Russell offers Plato's world of
universals
(Charybdis the whirlpool); Stephen prefers to steer close to hard rocky Scyllan Aristotle.
re-joyce-a-burgess
The Homeric parallel is to be found in the episode of the Laestrygonians, the cannibals who devoured so many of Odysseus's companions.
Bloom and his fellow-citizens are all moved, peristaltically-as food is moved on the long road to digestion-through the great digestive tracts of the city; they are contained in a digestive system, and thus the cannibalistic motif holds well.
Bloom's interior monologue is obsessed with food, often regurgitating with more disgust than gusto as he sees the one o'clock Dubliners gorging themselves like little Laestrygonians.
And yet, in this welter of eating, we must hang on to some vestiges of human dignity.
Bloom sees the ritual aspects of slaughtering and cooking, the blood victim and the burnt offering, and leads us on to the noblest of all human arts through considering the building of altars and the shedding of blood on the foundation of a public edi- fice.
Architecture seems to blend strangely with eating, but Bloom finds a connection.
These Dublin streets, coiling like intestines, are more than guts through which the citizen-gobbets are sluggishly impelled.
They are a pretext for magnificent architectural erec- tions.
But food, food as gutsy excess, dominates Bloom's thoughts- gormandising priests ('I'd like to see them do the black fast Yom Kippur . . . One meal and a collation for fear he'd collapse on the altar'), drunken rats floating on vats of porter ('Drink till they puke again like christians'), nuns frying everything in the best butter. Even the Liffey brings to mind Reuben J. Dodd's son swallowing 'a good bellyful of that sewage', while greedy gulls flap strongly over the water. Bloom, always kind to animals, buys a Banbury cake to feed them. The little rhyme he makes up about them-'The hungry famished gull! Flaps o'er the waters dull' -leads him temporarily to the Hamlet motif (awaiting its full development in the chapter that comes after): 'Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit . . . ' He is not con- cerned about the meaning of the blank verse, however-only, and not with any great curiosity, the form. As for the gulls, they give him no thanks: 'Not even a caw. ' They are typical Dubliners.
The river flows on, rowboat at anchor on its 'treacly swells', and the rowboat advertises Kino's I I /- Trousers. Bloom gives this his professional approval and thinks 'All kind of places are good for ads. ' A quack doctor once stuck up clap-cure posters in public urinals;
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) Hell, Wind, Cannibals
History is presented to Bloom as a sort of cannibalism, time eating cities as well as citizens, architecture itself (,Pyramids . . . built on bread and onions') ,m eater of building slaves but also food for time, leavmg the faeces of rubble and big stones. 'No one is anything. ' Bloom is depressed: 'Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed': the Laestrygonians have got at him.
Mter seeing George Russell (AE) and reflecting that aesthetes eat ethereal food-'only weggebobbles and fruit'-Bloom works towards hunger for lunch through love, an acceptable form of cannibalism: 'Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All kissed, yielded: in deep summer fields, tangled pressed grass . . . ' Joyce, according to his friend Frank Budgen, was fond of the fancy that the fermentation of food into alcoholic liquor derived from love-play. Bloom, a page or so later, is to recall a day with Molly on the hill of Howth: 'Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle.
Joy: I ate it: joy. ' But it is to the twitterings of generalised voices of
love that he enters the Burton restaurant: 'Jack, 10vel-Darling! -
Kiss me, Reggy! -My boy! -Love! '
We have now one of the most realistic evocations of disgust at the act of eating that literature has ever given liS. Meat-eating is, after all, a species of cannibalism: a pig or a rabbit can be, in life, a mem- ber of the family. Here the horror is neo-Hogarthian:
A man with an infant's saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his plate: half- masticated gristle: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump chop from the gnll . . . Smells ofmen. HIS gorge rose. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarette smoke, reek o. f p~ug, spilt beer, men's beery piss, the stale of ferm~nt '. " . Look on thIS pl~tur. e then on that. Scoffing up stewgravy with soppmg sippets of bread. LIck It off the plate, man! Get out of this.
Cannibalism brings men low: the Laestrygonians have frightful table-manners. Bloom again proves himself a Superior Person. He leaves, appalled, and goes to Davy Byrne's (,moral pub') for a glass of burgundy and a cheese sandwich. Cheese, 'the corpse of milk', can be disgusting when one thinks about it or (,the feety savour') separates smell from taste. Bloom eats with 'relish of disgust', Nosey Flynn's perilous dewdrop at his snout's end not helping. Flynn also, chatting to Bloom about Molly's concert tour and bringing in the name of Blazes Boylan ('0, by God, Blazes is a hairy chap') impairs digestion: 'A warm shock of air heat of mustard hauched on Mr Bloom's heart. He raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock.
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Bloom catches the image of 'some chap with a dose burning him' and then refuses to give shape to a particular horrid thought:
lfhe . . .
O!
Eh?
No . . . No.
