Before beginning a discussion of James Joyce it is essential - as it is not essential for any other novelist of this period - to consider the terms of the discussion, to decide how one is going to read him. He is reported to have commented that he had given plenty of work for the professors and it is clear that he expected to be studied by Joycean specialists as well as by that common reader to whose attention previous novelists had aspired. This is placed beyond question by a number of jokes built into the story, some of which have been elucidated by Robert M. Adams in Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The knowledgeable account of various horses by Nosey Flynn in Davy’ Byrnes pub is perhaps the clearest example: only a professor is likely to check the accuracy of this by contemporary records and discover that Joyce has changed the sex of the Derby winner. Joyce’s laughter must have echoed over the decades to the first discoverer of this discrepancy, planted so that it would only be noticed when Joyce studies had been added to Joyce readings.
If appreciation of that joke or other effects like it is an inherent and necessary part of a proper response to the novel then it is certain that only after a great deal of co-operative study will Ulysses be anything like fully understood, and we can say that Joyce did indeed write for the professors. If so he is a very different kind of novelist with very different aims from any other writer of significance (including many who are not obviously simple: Conrad, James, and Lawrence, for instance) and Ulysses is a different kind of novel from their works.
If we say that the joke and a multitude of other effects which only become clear after a great deal of research are not necessary elements then we must mean either that there is much in the book which is in the nature of optional extras or that the elaboration is, despite the incidental rewards, at bottom likely to be regrettable because it distracts us from what matters more.
The theory of optional extras, it should be clear, is not merely a manifestation of what we all know about most literary works—that serious reading is more rewarding than superficial and that we can sometimes be surprised even in works which we know well by a sudden perception of a shade of meaning or a resonance previously overlooked. A glance at either of the schemata for Ulysses which Joyce showed to Stuart Gilbert and to Carlo Linati indicates that there is a vast amount which can only be detected as the result of much detailed study and even a cursory glance at most criticism of Joyce leaves no doubt that most discussion is exegetical and assumes that what is revealed by co-operative scholarly effort is what deserves print. If Joyce gave the professors plenty to do, they have taken up their burden with a will and demonstrated their ability to bear it. If they are on the right lines then Joyce was indeed lucky that his works began to be established when the expansion of English Studies as an academic discipline ensured an adequate supply of professors to do the job. Nor is there any question, as there may be with some other writers, of over-ingenious critics reading things into the text; Joyce spent most of his lifetime elaborating his works and no critic is likely to be more ingenious than he was himself. But if everything which can be extracted from the text is important then the optional extras bulk as large as what an intelligent but non-scholarly reader can ever perceive and this is bound to make us feel that the common reading is an incomplete one.
My own opinion is that much of the elaboration is inert, intellectually rewarding in the same way that puzzles are, and that we have the right to regret this, and so far as we can, to ignore it.1 We are accustomed to the critical claim that we are justified in seeing things in a book of which the author was unaware; it seems equally justifiable to seek to reject some matters which the author introduced if we believe that they take attention away from the qualities which make him a great novelist.
My conviction rests upon two assumptions. One is that there is a limit to the attention which can be paid by any reader - specifically that we cannot combine different kinds of attention to more than a very limited degree; it is not possible to attend concurrently, for example, to the feelings and perceptions of a realized fictional character and to the proliferation within the prose of covert references to various organs of the body Or precious stones. Consecutive readings may allow us to move from one to the other but I do not believe that these consecutive readings can ever be combined in one. My second reason helps to explain why they cannot be combined. Characters, if we are to take any interest it them, must affect us as autonomous beings; even if the writer sees them as constrained by social forces which lessen their autonomy, as Conrad does in Nostromo, these forces are conceived as having an existence outside the arbitrary will of the novelist, perceived by him in society and in principle conceivable to the characters them-selves. Joyce very naturally sees his characters as determined by their Catholic upbringing and the political state of Ireland in the early years of this century. But the fuga per canonem which was claimed by Joyce as the form of the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses and the sequence of pastiche/parodies in Oxen of the Sun’ emerge from neither the perceptions of the characters nor the circumstances of society, and attention to them goes far to abolish all sense of the characters as people about whom Joyce certainly wishes us to have various feelings. This is particularly so because many of the elaborations bear all the marks of having been superadded to a work whose energies lie elsewhere, most evidently in such traditional pleasures as the deployment of characters and the establishment of the social scene. But much criticism of Joyce produces the odd paradox of critics avoiding all mention (presumably as too elementary) of these triumphs while expatiating at length on ingenuities which, in truth, should be well within the compass of any intelligent literary person. The chapter of parodies, for example, could surely have been produced, once the idea is there, by many a contributor to literary competitions, and the idea itself is strikingly mechanical.
There is one critical line of thought which accepts the mechanical nature of many of the effects and claims it as an inherent part of the totality of the book. Hugh Kenner, seizing on Wyndham Lewis’s attack in Time and Western Man (1927) and turning it on its head, asserts that Joyce is a backward-looking pessimist who believes that the world has been drained of meaning, so that the basic strategy of Ulysses is precisely an accumulation of inert detail which smothers everything. Kenner’s argument is marked by great erudition and great play of logic; in my opinion it falls to the ground because the tone of Ulysses is not in the least despairing but, on the contrary, humane, liberal, and celebratory.
The line traced by Joyce’s work is a strange and paradoxical one: he begins his significant work with short stories about a variety of people and, despite some complications under the surface, the stories can be read with ease; he then writes a novel about a highly intelligent and academically minded young man, and this, too, is now relatively easy to read; this is followed by the further adventures of that same young man, to whom are added as central characters, a strikingly ordinary man and his wife, and this is still, after sixty years, a difficult book; he ends by writing about the most ordinary man imaginable and produces a book which is unreadable, although it is studiable. I do not mean by this that Finnegans Wake is in all ways unrewarding, but my observation has been that professionals study it and a few others make it a cult book - that is, one in which a sense of being members of an initiated group provides its own somewhat dubious satisfaction - but it shows no signs of acquiring that readership which other notoriously ‘difficult’ works of the first half of this century have had for some decades.
Yet even in that first volume of stories there can be seen, warring against its triumphs, elements of inert ingenuity with which we must come to terms. Dubliners, first published in 1914, lingered with the publishers for a number of years of complicated negotiations, the subject of much anxiety and frustration. It is often suggested that we are fortunate, even if Joyce felt that he was not, because the delay enabled two good stories to be added - ‘A Little Cloud’ and ‘Two Gallants’ - and Joyce’s best story, ‘The Dead’ to conclude the volume. What is perhaps not always realized is the extent to which the additions changed the balance of the whole volume, highlighting certain qualities and diminishing the significance of others. I would go further and suggest that ‘The Dead’, though indeed the best story, does not really belong as clearly as the others within the volume and that a good deal of discussion of it has gone astray because of the attempt to fit it in.
