No More Learning

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
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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
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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
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. Anonymity and pseudonymity are appropriate to a chapter in which Bloom ceases to be Odysseus and becomes No-man. Thus, some play is made with Bloom's ancestral name, Virag; the Citizen's name is never once mentioned; the narrator is not sure whether a character is called Crofton or Crofter; Garryowen becomes Owen Garry-and so on. There are two other Homeric motifs which are cunningly planted-mere decoration-in the narrative: the eye (always singular) and the stake which put out the eye. These appear at the very start ofthe chapter, together with another Homeric reference:
I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D. M. P . at the corner o f Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye.
Later we find Bloom smQking a 'knockmedown cigar'-again, a purely decorative allusion, since Bloom does not use the cigar as a weapon. But Joyce seems to find it necessary to press home the classical parallel even if his references are mere fancy. At the end of the chapter Bloom's name is suppressed entirely to remind us that he is No-man and 'a loafer with a patch over his eye starts singing I f the man in the moon was a jew, jew) jew. ' But what really interests us is not the ingenuity of technique so much as the genuinely heroic qualities that Bloom shows when set among jingoists, cadgers, and
Jew-baiters.
Bloom is feared because he is both Jewish and part-Bungarian-
'44
doubly a foreigner and, moreover, a man allegedly given to un-Irish i
practices, such as selling Bungarian lottery tickets and buying cream
for his wife. He is recognised as uxorious but is also called a 'pishogue
-a half-and-half'. Unlike the Citizen, he does not believe in the use of force to settle arguments and-to a response of contempt which turns to outrage-he dares to preach the doctrine oflove. The paro- dic technique seems to sneer along with the Citizen:
Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A
loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle.
M. B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy eha Pu Chow.
Jumbo the elephant loves Alice the elephant . . . His Majesty the King
loves Her Majesty the Qyeen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.
But Bloom finds himself in trouble for another reason. When he leaves the pub to look for Martin Cunningham in the Courthouse, Lenehan, prince of cadgers, says: '. . . The courthouse is a blind. Be had a few bob on Throwaway and he's gone to gather in the shekels. ' We remember that, quite by accident, Bloom gave Throw- away as a tip for the Ascot Gold Cup to Bantam Lyons, telling him that he could keep his newspaper: 'I was going to throw it away that moment. ' Nobody doubts for one second that this man who is a dark horse himself, possessor of access to secret information (,He's the only man in Dublin has it'), has made a tidy win: it is clearly his duty to push the boat out. But when he comes back he makes no move to order pints all round. Everything is set for a pogrom, and the Citizen is ready to start it. The narrator sums up the general attitude:
Courthouse my eye and your pockets hanging down with gold and silver. Mean bloody scut! Stand us a drink itself Devil a sweet fear! There's a jew for you! All for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat. Hundred to five.
The Citizen says: 'Don't tell anyone', and Martin Cunningham- who is the book's real model of prudence-gets Bloom away, aware of coming trouble. The Citizen bawls: 'Three cheers for Israel! ' and Bloom courageously answers him back:
- Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. . . . Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.
This leads to one of the two solitary acts of violence in the whole of Ulysses, though it is weak and ineffectual enough. The Citizen- 'By Jesus, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By
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Fireworks
Jesus, I'll crucify him so' I will' - h{,r1s after Bloom the biscuit-tin from which Garryowen has been devouring crumbs. The sun is in his eyes (i. e. , he is drunk) and so, like Polyphemus, he misses. But the prose at once explodes gigantically:
The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect.
The ob- servatory at Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercal1i's scale, and there is no record extant of a similar seismic dis- turbance in our island since the earthquake of 1534, the year of the rebellion of Silken Thomas. The epicentre . . .
And so on.
What emerges from this brilliant and extremely funny series of
parodies is a sense ofthe falsenessofthe values that the public world tries to impose on the individual. Joyce gives us skits on all kinds of puffed-up writing, from provincial newspaper reportage to Wardour Street English, taking in also technical jargon, monstrous but vacuous catalogues, rituals from which the life has gone, and the sesquipedalian evasiveness of parliamentary answers. It is the lan- guage which the State uses to hide behind when aware ofthe corrup- tion of its enactments (politics, we remember, is the pseudo-art ruling this chapter); it is also the language of romanticism gone bad and turned to sentimentality-pretending to feeling when feeling has fled; it is the postures of little men pretending to be big. The com- munication media inflate language because they dare not be honest and call a spade a spade; popular historical novels falsify the past and simplify the motives which make historical change. Men are influenced by big loud empty words, styes which swell the eyelids and impede vision of the truth. Low as the garrulous narrator is, we can still see him as a creature not really taken in by humbug and, perhaps, ultimately on the side of Bloom rather than the Citizen:
his speech is all deflation.
