED BY GUTS, BY VISCERAL ORGIES. THE time has come for the brain to assert itself. T o a writer the brain'5 greatest achievement is literature, and the . greates~ na~e in all literature is William Shakespeare. The most mterestmg-If not the greatest-play of Shakespeare is Hamlet. The afternoon hour has struck for Stephen's promised disquisition on the meani~g of :hat play. The scene is the National Library and the techmque ~s a
dialectical one a moving towards truth-or at least plauslblhty- through the S~craticmethod of question and answer or proposition and counter-proposition. The Homenc parallel IS Scylla and Charyb- dis the rock and the whirlpool. The lines hold by the loosest of thr~ads the classical reference is fanciful rather than imaginative. And ye;, in a chapter dominated by Stephen D;dalus, ~magination burns as it has burned only once before-m the Proteus sectIOn. It is right to be reminded of that section and its presiding. art-philo- logy. Without language there IS no hterature; Wlth? ut a ht~ratureno
language can survive its speakers. It 1~ thIs fact m relatIOn to the Irish revival that John Eglmton (the edItor . of Dana, presented here under his own name) implies at the begmmng:
-Our young Irish bards have yet to create a figure which the world will
set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though I admue hIm, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.
It is Stephen's cue. . .
But the Qyaker librarian, Lyster, has already, m hls vague ,:ay,
opened the door to Shakespearian . discussion a~d at. the same. time hinted at the Scylla-Charybdis motIf. In Goethe s Wtlhelm MetSter- 'a great poet on a great brother poet'-the soul taking ar~sagainst a sea of troubles also comes to gnef agamst hard facts: whIrlpool and rock. George Russell (AE) is he,re t? O, full of s~i:ling,mystici~m about 'formless spiritual essences whlch, he says, It IS art s functtOn
126
to reveal. Stephen is all for then;"d basic rock of biographical fact: the solution to the problem of interpreting art lies in the life of the artist-at least, this is true of Shakespeare. Russell offers Plato's world of universals (Charybdis the whirlpool); Stephen prefers to steer close to hard rocky Scyllan Aristotle. What is wrong, his interior monologue seems to tell him, with the Irish art which Russell exemplifies is its wishy-washy whirly theosophical insub- stantiality. When Best (another historical character) comes in, it is to state that English Haines, that precious stone set in a silver sea, is waxing enthusiastic about Hyde's Lovesongs ~fCo1Znacht-swirling watery lyrics. But Russell's reference to Mallarme (France's 'finest flower of corruption') leads Best to mention the Mallarme prose- poem on Hamlet-'HAMLET ou LE DISTRAIT'-so a French provincial theatre advertised it-'Piece de Shakespeare'. Stephen translates 'Le Distrait' as 'The absentminded beggar'. Then he is off on the dangerous voyage of his Hamlet theory.
The whirlpool is figured in Stephen's interior monologue. He has been drinking, he bas had no lunch: thoughts and sensations swirl. But his speech is incisive and his facts are rock-solid. It is only his conclusions from the facts which fail to convince his auditors. He says, in effect, that it is wrong to identify Shakespeare with Hamlet, 'ineffectual dreamer' (Lyster's words). Hamlet is Hamnet, Shake- speare's own dead son; Shakespeare is the ghost, the wronged hus- band, deposed king; Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway, is the guilty queen. Russell, naturally, objects to this 'prying into the family life of a great man'. Stephen, steering by the rock of hard cash, remem- bers that he owes Russell a pound-'A. E. LO. U. '-and does not contradict him. But when Eglinton says that Ann Hathaway has no place in Shakespeare's works, that 'she died, for literature at least, before she was born', Stephen is quick and rude with his retorts. Ann was a wife and a mother (he thinks an instant of his own mother and his own guilt-'Who brought me into this world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers'), and if Shakespeare made an error in marrying her, then it was a volitional error, 'a portal of discovery' .
What, in fact, can an artist learn from a mother and a wife?
Socrates, remarks Eglinton, had a shrew-wife like Shakespeare; what useful 'portal of discovery' could she be? Stephen at once replies that he may have learned dialectic from her and from his midwife mother how to bring thoughts into the world. Fanciful but brilliant. And then we are back in the schoolroom, Stephen teaching
127
He Prows by Algebra
? ? ? ? ? The Labyrinth
/ He Proves by Algebra
father who has steered beyond the whirlpool and the rock of passion to become a ghost, a shadow finding life in 'the heart of him who is the substance . . . the son consubstantial with the father'.
We approach the whirlpool of theology, as Buck Mulligan- loudly shouting 'Amen! ' from the doorway-is quick to remind us. 'You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? ' he says to Stephen. Mulligan, as we remember, is of the 'brood of mockers', and Stephen's interior monologue at once embarks on a grotesque credo about 'He Who Himselfbegot . . . sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self. ' But the librarian thinks that Stephen himself may be a mocker who has presented a mere paradox, though one can never be sure: 'The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious. ' We are led away, through Mulligan, from Shakespeare to Synge and are ready to forget about the father-son hypostasis. And then the eternal father himself appears, offstage, Bloom asking for the files of the Kilkenny People to find that design for the House of Keyes. 'A patient silhouette waited, listening. ' Suddenly all the literary brilliance echoes hollowly. We remember Bloom's warmth and solidity, a fatherly substance, no ghost.
The mocker mocks. Mulligan cries, 'The sheeny I What's his name? Ikey Moses? ' Bloom has left his card; Stephen hears his name forthe first time. Mulligan rattles on : 'Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the' museum when I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite . . . He knows you, he knows your old fellow. 0, I fear me, he is Greeker than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove. ' (Bloom, the dogged enquirer, has at last found out about goddesses' back-passages. ) Mulligan has turned Bloom into a Greek, then, and it is appropriate that the name 'Penelope' should start off a resumption of talk about Ann Shake- speare. Bloom's wife is Penelope, no more faithful than Ann; he is a
cuckolded father without a son-we, if not Stephen, are beginning to find him Shakespearian. Stephen is concerned only "'ith his theory. He paints a fine picture of Shakespeare in London, dallying 'between conjugal love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures'-Scylla and Charybdis again. Meanwhile, in Stratford, Ann-'hot in the blood. Once a wooer twice a wooer'-is committing adultery. Back to Hamlet: 'Two deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. ' There is a choice
of three Shakespeare brothers for the adulterous act-Gilbert, Edmund, and Richard. Stephen will deal with that later. In the
1 2 9
young Sargent algebra and reflecting how impotent is a mother's
love to protect her child from the trampling feet of the world.