The original twelve stories form a loose unity, as Joyce said, stories of childhood, followed by adolescence and mature life and culminating in ‘stories of public life in Dublin’, ending with ‘Grace’.2 As might be expected of a collection called ‘Dubliners’ written by one educated by the Jesuits, the first and the last stories are concerned with aspects of Dublin Catholicism; they are both concerned with the religion and they are both extremely funny. ‘The Sisters’ is certainly about much else besides—the small boy’s first encounter with death and his mixture of shrewdness and incomprehension about the reciprocally uncomprehending world of adults and his fascination with those big matters which he does not understand. But its title, which has often puzzled readers, should direct attention towards the two old women who gossip ignorantly about their dead brother - ignorantly because, whatever they might superstitiously believe, no priest who is able to put the boy through his paces about such ‘intricate questions’ as are dealt with by the fathers of the Church (who wrote ‘books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspapers’) could possibly believe, as his sisters say, that the accidental breaking of a chalice, whether empty or not, has the dread significance which they give to it. The effect which the story leaves upon us has far less to do with the oddity of Father Flynn than with the comic banality of the sisters. There are few things in the whole of Joyce’s output more penetrating and funnier than the way in which the stilted conversation proceeds via every necessary cliché (from ‘Ah, well, he’s gone to a better world’, through ‘there’s no friends like the old friends’ to ‘It’s when it’s all over that you’ll miss him’) to the moment for which all this has been a preparation:
‘Grace’, the story of‘public life’, would have fittingly concluded the volume. Mr Kernan, having disgraced himself by falling down the lavatory steps in a bar, is persuaded by his friends to ‘wash the pot’ - make a retreat. To the accompaniment of glasses of stout and the ‘light music of whisky falling into glasses’ his friends proclaim the victory of religion and right thinking, all expressed in a farrago of inaccurate history, misquotation, ludicrous discussion of Papal mottoes (‘Lux upon Lux’ succeeded by ‘Crux upon Crux’), snobbery, and some toadying. As in ‘The Sisters’, their conversation is conducted in a succession of owlish clichés, and the story culminates in the sermon of Father Purdon (whose name is that of the Dublin street famous for its brothels) who addresses them as if he were ‘their spiritual accountant’ on the text.
The first collection of Dubliners is thus opened and closed by stories of the almost farcically superstitious debasement of a Catholicism which is as inescapably social as it is religious. There is much in the intervening stories, like the canvassers in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ listening to the fustian poem on Parnell to the accompaniment of the popping of corks in stout bottles, which is comic, too. But there is much else: even in the example which I have chosen there is the perception that men may be genuinely moved by fustian, and many of the stories—‘Araby’, for example, or ‘Clay’ or ‘A Painful Case’—are predominantly sad. What they share with ‘The Sisters’ and ‘Grace’ is a sense of debasement and staleness, of a society from which many of the characters desire to escape but in which they are trapped by poverty or habit or family. But whenever religion rises to the surface the tone is likely to become comic, even if pathetically so, as in the end of ‘Counterparts’ where the small boy cries: ‘I’ll say a Hail Mary for you, pa, if you don’t beat me … I’ll say a Hail Mary.1 It seems that in this volume the religion of Dublin, whether seen as the debasement of the highest claims or as the manipulation of the greatest trap, can only be confronted by irony and farce. And, because it is the biggest claim, the volume opens and closes with it.
‘The Dead’, written after the first collection had been put together, is different in many ways from all the other stories, including the other two later ones. Not only is it much longer and more complex in structure but it is - to put it in the simplest terms - about someone who has escaped from the constrictions which entangle the characters of the other stories; Gabriel Conroy is a successful teacher at the college, prosperous, happily married, a reviewer for an English newspaper and accustomed to take his holidays on the Continent. He has, indeed, moved so far away from the general outlook of Dublin that he feels at times awkwardly out of place among the guests at his aunt’s party, though at other times he is warmly affectionate towards the family. This unease is, indeed, what the story explores; it might be said that he is constantly putting his foot (extracted from its continental goloshes) in it. His attempted jocularity with the maid, Lily, falls flat, he is put out by Miss Ivor’s teasing about being a ‘West Briton’, and finally he discovers when he returns with his wife to their hotel that she has been reminded by a song heard at the dance of a man who had loved her in her youth and had, as she puts it, died for her. His frustration and anger die away first in an excessive self-contempt and then in a feeling of unity with the dead young man and with all the dead, culminating in an ornate and highly rhythmical prose which has not previously been found in Dubliners:
This snow with which the story ends is the most important of a number of central images which run through the story; appearing first as stuff to be scraped off Gabriel’s goloshes (which makes him seem finicky, perhaps, and certainly un-Irish, to judge by the jokes about them), the snow transforms everything: ‘A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the tops of his goloshes.’ Later, as Gabriel speculates a little apprehensively on the speech which he is to make, he looks out of the window and thinks how pleasant it would be to walk outside - ‘The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument’ and on their way to the hotel they see the statue of O’Connell, ‘the Liberator’, turned into ‘a white man’ from the snow lying on it. It is right, then, that snow should fill Gabriel’s mind at the moment when his feelings are transformed. It joins, too, with another theme which has surfaced intermittently throughout the story - the contrast between the East, England, the Continent (most clearly presented by the paradox of Gabriel’s being called a ‘West Briton’ by Miss Ivors) and the West of Ireland, the region of Gretta’s childhood, of the language advocated by Miss Ivors, of the primitive which Gabriel thought he had left behind and which he does not wish to visit, and finally of the snow-covered churchyard in the far West which Gabriel imagines and towards which his feelings go out.
Gabriel’s moment of revelation - or ‘epiphany’, to use Joyce’s own word - is the culmination both of finely observed and presented psychological detail and also of a train of imagery created with the story and perceived by the characters. It is in its nature the very opposite of sterility and lack of contact and shabbiness which are the climaxes of the other stories. The only possible parallel is the realization of the narrator at the end of ‘An Encounter’ that he is glad to see the companion whom he has always despised a little.
Nevertheless the story has not always been read thus and if we consider how else it can be read, we move to the central point of my argument about professors and common readers. William York Tindall, in A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce, for example, describes it as ‘at once the summary and the climax of Dubliners’, and in this judgement he is far from alone. If we take this view we are obliged to assert that Gabriel is, indeed, what he says of himself in his moments of frustrated self-contempt, ‘a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts’; he has never truly loved Gretta and is as hopeless a Dubliner as any other sufferer from physical or emotional paralysis.