Bloom himself is totally undeceived by the shouts and promises
of the politicians. If the world is to be improved it must be by the exercise of individual charity (he has only entered this ambience at all because ofhis desire to perform a charitable act). He uses the word 'love' and is derided for it. He is also derided for seeming to use the very language of inflation which fills the bellies of his enemies- terms like 'phenomenon' and 'mortgag/ee'. But when Bloom uses a word he normally uses it accurately. He comes close to Stephen, if not in imagination or the poetic gift, at least in a desire to rule lan- guage, make it serve truth, and not be ruled by it. He is David against the Philistines as well as against Goliath. He is the real deflator.
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He wins through at a price. We do not meet him again till nearly
nightfall-eight o'clock-and then he has become passive, convales-
cent, resting alone among the rocks on Sandymount shore. The encounter with violence has shaken this man of peace. But an unex- pected reward awaits him. He is to possess the heart of the king's daughter Nausicaa, and she, in imagination, is to give herself to him. A direct sexual encounter would be vulgar, fit only for lechers like Boylan; what is needed for Bloom is the dignity of ritual, the rite of Onan. By a fine irony his happiness is to be encompassedby the very forces of inflation that have struck at him in the precedmg chapter, only this time we can call inflation by a new name-
tumescence.
Nausicaa is changed, by metempsychosis, into Gerty MacDowell, a sweetly pretty girl given to dreams and the reading of ! ,opular trash for women. It is in terms of this trash that she IS descnbed:
The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid's bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers and ~s white as lemon juice and queen of ointments could make them though 1t was not true that she used to wear kid gloves in bed or take a mi~k footba~h either. Bertha Supple told that once to Edy Boardman, a delIberate he, when she was black out at daggers drawn with Gerty (the girl chums had of course their little tiffs from time to time like the rest of mortals) and she told her not let on whatever she did that it was her that told her or she'd never speak to her again.
The parallel with Homer's princess (who Samuel Butler believed was the authoress ofthe Odyssey) is maintained fairly closely through all the flat whimsy. Nausicaa's race was known for its cult of clean linen and it was to hold a large wash-day that she went down to the shor; where Odysseus, hidden from sight, slept off the weariness of his long sea-tossing. Gerty MacDowell washes no garments now, but references are made to her delight in spotless undies and her
pride in her many sets. She has come down to the seashore with attendant nymphs, most unnymphlike-Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman, together with 'the baby in the pushcar and Tommy a~d Jacky Caffrey, two little curly-headed boys, d;essed m sallor Slilt;' with caps to match and the name H. M. S. BellelSle prmted on both. Nausica. and her attendants played with a ball after the clothes- washing, and it was this ball, over-thrown, that woke up Odysseus. So here 'Master Jacky who was really as bold as brass there was no getting behind that' kicks the ball towards the rocks and . Bloom, who is lying there, throws it back. It is then that Gerty notices our
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Fireworks
dark hero, mature, in mourning, his face wan and drawn, and is
strongly attracted.
She could see at once by his dark eyes ? and his pale intellectual face that he ~a~ a ,foreigner, the image of the photo she had of Martin Harvey, the matmee Idol, only for the moustache which she preferred because she wasn't stage-struck like Winny Rippingham that wanted they two to always dress t~~ same on aCCOli,nt of a play but she could not see whether he had an aqUIlIne nose or a slightly retrousse from where he was sitting.
Gerty is virginal but all woman, like'Mary, star of tbe sea', whose church on Sandymount strand is holding an evening service ('. . . there streamed fortb at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to tbe storm-tossed heart of man'). She is to be worshipped rather than possessed, gazed on in her pure radiance, but she knows that the eye-which, along with the nose, is the dominant organ of the chapter-can be the window which lets passion come raging in. Whentbe Mirus Bazaar fireworks begin and her companions rush off to see them over the housetops, she remains on the beach and feasts Bloom's eyes on a dream o f well- filled hose, a richer, more leisurely, meal than sonnez fa cloche.
We know what happens to Bloom because the fireworks tell us so:
And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and 0 J then the
Roman candle burst and it was like asigh ofO! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, o so lovely! 0 so soft, sweet, soft!