Socrates was condemned to death, and 'neither the midwife's lore
nor the caudlectures saved him from the archons of Sinn Fein and their noggin of hemlock'. Here is Stephen's reply to Mulligan's proposal to Hellenise Ireland-the Hibernicising of Athens. There was never any golden age in Greece and prophets and poets are always liquidated if they do not toe the party line. Hence Stephen's cynicism about the Dublin literary movement ('We are becoming important, it seems') and his inward sneers at Russell's false Orien- talism-'Y ogibogeybox in Dawson chambers . . . Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma. ' Like Bloom, Stephen is not really of this provincial Dublin. He gives another copy of Mr Deasy's letter to Russell, politely asking for its publication in the Homestead. Russell is offhand, not sure: 'We have so much corre- spondence. ' He rejects the oxen, symbols of fertility, as the whole Irish literary movement rejects them.
But we have to return to Shakespeare. Stephen proposes the theoty that a Stratford Adonis was seduced by a Shottery Venus, but that the beauty of his heroines derived from that girl he left behind him. Shakespeare steers between the rock of home and the whirlpool of London. Soon, though, he is unsure of solidity any- where: Ann is unfaithful to him. Here is one of the most delicious 'set-pieces' in all Ulysses:
Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully tapsters' wives. Fox and geese. And . in New Place a slack dis- honoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and un- forgiven.
And so back to Hamlet and the cuckolded ghost that is Shakespeare himself. But, says Stephen, 'through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth'. The artist, like Penelope, weaves and unweaves his image. The crass world of time and space presents the father and the son lVacheinander and Nebendnander, but the artistic imagination makes them one. Stephen's argument is not always easy to follow, mainly because it is so laced with literary allusion and coloured with deliberate Elizabethanisms and clotted with eye-distracting paradoxes. But we reach. at length the image of a
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? ? The Labyrinth
He Proves by Algebra
Himself His Own Son . . . Well: if the father who has not a son be not a
father can the son who has not a father be a son?
Riddles, but the image of that special paternity of the imagination is being etched out, defined in terms of what it is not.
Stephen deals with the rest of the Shakespeare family and finds that, though Gilbert-his soul filled with the playhouse sausage- does not lend his name to any of his brother's characters, yet Richard and Edmund (the one the eponym of Richard III, the other the villain of King Lear) figure notably in the depiction of evil. The theme of the usurping or adulterous brother is always with Shake- speare, as is the theme ofbanishment. Dispossession is Stephen's own cry: Shakespeare is a kind of Telemachus. But he is too great to be . so diminished, turned into a moaning son. Stephen agrees with Eglinton's summing-up: 'He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all. ' (In other words, he is God. ) But Stephen unwittingly brings him closer to Bloom: 'His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer. ' So, in the
brothel scene to come, Bloom is to desire and see enacted his own
utter humiliation. Joyce now makes Eglinton confuse father and son: 'When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas pere ? ) is right. Mter God Shakespeare has created most. ' It is as near as we will get to the blasphemous identification.
But Stephen is led to blasphemy a different way. The opposites- whirlpool and rock-between which we steer may be illusion. Travel itself may be illusion: 'We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in- love. But always meeting ourselves. ' It is God- 'the playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later)'-who, merging all forms into one, His own, 'is doubtless all in all in all of us'. The 'hangman god'
invoked by Stephen's mother looms, the enemy, old Nobodaddy. The scene ends with Stephen's denial of the validity of his own theory. Mulligan leads the way out with medical-student ribaldry which, once again, takes in Bloom-'A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting. ' Mulligan notes that Bloom, like, appro- priately, the Ancient Mariner, fixed his eye upon Stephen. This, to Mulligan, can mean only one thing: 'He looked upon you to lust
after you . . . 0, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad. ' But, with Stephen, Bloom has at last registered. He remembers his dream of last night. In that dream he came to full Daedalian stature, no falling Icarus: ' . . . I flew. Easily flew. Men wondered. ' And after
131
n:eantime, there is this question of Shakespeare's meanness to his
WIdow: the man who lived richly in a rich town left her his second- best bed. At this p~intJo~ce breaks into blank verse which ends up, hke Shakespeare himself, III drunken feverishness:
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.
Woa!
Shakespeare was mean, a speculator, hoarder, usurer. 'He drew
Shylock out of his own long pocket. ' John Eglinton asks Stephen to prove that he was a Jew (a word spelt, throughout Ulysses, with a small 'j', as to point Dublin's contempt and suspicion of Bloom's race). ?
tephen, fulfilling the book's pattern, does so fancifully. The Chnstlan laws forced the Jews to hoard affection as well as goods. No man shall covet Shakespeare's chattels, nor his wife. If Shake- speare was a Jew, he was a most un-Bloomlike one.
But Eglinton will not have this probing into family. He agrees WIth Russell: 'What do we care for his wife and father? ' We are back on the old motif. Bloom comes unbidden into Stephen's thoughts: 'Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower. ' And then his mother in her 'squalid deathlair'. Stephen cannot throw off family so easily ('Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience') and does not see how Shakespeare could. Boldly but hopelessly he throws out definitions that are crucial to the whole conception of
Ulysses:
Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only beg? tte~. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning ItalIan mtellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like ,the world, macro- and micro- cosm, upon the void , . . Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father o f any son that any son should love him or he any son?
