“Eumaeus,” “Ithaca,” and “Penelope”
The final pages of “Circe” bring together our two protagonists, isolating them from the rest of the story world society. The following episodes take up that duality, extending it in different ways to narration, style, and emotion. Specifically, “Eumaeus” introduces yet another form of mental narration— what we might call audience-directed interior monologue. At the level of style, the episode applies Stephen’s aesthetic sensibility to Bloom’s language of the marketplace, in this way extending or even democratizing stylistic beauty. “Ithaca” further extends the narrational techniques of the novel to a double narration in the question-and-answer format. This episode also foregrounds the feelings of attachment loss that have been important but largely left in the background up to this point in the novel. Following the stress of these episodes on duality and interrelation, “Penelope” is striking for its absolute psychological isolation, its almost existential loneliness. Given this isolation, it is perhaps unsurprising that Molly shows very little shame. But she betrays torturous feelings of guilt.
There is a commonplace in Joyce criticism that “Eumaeus” is a tired episode. Just as Stephen and Bloom are exhausted, so is the narration itself. It is worn-out, threadbare. Up to now, Joyce has followed the Flaubertian principle of choosing “le mot juste,” the precisely right word. But in this episode, he chooses the wrong word.1 Of course, there is a sense in which this is true. There are slips and errors, not only in “Eumaeus,” but in all three concluding episodes of the book. Someone messes up the arithmetic in “Ithaca,” for example—though it is hard to say whether this is the drowsy narrator or a mathematically challenged author. Molly, dopey with sleep deprivation, thinks of cuckolded men as “coronado,” tonsured—as if entering a religious order—rather than “cornudo,” horned (see Gifford and Seidman for 18.1394). But, for the most part, none of the episodes works this way consistently—including “Eumaeus.” Indeed, quite the contrary, “Eumaeus” presents a particularly lucid and even idealized version of Bloom’s own style of speech. In other words, far from failing to present the right word, it continually gives us the right word. But the “rightness” here is defined by Bloom’s idiolect.2
Consider, for example, the way the narrator interrupts and corrects himself about Corley’s supposed ancestry, muddling up the issue further—“No, it was the daughter of the mother in the washkitchen that was fostersister to the heir of the house or else they were connected with the mother in some way.” The reader might be reminded of Bloom’s attempts at calculating the profits on porter (“What am I saying barrels? Gallons”), his changeable definition of a nation (12.22–12.23, 12.28), or other points of “mucking it up” (as the narrator of “Cyclops” puts it). Indeed, Bloom corrects himself in this episode itself. He refers to the inventor of the telescope, then identifies him as “Edison,” going on to say, “though I believe it was before his time Galileo was the man, I mean.” In a passage such as the one about Corley, then, there is a partial personification of the narrator such that he seems to be a double of Bloom. On the other hand, the narrator has greater knowledge than Bloom. We see both characteristics when, for example, the narrator tells us that “Mr Bloom’s sharp ears heard him then expectorate the plug probably (which it was).” The sentence simultaneously conveys the sensory experience of Bloom, Bloom’s inference based on that experience, Bloom’s degree of confidence in that inference (“probably”), and the actual external fact (“which it was”).
The section on Corley shows more than this. Specifically, Bloom does not even recognize Corley (though he feels he may have seen him somewhere before). Moreover, the comments on Corley’s ancestry come during the sequence focalized on Stephen. Indeed, the muddle here seems to be that of Stephen, predictably, given his “not … over sober state.” But the idiom is (roughly) that of Bloom—and certainly not that of Stephen (notable as it is for a distinct lack of anything in the way of church Latin or allusions to Aquinas Tunbelly). We might refer to this as generalized narrational mimesis since the imitation bears on Bloom even when he is not focalizing the particular scene. (In contrast, the narrational mimesis of Gerty in “Nausicaa” occurs only when Gerty is the focalizer. We might refer to this as focalization-constrained narrational mimesis.)
One of the most obtrusive features of Eumaean style is redundancy. Bloom brushes off “the greater bulk of the shavings.” “Greater,” however, tells us no more than “bulk.” Stephen’s “mind was not exactly what you would call wandering” gives us no new information with the words “what you would call.” He wishes for a “beverage to drink”—though, of course, the implication of “beverage” is precisely that one would drink it. Similar points could be made about there being no carriage “anywhere to be seen” versus “anywhere,” “a kind of a whistle” versus “a whistle,” and so on. The redundancy of repeating the same idea more than once recurs over and over in the course of the subsequent pages that follow, as when we learn that Bloom had never “travelled extensively to any great extent.”
The prose is also marked by expressions that, though not unique to Bloom, appear to be characteristic of his sociolect. Thus we find “hit upon” rather than “find” or “get”; “in the shape of” rather than “such as”; “… of some description” rather than “some …”; “in the shaving line” rather than “for shaving”; “if they had acquired drinking habits” rather than “if they drank”; “might have been a candidate for the accident ward” rather than “might have been badly injured”; and so on.
In some cases the narrator has a tendency to exaggerate events or, more generally, to give them apparently unwarranted emotional intensity. For example, rather than saying there was no “sign” a fourwheeler would move, the narrator says there is no “symptom of its budging.” Bloom, despite his indulgence in two drinks, is characterized as “disgustingly sober.” In a more aggrandizing vein, the narrator speaks of Bloom responding “heroically” to the loss of a trousers button. “Disgustingly” and “heroically” are both instances of the use of excessive adverbs, another case of which may be found in the depiction of Stephen as “blissfully unconscious.” Subsequently, Bloom worries they might encounter, not petty thieves, but “desperadoes.”
At least some of the speech in this episode seems to fit what Stephen had in mind when he spoke of language in “the tradition of the marketplace,” as opposed to that of “the literary tradition” (A Portrait 451). Indeed, it seems to exaggerate that quality. In part, this is simply a function of representing Bloom’s thoughts, such as his reflections on a concert tour with a “top notch” and “all star” line-up headed by a manager “with a bit of bounce.” Nonetheless, the idioms are such that they particularly fit the topic as a business undertaking. One can see this if one transfers the phrases to literature. Stephen, for example, would probably be disinclined to refer to a group of his preferred writers as “all star” or to characterize excellence in a literary editor as a matter of “bounce.” Nor would he celebrate “A great opportunity … for push and enterprise,” as Bloom does. Indeed, much of Bloom’s enthusiasm about nonbusiness matters is contextualized by possible mercantile schemes and therefore phrased in advertising terms. We find this, for example, when he thinks how hard-working people deserve a break when they can see “dame Nature … at her spectacular best,” yielding “nothing short of a new lease of life.” The phrasing seems to come from a brochure about a vacation spot—in keeping with the larger context in which Bloom is considering “uptodate tourist travelling.” The point, however, holds even when there is no mercantile context. For example, we see this when Bloom considers D. B. Murphy and realizes he is not likely to get a straight answer out of him. The narrator phrases Bloom’s thought in terms of a commercial interaction: “he was not likely to get a great deal of change out of such a wily old customer.”
This is not to say the episode lacks its quota of Bloomian literary resonances. Indeed, there are significant literary allusions, prominently to Shakespeare and Milton. In the third sentence, for example, the narrator takes up Hamlet’s famous phrase, “there’s the rub” (III.i.65). In its original context, it refers to eternal divine punishment as a deterrent to longed-for suicide. In “Eumaeus,” however, it refers to the lack of “a conveyance of some description” as a deterrent to acquiring “drinkables in the shape of a milk and soda or a mineral.” On the following page, the narrator is presumably reporting Bloom’s thoughts about bread. These include an advertising slogan for Rourke’s bakery, “O tell me where is fancy bread, at Rourke’s the baker’s, it is said.” The line echoes a song sung in The Merchant of Venice that begins, “Tell me where is fancy bred,/Or in the heart or in the head?” (III.ii.63–64; Gifford and Seidman for 16.58–59). In Shakespeare, the song helps unite true lovers. In Bloom’s mind, of course, the song merely operates to sell bread (placing it in a marketplace context).