To take this view involves, in my view, flying in the face not only of Gabriel’s memories of his married life with Gretta, which may of course be self-deception, but also of the things which she says both to and about him; it is also to fly in the face of our common experience of life, which includes the awareness that sometimes we may be made awkward by a social contretemps with the likes of Lily or Miss Ivors and that even in the happiest of marriages one partner does not always know what the other is thinking or feeling and may receive shocks. The arguments against this reading seem overwhelming in terms of psychological plausibility and of how we have seen the personages of the story behaving.
Those who take the view that Gabriel’s plight represents the culmination of the study of Dublin’s paralysis are supported by the fact that there are, throughout the volume, a substantial number of images, keywords, repetitions, which point to parallels, often of an arcane nature, and that these are continued into ‘The Dead’. They are not the excogitations of over-ingenious critics; they are there and Joyce’s own comments tend to draw attention to them. An example from ‘The Sisters’ should make clear the sort of ingenuity which I have in mind. The small boy accepts the sherry which one of the sisters offers him as they leave the bedroom where the priest lies dead and go into the room where he has always sat with him during his life; but he refuses the cream crackers because he thinks he will ‘make too much noise eating them’. This detail functions superbly to evoke the silence of the room and the constraint of the boy. But, it has been pointed out, to drink the wine and not to eat the bread is to reject what the laity take and to accept what (before Vatican II) was reserved for the priest; appropriately, therefore, in ‘Araby’ a boy carries the thought of the girl with whom he is in love through the crowded streets and ‘I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes’. The chalice which the priest has relinquished has been taken up by the priest of love or art, the seeker of Araby, the un-Irish splendours of the Orient.
It is perhaps possible to accept this addition to the story as an optional extra (though there is surely something forced about the boy’s likening his feelings to a chalice), but the sheer weight of recondite allusion soon demands too much attention for us to have much sense of the autonomy of character and social relationship. So far as ‘The Dead’ is concerned, the more attention we concentrate on a dense reticulation of thematic images the more we are bound to feel that the last story is the culmination of the volume. We will then seize on Joyce’s comments that the stories concern the paralysis of Dublin and that he chose brown as the appropriate colour for the city and pick up a cluster of brown references in ‘The Dead’.3 Gabriel carves a brown goose, he wonders whether or not to quote in his speech from Browning, and one of the guests is Mr Browne who, attentive to his hostesses, ‘is everywhere’. Gabriel is thus quickly fitted into the pattern of paralysis, aided by the fact that the opening word of the story, the name of the servant, ‘Lily’, is Gabriel’s emblem and is also a funereal flower.
The kind of elaboration which Joyce employs here may be characterized as cryptographic, in the sense that it requires us to decipher it and, moreover, it is usually unrelated to the experience of the character s. There is nothing new in exhibiting within a novel a pattern which the reader registers, though the characters do not; but such patterns are normally an organic outgrowth from their experiences. Put very simply, we may say that Dickens in Little Dorrit makes us see a pattern of many kinds of imprisonment and Conrad in Nostromo a series of variations on enslavement to the silver of the mine, but that, though only the writer and reader share that vision, it would be possible to point out to many of the characters that it is true. One could not point out to Gabriel Conroy that Mr Browne is at the party because only a man with that name would be appropriate.
We may feel - I certainly do - that there is something ineffectively mechanical in thus labelling Lily and Mr Browne in a story which elsewhere relies so triumphantly on the verisimilitude of detail; but the distortion which is imposed upon Gabriel especially in his relationship with Gretta and his aunts is far more significant. Either, it seems to me, we must seek out and respond to the thematic scheme and consequently deny both what Joyce makes us feel about the characters in their minute-by-minute activity and our experience of life, or we must choose not to concentrate attention on the scheme. To do this will no doubt deprive us of some effective moments and a number of jokes and it will certainly allow those who take the other path to patronize us as naïve readers. But the price of sophistication may be too high and if the choice is to be a common reader or a professor then the former is to be preferred. I am, of course, using these terms in their Pickwickian sense: real professors may choose to be common readers and common readers may aspire to the professoriate. I do not under-rate the devotion and intelligence and wit of those critics with whom I disagree and some of whom I list in my Bibliography, but it seems important to save Joyce’s works - and especially Ulysses - for the common reader and from the professional symposia.
To make this choice is to assert that Joyce is sometimes a victim of his own impulse towards cryptographic elaboration, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, whose publication followed Dubliners in 1916, though an earlier version, Stephen Hero, dates from considerably earlier, may provide some explanation of this characteristic. The novel is a Bildungsroman in the specific form of a Kiinstlerroman, the study of the development of an artist from infancy to the moment when, assured of his vocation and having rejected the claims of his country, his church and his family, he prepares to take flight from his native Ireland. What is most striking in his development is that he does not seem to be led to a theme or to any engrossing subject or even to a personal mood which he wishes to embody in words—save for an unconvincingly decadent villanelle - but to a concept of himself as an artist and to the need for a theory of art. It seems that, having abandoned the scholastic theology of an upbringing intended to turn him into a priest, he must needs heed the question of the dean of studies, ‘When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question?’ and, picking up that misquotation from Aquinas, ‘pulcra sunt quae visa placent’, which doubtless seems a good starting-point for the dean, develop a detailed aesthetics to Lynch.