To himself Stephen says: 'What the hell are you driving at? ' The answer is not young Stephen's so much as middle-aged Joyce's: '1 know. Shut up. Blast you! I have reasons. ' Stephen pushes on:
The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection in- crease~care. He. is a ! llale: ~isgrowth is his father's decl~ne,his youth his father s envy, hIS fnend hIS father's enemy . . . Sabelhus, the African subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the field, held that the Father w~
/
? ? ? ? ? ? ? The Labyrinth
that came the street of harlots, the Oriental man who held out 'a creamfruit melon'. Twice so far Bloom and Stephen have very nearly met-once in a place of newspapers, once-higher up in the literary scale-in a place of books. Stephen does not know that soon there will be a real meeting, and that his own dream has pointed to it. In Kildare Street a kind of peace comes over him-'Cease to strive'- and, though he sees no birds there now (he remembers himself as he was at the end of A Portrait), he notices that 'Frail from the house- tops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw of soft- ness softly were blown. '
This is a difficult, subtle chapter, as befits its central character, its subject, its symbol, and the art it glorifies. It draws on more literary forms than anything we have met so far-the lyric, the dramatic (both verse and prose), and an interior monologoe that contains (like a whirlpool) concentric layers of reference, touching the very verges of consciousness. The vocabulary is immense and the Shakespearian scholarship formidable. An apparently simple theme- the drawing together of brain and heart and senses in a father-son symbiosis-is dealt with on various interlocking levels, some of which seem to contradict each other. It is enough for us to see in it a second (and final) presentation of the intellectual and imaginative
powers of an immature poet and to consider how much this whirl-
pool needs to look across at a rock, image o f steadiness. Mter such a
chapter it will be a relief to encounter once more the simple life of
the city, be involved in action, however trivial, and to get on wit~the story.
7: Labyrinth and Fugue
WE NEED TO STAY OUT IN THE DUBLIN STREETS FOR A WHILE AFTER
the close atmosphere of the National Library. It is three o'clock in the afternoon, the hour when the blood is most sluggish. Joyce whips up the blood, draws attention to the wonder of its circulation, and allows it to rule this near-central chapter of his book (there are eighteen episodes in all; this is the tenth). Bloom and Stephen are temporarily free from the encumbrances of work and theory; there is no reason why, Dublin being so small a town, they should not now meet. But Joyce must reserve their meeting to a time of greater magic and drama-the night; moreover, though we have taken Stephen's measure, we have not yet learned enough about Bloom: Bloom must show more of himself, and he needs the foil of the city, not of the poet, for this. And there is the question of his necessary cuckolding, timed for after four, a consummation in which the intellectual imagination is not involved. Joyce has to use great cunning now. Here are the streets, and here are Stephen and Bloom walking through them, but they must be stopped - however artifi- cially- from achieving contact.
Artifice is tho very blood of this chapter. The 'art' featured is mechanicS; the engineer in Joyce erects a small labyrinth at the centre of the great one which is the whole book. In this labyrinth there is confusion, a need for steering at least as careful as in the Scylla and Charybdis episode just completed. The classical parallel is provided by those Symplegades, or Wandering Rocks, between which Jason and the Argonauts had so perilously to navigate. (We are outside the Odyssey for a space; we are looking down on a model of the total structure. ) Those clashing rocks formed an archipelago which is traditionally located in the Bosphorus-Europe on one coast, Asia on the other. Joyce has to find civic parallels here, and he finds them in representatives of the Church and the State, calm, fixed shores between which the citizenry wanders.
'33
'32
;; i::
? ? ? The Labyrinth
This episode was conceived spatially, and i~is in order for us to look over it with a surveyor's eye, as though It were a ';lap (Joyce in fact wrote it with a map of Dublin and a stop-,,:atch m ~ront of him). Count the humber ofsections in it, and you will find el~hteen, the number of chapters in the entire book. In the first sec! lon we meet Father Conmee S. J. , or rather re-meet him, since we ha:c already made his rather remote acquaintance at Clongowes ~ood,In A Portrait. In the final section we meet Lord Dudley, Viceroy of
Ireland, driving through the city in proud cavalcade. Church and
State afe well-separated, parallel powers. Place your street-wanderers
between them in neat little parcels, and you w! ll seem to have done-
an easy and i~genious synthesis, a sort of Dubliners without plots.
But nothing in Joyce is ever exactly easy. .
Our problems begin with Father Conmee. Nothmg could seem more straightforward than this representatlOn of SCI cne pnestly
authority:
The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. ]. , reset his sn;tooth watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery, steps. Five . to? t~~e. Just nice time to walk to Artane. What was that boy s name agam. 19- nam, yes. Vere dignum et justum est. Brother ~wan w~s the person to ~ee. :Mr Cunningham's l~tt~r. ~es. Oblige him, If possIble. Good practical
catholic: useful at mlSSlOn time.
He goes on his way, saluted and saluting, meditating mildly on what
he sees, on providence and men's souls. Then he s:oP. s to . read hIS
office by Rathcoffey. Without warning we are told: H,s thmsocked ankles were tickled by the stubble ofClongowes field. ' But, we know, he is no longer at Clongowes. We are brought up short, our smooth passage impeded by a little rock. We see? " to have taken the wrong turning in a labyrinth. ConfusIOn IS dehberately wished upon us. Then we realise that thiS IS no displacement of ! lme, only a mere memory' of a past sensation. We can go on our way agam, but we
Labyrinth and Fugue
must remember to go carefully.
. .
technique seems to be living a life of its own. Thus, right in the middle of Boylan's little scene, a line thrusts in, apparently from nowhere: 'A darkbacked figure under Merchants' arch scanned books on the hawker's car. ' Who is this-Stephen or Bloom? We shall not know until we reach the brief section from which the frag- ment is displaced. Soon we become used to the trick. Each section of the chapter concentrates on a particular Dubliner-either deeply involved in the plot, or presented only to be discarded almost at once-and into each section a brief passage from another section intrudes. Wandering rocks bump into us if we are unskilful naviga- tors, but we can learn our way through the maze.
More examples. In the course of a conversation between McCoy and Lenehan this sentence pushes in: 'A card Unfurnished Apart- ments reappeared on the windowsash of Number 7 Eccles Street. ' Then back to the conversation, which happens to be about the charms of Molly and, with a kind of reluctance, the peculiar distinc- tion of her husband: 'He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is . . . He's not one ofyour common or garden . . . you know . . . There's a touch of the artist about old Bloom. ' Bloom himself, in the follow- ing section, is borrowing Sweets o f Sin from a bookshop specialising in near-pornography. The scene is interrupted by: 'On O'Connell Bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing &c. ' Weare then at once sent back to Bloom: 'Fair Tyrants by James Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes. ' Another section shows us Mr Dedalus with no money to give to his daughters. He berates them: 'An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother died. ' A fragment from another section breaks in: 'Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along James's street'; then we are back once more with Mr Dedalus and his daughters. Think- ing we have endured our ration of floating rock, we are not ready for another collision: 'The viceregal cavalcade passed, greeted by obse- quious policemen, out ofParkgate. ' And then Mr Dedalus is allowed to finish his episode in peace.