But what is one to make of all this? If it is “generalized narrational mimesis,” and not exhaustion, what difference does that make? In itself, we cannot say the narration and style have any particular value simply because they are mimetic. The issue of their value is an issue of their precise use, the details of their development in context. My view is that the narration of “Eumaeus” is as aesthetically accomplished as that of most other episodes in the book. For example, it seems comparable to the first-person narrator of “Cyclops” in its consistent honing of style to the purposes of the episode, though of course the style and the purposes are different in the two cases.
Specifically, the idealized or intensified Bloomian diction of the episode creates a sense of a narrator’s voice, thus giving the reader (at least in my case) a feeling of relation to the narrator, even though that narrator is only minimally personified—a relation that is, of course, inseparable from one’s relation to Bloom as the source of the narrational mimesis. Moreover, it is novel, unexpected. Even with the most clichéd phrases, I doubt any reader anticipates just what the narrator is going to say or how he will say it. The diction may be the language of the marketplace, but it is not therefore banal and predictable. It is a style that is as continually surprising as, for example, that of the Gerty section of “Nausicaa.” Most important, it is also highly vivid, bringing images and perceptual perspectives to the mind of the reader and conveying information and emotion more effectively than more commonly used alternatives.
Take, for example, the apparently redundant phrase, “hit upon some drinkables in the shape of a milk and soda or a mineral.” To my mind, this is very different, and far more effective, than what might be considered the “normal” form of the statement—“get something to drink, such as a milk and soda or a mineral.” For me, “hit upon” suggests a happy surprise, a stroke of good fortune. It also seems more tactile then “get,” more connected with actually grasping the glass. The noun “drinkables” contributes to the concreteness, replacing the nondescript “something to drink.” Indeed, I am inclined to say water counts as a prototypical case of “something to drink,” but I would not see water as a particularly prototypical case of “a drinkable.” A “drinkable” has, for example, more of a taste. More significantly, “in the shape of,” though seemingly just a meaningless filler, actually draws one’s attention to the shape of the beverages, thus the form of the glasses, as both seen and felt. Moreover, in all these cases, the stylistic choices are unexpected. Even in the context of Bloom’s speech preferences, one would hardly predict that he—or the imitative narrator—would say or think “hit upon” rather than “get.” Indeed, the choice here is as unexpected as anything we might read from Stephen. A similar point could be made about the seemingly redundant statement that there was no conveyance “anywhere to be seen,” rather than simply “anywhere” or simply “to be seen.” To me, at least, “anywhere to be seen” brings to mind a turning around and searching. It is more kinetic and active than “anywhere” or “to be seen” on its own.
Joyce’s Eumaean sentences are, then, like music. They lead down unexpected paths until the end, when the reader recognizes the pattern. They repeatedly foster non-anomalous surprise. I cannot be alone in experiencing them as instances of beauty. Of course, the patterns they manifest are more valuable to the extent that they fit the particular purposes of the work. The first purposes of the style are to convey the story world and story effectively, with adequate precision. Despite common views about deviation from “le mot juste,” it seems clear that the style of “Eumaeus” has just this communicative effectiveness and precision.
There are different emotional purposes for which a particular style may be taken up. One of the most common is mirth, comic enjoyment. In fact, Bloomian phrasing is often highly comic. For instance, the idea of a handkerchief doing “yeoman service in the shaving line” is ludicrously elaborated. It in effect personifies the handkerchief and gives it a sort of employment as servant to Stephen. There is a little hint of this in the more ordinary idiom that the handkerchief “had served to wipe the razor.” But the possible humor here is brought out by the addition of “yeoman” and the elaboration of “shaving” into “shaving line,” as if it were a sort of profession. At the same time, there is a serious suggestion in this case because Stephen considers himself a servant to Buck, who wants him for “odd jobs” (Buck is the likely candidate for Stephen’s “third” master, mentioned in “Telemachus”). Buck was the one who put Stephen’s snotrag into yeoman’s service, as he presumably presses Stephen into such service.
The same point holds about the apparent aggrandizements of the style, in keeping with other episodes. There is nothing particularly heroic about Bloom soldiering on with a popped trousers button. Calling it heroic is absurd—so absurd, indeed, that one more or less has to take it as not only ironic, but as Bloom’s own self-irony. Bloom recognizes the triviality of the event but makes it tellable by expanding it to “the way of all buttons”—an allusion to “the way of all flesh,” thus death. In effect, Bloom is comparing his loss of a button to the inevitability of death and his continuance with loose pants to a soldier continuing on in the face of certain demise. In other words, he “made light of the mischance.”
Bloom’s reflections on crime are similar. Presumably echoing Bloom’s words, the narrator explains that though crime was “unusual in the Dublin area … it was not by any means unknown for desperadoes … to be abroad waylaying and generally terrorising.” The phrasing brings to mind some sort of Wild West scenario of the dime novel variety—shady characters with large hats and spindly mustaches. The comedy is only enhanced by the accidental consonances that follow: “terrorising peacable pedestrians by placing a pistol at their head in some secluded spot outside the city” (italics added). The consonances are of course not accidental for Joyce, but they are presumably accidental in the speech the narrator is reflecting—a sort of spontaneous poetry in ordinary speech.
Ironic deflation figures prominently in the episode as well, contributing to comic effects. For example, the proprietor of the shelter places “a boiling swimming cup of a choice concoction labelled coffee on the table and a rather antediluvian specimen of a bun, or so it seemed.” The phrase may seem simply verbose. But in fact every word contributes to the effect. “Boiling” is implausible, but for that very reason suggestive. It is as if the cup still produces bubbles, despite being removed from any heat. This makes it more like something produced in a chemistry experiment than in a kitchen. “Swimming” indicates there is something swirling about in the “concoction,” which calls to mind a witches’ brew more than something in the shape of a drinkable. “Choice” is straightforwardly incompatible with “concoction” or, for that matter, any other statement about the coffee. Thus the irony of the characterization is obvious. There appears to be only limited likelihood, at first blush or on reflection, that the cup truly bears the legend “coffee” printed on it. So “labelled coffee” is a metaphor suggesting to the astute reader that, not to put too fine a point on the depiction, it is not anything we would wish to call the genuine article. But the idea of it actually having the word “coffee” printed (falsely) on the cup makes the image more vivid and, at least for some cheerful readers, more mirth provoking. Similar points apply to the hyperbole of “antediluvian.” There is also something comic about the use of “rather” to modify “antediluvian.” “Rather” modifies scalar adjectives. One can be rather tall or rather thin, since there are degrees of tallness and thinness. But, strictly speaking, one cannot be more or less predating the Flood. The addition of a modifier to “antediluvian” thus intensifies the hyperbole, but it does so in an impossible, thus more comic way. Finally, the word “specimen” recalls something preserved for scientific study—hardly something one would care to eat. I assume I am not the only person who finds this all more vivid, engaging, comic, and communicative than “a hot cup of bad coffee and a stale bun.”
The more obviously mercantile elements of Bloom’s style are not excluded from either aesthetic value or mirth. The point is straightforward in Bloom’s characterization of Murphy as a “wily old customer” from whom he will not be “likely to get a great deal of change.” The phrasing metaphorizes the interaction between Bloom and the sailor as a sale in which Bloom is trying to get the sailor’s money. The metaphor is clever, unexpected, and vivid. It is also funny. Bloom is trying to extract information from the sailor. In effect, he is trying to trick the sailor into exposing himself—not in the Gerty Mac-Dowell sense, but in the sense of saying something that will show his tale is fake. But the sailor is too clever to be taken in, just as an old customer may be too sharp to be deceived by a sales pitch.