Tumescence has reached its limit. Bloom, who did not, after all, masturbate in the bath that morning, receives tbe reward of his continence. The tumescent prose comes to an end with Gerty walk- ing off 'with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because, because Gerty MacDowell was . . . ' Bloom's interior monologue, taking over at once, completes the sentence: 'Tight boots? No. She's lame! O! ' And now a long session of detumescent evening musings brings on night and the toughest, yet most magical, part of the book.
The colours of this chapter are blue (for the Blessed Virgin) and grey (for the bitter waters of the sea-this, remember, is Stephen's territory-and the falling dusk). The art fignred here is painting, but this does not quite come off. Joyce's intention is to give the eye (put out in the preceding episode) more than a feast offrillies, but he is temperamentally incapable of being very interested in this organ. Little pictorial episodes follow each other, like lantern-slides, in the
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romantic dreams of Gerty: pictures are her substitute for tbonght. Bloom thinks of colours ('depend on the light you see') and re-enacts in memory the tableaux of party charades, but his author's heart is not in it. Joyce is happier with tbe other organ, the nose, and lets Bloom luxuriate in remembered perfumes, especially the perfumes of women. But all women lead home to one-the adulterous Molly.
Has Bloom himself been unfaithful here on Sandymount strand? Technically, no. But he has achieved a sexual conquest more satisfy- ing than any enacted on a strange bed-pleasure without regret or recriminations, no fear of pregnancy, no weeping, no going back, in detumescence, on tumescent promises. 'For this relief much thanks. ' (We can never get away from Hamlet. ) He has done better than Boylan today-an adoring letter and a sort of surrender, and both
from virgins. And this brief auto-erotic session is also an unpremedi- tated preparation for the taking up of his responsibilities later that night. He will follow Stephen to Nighttown, but, being spent of seed, he will not be tempted by female flesh: he will be stern with prostitutes, unseducible. Odysseus was saved from enchantment into a swine because he carried Mercury's gift, the flower moly. Bloom carries this flower in his trousers-'a languid floating flower', no rod to beat him to his knees, gibbering in beast's lust, in tbe house of Circe.
Bloom closes his eyes for a moment at the end of the chapter-
'just for a few'. The interior monologue swoops deeper than ever it
did in full daylight; it touches the borders of dreams and anticipates the sleep langnage of Finnegans Wake:
o sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed met him pike hoses frillies for Raoul to perfume your wife black hair heave under embon senorita young eyes Mulvey plump years dreams return tail end Agendath swoony lovey showed me her next year in drawers return in her next her next.
One is persuaded that this is how the mind receives its images (little pictures all separate, no gluing of ideas together into logical state- ments) when it approaches sleep. Any reader presented with tbis passage unprepared would be baffled by it. If we have read UI)'Sses without skipping up to this point we shall recognise every single motif-Molly's version of 'metempsychosis" for instance, and the villain ofSweets o/Sin, Raoul, who is identified witb Boylan; Molly's first lover, Mulvey; the bit ofnewspaper (,Agendath Netaim') Bloom picked up in the butcher's that morning. Bloom's own recent sexual
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~bandonand his briefsen~ualityon the street before breakfast, Mully III bed readmg her lover s letter, the phrase 'her heaving embon- point' from Sweets ofS,n-all are fused into a single emblem of desire and its fulfilment. It is a miracle of compression.
But the bats fly, sedng nothing, and Bloom will not come face to face with the fact of his cuckolding. It is left to the cuckoo-clock in the priest's house, where, evening service over, Canon O'Hanlon and Father Conroy and the Reverend John Hughes S. ]. are eating mutton chops with catsup, to proclaim to the world what Bloom now is-Cuckoo Cuckoo Cuckoo, and on to the stroke of nine. The night in which, cuckold or not, he shall beget a son and conquer all the suitors, is now beginning.