Wandering rocks are, though unique, a natural hazard; a laby- rinth is a man-made device for causing confusion. Both, Joyce seems to be telling us, are puzzles soluble by human memory and human cunning. The booby-traps placed in this chapter are external, mechanical obstacles for which we must be on the look-out. When one of the Dubliners-Cashel Boyle O'Conner Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell-strides past the windows of a Mr Bloom who is a dental
'35
We must remember also that Joyce is rememben~g, despite all these perverse-seeming ingenu~ties, to c a r r y o n wIth . b s story. Father Conmee is doing somethmg to help a bereaved Dignam (so, as will soon appear, is Bloom himself). In Eccles Street the bare arm of Molly, who is awaiting her l~ver, throws out a com ;0a smgmg one-legged sailor who is growhng a song about the onehan,dle?
adulterer' Lord Nelson. Blazes Boylan, not yet due at Molly s, IS buying fr~itin Thornton's- 'far pears' and 'ri~eshamefaced peaches'. The story is moving gently towards Its vanous clImaxes, but the
134
? ? The Lakyrinth
surgeon, we have no excuse for confusing this. Bloom with our hero.
The duplication of names is a mere mechamcal hazard. When the Viceroy of Ireland goes grandly by, only ignorance convmces two old women that they are seeing 'the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain' and Gerty MacDowell that this is 'the lord lieutenant'. The chapter is crammed with fallible machines: at one end is the whole clockwork universe which Stephen thinks an act of imagination might bid collapse 'but stun myself too in th~blow'; at the other is Master Dignam's collar-stud, too smal! for its hole, so that his collar springs apart in salute of the Viceroy; in the middle
is news from America of an explosion on the General Slocum and consequent ship"Teck. On the whole the cosmic machine works well and the apparent rock-clashing confusion is really an artful laby- rinth. At the same time, though, a machine whose parts mterlock so wonderfully may really be as unpredictable as the Symplegades. Parnell's brother plays chess in a DBC teashop: how much is skill
and how much is chance?
Surrounded by machines-racing bicycles, dynamos in the power-
house, 'Mickey Anderson's all time ticking watches', T om ! t0ch- ford'slatestinvention(adevicetoshowlatecomerstothemusl~-~all what turn is 'on and what turns are over)-we may think that hvmg is merely a matter of learning certain mechanical tr~cks of control. But Bloom and Stephen are here to remind us of the Imponderable~, the uncontrollable manic forces which will not submit to a mecham- cal reduction. Bloom, at a bookstall, is set upon by images . of con- cupiscence conjured by Sweets of Sin; he becomes a mmor of
adulterous Boylan. Stephen, also at a bookstall, meets his sist~r Dilly, who has bought a second-hand French grammar, and he is overcome with regret and despair-the family IS breaking up, he cannot save his kin who are drowning in poverty: 'Agenblte of mWlt. Inwit's agenbite. Misery 1Misery l' (It is typical of Stephen, inciden- tally', that he should describe this very privy prick of c~nscience m
archaic terms. It is an attempt to push the pam back mto ancient literature, make it remote. This does not work, however. The past
is all too real. ) . Meanwhile the band like a well-oiled engine, marches along, itS
polished instruments discoursing 'My Girl's a Yorkshit;e Girl'. T~e viceregal cavalcade slides through the city: the State IS sure of itS mechanical ability to order life. But so is the Church: Father Conmee, his 'smooth watch' ticking in his pocket, goes his smooth parallel way. The Viceroy is going to 'inaugurate the Mirljs bazaar in aid of funds
13 6
Labyrinth and FUf,ue
for Mercer's hospital'; the priest is going to help the Dignams. Even the exercise of charity is drawn into the machine: the heart is a ticking watch. But the hearts of Bloom and Stephen keep more irregular, more human, time.
When c~m a machine be also a living organism? When it is a piece of music. In this 'Wandering Rocks' episode Joyce has been essaying a sort o f counterpoint, trying to achieve a kind o f simultaneity o f action in a medium that, being time-bound, fights against it. The labyrinth is mechanical, however, timed with a stop-watch and measured with a slide-rule. But music has been trying to dominate the chapter. The band plays; there is a significant conversation in Italian between Stephen and his teacher, Almidano Artifoni, about the sacrifice of Stephen's (or Joyce's) voice; even Father Conmee thinks of a song about the joy-bells ringing in gay Malahide. The' cavalcade and the loud band take us straight into the next chapter, which is dominated by music. The mechanical labyrinth has become a work of art-a fugue; the ear is the presiding organ; we have come to the bone-heaped island of the Sirens.
The way into the lair of Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy- barmaids
at the Ormond-is not easy. The first thing we meet is a collection of
unintelligible fragments: .
Trilling, trilling: Idolores.
Peep! Who's in the . . . peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
There are just over two pages of these. Having sailed successfully between the Wandering Rocks, we would be right in guessing that lines like 'ClapcJop. ClipcJap. ClappycJap' and 'Goodgod henev erheard inaH' will make sense when we meet them in context. They are, in fact, displacements of the kind we have already met in the preceding chapter.
though he cannot be sure, that these immortals have no back pas- sages. This afternoon he will know for certain. There is a world beyond the endless peristalsis, the moving forward in circles, which men have to suffer. 'Nectar, imagine it drinking electricity: gods' food. ' He yearns towards it through idealised forms of his own "ife: 'Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires. '
While he is out he is discussed. Davy Byrne-a landlord, one who must speak well of everyone-says that he is a 'decent quiet man. I often saw him in here and I never once saw him, you know, over the line. ' Nosey Flynn gives Bloom the regular Dublin tribute of respect (he is generous, prudent) and suspicion (he is a freemason, he will never put anything in writing). And then Paddy Leonard and Ban- tam Lyons come in, accompanied by Tom Rochford who has (it is high time somebody had it) dyspepsia. Talk about the Ascot Gold Cup and Bantam Lyons's smug winking over the tip he has had ('I'm going to plunge five bob on my own') coincides with Bloom's
reappearance. 'That's the man now that gave it to me', whispers Bantam Lyons. Though Paddy Leonard goes 'Prrwht! ' in scorn we can feel the tension between Bloom and his fellow-citizens beginning to tighten.