It seems natural to Joyce that his artist hero cannot, with a good conscience, be a writer until he has constructed a theology of art which asserts something like the same degree of intellectual rigour as the theology in which he no longer believes, one moreover which will admit of casuistry (of a man hacking in fury at a block of wood … make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not’), and which will inevitably respond to multiple forms of interpretation. Lynch points out that this approach ‘has the true scholastic stink’, just as Cranly tells him that his mind is ‘supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve’. He concludes his exposition to Lynch with the description of the position of the artist in relation to his creation which has been so often quoted in discussion of the book:
Though sometimes claimed as a proclamation of the basic moral neutrality of the artist, this, in context, clearly means that in the dramatic form the artist does not intrude his opinions, that all his beliefs are embodied within the work. It is, moreover, right that Stephen, poor, lice-ridden, lonely, should liken himself to the God of creation, just as he has started the discussion by the arrogant proclamation, ‘Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have.’ But it is surely significant also as proclaiming a view of a work of art as a world created by an artist which will stand any amount of scrutiny, any amount of poring over, any amount of interpretation, as often as not in terms which its inhabitants could not envisage. Joyce has commonly been discussed, and rightly in many ways, as one of the masters of Modernism, and in his use of, say, the stream of consciousness has been related to Proust, to Virginia Woolf, and, of course, to that writer from who he said he learnt his method of character presentation, Edouard Dujardin; yet it is equally true that his central concept of a work of art is profoundly medieval.4 In saying this I am assuming that in this aesthetic definition Joyce is in agreement with Stephen. There are certainly many sections of the book where it can be argued that Joyce is detaching himself from his hero and even mocking him, agreeing perhaps with Cranly’s affectionate jibe, ‘You poor poet, you!’ The scene at the end of Part 4 in which Stephen is assured of his vocation on the beach, sleeps, and wakes, faces us with the task of deciding whether the lush prose is intended to evoke a sense of revelation and wonder in us or whether we are to feel that Stephen’s revelation is intensely adolescent. If we choose the latter in its most extreme form then a great deal of the book is undermined and presumably we will find an essentially critical pun in its penultimate sentence, where Stephen goes ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’; the shadow of Shem the Penman, Joyce’s forger shadow, will lie heavily over the entire novel. We shall also find much of the eloquent prose towards which the novel has developed from the childish language of the opening, through the schoolboy vocabulary, hollow. It seems probable to me that Joyce may mock affectionately, as Cranly does, but it is hard to read the whole book as an ironic performance. Consequently I would hold that Stephen’s aesthetics are, broadly, Joyce’s, though he may, as is appropriate in a novel, present them with some irony and with a pomposity which befits his hero. But whichever view one takes of Joyce’s relationship with Stephen need make no difference to my argument about the significance of the theories in relation to Joyce’s habit of mind; he takes it for granted that a young artist with his background and upbringing would be impelled to construct a theology of art; if it is to be taken ironically as an awful warning it is certainly a warning which he himself needs but which he strikingly did not heed.
There is, however, one way in which Joyce indubitably breaks his aesthetic rules; the practice of writing sequels surely conflicts with the principle of integritas. Yet Ulysses opens with the reappearance of Stephen Dedalus and in the course of the novel we meet with many of what an older generation would have called ‘old friends’: Leopold Bloom, for example, goes to Paddy Dignam’s funeral in the company of Messrs Cunningham, Power, and Kernan who, in ‘Grace’, have 1 washed the pot together. However important it may seem to the Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that each work of art should be ‘selfbounded and selfcontained’ it is clear that Joyce’s concept of fictional characters and their relationship with their surroundings is of a continuing identity extending beyond the bounds of any one book.
Eight of the first nine sections of Ulysses are basically a mixture of straight narrative and interior monologue (or stream of consciousness or whatever other term seems best) of either Stephen Dedalus, returned from his visit to Paris and two years older than at the end of Portrait, or Leopold Bloom. The focus of our interest is thus fixed initially on the feelings, actions, and relationships of the people of the book.
But in a number of the later sections (and to a limited extent as a result of revision in some of the earlier ones) he abandons this direct presentation of character in favour of techniques of parody, pastiche, symbolic fantasy, and narration by question and answer from an omniscient narrator. It has been shown by a number of critics that Joyce changed his mind about the novel as he was writing it and that this involved not only constructing the later sections in a different manner from the earlier ones but also revising with varying degrees of thoroughness the earlier parts to bring them into accommodation with what follows. The revisions involved the introduction of a vast number of references to mythical patterns (or supposed ones, since it has been shown that he used as source books sundry speculative and unreliable guides) and of key images for each scene. These insertions are those which Joyce describes in the ‘schema’ which he sent to Carlo Linati with an accompanying letter on 21 September 1920 in which he says that the book
Michael Groden, whose Ulysses in Progress documents the rewritings very thoroughly and lucidly, says of the change from internal monologue to the other devices that ‘Joyce changes his focus of interest from his characters to his styles’, and many critics would clearly agree with him.
But it is difficult to be clear as to what this means. If the styles are themselves the focus of interest they have little to offer but examples of manners; a series of questions and answers is in itself inert and a chapter of parodies is the stuff of literary parlour games.
If, however, we believe that the focus is still on the characters but that, having established those characters in depth, Joyce now goes on to show the variety of ways in which we can perceive or interpret them, the development of the book is in its larger scheme quite unproblematical. We may find some of the methods more effective than others and we may, as I do, regard much of the encyclopaedic insertion as inert or positively distracting, but the deeply moving effect of the apparently most detached section - the questions and answers of ‘Ithaca’ - is sufficient evidence of the wisdom of his choice of development.6
Throughout there is one simple sense in which the novel aims at the encyclopaedic. Joyce sees to it that there are few experiences of human life, major or minor, at which we are not present and it was for the presence of some of these activities and the indecorous words used to describe them that the book was banned in both Britain and the United States for a number of years. We are with the characters when they are eating, drinking, sleeping, arguing, bearing children, burying the dead, pissing, working, shitting, bathing, fornicating, singing, menstruating, quarrelling, remembering, grieving, masturbating, teaching, being snubbed, being inquisitive, compassionate, jealous, forgetful, reconciled, boastful, unsure, doing and being, in fact, nearly everything that men and women can do and be except what is noble, dignified, and heroic. The paradox of the book is that we are frequently on the edge of attributing to Leopold Bloom nobility, dignity, and heroism.
Bloom is, indeed, modelled upon the legendary hero who gives his name to the book. He is the Ulysses/Odysseus in a mock-heroic Odyssey with Stephen as a weaker Telemachus and Molly Bloom as a Penelope who does not resist all her suitors. Writing on 10 November 1922 to his aunt, Mrs Josephine Murray, whom he hoped would read the book, Joyce recommended her to read a translation of the Odyssey first or even Lamb’s simplified Adventures of Ulysses, and repeated this advice in his Christmas letter.
Joyce chose not to attach to the published book the chapter titles which he gave to them in accounts to various friends and critics, but they have been commonly used and provide a convenient way of referring to the sections of the novel. The relationship is at times a loose one and an awareness of the parallels is far more rewarding in some sections than in others, but it is impossible to discuss the book without having some idea of the general parallel as well as a number of specific ones. The course of the novel, with the parallels, is:
Joyce is as anxious to show what his characters share in their environment as in showing their individuality. The ‘Wandering Rocks’ sequence is, from this point of view, something of an epitome of the whole book. Its cross-cutting indicates the simultaneity of the experienees of many people who are acquainted but at the moment separated and the account of the vice-regal procession, in a style which veers from the court circular to the tone of the successive spectators, fixes a whole string of characters in postures of watching. The whole book is filled with a sense of people meeting, passing, bumping into one another, and the effect is achieved as much by the reappearance of phrases and objects in different contexts as by the actual contact of people. The symbolic significance of such objects as the three-masted Rosevean or the sandwich-board carriers or the throwaway sheet proclaiming the coming of Elijah has been commented upon a good deal but it is arguable that they have the even more important function of adding to the sense of a densely populated novel about a crowded city which is still small enough for those in it to share a world of streets and hotels and libraries and hospitals and shops and, above all, pubs. ‘Above all’ not because the community of Joyce’s novel is a drinking one (though it is) but even more because it is a talking one and it is in pubs that people talk. That astonishing skill at persuading the reader that he is hearing a speaking voice, whether angry, plaintive, mocking, or whatever which Joyce displays in the Christmas dinner scene in the Portrait is deployed at length in Ulysses, from the jocular blasphemy of Mulligan on the first page to Molly’s excited recollection of saying ‘Yes’ on the last, to create a world which is very largely one of voices.