Moreover, the aesthetic value of the episode’s style is not confined to the narrational mimesis of Bloom. Rather, it extends to characters, particularly Murphy, whose language is no less unexpectedly patterned, vivid, and effective in creating a sense of voice and in communicating information and emotion. For example, his account of the Chinese, though brief, has all these qualities. Thus he says, “I seen a Chinese one time … that had little pills like putty and he put them in the water and they opened and every pill was something different.” A more standard phrasing would be something along the following lines: “I once saw a Chinese man who had little pills like putty. He put them in water. Each one opened into something different.” The blandness of the second version is striking. There is no sense of particularity of voice in the “correct” diction. There is no sense of intimacy with the addressee, as suggested by the use of the definite article in “put them in the water”—“the” suggesting there was some water there that we already knew about. This is lost in the more standard “put them in water.”3 The use of the repeated coordinate clauses (“and … and … and”) creates a sense of forward momentum and the speaker’s own engagement that is missing in the more thoughtfully distinguished sentences of the revision. Finally, Murphy’s rugged, sailor’s narrative voice contrasts with the following image of an opening flower, suggesting an unexpected gentleness in his character.4 The rugged quality is less striking in the revised version.
The humor and pathos of the scene may be enhanced by a possible allusion to the most famous scene in Proust’s 1913 Du côté de chez Swann, that of the madeleine. At the culmination of this scene, Marcel recalls an array of associated memories, including Asian papers (in this case Japanese rather than Chinese) that become flowers and houses when dropped in a porcelain bowl of water (61). The sailor similarly recounts that “One … was a house, another was a flower.” If this is indeed an allusion, we may see Murphy’s speech as recalling the accumulating coordinate clauses of Proust’s famous culminating sentence. In this way, Joyce is creating beauty in different registers and sociolects of speech; he is democratizing aesthetics by paralleling the working class idiom of Murphy’s Hiberno-English with the elite refinement of Proust’s French. Moreover, if this link is strong enough to constitute an allusion, it is likely to give further comic resonance to Stephen’s coffee and bun, which now become an absurd reincarnation of the tea and pastry in Proust’s scene.
This mention of democratization leads us to the thematic purposes of Joyce’s Eumaean style. As noted in the opening chapter, part of Joyce’s response to the social shame produced by colonialism is the development of the aesthetic properties of Hiberno-English. This is not in itself a wholly novel project. We see it, for example, in the writings of Synge and other Irish Renaissance authors. However, what is striking about Joyce’s work is that he didn’t set out to present a purified Hiberno-English, a single poetic standard derived from Irish language or the English of native Irish speakers. Rather, he brought out the vibrancy and wit, precision, and beauty of many varieties of Irish English. In contradiction with the elite aesthetic theory of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses does not present the language of art and the language of the marketplace as necessarily mutually exclusive. The logic and goals of poetry may still be radically different from those of business. But the language of ordinary people is not excluded from beauty.
This does not mean that everything said by everyone is beautiful. Most of what people say is clearly not beautiful. Beauty requires work. It requires attention to sound and rhythm, discrimination of semantic nuance, care with the timing of information within and across sentences, sensitivity to implications about register, and features of audience address. But no type of language is excluded from this work. Part of Joyce’s genius, perhaps the central part, was a matter of following out the logic of whatever principle preoccupied him. For example, once he recognized the autonomy of style, he followed it through to places no one had anticipated—freedom from stylistic consistency within a work, freedom from confinement to a single historical period, and so on. Similarly, Joyce saw, as others did, that Hiberno-English has no more limited aesthetic and philosophical capacities than Oxford English. But he did not limit this realization. He extended it to all the varieties of Hiberno-English—the language of, for example, the narrator of “Cyclops,” as already noted, or Bloom and Murphy in this episode. Given his prior aesthetic theory, perhaps the most difficult task for Joyce was to form an aesthetics of the language of the marketplace. But his recognition of the general principle—that aesthetic achievement is not limited a priori for any language—would not allow him to deny equal aesthetic status to even that form of speech.
Joyce’s democratic aesthetics, as we might call them, are not democratic in the sense that everyone is equally right and the best novel is the one that gets the most votes (e.g., the highest sales). Joyce certainly saw value as distinct from popularity. Rather, they are democratic in not excluding any language from the possibility of achieving beauty, wit, and narrative precision or resonance. Indeed, this democracy of value may be incompatible with a democracy of individual preferences. It is well established in empirical research that people rank dialects in terms of beauty or “attractiveness.” Perhaps due to the efforts of Joyce, Synge, Yeats, and others, Hiberno-English now is fairly high in such rankings (see Coupland 93–99, particularly 98). But that does not mean that language hierarchies have gone away, just that the ordering has changed. The very fact of the ordering is what distinguishes Joyce’s democracy from popular preferences—for Joyce’s democracy does not, it seems, rank languages or dialects by relative aesthetic value, as popular opinion does.
Indeed, the topic is addressed explicitly in the episode. Bloom and Stephen pass some workers arguing in Italian over money in extremely crude terms. When ignoring the meaning, one might feel that “Putana madonna” sounds musical. But no one with any knowledge of Italian is likely to find the exclamation—“Whore madonna”—to be particularly aesthetic. Bloom comments, however, that it is a “beautiful language,” even going so far as to suggest that Stephen write his poetry in Italian. Stephen deflates the status of Italian by pointing out the topic of the argument. But the point of the implied author, I take it, is larger. No language is inherently poetic, and no language is inherently unpoetic. It is important to note that Bloom’s view here is far from idiosyncratic. For example, in the preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole makes a similar claim: “Our language falls far short of the charms of the Italian, both for variety and harmony.” Indeed, Walpole then connects the putative aesthetic excellence of Italian with speaking “correctly” (42). (Walpole’s relevance to Ulysses is indicated by the imitation of The Castle of Otranto in “Oxen” [see Gifford and Seidman for 14.1010–37].) This is just the sort of view Joyce was tacitly opposing. Again, beauty is effortful. But it is not a matter of either the language itself or of rules of grammar for the standard language.
As already noted, the innovations of “Eumaeus” are not confined to verbal idiom, but rather extend to important features of narrative technique. Indeed, one could argue that the episode involves a quite radical revision of interior monologue. Specifically, one problem I have always had with Joyce—as well as Woolf, Faulkner, and other writers who followed him— is his conception of just how language works in the mind, more precisely how subvocalization works. Put simply, Joyce’s representation of extended interior monologue simply does not fit my experience. Joyce seems to represent interior monologue as entirely monological5 or what we might call solipsistic—just the character speaking to no one or to himself or herself. I undoubtedly do have moments of undirected subvocalization—a stray thought, such as “That’s strange” or the like. But for the most part my actual subvocalization is audience directed. When I catch myself subvocalizing, it seems I always have some narratee in mind. It is often someone specific, though it may be more general, such as a class of students—perhaps a class I have not even met (e.g., a class from next semester). But there is almost always direction to an addressee. My broader stream of consciousness is not audience directed (e.g., I do not recall a memory aiming it at a particular addressee). But it seems that my sustained subvocalization, thus my interior monologue, is consistently audience directed.
There are different possible explanations for this. I may simply be missing the times when I engage in isolated interior monologue. Moreover, I may be unusual in the degree to which my interior monologue is audience directed. However, it seems unlikely that my interior monologue would be radically different from that of other people for the simple reason that my brain is not radically different from that of other people. Thus we would expect audience direction to have some role—indeed, a significant role—in literary interior monologue. However, to this point, it seems to be absent from Ulysses.6
This situation changes in “Eumaeus.” Specifically, toward the end of the episode, there are passages that at first suggest Bloom is speaking to Stephen at length on various topics. However, intervening events indicate he has not in fact uttered those long speeches. The implication is that they were subvocalized, but directed toward Stephen.