But Bloom has now left the pub and we go with him. In the urinal that busy internal monologue has been ticking away, unheard of us and the author; we re-enter it in medias res: 'Something green it would have to be: spinach say. Then with those Rontgen rays searchlight you could,' A dog vomits 'a sick knuckly cud' and laps it up again. 'Surfeit. Returned with thanks having fully digested the contents. ' Lunch is ended; it is the hour for digestion, rumination, defecation (Bloom passes closestools in the window of a plumber, William Miller-an appropriate grinding name). The next meal will be supper. Bloom, his sound-track back on Don Giovanni, skips 'La ci darem' and moves on to 'Don Giovanni, a cenar teeo m'invitasti': 'Don Giovanni, thou hast me invited to come to supper tonight. '
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? ? 6: He Proves by Algebra
WE HAVE BEEN OPPRESSED BY GUTS, BY VISCERAL ORGIES. THE time has come for the brain to assert itself. T o a writer the brain'5 greatest achievement is literature, and the . greates~ na~e in all literature is William Shakespeare. The most mterestmg-If not the greatest-play of Shakespeare is Hamlet. The afternoon hour has struck for Stephen's promised disquisition on the meani~g of :hat play. The scene is the National Library and the techmque ~s a
dialectical one a moving towards truth-or at least plauslblhty- through the S~craticmethod of question and answer or proposition and counter-proposition. The Homenc parallel IS Scylla and Charyb- dis the rock and the whirlpool. The lines hold by the loosest of thr~ads the classical reference is fanciful rather than imaginative. And ye;, in a chapter dominated by Stephen D;dalus, ~magination burns as it has burned only once before-m the Proteus sectIOn. It is right to be reminded of that section and its presiding. art-philo- logy. Without language there IS no hterature; Wlth? ut a ht~ratureno
language can survive its speakers. It 1~ thIs fact m relatIOn to the Irish revival that John Eglmton (the edItor . of Dana, presented here under his own name) implies at the begmmng:
-Our young Irish bards have yet to create a figure which the world will
set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though I admue hIm, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.
It is Stephen's cue. . .
But the Qyaker librarian, Lyster, has already, m hls vague ,:ay,
opened the door to Shakespearian . discussion a~d at. the same. time hinted at the Scylla-Charybdis motIf. In Goethe s Wtlhelm MetSter- 'a great poet on a great brother poet'-the soul taking ar~sagainst a sea of troubles also comes to gnef agamst hard facts: whIrlpool and rock. George Russell (AE) is he,re t? O, full of s~i:ling,mystici~m about 'formless spiritual essences whlch, he says, It IS art s functtOn
126
to reveal. Stephen is all for then;"d basic rock of biographical fact: the solution to the problem of interpreting art lies in the life of the artist-at least, this is true of Shakespeare. Russell offers Plato's world of universals (Charybdis the whirlpool); Stephen prefers to steer close to hard rocky Scyllan Aristotle. What is wrong, his interior monologue seems to tell him, with the Irish art which Russell exemplifies is its wishy-washy whirly theosophical insub- stantiality. When Best (another historical character) comes in, it is to state that English Haines, that precious stone set in a silver sea, is waxing enthusiastic about Hyde's Lovesongs ~fCo1Znacht-swirling watery lyrics. But Russell's reference to Mallarme (France's 'finest flower of corruption') leads Best to mention the Mallarme prose- poem on Hamlet-'HAMLET ou LE DISTRAIT'-so a French provincial theatre advertised it-'Piece de Shakespeare'. Stephen translates 'Le Distrait' as 'The absentminded beggar'. Then he is off on the dangerous voyage of his Hamlet theory.
The whirlpool is figured in Stephen's interior monologue. He has been drinking, he bas had no lunch: thoughts and sensations swirl. But his speech is incisive and his facts are rock-solid. It is only his conclusions from the facts which fail to convince his auditors. He says, in effect, that it is wrong to identify Shakespeare with Hamlet, 'ineffectual dreamer' (Lyster's words). Hamlet is Hamnet, Shake- speare's own dead son; Shakespeare is the ghost, the wronged hus- band, deposed king; Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway, is the guilty queen. Russell, naturally, objects to this 'prying into the family life of a great man'. Stephen, steering by the rock of hard cash, remem- bers that he owes Russell a pound-'A. E. LO. U. '-and does not contradict him. But when Eglinton says that Ann Hathaway has no place in Shakespeare's works, that 'she died, for literature at least, before she was born', Stephen is quick and rude with his retorts. Ann was a wife and a mother (he thinks an instant of his own mother and his own guilt-'Who brought me into this world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers'), and if Shakespeare made an error in marrying her, then it was a volitional error, 'a portal of discovery' .
What, in fact, can an artist learn from a mother and a wife?
Socrates, remarks Eglinton, had a shrew-wife like Shakespeare; what useful 'portal of discovery' could she be? Stephen at once replies that he may have learned dialectic from her and from his midwife mother how to bring thoughts into the world. Fanciful but brilliant. And then we are back in the schoolroom, Stephen teaching
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He Prows by Algebra
? ? ? ? ? The Labyrinth
/ He Proves by Algebra
father who has steered beyond the whirlpool and the rock of passion to become a ghost, a shadow finding life in 'the heart of him who is the substance . . . the son consubstantial with the father'.
We approach the whirlpool of theology, as Buck Mulligan- loudly shouting 'Amen! ' from the doorway-is quick to remind us. 'You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? ' he says to Stephen. Mulligan, as we remember, is of the 'brood of mockers', and Stephen's interior monologue at once embarks on a grotesque credo about 'He Who Himselfbegot . . . sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self. ' But the librarian thinks that Stephen himself may be a mocker who has presented a mere paradox, though one can never be sure: 'The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious. ' We are led away, through Mulligan, from Shakespeare to Synge and are ready to forget about the father-son hypostasis. And then the eternal father himself appears, offstage, Bloom asking for the files of the Kilkenny People to find that design for the House of Keyes. 'A patient silhouette waited, listening. ' Suddenly all the literary brilliance echoes hollowly. We remember Bloom's warmth and solidity, a fatherly substance, no ghost.