9: Bullockbefrienders
SHEER GOODNESS OF HEART,AND AKINDOFVICARIOUS MASOCHISM, send Bloom to the Lying-in Hospital in Holies Street at an hour when the pubs are gay and the theatres playing. Mrs Purefoy is trying to give birth and, as Mrs Breen told Bloom at lunchtime, having a hard time of it. Bloom knows her well and, with his capacity for imaginative penetration into the sufferings of women, is anxious to know how long it will be before she delivers. This is his motive for going to Sir Andrew Horne's house of labour and joy, but what comes out of the visit is the first fruitful meeting between himself and Stephen Dedalus. There have been two abortive con- tacts earlier in the day, but now Bloom and Stephen are to sit at the same table. Admittedly there will be the distraction of noisy company, tipsiness and ribaldry, for Stephen is carousing with the medical students in their common-room, but at last the rapproche- ment between body and soul, common sense and imagination is ready for parturition, and this chapter is an important one. Typically, Joyce refuses to let us have too clear a view of what is happening; he flashes an almost intolerable technical brilliance into our eyes, though this is not sheer wantonness. The Homeric correspondence must be kept up, an art or science celebrated, and a fresh literary technique attempted. This, though, is the most consciously virtuoso of all the episodes of Ulysses, and for some readers Joyce will seem to go too far.
Before, as a schoolboy, I smuggled my own copy of Ulysses into England, I was lent the Odyssey Press edition by my history master. This was in two volumes, and he gave me the second volume first. The second volume starts with this maternity hospital chapter, and I was thrown into the most difficult part of the whole book without preparation. But it seemed pretty clear what Joyce was trying to do. He begins with three ritual statements, each intoned three times. 'Deshil Holies Eamus'-let us go to Denzille and Holies Street.
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Bullockbefrienders
'Send us, bright one, light one, Harhorn, quickening and womb-
fruit. ' I took this to be an invocation to Hecate, goddess of the moon and patroness of women in childbirth, but I should have realised that the moon has nothing to do with the 'horhorn'-the phallic erection with which generation starts. The 'bright one' is the sun. The 'harhorn' (I could not know this till 1 had read the 'Sirens' chapter) goes back to Boylan, the musical-comedy presentation of his lust, but Sir Andrew Horne is in the picture too. Finally, we hear the joyful cries of the midwife when a son is born: 'Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! '-three times, of course. Then 1 plunged into the real
difficulties:
has its sexual meaning. As for the series of literary pastiches that
follow they have cunningly embedded in them references to the various stages of the development of the embryo-here comes the eye, here the jawbone and so on. The growth of the embryo is not uniform; some parts lag behind others. Joyce symbolises this in a deliberate harking back to an earlier stage of the language when, in terms of historical progress, there seems no justification for it. Thus, in the course of an Elizabethan pastiche a passage of Anglo-Saxon suddenly appears.
Complexities enough, but we still have the Homeric correspon- dences to deal with. We are given a clue as to what part of the Odyssey finds its parallel here at the very beginning-'Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn . . . ' The 'bright one' is the ? sun, or rather the Sun-god, and 'Horhorn'-a duplicated form-refers to the two-horned oxen of the Sun-god. Odysseus and his men landed famished on the triangular island of Sicily, and-though they knew that this was a blasphemous act-the sailors slaughtered the holy oxen that were guarded there by the daughters of the god- Phaethusa and Lampetie, who find their correspondence in the two nurses of the Lying-in Hospital. All comes clear if we remember that the Oxen of the Sun stand for fertility, and that the medical students in Horne's house blaspheme against it, loudly expressing their belief in the separation ofsex from procreation- 'copulation without popula- tion'. Odysseus's men were struck down by the thunder of Zeus, and Stephen's companions are temporarily daunted by the thunder of the God of the Catholics.
References to triangles in this episode (the red triangle of the label of a bottle of Bass, for instance) keep the island of the Sun-god in our minds, and there are l. engthy references to bulls. We remem- ber that Stephen is a 'bullockbefriending bard', but, if"we have forgotten, somebody comes in with an evening paper in which Mr Deasy's letter about foot-and-mouth disease appears. Bloom is a 'bullockbefriender' in that he is on the side of fertility. He is, after all, a father, and his protective paternalism towards the drunken Stephen is given full scope for expression in the pastiches of prose of a more pious, God-and-fertility-centred, age. The following is in the style of Malory's Morte D'Arthur:
But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had pity ofthe terrorcausing shrieking ofshrill women in their. labour and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art
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Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive con- cerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction.
Gibberish? Possibly, but Latin gibberish-an attemptto turn English into a limping, lumpish travesty of Latin. Why? The answer came after three ghastly paragraphs in this style, Bloom to the rescue:
Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's oncoming. Of Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.
