No More Learning

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. But their function is different: they are the musical themes which are to be developed in the score to come. Joyce loves a puzzle, but he does not like us to have to wait too long for the solution. And so his second theme-'Imperthnthn thnthnthn' - makes sense very quickly. The pageboy has brought tea to the two Sirens. He is cheeky, and Miss Douce complains of his 'impertinent
insolence'. The young brat immediately deforms that, cheeky still, into 'Imperthnthn thnthnthn'.
We have two things to WTestle with-the detail of the Homeric
? correspondence; a technique which tries to turn words into music
with onomatopoeic fidelity. The Sirens themselves are the less 137
? ? The Labyrinth
Labyrinth and Fugue
trouble. Both have musical names-Mina (a pun on 'minor) and Lydia (a reference to the Lydian scale-F major with B natural instead of B flat). Because their Homeric prototypes lived on an island, they must be surrounded by marine associations. They 'cower under their reef o f counter'; Miss Douce has been on holiday and has lain on the beach all day- 'tempting poor simple males', teases Mr Dedalus; to remind us what they are in their mythical aspect, Bloom is made to look at a poster which shows 'a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves. Smoke mermaids, coolest whiff of all. ' Miss Doucelslneonly--Siren who sings, and she does not know the words of her song very weIE'O, Idolores, queen of the eastern seasl'-meaning 'my Dolores'. The singing in this chapter is reserved for the tempted males. As for tempting, there is not much of that: they are barmaids, and it is part of their office to flirt mechanically with the customers. The Sirens are swirled up into the whorl of a huge ear, caught in a web of music.
The technique of this episode is described by the author as that of afuga per canonem-a strict form which words' are not really competent to imitate. We need not take it too seriously, then, though we ought to note that the subject of the fugue-the theme, that is, on which the composition is based-is represented by the Sirens themselves; the answer (technically, the subject sounded in another voice, a fifth higher or fourth lower) is Mr Bloom, entering the Ormond and monologuising; the counter-subject-the contrapuntal accompani- ment to the answer and, from then on, to every re-statement of the subject-is Blazes Boylan, taking a final drink before going to Eccles Street then jingling off. Between re-statements of subject and answer there have to be brief interludes known as 'episodes', and these are provided by the songs sung by Mr Dedalus (tenor) and Ben Dollard (bass). It is all rather fanciful, but Joyce's real achieve- ment here-foreshadowed among the Wandering Rocks-is the crea- tion of genuine counterpoint of action. While the Sirens are drinking their tea and gossiping, Bloom is buying notepaper so that he can write a reply to his pen-friend, Martha Clifford. A mere reference to his name ('But Bloom ? ') is enough to make us aware of his own
music playing horizontally to that of the Sirens. As the chapter
advances, the technique grows subtler, and we can take in three or four strands of counterpoint at the same time-Bloom's unspoken thoughts; ine singing in the concert-room; the knocking of Boylan at the door of Number 7 Eccles Street (,with a cock with a carra') and the tapping (,Tap. Tap. Tap') of the stick of the blind piano-
138
tuner (the one whom Bloom helped across the road earlier that day) as he comes back to the Ormond to recover his tuning-fork (left on top ofthe piano he has tuned). The quasi-musical technique enables Joyce to indulge fully in a daring but successful device-,that of
allowing a single word, like a musical note, to sound a whole world
of. harmonics. Thus the word 'jingle'-thrown into the text with neither preparation nor resolution-stands for Boylan's riding off to see Molly Bloom in a jaunting-car and, proleptically, for the boun- cing of the adulterous springs.
Bloom has been gathering themes all day. His most recent is provided by the book he has borrowed for Molly-Sweets of Sin- and its adulterer-villain Raoul. Raoul he identifies with Boylan; 'sweets of' or 'sweet are the sweets of' is enough to sound the over- tones of his own sensual imaginings, his awareness of what is hap- pening in Eccles Street (the hour is four in the afternoon), and a
kind of pleased acquiescence in his cuckoldry. Soon this technique
will not merely serve a celebration of the art of music: it will be integral to the whole pattern of the Bloom or Stephen interior monologue.
Bloom comes to the Ormond for a meal-liver and bacon: he re-
mains inner-organ-Ioving and still defies the taboos of his ancestral religion. Stephen's uncle, Richie Goulding, sits near him, eating steak-and-kidney pie. Bloom is cut off from the seduction of the Sirens in the bar; he is also cut off from the sight of Mr Dedalus and Ben Dollard singing in the concert-room. Still, a true Dubliner, vocal music affects him deeply, colours his musings, drives his moods from joy to sadness. We disentangle him from a mass of musical tricks-a tremolo, for instance: 'Her wavyavyeavyheavy-
eavyevyevy hair un comb:'d'; a staccato triplet: '1. Want. You. '; hollow fifths: 'Blmstdp'-in which the vowels are missing ('Bloom stood up') on the analogy of suppressed thirds in common chords.