Pre-eminent among these are the internal voices of Stephen and Bloom and, in the last section, of Molly Bloom. The first three chapters are presented to us largely through the perceptions and reflections of Stephen and the next three through those of Bloom, though a third-person narrative plays a large part in several of them; in the funeral episode, for instance, we move away from Bloom’s meditation on death to hear Mr Cunningham’s whispered confidence to Mr Power about the suicide of Bloom’s father, and the book starts with a brisk objectivity. In addition to these first six sections we are plunged into the mind of Bloom in ‘Lestrygonians’ and for parts of ‘Aeolus’, ‘Sirens’, and ‘Nausicaa’, and of Stephen for much of ‘Aeolus’ and of ‘Scylla and Charybdis’.
These three characters, Bloom, Stephen, and Molly, the Odysseus, Telemachus, and Penelope of this comic epic, have very differently stocked minds and much of the effect of the book comes from the sense thus created of inevitable incomprehension between Bloom and Stephen and, in the case of Bloom and his wife, of great superficial differences coexisting with a basic continuing awareness of one another and, despite infidelities and evasions, respect.
Our first entry into Stephen’s consciousness announces one of the central preoccupations, his guilt for refusing to pray with his dying mother:
To this guilt at not having paid lip service to the religion in which he no longer believes, but in whose theology and terminology he is ‘supersaturated’, is added a general sense of disinheritance; the English rule Ireland, the Irish give allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church, and Buck Mulligan’s mockery seems to usurp Stephen’s own attempt at a mental kingdom, though readers are likely to find Stephen’s casting of Mulligan as villain somewhat paranoid, even if the Buck’s bawdry and blasphemy is not to their taste. Perhaps as the priest of art Stephen feels that as successor state he inherits heretics along with splendours.
Throughout the book Stephen’s response to his insecurity and loss is an assertion of superiority manifested in an often frenetic cleverness, seen at its fullest development in his disquisition on Hamlet, which Mulligan has earlier described as a proof that Hamlet is the ghost of his own father. Nor is Stephen’s showing-off confined to public appearances. His ruminations as he walks alone on Sandy mount strand in ‘Proteus’ emerge as a farrago of reminiscences of theology, English literature, Irish folk history, snatches of French from his recent stay in Paris, Aristotelian philosophy, Italian opera, and so forth. This doubtless corresponds to what stocks the mind of a highly educated literary young man, but minds are not merely passive repositories and the dynamic at work here is surely the parading of erudition and multilingual name-dropping as a defence against a feeling of isolation and failure.
Bloom is as different from Stephen as a man could be, except that, as a Jew in a Gentile society, he, too, sometimes feels not altogether at home and for him, too, the memory of death is important - in his case the deaths of both his father and his only son, Rudy. He is tolerant, kind, long-suffering, ineffectively prurient, and above all curious - curious about elementary science and administration and how people make their living and, in most striking contrast to Stephen, about what other people may be feeling. Stephen’s stream of consciousness is loaded with memories of philosophy and literature and the liturgy; Bloom’s mind is full of what may be best described by the title of the magazine in which he reads a sentimental story and on which he wipes his arse—Tit-Bits.
His internal monologue is marked, as is Stephen’s, by two characteristics which make a first reading difficult but, in the long run, add immensely to the depth of our knowledge of them and increase the feeling of immediacy. The first, which gives a sense that the moment of experience is merely the forward edge of a continuum, is the frequency of memories, often triggered off by a perception which we cannot immediately comprehend. The other, related to it, is the constant occurrence of half-finished sentences, snatches of phrases, often remembered scraps of past conversations, which give a striking impression of the speed of the flow of association and its often indirect and apparently illogical nature. Before going out to buy his breakfast, Leopold Bloom asks his wife whether she wants anything:
There are several things here which we will only understand later, notably that the slip of paper in his hat carries the false name which he uses to claim at the post office the letter from Martha Clifford (which also sounds like a false name) with whom he is carrying on a rather squalid postal flirtation. There is also the beginning of a train of associations which will develop largely through the book, for just as he is picking up old associations he is also still making them. The jingling of Molly’s bed, repeated a few pages further on - ‘She set the brasses jingling as she raised herself briskly, an elbow on the pillow’ - is echoed several times by Blazes Boylan’s jaunting car.
In ‘Sirens’ we find:
Bloom knows, as we do, that Boylan is on his way to set the loose brass quoits of the bed jingling, too, and he winces away from the knowledge.
But Joyce did not choose to write the whole book in those styles in which he first establishes his characters and their society; one of the assertions which emerges from the book is that not only can all human experience be seen, in essence, in eighteen hours of a Dublin day, but also that it can be discussed in any number of ways. We have already, quite early in the book, had in ‘Aeolus’ the comic and appropriate device of the insertion of newspaper headlines, ranging from the traditionally periphrastic in the heart of the Hibernian metropolis to the demotic of the yellow press, where the windiness of the headlines goes along with the conversation. But the latter two-thirds of the book consists very largely of observations of the personages in sundry modes; this includes the five longest sections - ‘Circe’, ‘Cyclops’, ‘Ithaca’, ‘Eumaeus’, and Oxen of the Sun’ - all of which are stylistically elaborated and which together take up slightly more than half the length of the entire novel. Expansion into parody, pastiche, question-and-answer linguistic fantasy is very natural in this mock-Odyssey, for the essence of the mock-heroic lies in the application of apparently inappropriate styles. Moreover, as in traditional mock-heroic, Joyce’s stylistic choices usually have the effect of commenting upon the subject.