The mocker mocks. Mulligan cries, 'The sheeny I What's his name? Ikey Moses? ' Bloom has left his card; Stephen hears his name forthe first time. Mulligan rattles on : 'Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the' museum when I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite . . . He knows you, he knows your old fellow. 0, I fear me, he is Greeker than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove. ' (Bloom, the dogged enquirer, has at last found out about goddesses' back-passages. ) Mulligan has turned Bloom into a Greek, then, and it is appropriate that the name 'Penelope' should start off a resumption of talk about Ann Shake- speare. Bloom's wife is Penelope, no more faithful than Ann; he is a
cuckolded father without a son-we, if not Stephen, are beginning to find him Shakespearian. Stephen is concerned only "'ith his theory. He paints a fine picture of Shakespeare in London, dallying 'between conjugal love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures'-Scylla and Charybdis again. Meanwhile, in Stratford, Ann-'hot in the blood. Once a wooer twice a wooer'-is committing adultery. Back to Hamlet: 'Two deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. ' There is a choice
of three Shakespeare brothers for the adulterous act-Gilbert, Edmund, and Richard. Stephen will deal with that later. In the
1 2 9
young Sargent algebra and reflecting how impotent is a mother's
love to protect her child from the trampling feet of the world.
Socrates was condemned to death, and 'neither the midwife's lore
nor the caudlectures saved him from the archons of Sinn Fein and their noggin of hemlock'. Here is Stephen's reply to Mulligan's proposal to Hellenise Ireland-the Hibernicising of Athens. There was never any golden age in Greece and prophets and poets are always liquidated if they do not toe the party line. Hence Stephen's cynicism about the Dublin literary movement ('We are becoming important, it seems') and his inward sneers at Russell's false Orien- talism-'Y ogibogeybox in Dawson chambers . . . Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma. ' Like Bloom, Stephen is not really of this provincial Dublin. He gives another copy of Mr Deasy's letter to Russell, politely asking for its publication in the Homestead. Russell is offhand, not sure: 'We have so much corre- spondence. ' He rejects the oxen, symbols of fertility, as the whole Irish literary movement rejects them.
But we have to return to Shakespeare. Stephen proposes the theoty that a Stratford Adonis was seduced by a Shottery Venus, but that the beauty of his heroines derived from that girl he left behind him. Shakespeare steers between the rock of home and the whirlpool of London. Soon, though, he is unsure of solidity any- where: Ann is unfaithful to him. Here is one of the most delicious 'set-pieces' in all Ulysses:
Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully tapsters' wives. Fox and geese. And . in New Place a slack dis- honoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and un- forgiven.
And so back to Hamlet and the cuckolded ghost that is Shakespeare himself. But, says Stephen, 'through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth'. The artist, like Penelope, weaves and unweaves his image. The crass world of time and space presents the father and the son lVacheinander and Nebendnander, but the artistic imagination makes them one. Stephen's argument is not always easy to follow, mainly because it is so laced with literary allusion and coloured with deliberate Elizabethanisms and clotted with eye-distracting paradoxes. But we reach. at length the image of a
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He Proves by Algebra
Himself His Own Son . . . Well: if the father who has not a son be not a
father can the son who has not a father be a son?
Riddles, but the image of that special paternity of the imagination is being etched out, defined in terms of what it is not.
Stephen deals with the rest of the Shakespeare family and finds that, though Gilbert-his soul filled with the playhouse sausage- does not lend his name to any of his brother's characters, yet Richard and Edmund (the one the eponym of Richard III, the other the villain of King Lear) figure notably in the depiction of evil. The theme of the usurping or adulterous brother is always with Shake- speare, as is the theme ofbanishment. Dispossession is Stephen's own cry: Shakespeare is a kind of Telemachus. But he is too great to be . so diminished, turned into a moaning son. Stephen agrees with Eglinton's summing-up: 'He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all. ' (In other words, he is God. ) But Stephen unwittingly brings him closer to Bloom: 'His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer. ' So, in the
brothel scene to come, Bloom is to desire and see enacted his own
utter humiliation. Joyce now makes Eglinton confuse father and son: 'When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas pere ? ) is right. Mter God Shakespeare has created most. ' It is as near as we will get to the blasphemous identification.
But Stephen is led to blasphemy a different way. The opposites- whirlpool and rock-between which we steer may be illusion. Travel itself may be illusion: 'We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in- love. But always meeting ourselves. ' It is God- 'the playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later)'-who, merging all forms into one, His own, 'is doubtless all in all in all of us'. The 'hangman god'
invoked by Stephen's mother looms, the enemy, old Nobodaddy. The scene ends with Stephen's denial of the validity of his own theory. Mulligan leads the way out with medical-student ribaldry which, once again, takes in Bloom-'A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting. ' Mulligan notes that Bloom, like, appro- priately, the Ancient Mariner, fixed his eye upon Stephen. This, to Mulligan, can mean only one thing: 'He looked upon you to lust
after you . . . 0, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad. ' But, with Stephen, Bloom has at last registered. He remembers his dream of last night. In that dream he came to full Daedalian stature, no falling Icarus: ' . . . I flew. Easily flew. Men wondered. ' And after
131
n:eantime, there is this question of Shakespeare's meanness to his
WIdow: the man who lived richly in a rich town left her his second- best bed. At this p~intJo~ce breaks into blank verse which ends up, hke Shakespeare himself, III drunken feverishness:
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.
Woa!
Shakespeare was mean, a speculator, hoarder, usurer. 'He drew
Shylock out of his own long pocket. ' John Eglinton asks Stephen to prove that he was a Jew (a word spelt, throughout Ulysses, with a small 'j', as to point Dublin's contempt and suspicion of Bloom's race). ?
tephen, fulfilling the book's pattern, does so fancifully. The Chnstlan laws forced the Jews to hoard affection as well as goods. No man shall covet Shakespeare's chattels, nor his wife. If Shake- speare was a Jew, he was a most un-Bloomlike one.