We have recapitulations, ornamented cadences, appoggiaturas, but
above everything we have an exploitation of the musical possibilities of sheer sound which can only be matched by that ultimate word- symphony Finnegans Wake.
Does the virtuoso display obscure this latest phase of the story? No, since the essence of the whole book is Bloom and his qualifica- tions for the spiritual fatherhood of a poet, and we must meet Bloom's inner world at all its levels. Every fresh stimulus brings to
the surface a new aspect ofthe man, and music-in a city passionately
devoted to it-is a stimulus of considerable potency. But Joyce does 139
? ? The Labyrinth
Labyrinth and Fugue
not forget that a crucial event is taking place at this afternoon hour- Bloom's cuckolding. Boylan enters the bar to the tune of Lenehan's 'See the conquering hero comes', counter-subject to 'Between the car and window, warily walking, went Bloom, unconquered hero. ' Joyce means this latter. Boylan is smiled on by the barmaids (one of whom snaps her garter for him-'Sonnez fa cloche') and shines in all the glory of a provincial Don Giovanni, but he is essentially ridiculous, and the musical technique serves to bring this out:
By Bachelor's walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun, in heat, mare's glossy rump atrot, with flick of whip, on bounding tyres: sprawled, warrnseated, Boylan impatience, arrlentbold. Horn. Have you the? Horn. Have you the? Haw haw horn.
(He has been described as 'Boylan with impatience' by Lenehan, who also asked: 'Got the hom or what? Wait. ') Impatient, anxious to put horns on Bloom, Boylan continues on his way:
Jingle by monuments of sir John Gray, Horatio onehandled Nelson, reverend father Theobald Matthew, jaunted as said before just now. Atrot, in heat, heatseated. Cloche. Sonnez la. -Cloche. Sonnez la. Slower the mare went up the hill by the Rotunda, Rutland square. Too slow for Boylan, blazes Boylan, impatience Boylan, joggled the mare.
Soon he is near Bloom's kidney-seller:
This is the jingle that joggled and jingled. By Dlugacz' porkshop bright tubes of Agendath trotted a gallantbuttocked mare.
('Bright tubes' of sausages and the advertisement for 'Agendath Netaim: planter's company' refer us back to that morning excursion of breakfast"buying Bloom-before the letter from Boylan had arrived. )
Bloom, meanwhile, liver and bacon finished, is writing his letter to Martha Clifford-a more subtle kind of infidelity than his wife's. At last Boylan arrives:
Jog jig jogged stopped. Dandy tan shoe of dandy Boylan socks skyblue docks came light to earth.
And then:
One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de
Kock, with a loud proud knocker, with a cock carracarracarra cock.
Cockcock.
(Boylan has already been identified by Bloom with one porno- graphical villain. Now he becomes the actual writer of certain spicy romances beloved of Molly Bloom: 'Paul de Kock. Nice name he
'40
has. ') The ridiculous betrayer is heard periodically from now till the end of the chapter: 'Cockcarraearra . . . With a cock with a carra. ' Music must end soon, since it has been debased into silly rhythms to match Boylan's silly lust. The tap of the stick of the blind piano- tuner is heard more frequently now-a mere noise, though it suggests the still centre ofsound represented by the tuning-fork he is coming for. Noises are starting in Bloom's inner organs: 'Pwee! A wee little wind piped eeee. In Bloom's little wee. '
Bloom, in Hades that morning, did not meet the seer Tiresias, in
his reincarnation as Robert Emmet. But now he sees Emmet's last
words in Lionel Marks's window: 'When my country takes her place among. Nations of the earth. Then and not till then. Let my epitaph be. Written. I have. Done. ' This is punctuated by. new, more urgent noises (Bloom blames his flatulence on the noontime glass of burgundy): 'Prrprr . . . Fff. 00. Rrpr . . . Pprrpffrrppflf. ' We are reminded of Joyce's devotion to sheer sound, meaningful or otherwise-the eat's cry, the noise of the printing machines in the 'lEolus' episode, the squeaking of Stephen's ashplant as he trails its ferrule on the ground behind him. And so, after a stretto in which all the themes of the chapter are gathered together over a pedal- point ('Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap'), Bloom pushes on to his next adven- ture. The song of the cuckoo, which mocks married men, is to be deferred till nightfall, but 'Love's Old Sweet Song' is doubtless now jingling happily away.
? ? 8: Fireworks
W E MUST NOTE TWO CHANGES THA T TAKE PLACE IN
JOYCE'S
stake of wood in the fire, then put out Polyphemus's one eye with it.