The simplest example - hardly more than the addition of yet another internal monologue - is the presentation of Gerty McDowell in the idiom of the sentimentally romantic and pious magazine. The section is relatively brief - twenty-one pages before we move into Mr Bloom’s mind - and it strikes hard at two of Joyce’s pet targets, the namby-pamby mingling of sexual feeling and pretensions to elegance, and that religiosity which, in its masculine form, he has so satisfactorily dissected in ‘Grace’. Gerty exposes herself to Bloom by leaning back and showing her good leg and thus provoking to masturbation that stranger whom she sees as a foreigner with ‘his dark eyes and his pale intellectual face’; to the reader she exposes herself and that type to which she belongs by the style of her stream of consciousness.
By contrast the other exercise in parody (or pastiche; it is hard to know which is the correct description), Oxen of the Sun’, seems to me to be the least successful of all the sections of the book. It follows the increasingly drunken conversation of Stephen, Mulligan, and some of their friends in the Holies Street lying-in hospital while the medical students await the birth of a child to Mrs Purefoy and Bloom watches them and decides to follow Stephen at the end to try to stop him getting into trouble. It is narrated in the form of a series of imitations of English prose, developing over about nine hundred years, for which Joyce pillages a number of standard works on English prose. This development is intended, according to Joyce’s own account, to parallel the embryonic development of the baby; he also said, in a letter of 13 March 1920 to his friend Frank Budgen that ‘Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo’. Some of the parodies are good of their kind - the obvious Dickens, for example—but many seem flat and there are not a few places where the prose has the deadness which we shall later meet, used to deliberate effect, in ‘Eumaeus’. This impression of labouredness comes about because, by contrast with the depiction of Gerty MacDowell, Joyce has no target for his parody, no characteristic to which each particular style is peculiarly appropriate. The imposition of a succession of styles is mechanical and inorganic. It is only at a highly rarefied level that we can equate the baby with the word and the effort to do so and to follow through the symbolic allusions with which the section is loaded cannot but take attention away from all the characters and from the social environment in which they move.
A similar objection can be made to the opening of what is, through most of its length, one of the most successful of all the episodes - ‘Sirens’. Joyce said that it was written in the form of a fuga per canonem and it not only tells of singing and thinking about music but also mimics music in a number of effective verbal coinages - the splendid operatic cadence, for example, of ‘Her wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevy hair un comb: ‘d.’ It is also loaded with supposedly verbal equivalents of a very large number of musical techniques. The insistently musical nature of the imagery is shared by the authorial narrator, Bloom, and all the other persons who visit the Ormond Hotel, and the jingle of Boylan’s jaunting car provides the lighter components of the percussion section. Simon Dedalus plays the newly tuned piano and later sings an aria from Flotow’s Martha, Richie Goulding whistles a tune from Bellini’s La Sonnambula and sets Bloom thinking of the plight of sleep-walking women, Fr Cowley plays an arrangement from Don Giovanni, Ben Dollard sings The Croppy Boy, and Miss Douce, the barmaid, to appreciative cries of ‘sonnez la cloche’, pings her elastic garter against her thigh. The easy, undemanding, and shared musical culture of Dublin fills the whole section, amid which Bloom thinks of the sexual power of the music, its way of articulating his own feelings and, since he is always the critical and thinking man, the way in which they are all swept away by it. An astonishing number of the central themes of the book and of the preoccupations of Bloom are set going in this section and carried to and fro on the tide of music.
But Joyce’s urge to load every rift with significance made him conceive of the structure as being not merely about music but music itself. It is unlikely that any reader will actually identify and respond to the detail of the fugai pattern (it is, in any case, not possible to reproduce in a unilinear stream of words a genuinely contrapuntal effect), though we recognize a pattern of repetition and an indication of overlapping. But we are presented at the opening with a passage which can only have meaning as part of a pattern; it consists of fifty-nine snatches of what is to come later, mostly of less than a line in length. It has been suggested by some critics that this is an overture (though the addition of an overture to a fuga per canonem suggests an unsteady grasp of musical form) or, alternatively, that it represents the orchestra tuning up. There are objections to either of these if we are to think in terms of imitative form. Overtures, though they frequently contain themes from a work, are not thus constructed from incomprehensible fragments, and orchestral players, though they can often be heard practising a few bars of what they are to play, do not play sequential scraps of the whole work. Perhaps the opening can be taken as a very, very comprehensive programme note, the indication in words (incomprehensible as such notes may be) of what is to follow in another medium (here comprehensible words suggesting music). Whatever we decide, it seems to me an example of the kind of inert ingenuity which deflects attention from the real substance of the section - the pub culture of Dublin and Bloom’s consciousness - to an idea of a self-subsisting technique. Moreover this is its effect whether one praises its inventive originality or, as seems equally justified, registers the objection that whatever the opening may represent it emphatically does not suggest the unity and logical economy of a fugue.
‘Cyclops’, the episode which follows ‘Sirens’, is one of the longest in the book and breaks just as radically with any kind of straightfor-ward narrative form, whether authorial or interior monologue, but it does so in a manner which is wholly organic. Set into a vulgarly demotic account of how a boastful and anti-Semitic xenophobe known as ‘the Citizen’ holds forth in a pub, quarrels with Bloom, and drives him out, there is a succession of parodies of a variety of public styles. The significant difference between these parodies and those in Oxen of the Sun’ is that these have a direct and criticizing relevance to the action in which they are interspersed. There are just over thirty parodies and the majority are of epics, medieval romances, journalistic accounts of such ceremonies as weddings, state visits, nationalist celebrations, parliamentary sessions, and rituals, but there are also sections mimicking legal terminology, a children’s story, stilted literary dialogue, medical technicalities, the Bible, and a parody of the Creed. This is one of the episodes in the book in which the parallel with the Odyssey is clearest and most rewarding. The blinkered Citizen is the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, and Bloom, smoking a ‘knockmedown cigar’ which he has accepted rather than a drink, is able at the end to escape from the cave of the pub, but not before he has - ineffectively, given his audience - spoken against persecution and hatred and for love, proclaimed himself an Irishman and finally, by asserting that ‘Christ was a jew like me’, driven the Citizen to hurling after him the biscuit tin which stands in here for the rock which Polyphemus hurls in Homer’s epic.
Most of the early parodies are of epic and romance and they are intercut with the tittle-tattle and patriotic assertions of the Citizen and his acquaintances in a manner which reminds us of, and at the same time deflates, the traditional praise of Ireland as the home of saints and heroes. When the hostility of the Citizen to Bloom first begins to manifest itself, while Bloom is still engaged in the hopeless task of trying to converse rationally about Ireland’s heroes, the narrator jeers at ‘his but don’t you see? and but on the other hand’ and, raising his glass:
Immediately and appropriately there follows:
This episode comes closest in method to the traditional mock-heroic. The mundane doings of daily Dublin and the preoccupations of the drinkers who utter the patriotic pieties are mocked by likening them to the deeds of the heroes of epics or the newspapers, and Bloom, making his somewhat ignominious exit, is assimilated to Elijah (whom we have previously met several times on the handbill of the evangelist which asserts that ‘Elijah is coming’), and the episode ends with a biblical assurance that crumbles in the last phrase into the vulgar!