No Latin here-indeed, nothing but Anglo-Saxon. Joyce's purpose became clear. The Latin stood for the feminine element-here shapeless and unfertilised-in the English language; the Anglo- Saxon represented the masculine. One would have to fertilise the other before English as we know it could come to birth. From then on the technique explained itself: a sort of history of English prose from Anglo-Saxon to the present day seemed to indicate growth- surely, the growth of the embryo in the womb? Then the language of the future could be born-a hybrid giant.
When 1 eventually read Stuart Gilbert's commentary on Ulysses I discovered that 1 had not gone far enough. Now 1 know that it is Bloom himself who stands for the fertilising principle: he enters, phallus-like, the house of all-woman; even the taking off of his hat
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? ? The Lab)'rinth
Bullockbefrienders
When Joyce reaches the age of romanticism he becomes more ambi-
tious, making a rich De Qyincey vision out of a word that Bloom has half-heartedly puzzled ahout all day ('Parallax stalks behind and ~oads them . . . '), that butcher's-shop slip of newspaper ('Agendath IS a waste land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa'), Bloom's pen-friend, daughter, and wife ('And 10, wonder of metem- psychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride . . . Martha, thou lost one'- a reference to 'M'appari', sung that afternoon by Simon Dedalus- 'Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant'). At the same time Joyce keeps his eye on the fertility theme in its Homeric aspect- 'Alpha, a ruby and trjangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus' (there is your Bass labell-and does not forget the 'moving moaning multitude, murderers of the sun'. It is a brilliant performance.
But the mere fact that Joyce has to find static material for his literary pastiches (ideas, images, motifs) in order to fill up the nine months of gestation and nine hundred years of linguistic history makes us doubtful about the validity of his technique. He seems to be forgetting about Bloom and Stephen; they have been subordinated to a mere display of ingenuity-that at least is what we are inclined to object. On the other hand, it is right that we see them both under as many social and mythical aspects as possible, and this Can only be done by a kind of metempsychosis-Stephen and Bloom through the ages, wearing a whole museum of dress, using the whole of English speech as a sort of Oxtail Book of English Prose might present it, becoming the heroes of every major English writer from King
Alfred to Carlyle. And yet the ghosts of these writers-as conjured
in that drunken common-roam-are not concerned at all with these
heroes, only with the orts and oifal of their thoughts and speech. The
dress remains fancy dress, the whole thing is a pageant-charade.
Joyce has to go to his bulls-tauric, papal, Irish-for the Swiftian climax of the chapter, and to concoct masterly dishes of mere kitchen scraps for the rest. When, at last, Mrs Purefoy's child is born (naturally, we have been bludgeoned by sheer technique into for- getting all about this) Bloom makes an important decision which it is all too easy to miss in the general flurry:
By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed and no? botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering aUincluding most farraginous chronicle. Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarship and all Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore.
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could save so dark is destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of heart for that evil hap and for his burial did him on a fair corselet of lamb's wool, the flower of the flock, lest he might perish utterly and lie akeled (for it was then about the midst of the winter) and now sir Leopold that had of his body no manchild for an heir looked upon him his friend's son and was shut up in 'sorrow for his forepassed happiness and as sad as he was that him failed a son of such gentle courage (for all accounted him of real parts) so grieved he also in no less measure for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and murdered his goods with whores.
Stephen himself, with Thomistic logic, insists on the right true end of sex:
Gramercy, what ofthose Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise. which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we.
Bloom and Stephen, however, are alone in according reverence to
the sacred oxen.
This chapter has a function over and above stylistic display, symbolism, the slow pushing-on with the story. Joyce has amassed a great deal of material which has not been developed, and the time has come to use it. He is concerned here primarily with shapes, forms, styles of writing, but form cannot exist without content. The content, then, may as well come from the odds and ends, the slogans, songs, small obsessions of the day. Thus, when-in this historical survey of English prose-it becomes necessary to imitate the style of the Authorised Version of the Bible, the subject-matter is drawn from those early musings of Stephen on the beach, the wild geese, exiled artists and patriots whom Ireland has forgotten:
Look forth now, my people, upon the land of behest, even from Horeb and from Nebo and from Pisgah, and from the Horns of Hatten unto a land flowing with milk and honey. But thou has suckled me with a bitter milk: my moon and sun thou hast quenched for ever. And thou hast left me alone for ever in the dark ways of my bitterness: and with a kiss of ashes hast thou kissed my mouth.
Stephen's thoughts of the tied-up navel-strings of the world leading back to the ultimate telephone exchange find a reference in a pastiche of Sir Thomas Browne:
And as no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness.
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