No, no. I don't believe it. He wouldn't surely? No, no.
The hour is approaching for the knocking on the door of Blazes Boylan, the rehearsal of 'Love's Old Sweet Song'. Bloom escapes back into meditations on words-'parallax', Molly's folk-etymologi- sing of 'metempsychosis' (met him pikehoses)-and, through seeing five men advertising H. E. L. Y. S. on their five tall white hats, the safe world of advertising, though food (Plumtree's potted meat under the obituaries, 'cold meat department') is never very far away.
He meets Mrs Breen, an old friend of Molly's, who tells him,
among other things, that another friend, Mrs Mina Purefoy, is in
the lying-in hospital in HolIes Street-'Dr Horne got her in. She's
three days bad now. ' This is important, for it will send Bloom, ever kind-hearted, to visit the hospital and thus become irrevocably in- volved in Stephen's future: Stephen, drunken poet, temporarily moneyed, will be carousing there with medical students. Nor is this concern about Mrs Purefoy's confinement a mere plot-device. Bloom, in his womanly way, feels for women in labour: in the night- mare of the brothel scene he will undergo labour himself and give birth to grown-up sonS. It is an aspect of his maternal paternality.
Food, food, food. Constables march from College Street, off to
their beats, in goose-step, fat soup under their belts; others make their way, marching, to the station, 'bound for their troughs'. These constables stand for the digestive process-the march of the food down the gullet, the entry of the nutriment into the blood-stream, dispersed then-as these about the city-into the various organs of the body. The decay and renewal of the body's parts, already pre- figured in some of the images of the graveyard scene, is given more general treatment here:
Things go on same; day after day; squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out . . . Dignam carted off. Mirra Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.
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I Hell, Wind, Cannibals
He thinks that 'tonight' may possibly be the translation of 'teco'. But 'teco' means 'with you', and it is hidden from Bloom that he will be taking a late collation with somebody important. Still, Bloom is never far wrong about anything, and this meeting will in fact give the night its meaning. ' ,
Food moves down the gullet into darkness. The caecum is an intestinal sac mth a blind end. It is appropriate that Bloom should try and make himself blind about what is going to happen that after- noon In Eccles Street ('Today. Today. Not think') and that he should help a blind young man across the road. But then he has to wrestle with an atrack of seeing that sends him into frightful con- fusion. 'Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is. ' Blazes Boylan. Bloom turns his eyes up to the eternal glory of pseudo-Greek architectnre, making for the Museum gate. He fiddles
in his pockets fnssily, trying not to see or be seen by Boylan. He enters the abode of learning and Greek goddesses, temporarily safe from the grinding and digesting and chewing and spewing of the gutsy world.
Two . . . Time going on. Hands moving. ' (La ci damn fa mana. ) 'Two. Not yet. ' But not long to go now.
Before Bloom leaves the bar to reply to the quiet message from his bladder he allows the main themes of the chapter to coalesce. The process of ingesting, digesting, excreting is low-'food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never looked. I'll look today. 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
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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~
/
? ? ? ? ? ? ? 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.
But food, food as gutsy excess, dominates Bloom's thoughts- gormandising priests ('I'd like to see them do the black fast Yom Kippur . . . One meal and a collation for fear he'd collapse on the altar'), drunken rats floating on vats of porter ('Drink till they puke again like christians'), nuns frying everything in the best butter. Even the Liffey brings to mind Reuben J. Dodd's son swallowing 'a good bellyful of that sewage', while greedy gulls flap strongly over the water. Bloom, always kind to animals, buys a Banbury cake to feed them. The little rhyme he makes up about them-'The hungry famished gull! Flaps o'er the waters dull' -leads him temporarily to the Hamlet motif (awaiting its full development in the chapter that comes after): 'Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit . . . ' He is not con- cerned about the meaning of the blank verse, however-only, and not with any great curiosity, the form. As for the gulls, they give him no thanks: 'Not even a caw. ' They are typical Dubliners.
The river flows on, rowboat at anchor on its 'treacly swells', and the rowboat advertises Kino's I I /- Trousers. Bloom gives this his professional approval and thinks 'All kind of places are good for ads. ' A quack doctor once stuck up clap-cure posters in public urinals;
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) Hell, Wind, Cannibals
History is presented to Bloom as a sort of cannibalism, time eating cities as well as citizens, architecture itself (,Pyramids . . . built on bread and onions') ,m eater of building slaves but also food for time, leavmg the faeces of rubble and big stones. 'No one is anything. ' Bloom is depressed: 'Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed': the Laestrygonians have got at him.
Mter seeing George Russell (AE) and reflecting that aesthetes eat ethereal food-'only weggebobbles and fruit'-Bloom works towards hunger for lunch through love, an acceptable form of cannibalism: 'Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All kissed, yielded: in deep summer fields, tangled pressed grass . . . ' Joyce, according to his friend Frank Budgen, was fond of the fancy that the fermentation of food into alcoholic liquor derived from love-play. Bloom, a page or so later, is to recall a day with Molly on the hill of Howth: 'Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle.