But the effect is reciprocal. When one of the drinkers orders one more drink and says, rapping for his glass, ‘God bless all here is my prayer’ this meaningless piety provokes a solemn change of key: ‘And at the sound of the sacring bell, headed by a crucifer with acolytes, thurifer, boatbearers, readers.’ But this goes on with a list of saints, among whom coyly hides ‘S. Marion Calpensis’ - that is, Saint Molly Bloom of Gibraltar - which makes it hard for us to be impressed by the acolytes and thurifers. Bloom’s transmogrification into Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft so that he can explain, in terms of ‘a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres, causing the pores of the corpora cavernosa to rapidly dilate’, why in articulo mortis per diminutionem capitis the hanged man may have an erection pokes fun not only at Bloom’s addiction to tit-bits of popular science but also at the ponderous and self-important terminology which explains a phenomenon which the drinkers describe somewhat more vividly.
The impression created throughout this chapter is one of sprawling improvisation; the burlesques seem constantly in danger of running out of control and sometimes achieve an effect of manic monotony, especially in the lists (whether plausible or grotesquely implausible) of heroes and heroines of Irish antiquity, mourning dignitaries, priests attending a nationalist meeting, wedding guests with the names of trees, Irish beauty spots and saints. The effect of a list of thirty names in the nature of ‘Miss Virginia Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs Maud Mahogany …’ is not so much a parody of a newspaper list of wedding guests as of the act of producing such a symbolic parody itself.7
But it is inherent in the effect of such burlesques that we should feel that local bravura is in danger of disrupting the whole; the apprehension that an endless list of names may pour on for ever mixes the pedantic and the unnerving and the tension generated between the local spasm and our attempt to hold on to a sense of progression is what generates energy. The final effect of the episode is one of farcical high spirits and zany irresponsibility which not infrequently reminds us of Buck Mulligan’s treatment of the preoccupations of his fellow countrymen; and in the midst of this explosion of exaggeration is the voice of Bloom, rather incompetently proclaiming those values which neither the drinkers in Barney Kiernan’s nor the public voices will or can express.
In the schema which Gilbert published with Joyce’s permission, the technique of ‘Cyclops’ is given, naturally enough, as ‘gigantism’. ‘Circe’, too, might lay claim to this, though Joyce said that its technique was ‘hallucination’. Its rhetoric, too, has much to remind us of Buck Mulligan’s habit of speech and supports the view that he is closer to the authorial persona than his reputation as usurper suggests. Drunk, Stephen goes to Bella Cohen’s brothel, followed by Bloom who hopes to keep him out of trouble. Joyce’s technique for presenting his version of the story of the enchantress who turns men into swine is a fantasy play in which the hidden fears and suppressed urges of Bloom and Stephen are acted out in a grotesque medley of incidents from the Dublin day which we have seen and their own memories and imaginings. Stephen’s mother rises from the dead to reproach him; Bloom’s first hallucination is of his dead father and his last, at the point at which he bends over Stephen, is of his dead son, Rudy. There is a great deal which is deliberately disgusting or horrifying and much shameful self-glorification; but it is in the mode of farce, whether Bloom, transmogrified into a woman, is publicly degraded by Mrs Cohen, transformed into a man, or, anointed Leopold I, founds ‘the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future’.
In such a scene of evil enchantment the frightening and the disgusting and the grotesque are to be expected; what is not to be expected after mention of Antichrist and the last day is:
The deaf-mute idiot and stunted men and women of the opening, the sense of hunger and deformity and disease and violence are horrifying, but the explicit and stereotyped gratification of deeds previously without a name and the instant acting out of hidden fears emerge as slapstick. When Bloom is about to suffer the delicious pain of flogging by a voluptuous and high-born woman, egged on by two more of the same kind, his actual humiliation is enforced by the voices of inanimate objects:
When the English soldier, Private Carr, wants to fight Stephen the spectators greet it with the standard mock-heroic device of inappropriate language:
As in ‘Cyclops’ the effect is one of excess and the struggle to reconcile this excess with the theme of the book and its narrative progress; the material is horrific enough but the technique simultaneously makes matters more vivid and, by its unstoppable outpouring of farcical specificity, obliges us to see the most unlikely matters within a comic vision. Again, as in ‘Cyclops’ the technical method is reciprocal in its operation: it asserts that Bloom’s furtive sexuality is a manifestation of a gigantic perversity and also makes us regard gigantic perversity as being on a level with Bloom’s little fantasies. The whores and the whoremistress are creatures from a diabolical underworld of the unconscious, but at the same time that sulphurous underworld is Bella trying to get Bloom to pay too much for a broken lamp and having as a regular customer a vet who pays her son’s fees at Oxford. The episode ends rather as ‘Cyclops’ does, with a good deed from Bloom; but just as his definition of love to the Citizen is not very effective, so, here, his befriending of Stephen involves a good deal of man-ofthe-world deviousness with the watch and the vision of his dead son, Rudy, which rewards him as he bends over Stephen, is subdued to the prevailing tone of burlesque—‘In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.’
The opening of ‘Eumaeus’, which recounts how Bloom takes Stephen to the cabman’s shelter kept by a man reputed to be ‘Skin-the-Goat’, one of the Invincibles, buys him a cup of coffee and a bun, and then takes him home, declares its technique:
Joyce claimed to have written Dubliners ‘for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness’ and this defines very well the prose of ‘Eumaeus’. The rambling syntax and proliferation of hackneyed phrases project the boring stories of the sailor to which Bloom and Stephen listen, the weary gossip of nationalist derring-do, the reaction which has set in after the excitements and dangers of the brothel and the understandable tiredness of them both.
‘Ithaca’, which follows and tells of their journey to Bloom’s home, their conversation and parting, and Bloom’s retirement to bed, appears at first to be, if anything, even flatter. It is in a question-and-answer form which is the furthest from what one might expect of ‘fiction’. Joyce once said that it was the ‘ugly duckling’ of the book and initially it appears to offer little to enjoy except an excess of documentation akin to some of the excesses of the preceding chapters. But it shows itself before the end to be a swan. The catechism is a pedantic and apparently reductive one, full of the kind of facts which Bloom loves - the way in which water is brought from the reservoir to the tap, for example, or the recital of strange coincidences concerning the results of the horse-race. But the severely factual nature of the answers, combining with our previous knowledge or partial knowledge of the matters dealt with, soon shows a surprising power to bring us unexpectedly close to the two men. There is one striking example of this near the beginning which takes us back not only through this book, but through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, too. Bloom kneels down to light the fire and to the question Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think?’ the answer is:
Through most of the book, and most recently in ‘Circe’, Stephen’s mother has been a fixed, raw-head-and-bloody-bones symbol of guilt and suffering; to find her here, lighting a fire six years before, caught in Stephen’s memory before he has turned her into anything, is astonishingly moving; she is transformed from a symbol into a person.