But Eglinton will not have this probing into family. He agrees WIth Russell: 'What do we care for his wife and father? ' We are back on the old motif. Bloom comes unbidden into Stephen's thoughts: 'Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower. ' And then his mother in her 'squalid deathlair'. Stephen cannot throw off family so easily ('Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience') and does not see how Shakespeare could. Boldly but hopelessly he throws out definitions that are crucial to the whole conception of
Ulysses:
Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only beg? tte~. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning ItalIan mtellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like ,the world, macro- and micro- cosm, upon the void , . . Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father o f any son that any son should love him or he any son?
To himself Stephen says: 'What the hell are you driving at? ' The answer is not young Stephen's so much as middle-aged Joyce's: '1 know. Shut up. Blast you! I have reasons. ' Stephen pushes on:
The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection in- crease~care. He. is a ! llale: ~isgrowth is his father's decl~ne,his youth his father s envy, hIS fnend hIS father's enemy . . . Sabelhus, the African subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the field, held that the Father w~
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? ? ? ? ? ? ? The Labyrinth
that came the street of harlots, the Oriental man who held out 'a creamfruit melon'. Twice so far Bloom and Stephen have very nearly met-once in a place of newspapers, once-higher up in the literary scale-in a place of books. Stephen does not know that soon there will be a real meeting, and that his own dream has pointed to it. In Kildare Street a kind of peace comes over him-'Cease to strive'- and, though he sees no birds there now (he remembers himself as he was at the end of A Portrait), he notices that 'Frail from the house- tops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw of soft- ness softly were blown. '
This is a difficult, subtle chapter, as befits its central character, its subject, its symbol, and the art it glorifies. It draws on more literary forms than anything we have met so far-the lyric, the dramatic (both verse and prose), and an interior monologoe that contains (like a whirlpool) concentric layers of reference, touching the very verges of consciousness. The vocabulary is immense and the Shakespearian scholarship formidable. An apparently simple theme- the drawing together of brain and heart and senses in a father-son symbiosis-is dealt with on various interlocking levels, some of which seem to contradict each other. It is enough for us to see in it a second (and final) presentation of the intellectual and imaginative
powers of an immature poet and to consider how much this whirl-
pool needs to look across at a rock, image o f steadiness. Mter such a
chapter it will be a relief to encounter once more the simple life of
the city, be involved in action, however trivial, and to get on wit~the story.
7: Labyrinth and Fugue
WE NEED TO STAY OUT IN THE DUBLIN STREETS FOR A WHILE AFTER
the close atmosphere of the National Library. It is three o'clock in the afternoon, the hour when the blood is most sluggish. Joyce whips up the blood, draws attention to the wonder of its circulation, and allows it to rule this near-central chapter of his book (there are eighteen episodes in all; this is the tenth). Bloom and Stephen are temporarily free from the encumbrances of work and theory; there is no reason why, Dublin being so small a town, they should not now meet. But Joyce must reserve their meeting to a time of greater magic and drama-the night; moreover, though we have taken Stephen's measure, we have not yet learned enough about Bloom: Bloom must show more of himself, and he needs the foil of the city, not of the poet, for this. And there is the question of his necessary cuckolding, timed for after four, a consummation in which the intellectual imagination is not involved. Joyce has to use great cunning now. Here are the streets, and here are Stephen and Bloom walking through them, but they must be stopped - however artifi- cially- from achieving contact.
Artifice is tho very blood of this chapter. The 'art' featured is mechanicS; the engineer in Joyce erects a small labyrinth at the centre of the great one which is the whole book. In this labyrinth there is confusion, a need for steering at least as careful as in the Scylla and Charybdis episode just completed. The classical parallel is provided by those Symplegades, or Wandering Rocks, between which Jason and the Argonauts had so perilously to navigate. (We are outside the Odyssey for a space; we are looking down on a model of the total structure. ) Those clashing rocks formed an archipelago which is traditionally located in the Bosphorus-Europe on one coast, Asia on the other. Joyce has to find civic parallels here, and he finds them in representatives of the Church and the State, calm, fixed shores between which the citizenry wanders.
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? ? ? The Labyrinth
This episode was conceived spatially, and i~is in order for us to look over it with a surveyor's eye, as though It were a ';lap (Joyce in fact wrote it with a map of Dublin and a stop-,,:atch m ~ront of him). Count the humber ofsections in it, and you will find el~hteen, the number of chapters in the entire book. In the first sec! lon we meet Father Conmee S. J. , or rather re-meet him, since we ha:c already made his rather remote acquaintance at Clongowes ~ood,In A Portrait. In the final section we meet Lord Dudley, Viceroy of
Ireland, driving through the city in proud cavalcade. Church and
State afe well-separated, parallel powers. Place your street-wanderers
between them in neat little parcels, and you w! ll seem to have done-
an easy and i~genious synthesis, a sort of Dubliners without plots.
But nothing in Joyce is ever exactly easy. .
Our problems begin with Father Conmee. Nothmg could seem more straightforward than this representatlOn of SCI cne pnestly
authority:
The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. ]. , reset his sn;tooth watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery, steps. Five . to? t~~e. Just nice time to walk to Artane. What was that boy s name agam. 19- nam, yes. Vere dignum et justum est. Brother ~wan w~s the person to ~ee. :Mr Cunningham's l~tt~r. ~es. Oblige him, If possIble. Good practical
catholic: useful at mlSSlOn time.
He goes on his way, saluted and saluting, meditating mildly on what
he sees, on providence and men's souls. Then he s:oP. s to . read hIS
office by Rathcoffey. Without warning we are told: H,s thmsocked ankles were tickled by the stubble ofClongowes field. ' But, we know, he is no longer at Clongowes. We are brought up short, our smooth passage impeded by a little rock. We see? " to have taken the wrong turning in a labyrinth. ConfusIOn IS dehberately wished upon us. Then we realise that thiS IS no displacement of ! lme, only a mere memory' of a past sensation. We can go on our way agam, but we
Labyrinth and Fugue
must remember to go carefully.
. .
technique seems to be living a life of its own. Thus, right in the middle of Boylan's little scene, a line thrusts in, apparently from nowhere: 'A darkbacked figure under Merchants' arch scanned books on the hawker's car. ' Who is this-Stephen or Bloom? We shall not know until we reach the brief section from which the frag- ment is displaced. Soon we become used to the trick. Each section of the chapter concentrates on a particular Dubliner-either deeply involved in the plot, or presented only to be discarded almost at once-and into each section a brief passage from another section intrudes. Wandering rocks bump into us if we are unskilful naviga- tors, but we can learn our way through the maze.