Joy: I ate it: joy. ' But it is to the twitterings of generalised voices of
love that he enters the Burton restaurant: 'Jack, 10vel-Darling! -
Kiss me, Reggy! -My boy! -Love! '
We have now one of the most realistic evocations of disgust at the act of eating that literature has ever given liS. Meat-eating is, after all, a species of cannibalism: a pig or a rabbit can be, in life, a mem- ber of the family. Here the horror is neo-Hogarthian:
A man with an infant's saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his plate: half- masticated gristle: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump chop from the gnll . . . Smells ofmen. HIS gorge rose. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarette smoke, reek o. f p~ug, spilt beer, men's beery piss, the stale of ferm~nt '. " . Look on thIS pl~tur. e then on that. Scoffing up stewgravy with soppmg sippets of bread. LIck It off the plate, man! Get out of this.
Cannibalism brings men low: the Laestrygonians have frightful table-manners. Bloom again proves himself a Superior Person. He leaves, appalled, and goes to Davy Byrne's (,moral pub') for a glass of burgundy and a cheese sandwich. Cheese, 'the corpse of milk', can be disgusting when one thinks about it or (,the feety savour') separates smell from taste. Bloom eats with 'relish of disgust', Nosey Flynn's perilous dewdrop at his snout's end not helping. Flynn also, chatting to Bloom about Molly's concert tour and bringing in the name of Blazes Boylan ('0, by God, Blazes is a hairy chap') impairs digestion: 'A warm shock of air heat of mustard hauched on Mr Bloom's heart. He raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock.
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Bloom catches the image of 'some chap with a dose burning him' and then refuses to give shape to a particular horrid thought:
lfhe . . .
O!
Eh?
No . . . No.
No, no. I don't believe it. He wouldn't surely? No, no.
The hour is approaching for the knocking on the door of Blazes Boylan, the rehearsal of 'Love's Old Sweet Song'. Bloom escapes back into meditations on words-'parallax', Molly's folk-etymologi- sing of 'metempsychosis' (met him pikehoses)-and, through seeing five men advertising H. E. L. Y. S. on their five tall white hats, the safe world of advertising, though food (Plumtree's potted meat under the obituaries, 'cold meat department') is never very far away.
He meets Mrs Breen, an old friend of Molly's, who tells him,
among other things, that another friend, Mrs Mina Purefoy, is in
the lying-in hospital in HolIes Street-'Dr Horne got her in. She's
three days bad now. ' This is important, for it will send Bloom, ever kind-hearted, to visit the hospital and thus become irrevocably in- volved in Stephen's future: Stephen, drunken poet, temporarily moneyed, will be carousing there with medical students. Nor is this concern about Mrs Purefoy's confinement a mere plot-device. Bloom, in his womanly way, feels for women in labour: in the night- mare of the brothel scene he will undergo labour himself and give birth to grown-up sonS. It is an aspect of his maternal paternality.
Food, food, food. Constables march from College Street, off to
their beats, in goose-step, fat soup under their belts; others make their way, marching, to the station, 'bound for their troughs'. These constables stand for the digestive process-the march of the food down the gullet, the entry of the nutriment into the blood-stream, dispersed then-as these about the city-into the various organs of the body. The decay and renewal of the body's parts, already pre- figured in some of the images of the graveyard scene, is given more general treatment here:
Things go on same; day after day; squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out . . . Dignam carted off. Mirra Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.
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I Hell, Wind, Cannibals
He thinks that 'tonight' may possibly be the translation of 'teco'. But 'teco' means 'with you', and it is hidden from Bloom that he will be taking a late collation with somebody important. Still, Bloom is never far wrong about anything, and this meeting will in fact give the night its meaning. ' ,
Food moves down the gullet into darkness. The caecum is an intestinal sac mth a blind end. It is appropriate that Bloom should try and make himself blind about what is going to happen that after- noon In Eccles Street ('Today. Today. Not think') and that he should help a blind young man across the road. But then he has to wrestle with an atrack of seeing that sends him into frightful con- fusion. 'Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is. ' Blazes Boylan. Bloom turns his eyes up to the eternal glory of pseudo-Greek architectnre, making for the Museum gate. He fiddles
in his pockets fnssily, trying not to see or be seen by Boylan. He enters the abode of learning and Greek goddesses, temporarily safe from the grinding and digesting and chewing and spewing of the gutsy world.
Two . . . Time going on. Hands moving. ' (La ci damn fa mana. ) 'Two. Not yet. ' But not long to go now.
Before Bloom leaves the bar to reply to the quiet message from his bladder he allows the main themes of the chapter to coalesce. The process of ingesting, digesting, excreting is low-'food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never looked. I'll look today. 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
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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~
/
? ? ? ? ? ? ? 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.