The equivocation between speech and subvocalization begins with the discussion in the shelter regarding the possible return of Parnell. The narrator notes that Bloom “was rather surprised” at aspects of the conversation. This opening is ambiguous between thought and speech, meaning either that he felt surprise or expressed surprise. Some passages point toward speech, such as “He [Bloom] saw him [Parnell] once.” The phrasing suggests Bloom is imparting new information (“I saw him once”). This would clearly be unnecessary if Bloom were merely recollecting events solipsistically. On the other hand, this sort of phrasing would be apt for either speech or audience-directed interior monologue. (The discourse of these sections is free and indirect—thus there is no tagging to indicate speech or thought, or the tagging is ambiguous, and Bloom is “he,” rather than “I.” However, I will refer to “interior monologue” since the free indirect presentation suggests a form of underlying interior monologue, if the passages are not spoken.) In the course of the passage, Bloom introduces the story of Roger Tichborne. The elliptical quality of Bloom’s discourse in this subsection seems to be more consistent with interior monologue. However, the ending is clearly spoken (“as Bloom said”) and continuous with what preceded, suggesting Bloom has been speaking all the while.
In this case, then, equivocation is apparently resolved in the direction of speech. However, the initial ambiguity allows the passage to serve as a (typically Joycean) transition to passages that evidently do involve audience-directed subvocalization. The next section is introduced in the same ambiguous fashion, with the comment that Bloom “reflected.” This could mean that he reflected in his mind or that he expressed his thought. The following discourse shows fairly clear audience orientation. There are hints of this when Bloom poses a question—“Can real love, supposing there happens to be another chap in the case, exist between married folk?” This is suggestive of audience orientation (external or internal) in part because it is a question, but also in part because it so obviously alludes to his situation with Molly but involves no direct reference to that situation. The absence of such a reference could be a matter of Bloom’s avoidance of the thought. But this is so extreme as to be almost pathological. In contrast, he would clearly avoid a reference to Molly either in actual speech or in audience-directed subvocalization. There is also a hint of narratee awareness in the self-correction, “the 18th hussars to be accurate.” Specifically, the phrase “to be accurate” seems to fill in information that is more functional in real or imagined dialogue than in one’s private thought. A still clearer case of audience orientation comes when Bloom clarifies an ambiguous reference— “the fallen leader, that is, not the other.” Clarification of reference only has a function in real or imagined audience address. Bloom’s intended reference is always clear to Bloom. Disambiguating a reference only benefits an addressee. (In some cases, reference disambiguation could be attributed to the narrator. However, this instance appears to be part of the indirectly reported discourse, whether thought or speech.)
Without an awareness of audience-directed interior monologue, a reader may take these various points as indicating Bloom is actually speaking to Stephen. This seems confirmed when we come to the line that various facts “just bore out the very thing he was saying as she also was Spanish.” But then something strange happens. Bloom explicitly says to Stephen “Just bears out what I was saying…. And if I don’t greatly mistake she was Spanish too.” Bloom is not simply repeating himself. Rather, the first statement is subvocalized, whereas the second is uttered. This indicates the entire preceding passage indirectly represented interior monologue, not speech. However, it was interior monologue imaginatively, if implicitly, directed toward Stephen. The point is brought out particularly by the parallel in phrasing between the final subvocalized thought and the subsequent utterance—an utterance prepared for by the thought.
The same sort of equivocation recurs in the remaining sections of the episode. For example, a few moments later, Bloom is considering again “the distinction of being close to Erin’s uncrowned king.” Here, too, there is reference clarification, “His hat (Parnell’s),” along with other suggestions of audience orientation. It is possible initially that Bloom is speaking aloud and forgetfully repeating a story he just told Stephen. However, it becomes clear that this is audience-directed subvocalization when Bloom elliptically alludes to his encounter with John Henry Menton and the audience orientation is briefly broken.7
The passage continues with suggestions that, despite the allusive character, the speech may be spoken. For example, Bloom “believed and didn’t make the smallest bones about saying so.” The most obvious way of construing this is as a case where he is indeed “saying so.” What follows appears to be advice directed to Stephen. The qualifications—for example, “not that he wanted in the smallest to pump Stephen about miss Ferguson”—suggest Bloom is indeed speaking to Stephen; otherwise there would be no reason to suppose that he might be pumping Stephen at all. On the other hand, it seems highly unlikely Bloom would feel confident enough to bring up his inferences regarding Miss Ferguson. Moreover, parts of the passage appear to be narrator reports about Bloom’s intentions or feelings, rather than indirect versions of Bloom’s speech or subvocalization. Finally, Bloom turns to the issue of Stephen having something to eat. Following this passage, he explicitly asks, “At what o’clock did you dine?” The suggestion is that Bloom has not uttered what was just recorded. Rather, his preceding thoughts have led him to ask this question. Thus the preceding section does not represent speech but apparently audience-directed interior monologue (presented indirectly and combined with narrator reports of his thought).
The episode ends with another instance of the same sort. Bloom asks Stephen to sing. There is a new paragraph, which could suggest an ellipsis in which the singing finished or could indicate that the singing has just begun. The indirect discourse presents Bloom noting Stephen’s “phenomenally beautiful tenor voice.” Bloom’s subsequent reflections are apparently directed to Stephen as Bloom indicates the romantic advantages that Stephen’s voice could bring. He even articulates a sort of subdued boast—“without giving the show away, he himself once upon a time, if he cared to, could easily have.” The sentence is not finished. The ellipsis is designed to suggest great possibilities of sexual adventure. But it would make no sense for Bloom to elliptically suggest such possibilities to himself. Following this, we are told that Bloom “parenthesised,” also suggesting address to an audience. However, after an interruption due to a horse (“The horse was just then”), we shift back to Bloom, who is considering that he will at some point give Stephen advice—and, in effect, practicing giving the advice. Here, the reader must conclude that Bloom has only been simulating things he might say to Stephen. Not long after, we are told that Stephen finishes his song. The passage, then, has (indirectly) represented audience-directed interior monologue running parallel with Stephen’s singing.
Describe differences defining this duo of episodes (id est, “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca”).
Unlike most episodes in the book, “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca” topicalize two people—Stephen and Bloom. Bloom is certainly more fully focalized than Stephen, but there is some focalization on each. Moreover, the two people are continually interacting, directly and verbally. Thus the situation is different from “Aeolus” or “Scylla and Charybdis,” where Bloom and Stephen are both present but are quite separate from one another. It is not even like “Nausicaa,” where Gerty and Bloom interact only vaguely and nonverbally. In contrast with these cases, there is a sort of interrelational duality in “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca.” It is unsurprising that this duality manifests itself in narrational techniques, particularly given Joyce’s tendency to follow a principle that autonomous techniques (of verbalization or narration) should echo the sense (thus the story and story world). In “Eumaeus,” the relevant technique is audience-directed interior monologue. It connects the two characters within the mind of one. This is important, but it is clearly not the only possible form of narrational interrelation. Indeed, the more obvious kind of connection is external, a matter of uttered dialogue, rather than interior audience address (or interior dialogue of the oneiric kind found in “Circe”). This is just what we get in the narration of “Ithaca.”
Need this interleaved narration be entirely novel, unknown in normal interactions?8
It occurs spontaneously when two people try to tell a story by turns. Of course, such cooperative retellings are often unsuccessful, with the two speakers unable to coordinate their presumptions and timing of information. This form of dialogic narration is not absent from the story world of Ulysses. There, too, it is not terribly successful. In “Hades,” with the awkward mention of Reuben J., Bloom begins an anecdote, “That’s an awfully good one that’s going the rounds about Reuben J and the son.” Bloom introduces the topic in a more or less standard way, justifying his pending monopoly of speech through an appeal to the interest of the anecdote and introducing the main characters.9 He goes on to give background (“There was a girl in the case”), then begins to recount the action. Unfortunately, he is not entirely clear in his use of pronouns, leading to an interruption from Simon Dedalus. As Bloom tries to clarify the pronoun use, Martin Cunningham interrupts, shifting the style of the story. After the main complicating action, Bloom tries to continue with the conclusion. Indeed, there is a sort of false conclusion to the story, followed by a punch line. After the false conclusion, Bloom seeks to introduce the punch line through another evaluative comment, “But the funny part is.” Here, again, Martin Cunningham interrupts, finishing the story.