More examples. In the course of a conversation between McCoy and Lenehan this sentence pushes in: 'A card Unfurnished Apart- ments reappeared on the windowsash of Number 7 Eccles Street. ' Then back to the conversation, which happens to be about the charms of Molly and, with a kind of reluctance, the peculiar distinc- tion of her husband: 'He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is . . . He's not one ofyour common or garden . . . you know . . . There's a touch of the artist about old Bloom. ' Bloom himself, in the follow- ing section, is borrowing Sweets o f Sin from a bookshop specialising in near-pornography. The scene is interrupted by: 'On O'Connell Bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing &c. ' Weare then at once sent back to Bloom: 'Fair Tyrants by James Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes. ' Another section shows us Mr Dedalus with no money to give to his daughters. He berates them: 'An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother died. ' A fragment from another section breaks in: 'Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along James's street'; then we are back once more with Mr Dedalus and his daughters. Think- ing we have endured our ration of floating rock, we are not ready for another collision: 'The viceregal cavalcade passed, greeted by obse- quious policemen, out ofParkgate. ' And then Mr Dedalus is allowed to finish his episode in peace.
Wandering rocks are, though unique, a natural hazard; a laby- rinth is a man-made device for causing confusion. Both, Joyce seems to be telling us, are puzzles soluble by human memory and human cunning. The booby-traps placed in this chapter are external, mechanical obstacles for which we must be on the look-out. When one of the Dubliners-Cashel Boyle O'Conner Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell-strides past the windows of a Mr Bloom who is a dental
'35
We must remember also that Joyce is rememben~g, despite all these perverse-seeming ingenu~ties, to c a r r y o n wIth . b s story. Father Conmee is doing somethmg to help a bereaved Dignam (so, as will soon appear, is Bloom himself). In Eccles Street the bare arm of Molly, who is awaiting her l~ver, throws out a com ;0a smgmg one-legged sailor who is growhng a song about the onehan,dle?
adulterer' Lord Nelson. Blazes Boylan, not yet due at Molly s, IS buying fr~itin Thornton's- 'far pears' and 'ri~eshamefaced peaches'. The story is moving gently towards Its vanous clImaxes, but the
134
? ? The Lakyrinth
surgeon, we have no excuse for confusing this. Bloom with our hero.
The duplication of names is a mere mechamcal hazard. When the Viceroy of Ireland goes grandly by, only ignorance convmces two old women that they are seeing 'the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain' and Gerty MacDowell that this is 'the lord lieutenant'. The chapter is crammed with fallible machines: at one end is the whole clockwork universe which Stephen thinks an act of imagination might bid collapse 'but stun myself too in th~blow'; at the other is Master Dignam's collar-stud, too smal! for its hole, so that his collar springs apart in salute of the Viceroy; in the middle
is news from America of an explosion on the General Slocum and consequent ship"Teck. On the whole the cosmic machine works well and the apparent rock-clashing confusion is really an artful laby- rinth. At the same time, though, a machine whose parts mterlock so wonderfully may really be as unpredictable as the Symplegades. Parnell's brother plays chess in a DBC teashop: how much is skill
and how much is chance?
Surrounded by machines-racing bicycles, dynamos in the power-
house, 'Mickey Anderson's all time ticking watches', T om ! t0ch- ford'slatestinvention(adevicetoshowlatecomerstothemusl~-~all what turn is 'on and what turns are over)-we may think that hvmg is merely a matter of learning certain mechanical tr~cks of control. But Bloom and Stephen are here to remind us of the Imponderable~, the uncontrollable manic forces which will not submit to a mecham- cal reduction. Bloom, at a bookstall, is set upon by images . of con- cupiscence conjured by Sweets of Sin; he becomes a mmor of
adulterous Boylan. Stephen, also at a bookstall, meets his sist~r Dilly, who has bought a second-hand French grammar, and he is overcome with regret and despair-the family IS breaking up, he cannot save his kin who are drowning in poverty: 'Agenblte of mWlt. Inwit's agenbite. Misery 1Misery l' (It is typical of Stephen, inciden- tally', that he should describe this very privy prick of c~nscience m
archaic terms. It is an attempt to push the pam back mto ancient literature, make it remote. This does not work, however. The past
is all too real. ) . Meanwhile the band like a well-oiled engine, marches along, itS
polished instruments discoursing 'My Girl's a Yorkshit;e Girl'. T~e viceregal cavalcade slides through the city: the State IS sure of itS mechanical ability to order life. But so is the Church: Father Conmee, his 'smooth watch' ticking in his pocket, goes his smooth parallel way. The Viceroy is going to 'inaugurate the Mirljs bazaar in aid of funds
13 6
Labyrinth and FUf,ue
for Mercer's hospital'; the priest is going to help the Dignams. Even the exercise of charity is drawn into the machine: the heart is a ticking watch. But the hearts of Bloom and Stephen keep more irregular, more human, time.
When c~m a machine be also a living organism? When it is a piece of music. In this 'Wandering Rocks' episode Joyce has been essaying a sort o f counterpoint, trying to achieve a kind o f simultaneity o f action in a medium that, being time-bound, fights against it. The labyrinth is mechanical, however, timed with a stop-watch and measured with a slide-rule. But music has been trying to dominate the chapter. The band plays; there is a significant conversation in Italian between Stephen and his teacher, Almidano Artifoni, about the sacrifice of Stephen's (or Joyce's) voice; even Father Conmee thinks of a song about the joy-bells ringing in gay Malahide. The' cavalcade and the loud band take us straight into the next chapter, which is dominated by music. The mechanical labyrinth has become a work of art-a fugue; the ear is the presiding organ; we have come to the bone-heaped island of the Sirens.
The way into the lair of Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy- barmaids
at the Ormond-is not easy. The first thing we meet is a collection of
unintelligible fragments: .
Trilling, trilling: Idolores.
Peep! Who's in the . . . peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
There are just over two pages of these. Having sailed successfully between the Wandering Rocks, we would be right in guessing that lines like 'ClapcJop. ClipcJap. ClappycJap' and 'Goodgod henev erheard inaH' will make sense when we meet them in context. They are, in fact, displacements of the kind we have already met in the preceding chapter.