Polyphemus yelled, his neighbours came near his cave to ask what the matter was: had anyone harmed him? He replied that No-man had harmed him. His neighbours concluded that he was dreaming or delirious and went back to their homes. Odysseus and his uneaten
. men got away by clinging to the fleecy bellies of the giant sheep and being driven out to pasture with them, but, once embarked, the hero could not resist boasting. In rage, Polyphemus hurled a huge rock at the ship but, naturally, missed. A near thing, all the same.
It i~Joyce's main pu~pose to emphasise the absurdity of gigantism, especially when it is one-eyed. The Citizen's vision is limited to the trampled-on greatness of Ireland, the hopes of her re-birth when the foul foreigner shall be driven out. His patriotism, he considers, earns him many free drinks and, by extension, his dog Garryowen free biscuits. But he is also a hero in his own right, a once-great athlete still a man of muscle. Muscle is the part of the body that rules here; and the art of politics-in its narrowest aspect of chauvinism-sits over everything like the Irish giant himself. Joyce lets the Citizen have his say, but is quick to inflate him in the mock-epic style,
. though on a scale of ridicule unknown to his picaresque forebears:
The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired fr~ely freckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deep- VOIced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus).
Joyce, like Rabelais, dearly loves a catalogue pushed to intolerable length, and he spends a page listing the 'tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity' which are engraved on the stones that dangle from the giant's girdle:
. . . Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages Brian of Kincora, the Ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O'NeilI, Father John Murphy, Owen Roe . . . Henry Joy McCracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff, Peg Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain Boycott, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Colum- bus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan, Marshal MacMahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the Maccabees, the Last of the Mohicans the Rose of Castille, the Man for Galway, The Man that Broke the Ba~k at
Monte Carlo, the Man in the Gap, the Woman Who Didn't, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, John L. Sullivan, Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar . . .
143
approach to his technique from about the middle of Ulysses on. First, the chapters grow longer, as if the author is trying to make the fictional time-the time required for the enactment of the fictional events-correspond exactly to the reading time-the time required to read about those events. Second, he makes far greater use of parody. We have met parody sporadically so far-the skits on news- paper headlines and on newspaper rhetoric in the '. lEoIus' episode, the Elizabethan and Irish Renaissance pastiches in the National Library. Now we find it employed pretty consistently. Joyce leans
to condensation when writing in his own person-never a word too
many. It is natural, then, that he should choose for parody styles which are tedious, gaseous, inflated. The length of the chapters and the nature of the parodies thus become aspects of each other.
Bloom goes to Barney Kiernan's tavern at five in the afternoon,
looking for Martin Cunningham. Martin Cunningham has his con-
nections with Green Street Courthouse, and Barney Kiernan's- crammed with curiosities of crime (murder-weapons, rope, forged money)-is close to the Courthouse. Bloom wants to arrange for the payment of Dignam's widow's insurance money, and Cunningham knows all about that. His errand, then, is a charitable one, but he runs stra,ight into hate and contempt. In this tavern there is a loud- mouthed, drink-cadging Irish Nationalist known as 'The Citizen', a jingoist who hates all foreigners, especially Jews. His Homeric prototype is the giant cannibal Polyphemus, one of the race of one- eyed Cyclopes, shepherds good to their sheep but always ready to dash a man's brains out and devour his body in a couple of gulps. Polyphemus ate most of Odysseus's companions who went ashore and into his cave, but Odysseus saved himself by his usual cunning. He gave his name as Outis or No-man, he introduced Polyphemus. to wine. When the giant was vinously asleep he prepared a pointed
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Fireworks
? ? The Labyrinth
Fireworks
i I
And so on, not forgetting Patrick W. Shakespeare, Thomas Cook and Son, and Adam and Eve. This ubiquitous cataloguing derives from Homer himself, who is precise and detailed about the furniture of the Cyclops's dwelling. Bere, finally, is Garryowen:
At his feet reposed a savage animal of the canine tribe whose stertorous gasps announced that he was sunk in uneasy slumber, a supposition Con- firmed by hoarse growls and spasmodic movements which his master repressed from time to time by tranquillising blows of a mighty cudgel rudely fashioned out of paleolithic stone.
Then Comes deflation into demotic Dublinese:
So anyhow Terry brought the three pints Joe was standing and begob the sight nearly left my eyes when I saw him land out a quid. 0, as true as I'm telling you. A goodlooking sovereign.
The straight narrative, as opposed to the gigantesque commentary, is put into the mouth of an anonymous Dubliner with no literary pretensions-indeed) no pretensions at all except to the unlimited imbibing of other men's beer-treats.