But doesn’t this differ drastically from the dialogue defining “Ithaca”?
Perhaps most obviously, the dialogue in “Ithaca” is cooperative, rather than competitive, as in the preceding case. Moreover, the division of labor of the narrators is different. Indeed, one of the two is arguably more in the role of a narratee than a narrator. Thus the “questioner-narrator” begins the episode by asking about the “parallel courses” followed by Bloom and Stephen as they went from the cabman’s shelter to Bloom’s home. The “responder-narrator” then provides the information. As a very simple first approximation, one might reasonably think the responder-narrator is the narrator and the questioner-narrator is the narratee. There is certainly an element of this. Indeed, initially, the questioner-narrator seems to be a particular type of narratee, the type that personifies the interests of the implied reader, a narratee who occasionally steps in with questions of the sort a reader might ask.
But, as it turns out, the relation of the Ithacan narrational pair is not so straightforward. One wonders—why? Even in the early questions, the questioner is a genuine narrator, since he or she actually presents information not yet available in the discourse. The first question presupposes that Bloom and Stephen “return[ed]” together. The second provides the information that they “deliberate[d] during their itinerary.”
Is inference alone an adequate account of any apparent anomalies?
It may seem so. For example, the “duumvirate” had started toward 7 Eccles Street. The questioner might simply infer that they continued and chatted on the way. But subsequent questions make it clear that the questioner-narrator is genuinely providing new and non-inferable information. For example, the questioner-narrator asks about Bloom, “Why was he doubly irritated?” Given what has just occurred—Bloom realized he has forgotten his key—we, and the questioner, may infer that Bloom would be irritated. But the question presupposes as a fact that Bloom was irritated for two reasons, though neither we nor the questioner has any reason to infer this. Moreover, this apparently shows internal access to Bloom’s mind, something we associate with narrators, since a narratee with such access would hardly need to hear the recounting of a story.
Are there any instances of internality dedicated to Dedalus?
Yes, on the next page, Stephen sees Bloom doing things in the kitchen. Then the questioner asks, “Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think?” Here, again, the questioner acts as a narrator, introducing new information. Moreover, that new information requires internal access to Stephen’s mind. So, in some ways, the questioner is a sort of narratee, asking for information available to the responder, who is therefore the primary narrator. But in other ways the questioner is himself or herself a sort of secondary narrator.
Can a conscientious critic reconcile these conflicting construals?
Yes. The cooperative, dialogue narration in this case does not actually require that the questioner have direct access to Bloom and Stephen’s story world. It only suggests he or she has somehow acquired knowledge of that story world. This could result from prior perception (e.g., access to Stephen’s thoughts). But it could result equally from prior knowledge of the responder’s answers. Indeed, the second seems in many ways more plausible. In that case, we should understand the sequence of questions and answers here as a repetition of prior sequences of questions and answers. The questioner/secondary narrator is able to anticipate the answers of the responder/primary narrator because he or she has heard those answers (or versions of those answers) previously.
The couple’s (Leopold’s and Molly’s) concluding congregation is called a “catechetical interrogation”—can this convey a clue for critical investigation?
This initially seems to supply internal support for Joyce’s (external) characterization of the episode’s technique as “catechism” (see Gilbert 30). However, this seems to emphasize the wrong part of the phrase. A catechism involves the repetition of information that is doctrinally specified in its detail. It typically involves reference to what would be considered “universals,” abstract matters, rather than particulars (e.g., “What is a sacrament?” not “Why was he doubly irritated?”). Moreover, it seems odd to take up the adjective of the phrase, rather than the noun.
Suppose a scholar seeks to ascertain the nature of Ithacan narration— how can he or she construe “catechetical interrogation”?
An apt method, it seems, would be to consider what it means in context. Bloom has arrived home late, and Molly has questioned him about what has kept him out. Bloom has given answers that are not entirely sincere and that are in part rehearsed (e.g., regarding his supposed attendance at a performance of Leah; lines 17.2251–17.2266 list Bloom’s fabrications). Thus the phrase refers to a partially practiced and partially spontaneous sequence of questions and answers. In the case of the episode’s narrators, however, there seems to be one difference. The narrators appear to be cooperating with one another much more fully than Bloom and Molly. Specifically, there does not seem to be any reason to infer the responder/primary narrator is keeping anything from the questioner/secondary narrator. Moreover, unlike Bloom and Molly, the questioner knows at least part of the responder’s answers. This suggests the questioner and responder have rehearsed, not separately, but together.
What source might make manifest some resonances of this rehearsal?
One option is a “catechism.” But, again, that does not seem to fit. There is nothing particularly catechetical about the narration of “Ithaca,” since it is largely particular (rather than general) and secular (rather than religious or doctrinal). But there are other types of rehearsed “interrogation.” The most obvious is the lawyer/witness interaction in a trial. Indeed, this interaction seems a very plausible model for Ithacan narration, since the relation between a lawyer and a friendly witness is commonly one in which the lawyer is fully aware of what the witness is going to say. Like the Ithacan questioner, the lawyer asks questions in light of that knowledge.
To what does this testify theoretically?
It indicates that there are many varieties of dialogue narration and that authors may draw on any of these varieties in creating a literary work. These varieties include not only informal conversation, catechism, and legal interrogation, but also psychotherapeutic sessions, job interviews, and a wide range of other forms of interactive storytelling. Moreover, these dialogue narrations may be cooperative or confrontational, convergent or dialectical. In each case, authors may draw on a particular variety directly and literally or as a model. In the case of “Ithaca,” Joyce is clearly not presenting a literal court scene, but appears to be using lawyer/witness interrogation as one model for the narration.10
Before finishing can you define the functions of this narrational novelty?
As usual, the use of a particular narrational form may have a function in creating new narrational possibilities, communicating story or story world information, conveying thematic concerns, or fostering emotional response. In this case, the novelty of the technique seems fairly clear. The narration of “Ithaca” is continuous with nonliterary forms of dialogue storytelling, as well as literal literary uses of those forms (e.g., in court dramas). However, it may be unique in its extensive development of dialogue-modeled storytelling.
Is this, then, consistent with the Popean principle that the style should serve as signal to the sense?
Indubitably. It extends the dual topicalization of the narrative to a dual narration. Indeed, the topicalization is unequal, in favoring Bloom, just as the narration is unequal, in favoring the responder/primary narrator.
And the engagement of emotive excitations in addition?
There is the usual effect of novelty, provoking interest and focusing attention. There is also a sort of play with the emotions involved in legal proceedings. Specifically, Bloom has at various points hinted at revenge against Molly, Boylan, or both. For example, in “Eumaeus,” he expresses “a certain kind of admiration for a man who had actually brandished a knife … with the courage of his political convictions.” He then goes on to compare this to a man killing his unfaithful wife, even knowing that he will be hanged for it.11 Passages such as this may hint to the reader that Bloom has some such plan in the back of his mind. Given these hints, and in the context of a narration that recalls a criminal trial, the reader may experience an uncharacteristic moment of suspense when reading of a strange gap. The primary narrator is generally free to focalize either Bloom or Stephen. However, at one point, he or she suddenly becomes spatially constrained. Bloom has entered the house, but the narrator remains outside with Stephen. Stephen sees that Bloom enters the house, removes his boots (thus allowing relatively silent movement through the house), and leaves the kitchen. Bloom appears again “After a lapse of four minutes.” The reader is left to ponder just what occurred in those four minutes and why they have been left elliptical. For a long time after, there is no sign Molly is in the house. Bloom does not address her, nor does she join them or call out (as she had done in the morning). If the author were, say, Poe, readers would be convinced something treacherous had happened in the missing four minutes. The suggestion of some unmentionable business is reinforced by the Odyssey parallel. The homecoming of Odysseus and Telemachus is marked by the slaughter of the suitors. In principle, we should expect some parallel event in “Ithaca.” The missing four minutes hint at that parallel event—a parallel event that, like most other key moments of the story, occurs offstage.