Bloom’s dead friends, of whom he is reminded when he parts from Stephen, ‘companions now in various manners in different places defunct: Percy Apjohn (killed in action, Modder River), Philip Gilligan (phthisis, Jervis Street hospital) … Patrick Dignam (apoplexy, Sandymount)’ have less need to be rescued, for, though Joyce may encourage us to think of Bloom’s world as mythical and symbolic, this is not Bloom’s own habit of mind.
One of the ways in which we are brought close to Bloom is by having revealed to us not, as we have throughout the book, the flue-tuating contents of his mind and his momentary impulses and evasions, but the contents, the furniture, of his house - fixed, determined, and determining.
As we move towards the end of Bloom’s story, we reach the most revealing, and therefore, locked drawers, in the first of which he will deposit the latest letter from Martha Clifford. The other contents of the first drawer are the higgledy-piggledy of a life: a drawing of him done by his daughter Milly as a child, an old Christmas card, a bazaar ticket, a magnifying glass, two dirty postcards, a cameo brooch of his mother’s. The second drawer contains an insurance policy in Milly’s favour, a record of his own savings, a docket for a grave-plot, a notice of his father’s change of name by deed poll and sundry memorials of his father, including his last letter. Bloom regrets that he had once been disrespectful to the practices of Judaism and the question and its answer which follow seem to me to sum up a great deal of the realism and tolerance which make Bloom the hero of this book. In the face of all the large claims and the big words - not least those of Stephen when he parrots the theology in which he no longer believes - Bloom’s conclusion, expressed with the linguistic spareness to which this episode has accustomed us, seems the epitome of sober wisdom:
The wandering Bloom has returned to his household gods, but the wanderer Odysseus’s return is enacted, too, in the mode of the comic and the muddled and the humane. And if the suitors of his Penelope are not to be put to flight and slain, then they must be put to flight by being tolerated by a man who does not wish to kill them, more because he lacks heroic vices than heroic virtues.
So, with a parody of Jewish festivals equated with his recollections of his day’s doings (‘The preparation of breakfast (burnt offering): intestinal congestion and premeditative defecation (holy of holies): the bath (rite of John): the funeral (rite of Samuel) …’), he retires to bed and the conquest of jealousy. The conquest is achieved by a number of reflections, some ignoble - that he and Boylan will share the proceeds of Molly’s musical tour—some resigned—adultery is ‘not more abnormal than all other altered processes of adaptation to altered conditions of existence’ - and his last conviction - ‘the futility of triumph or protest or vindication: the inanity of extolled virtue: the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy of the stars’. With which he kisses Molly’s rump, gives her a carefully edited account of his day’s doings and sleeps - ‘He rests. He has travelled.’
Having routed the suitors by tolerating them and offered paternal help to Stephen, who probably, though not certainly, will never return under his roof, Bloom must be reunited with his wife. For this Joyce returns to the internal monologue in what, in a letter of spring 1921 to Claud Sykes he called the ‘amplitudinously curvilinear episode Penelope’. Molly Bloom’s virtually uninterrupted and unpunctuated drowsy monologue ends in affirmation as she remembers accepting Bloom’s proposal on the hill of Howth. But her preference for him can only come after she has remembered both her dissatisfactions with him and her pleasures, imaginary or actual, with others. Joyce made it clear that she is to be thought of not only as Penelope, unweaving at night what she has woven during the day, but also as an earth goddess affirming the female principle, and it is normally thus that she is discussed. Rightly so, in terms of much of the effect produced; but it should be noted that she is a strange choice for a fertility deity.
She has had two children. Of her daughter Milly she is more than a little jealous and her son Rudy is dead; since his death she has had no full conjugal relations with her husband. Various characters in the book think of her and gossip about her as a plumply provocative woman but, apart from a few furtive squeezes, she has until this afternoon’s vigorous adultery with Boylan led a very unfleshly life. In ‘Ithaca’ we are given a list of twenty-five lovers, but her memories deny some of these and many are obviously farcical implausibili ties. Even the most optimistic estimate suggests that she has endured months and very probably years on end of abstinence.
I suspect that the acceptance of her as a sexual goddess without noting this paradox came about originally because at the date of publication it was a welcome surprise to have sexual acts described and sexual words used. Molly’s frankness to herself about her sensations came to be seen as the expression of a rich and fulfilled sexuality. Rich in potential it may be, but fulfilled it is not. After a Nestor who is Mr Deasy, a tedious schoolmaster, Sirens who are the barmaids of the Ormond Hotel, a Circe who is Bella Cohen, a Telemachus who is Stephen unable to accept the invitation to stay in Ithaca, and an Odysseus/Bloom who takes possession of his wife by kissing her behind and then falling asleep in the foetal position, it is right that Molly/Penelope, presented symbolically as an Erdgeist, should prove to experience her sexual urges nearly always in daydreams. I am not suggesting that we have no sense of her as the eternal female, but that the correspondences work both ways and that part of the effect of the last episode is of her symbolic function being subverted by her human nature and the restrictions of the Dublin society in which she lives.
Appropriately, this ending is in tune with the effect of the book as a whole. Ulysses is a novel in which the characters become symbolic and then assert themselves over that symbolism. Molly is far more interesting than Gea Tellus, Bloom than Everyman, Stephen than the alienated Son. Joyce’s quasi-medieval desire to produce a work which could be interpreted endlessly in the way in which the theology in which he had ceased to believe could endlessly interpret the works of God comes close at times to replacing created life by the interpretation of it. Sometimes it seems that the novel is triumphant not because of, but in spite of, the conscious intentions of the author in the later phase of its writing. But, though the danger of excess is often there, the proliferation of cryptological features cannot, as it does in Finnegans Wake, overwhelm an interest in the human, removing the book from the grasp of the reader and consigning it to the professional student. Ulysses remains readable, a celebration of the daily, the mundane, the ordinary. Bloom, its hero, concerns us not because he is Odysseus or Everyman and is so identified by a multitude of hidden clues, but because he is a man. He matters not because of what he stands for or may be thought to prefigure but because the book engages our interest in an undistinguished member of our own kind, the fit hero for a great, sceptical, humane masterpiece.