Recount the factors rendering such insinuations entirely ineffective.
First, there is the fame of Molly’s concluding monologue (which assures every reader that Molly is alive and well at the end), then the relative subtlety of the implications themselves. Nonetheless, those resonances remain part of the narrational innovation. Indeed, the link with murder stories is related to another peculiar feature of the narration in “Ithaca”—its astonishing excess of facts (sometimes inaccurate). The proliferation of information (including misinformation) is a feature of mysteries because the reader must be kept guessing as to just what the relevant facts are. In other words, the purpose of the excess is precisely to prevent the reader from understanding too much or knowing it with too great confidence. As usual, Joyce takes this principle and sets it loose from its moorings, generalizing it.
In any work, there are selection principles that guide the communication of story information. Often those selection principles are constrained by the causal sequence of the main story line. In murder mysteries, the selection of information is partially freed from that causal sequence, so that the reader is given story world information that is misleading with respect to the story. For example, in a story concerning the shooting of Doe, we might learn that Smith had recently purchased a rifle—even though the omniscient narrator knows perfectly well Smith was asleep in his bed at the time the murder occurred. Again, Joyce generalizes the autonomy here. In murder mysteries, irrelevant information is constrained by at least a possible causal connection with the mystery. Specifically, the narration does not provide any story world information whatsoever. Rather, it provides story world information someone might reasonably take to be relevant to the murder. Joyce, however, simply gives us vast quantities of information—for example, about the Dublin water system—that have no possible bearing on the main causal sequence of the story.
But other problems, then, ensue, not so?
Sadly, yes. Joyce clearly cannot provide all the information about the story world.
So he should still seek substitute selection principles?
Certainly. Here, he uses a version of the psychological selection that connects knowledge with narrator or focalizer. The primary focalizer in this episode is Bloom, as it was in the preceding episode. Just as the preceding episode’s narration presented Bloom’s “language of the marketplace,” the narration in this episode presents his knowledge about science, engineering, and related matters. As Molly puts it, Bloom “knows a lot of mixedup things.” The episode puts on show not only the mixedup things he knows, but the sorts of things he might know—though the occasional errors keep the “mixedup” quality. In other words, we are given a partially idealized version of Bloomian knowledge. The randomness and the errors are necessary to keep it Bloomian.
Fill in the final functions.
As to narrative communication, even if readers do not suspect a murder, they are likely to wonder if Bloom at least met Molly in the missing four minutes. If there was a meeting, what was it like? This was the first interaction after Molly’s affair. It is important for us, as it is for Bloom. But the unfocused proliferation of information keeps us from knowing precisely what occurred. Put differently, however interesting it may (or may not) be in itself, this is information that substitutes for something crucial. Indeed, the questions also substitute for the key question—what happened with Molly? The point has obvious emotional consequences in terms of plot interest. Indeed, this is bound up with character interest as well. Specifically, the narration is not simply reflecting and partially idealizing—or at least extending—Bloom’s scientific proclivities. It also reflects and extends his mood repair strategy, his tendency to avoid thinking about precisely the topic that most centrally concerns him. The excess of information, then, is not only a way of deferring the reader’s understanding. It is a manifestation of Bloom’s own deferral, of the way he uses knowledge of some things in order not to think about other things.
The duality of the episode is also bound up with a shift in the emotional focus. Elsewhere in the book, shame and, to a lesser extent, sexual desire have been particularly prominent. Since this scene involves the first encounter with his unfaithful wife, we might expect jealousy or rage. Again, the narration plays with that expectation. But jealousy and rage are not what we find. In this episode, Bloom returns home, and he does so with a substitute for his dead son. Home may be a place of sexual desire or possible jealousy. But it is first of all a place of attachment, bonding of spouses or parent and child. Panksepp has suggested that attachment to a place (thus a sense of home) may be linked with the evolution of our attachment bonding (265). In keeping with this, the return home in “Ithaca”—Joyce’s professed favorite (Beja 78)—presents us with a shift from shame and desire to attachment, from Scheff and Freud to Bowlby, so to speak.
In keeping with Joyce’s recurring practice, the shift is prepared for earlier, specifically in the ending of “Circe.” As Nicholas Brown nicely described the scene,12 Bloom is above the prone form of Stephen. He is not distracted by some sort of hallucination or apparition. Rather, the figurative narration tells us what he sees and feels when he looks down on the motherless youth before him. This is expressed by his utterance, “Rudy!” and by the image of Rudy as religiously learned, which is just how Bloom understands (or “sees”) Stephen.
Part of Bloom’s relation with Stephen involves an attempt at a particular sort of emotion sharing—that is to say, emotional communication about some object or person, as when two people share their anger over a political event or their admiration for an acquaintance.13 Emotion sharing is important in attachment relations generally and for a variety of emotions. But one sort of emotion sharing that may be particularly important in familial relations is the sharing of attachment feelings themselves. In other words, friends and family members seek to share many feelings with one another— joy, grief, anger. One emotion that seems particularly important within families is the sharing of feelings of attachment—for example, sharing love of a child with one’s spouse or love of one’s spouse with one’s child, though such feelings may be complicated by jealousies, as Freud famously stressed.
A particularly touching moment of emotion sharing occurs in this episode when Bloom and Stephen are outside and Bloom looks up at the illuminated bedroom window. Thinking of Molly, he seeks to convey her presence to Stephen with “allusions” and “affirmations” expressing “subdued affection and admiration.” The narration is carefully phrased. In being “subdued,” Bloom shows concern for Stephen’s feelings. Excessive attachment to someone else would exclude Stephen, and probably embarrass him as well. But at the same time Bloom does not conceal his emotions entirely. Rather he shares these intimate and private feelings of attachment with Stephen. Moreover, it is important that these feelings involve both affection and admiration—just the feelings one would hope bind a family together.
Unfortunately, however, the presence of attachment concerns in the episode is largely not very positive. It is, rather, primarily a matter of attachment loss. Bloom has hardly forgotten Molly’s adultery. Quite the contrary, returning home has only made his realization all the sharper and more painful. In keeping with this, his longing for an attachment bond with Stephen is inseparable from the attachment losses he has been trying not to recall all day. The most obvious, with regard to Stephen, is the death of Rudy. But the loss of Molly is the most pressing and emotionally pervasive. Indeed, it leads him to question everything about his family life. At one point, he even doubts whether Milly is his daughter (17.868–17.870). This does not mean he would reject her. Indeed, it seems clear his attachment to her is undiminished. He recalls with tenderness how Milly admired his knowledge (17.925–17.928), then immediately suggests Stephen in effect take her place as she is away, thinking they will be able to have intellectual conversations. He also suggests Stephen’s presence may turn Molly away from Blazes (17.939). Beyond the losses of Rudy, Molly, and Milly, there is the approaching anniversary of Bloom’s father’s death—a loss all the more painful as Rudolph may have provided some comfort now. This attachment loss particularly links the episode with “Telemachus,” where Stephen’s preoccupation with the death of his mother was introduced. Indeed, Bloom connects the deaths of the two parents when he explains he could not attend Mrs. Dedalus’s funeral due to its coinciding with the death anniversary of his own father (17.951–17.953). In short, Bloom’s attempt at bonding with Stephen is inseparable from his overwhelming sense of attachment loss.
Sadly, the relation between Stephen and Bloom is no more successful than any of the others. When Stephen leaves also, Bloom is horribly alone. Here the excess of scientific information, mirroring and extending Bloom’s interest in astronomy, is put to direct emotional use. The questioner asks, “Alone, what did Bloom feel?” The responder answers, “The cold of inter-stellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero.” Bloom proceeds to think of all the friends who have died.
Inside the house, he looks through his two private drawers. The contents bring with them humor (e.g., regarding the Wonderworker, guaranteed to relieve flatulence). But they also bring nostalgia, a feeling not just of lost happiness, but specifically of lost joy from attachment bonds, joy that is gone or declined through the passage of time. The nostalgia is prominent in the childish sketch and note from Milly (“a large globular head with 5 hairs erect, 2 eyes in profile” “marked Papli”) and the suicide note from his father (“To My Dear Son Leopold”)—a suicide itself bound up with attachment loss, due to the death of his wife, Leopold’s mother.
Bloom’s only comfort is the sense he has had some financial success— “What object offered partial consolation for these reminiscences? The endowment policy, the bank passbook, the certificate of the possession of scrip.” This is linked with his soothing fantasy of Bloom cottage. But no sooner does he think of the partial financial security than his fancy goes awry and he realizes it could all be lost by a series of reversals until he finds himself an “aged impotent disfranchised ratesupported moribund lunatic pauper.” The word “impotent” is perhaps the most important here. It recalls Bello’s figurative taunt in “Circe” before he reminds Bloom of Molly’s affair. The reasons for the waking nightmare of financial devastation then become clear. He feels that emotional devastation has just occurred with his family. Doubt tugs at his confidence, suggesting his financial security is as uncertain as his attachment security.
This leads him once again to the fantasy of departure, the simulation of leaving home, the imagination of a trip to “Jerusalem, the holy city” and elsewhere. We now know another source of this imagination. His earliest memory of his father was of the latter recounting just such a journey. In a particularly pathetic touch, he imagines how Molly would react to his departure. She would, he thinks, miss him as one misses a pet dog, no more (see 17.2000–17.2005).
So Bloom goes to sleep, feeling his attachment bonds nearly severed—and yet finding that he still loves (has “affection” for), desires (see 17.2238), and has “admiration” for Molly. With all the episode’s concern about duality and dialogue, it ends in utter, almost solipsistic loneliness. This prepares us for the following episode, for Molly, too, is deeply alone. We as readers see what she feels for Bloom, but Bloom is forever excluded from that understanding. Molly will never have the access to Bloom’s thought that we have, so she can never know what he feels for her, at least not in the way we know it. The portrait is tragic because it is real. This is the way people are. Even the most strongly attached and intimate people have no way of experiencing one’s another’s thoughts. They are condemned forever to misunderstanding.
From the beginning of the episode, Molly suspects Bloom has been unfaithful that day. In consequence, she is jealous. The jealousy certainly concerns sex, but it does not seem to be primarily a matter of sexual possessiveness. Rather, she seems to have some sense of relief when she concludes, “love its not or he’d be off his feed thinking of her.” What she cannot imagine is that, far from thinking of some other woman, Bloom has spent almost the entire day thinking of Molly herself. She shows a similar, but converse, concern when faced with the possibility of a rival in Josie Breen. Specifically, she imagines she would deal with the problem by confronting the hussy and asking her “do you love him,” since “she couldn’t fool me.” What is perhaps most touching about this is that it not only shows Molly’s love for Bloom, it shows a sort of unselfish concern that he not be deceived in love. The feeling is not unlike her protectiveness with respect to the medical students—“well theyre not going to get my husband again into their clutches if I can help it making fun of him then behind his back.”
As the preceding points suggest, Molly completely misunderstands the way Bloom thinks of her. She laments that “I suppose he thinks Im finished out and laid on the shelf”—just as Bloom thinks she would hardly care if he disappeared. When they were courting, things were different. Bloom wrote “mad crazy letters my Precious one everything connected with your glorious Body everything underlined that comes from it is a thing of beauty and of joy for ever.” But now “I cant help it if I’m young still can I it’s a wonder Im not an old shrivelled hag before my time living with him so cold never embracing me except sometimes when I’m asleep the wrong end of me.” But there is a change in her as well. In the beginning, she desired him so strongly that “he had me always at myself 4 and 5 times a day sometimes.”
There is a deep, in effect a philosophical, problem here. It might be called the problem of existential loneliness.14 This is the loneliness that comes from the fact that our consciousnesses are irremediably separate, isolated from one another so that Molly can never directly know what Bloom thinks and feels, nor can Bloom directly know what Molly thinks and feels. They can only infer from behavior or trust speech—both the sincerity of the speaker and the precision of the words themselves. But, in addition to this existential loneliness, both Leopold and Molly suffer from quotidian loneliness as well, isolation from friends, recently from their daughter, now from each other. Their personal isolation is inseparable from their social oddity—both (by some definition) Jewish, sober, hard-working, talented, and successful enough to be envied, yet not so successful as to be desirable for prestige.
Molly’s loneliness is particularly terrible. She is no longer close to her school friend, Josie Breen, but is instead worried that she may be a rival. She is not only separated from her daughter, but their relation is strained. She is a respected soprano, but the “last concert [she] sang” was “over a year ago.” Her affair with Boylan is in part about sexual enjoyment. But it is even more about overcoming loneliness. When she speaks of Boylan making her “feel full up” (18.150), she is initially referring to his prodigious organ, “that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has” like “some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time.” But later she thinks of romantic literature and wonders if it is possible “to find two people like that nowadays full up of each other.” This suggests the “filling” she wishes for is a matter of attachment needs more than sexual desires.15 She immediately thinks of such a couple, full up of each other—Bloom’s parents, so much so that Rudolph killed himself after his wife’s death.16 Once again, Molly does not realize that Poldy is no less a doting husband than his father was—even to the point of considering suicide in response to his (apparent) loss of her love (15.3374–15.3376). This misunderstanding of Poldy in part motivates her worries over Boylan, “if I could find out whether he likes me”—an affecting moment because it is one of the few times when she reveals her vulnerability.
This reference to Molly revealing her vulnerability leads us to the topic of narration. To whom is she revealing this? Is there some doubleness in the narration here as well? After the audience-directed interior monologue of “Eumaeus” and the dialogue narration of “Ithaca,” we would certainly expect it. There are some points at which the reader is teased by the possibility of a narratee. These start with the very first word, “Yes,” which—particularly in the context of the question-and-answer format of “Ithaca”—initially seems to be a reply to a question. There are other hints as well. For example, when gazing delightedly on her thighs, she exclaims, “look how white they are.” But we soon realize the repeated “yes” is just a quirk of Molly’s speech, a verbal habit that continues from external speech to subvocalization. The exclamation “look” has the force of an ejaculation, along the lines of “wow.”
There are certainly perceptual elements that enter into Molly’s stream of consciousness (see, for example, 18.596 and 18.874). There are also points where one might reasonably judge that Molly is not really subvocalizing. Rather, Joyce has taken a perceptual experience and translated it into Molly’s idiom—as when she thinks “I feel some wind in me,” an unlikely subvocalization. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the narration is interior monologue, not broader stream of consciousness. Indeed, it is what we might call “canonical interior monologue,” for it has become the standard model of what interior monologue is. As Dorrit Cohn puts it, “Within the limited corpus of autonomous interior monologues the ‘Penelope’ section of Ulysses may be regarded as a locus classicus, the most famous and the most perfectly executed specimen of its species” (217). This is unfortunate as the paradigmatic status of this episode easily leads us to think that subvocalization is isolated, that it has no dual quality, including no audience orientation.17 In this way, it is psychologically misleading. It is also deleterious for our response to Ulysses. Insofar as we think of Molly’s monologue as normative and generalizable, we are likely to miss the emotional consequences of its isolation, its almost monadic quality. The primary emotional consequence of this quality is to further convey—to our thought and feeling—just how lonely Molly is, just how far removed she is from everyone in her past and present. Here, once again, Joyce’s innovations in narration are both thematically and emotionally functional. But these functions have been obscured because an excessively isolated form of interior monologue has been mistakenly assumed to be the usual form.
There is, however, an advantage to isolation. On the one hand, it removes one from the comforts of attachment reciprocity. But it may also remove one from the feelings of social or bodily disgust that tend to provoke shame. It is no accident that the most psychologically solipsistic episode is the one where shame is least in evidence, for Molly does not seem to experience shame, at least bodily shame. Indeed, the episode as a whole treats topics and actions that might have given rise to shame for other characters elsewhere in the book but do not provoke shame here. In that sense, “Penelope” involves an extended criticism of shame.
Even before Molly begins to worry about Leopold’s fidelity, she complains about sexual puritanism. Specifically, she remembers the censorious attitudes of Mrs. Riordan, who was “down on bathing suits” and so generally opposed to free interaction of the sexes that Molly finds it “a wonder she didn’t want us to cover our faces.” In contrast, Molly’s view is “let us have a bit of fun God help the world if all the women were her sort.” The “God help the world” remark concerns the necessity of reproduction. This is, as we have seen, a recurring theme in the novel. It is most fully and directly articulated in this episode when Molly reflects “what else were we given all those desires for Id like to know.” This is in effect a sanctification of sexuality, an insistence that it is part of divine creation.
In keeping with this elevation of sexuality, Molly has an almost prelapsarian lack of shame about her body and about an entire range of sexual practices. She complains about men’s insensitivity to a woman’s sexual pleasure and how the woman must resort to masturbation—“no satisfaction in it pretending to like it till he comes and then finish it off myself anyway.” The point is not peculiar to Molly.18 Fortunately for Molly, she has a better physical experience with Boylan. She recalls delightedly that she “was coming for about 5 minutes.” She also thinks without shame of masturbating a man (“I pulled him off into my handkerchief”); taking the “lovely young cock” of a boy (here, a statue) “into my mouth”; experiencing cunnilingus (18.1244ff.); engaging in anonymous sex (18.1410–18.1412); and having sex with a woman (“I wouldnt mind being a man and get up on a lovely woman”). She acknowledges autoeroticism, how her own body does “excite myself sometimes.” She has no squeamishness about comparing the relative quantity of semen produced by different men, or imagining swallowing some after fellatio (“its only like gruel”). Like Bloom, she even has transsexual fantasies—“I wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so soft when you touch it.” But her fantasies are not tainted by the dysfunctional aspects of Bloom’s fantasy life, with its coprophilia and easy shifting between fantasy and nightmare. Perhaps the difference is precisely that Bloom feels bodily and particularly sexual shame, which distorts his feelings, whereas Molly does not.
But this is not to say Molly is in any way happy with her life or her actions. She does not suffer shame, a sense that her body and her sexuality are or should be disgusting. But she does suffer a debilitating sense of guilt—not over the acts themselves, but over the attachment bond those acts have served to betray. She also suffers anger and resentment over the attachment bonds she feels were already broken by Leopold. This is the ultimate tragedy of their mutual loneliness. That loneliness, based in part on misunderstanding, drives Molly to do something she hates having done. Again, this is not the sex itself. Indeed, despite her sexual delights, she suggests the sex is itself almost banal: “anyhow its done now once and for all with all the talk of the world about it people make its only the first time after that its just the ordinary do it and think no more about it.” The attitude is in keeping with Bloom’s judgment at the end of the “Ithaca” that Molly’s act was “As natural as any and every natural act” and “not so calamitous as a cataclysmic annihilation of the planet in consequence of a collision with a dark sun”—that is, literally, it is not the end of the world. In short, the act itself is nothing to feel either shame or guilt over. But the implications of the act, specifically its implications for attachment bonds, are something else.
Molly’s complex feelings of guilt and anger—in part, anger over that guilt—are manifest particularly in her fantasies about Leopold. For example, she imagines arousing him, but not from her own sexual feelings. Specifically, she envisions how she might “let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him.” Then, when he is filled with desire, “Ill let him know if that’s what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times.” The point is obvious. Her fantasy is to make Leopold desire her again, then tell him that it is too late, that she has finally had real sex, after more than ten years, and that Boylan did it well, whereas (she suggests) Leopold never had. The purpose of the imagined speech is to hurt Leopold for what she feels to be his disregard (but that we know is not). Then she points to the proof: “theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet,” just in case he doubted her word. “I wouldn’t bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him,” she continues. She wishes to convey that she cares so little about Leopold that she does not take the trouble to conceal what she has done. In fact, she does care, but in a perverse way; she cares to hurt him and has positively decided not to hide the traces of the affair, in the hope that the knowledge will wound him. She then has the same fantasy of humiliation that Leopold had in “Circe,” that she will degrade him by “tell[ing] him every scrap and mak[ing] him do it out in front of me.” She fancies having the power to force him to masturbate while listening to the details of her affair. It is a strange and somewhat frightening combination of desire and hatred, a terrible anger that manifests itself in the fantasy of causing Leopold severe emotional pain along with physical pleasure.
The reason for all this is expressed in the following line: “serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress.” In this fantasy, Molly is exacting revenge on Bloom. The revenge is not only for what she perceives as cold indifference. The revenge is more deeply for her own sense of guilt, for her sense that this is someone who loved her and whom she loved, and whom she has now betrayed and hurt. She blames Leopold for that guilt, in part because it is the only way she can mitigate her own responsibility and pain. Imagined cruelty is her form of mood repair.
After this, she quickly shifts back to her view, much like Bloom’s own, that adultery is not that terrible an act, not the end of the world—“if that’s all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much.” This, however, leads to a further, strange fantasy. She thinks about Bloom’s money. She imagines letting him indulge his coprophilic desires by allowing him to lick far up into her anus; “then Ill tell him I want £1 or perhaps 30/-.” In short, she imagines prostituting herself to her husband. She also continues to imagine that she is humiliating him because she explains that the money is for underclothes, which he is likely to recognize as a preparation for Boylan.
In keeping with this, she goes on to imagine him masturbating “on me behind,” after which “Ill wipe him off me just like a business his omission”— the suggestion of the word “business” is too obvious to require comment. But what is curious and touching in this third fantasy is that the purpose changes. It is not to humiliate Bloom and exact guilt-alleviating revenge or money. It is to find out what he feels and whether he is involved with anyone else. She thinks, “Ill do the indifferent 1 or 2 questions Ill know by the answers when hes like that he cant keep a thing back.” Now Molly’s own attachment vulnerability becomes clearer. She continues to imagine subjugating Bloom, but it is a fantasy designed to respond to her anxiety over possible attachment loss.
The closing pages turn to her recollection of the pinnacle of their love, the most intense and secure moment of their attachment, when on Howth, with the irritating goat that, even so, couldn’t spoil the bliss of that one moment, and the rhododendrons, and then how he proposed and she asked him only with her eyes to ask again, and they could understand one another so well even without words that he did ask because he knew or felt what it was she wanted, and she pulled him down to her, like a player settling her harp against her shoulder and breast, not like that now, no, not at all, the two of them, as if she is asking, behind the plain thought, could it ever again and thinking too no it couldnt the two of them all filled up with one another like the old couple whose life alone was worse than death no life like that not now already life alone and remembering the seedcake and the breathing in each others moist warm breath no it cannot not like that not again not ever no.