Time: Between "the altercation with a truculent troglodyte" at Kiernan's bar around five o'clock and the present chapter 10 there is a blank period of time that includes a carriage drive and then a visit to a house of mourning, to Dignam's widow, in east Dublin, not far from Sandymount, but this visit is not described. When the action resumes with chapter 10 it is sunset time, around 8 P.M.
Place: Sandymount shore, Dublin Bay, southeast of Dublin, where Stephen had walked in the morning, in the direct vicinity of the Star of the Sea Church.
Characters: Seated on the rocks are three girls: two of them are named at once. Cissy Caffrey, "A truerhearted lass never drew the breath of life, always with a laugh in her gypsylike eyes and a frolicsome word on her cherryripe red lips, a girl lovable in the extreme." The style is a deliberate parody of feminine magazines and of commercial English prose. Edy Boardman is petite and shortsighted. The third girl, the heroine of the chapter, is named on its third page—"But who was Gerty?" And here we are told that Gerty MacDowell, who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, "was in very truth as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see," a beautiful parody of corny descriptions. Cissy Caffrey has with her her two little brothers, Tommy and Jacky, twins, "scarce four years old," and of course curly headed; and Edy Boardman is with her infant brother, a baby in a pushcar. There is yet another person present, sitting on some rocks opposite. He is mentioned on the third and eighth pages, but it is only later that he is identified as Leopold Bloom.
Action: The action of this chapter is difficult to separate from its very special style. In answer to a simple question what happens in this chapter, we can reply simply: the two little boys play and quarrel and play again, the baby gurgles and squalls, Cissy and Edy tend their respective brothers, Gerty daydreams, voices sing in the nearby translucent church, twilight comes, the fireworks at the bazaar (to which the viceroy had been heading) start, and Cissy and Edy with their charges run down the strand to see the display over the houses in the distance. But Gerty does not follow them immediately: if they could run like horses she could sit and see from where she sat. Bloom has been sitting on a rock opposite and staring at Gerty, who for all her coy girlishness realizes quite clearly what is going on behind his stares, and finally she leans back in a shameless show of garters while "a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely! O so soft, sweet, soft!" Shortly, Gerty rises and slowly walks away down the strand. "She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because, because Gerty MacDowell was ...
Tight boots? No. She's lame! O!
Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl!"
Style: The chapter consists of two parts totally different in technique. First, while the three girls are on the beach, sitting on the rocks, there is in describing them and their charges a sustained parody of feminine magazine or novelette prose with all the cliché's and false elegancies of that kind.[*] Then comes the second part when Mr. Bloom's stream of consciousness takes over; in its familiar abrupt fashion there comes a medley of impressions and recollections until the end of the chapter.
The parody is full of wonderfully amusing clichés, the platitudes of gracious living and pseudopoetry. "The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace.... the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand ... and, last but not least, on....
The three girl friends were seated on the rocks, enjoying the evening scene and the air which was fresh but not too chilly.... Many a time and oft were they wont to come there to that favourite nook to have a cosy chat beside the sparkling waves and discuss matters feminine." (The adjective placed for the sake of elegance after the noun is of course characteristic of the House Beautiful style.)
The very construction is corny: "For Tommy and Jacky Caffrey were twins, scarce four years old and very noisy and spoiled twins sometimes but for all that darling little fellows with bright merry faces and endearing ways about them. They were dabbling in the sand with their spades and buckets, building castles as children do, or playing with their big coloured ball, happy as the day was long." The baby is of course chubby and "that young gentleman fairly chuckled with delight." Not simply chuckled, but fairly chuckled—how arch and coy all this is. A number of these deliberately collected elegant clichés are found on each of the twenty pages of this part of the chapter.
When we say cliché, stereotype, trite pseudoelegant phrase, and so on, we imply, among other things, that when used for the first time in literature the phrase was original and had a vivid meaning. In fact, it became hackneyed because its meaning was at first vivid and neat, and attractive, and so the phrase was used over and over again until it became a stereotype, a cliché. We can thus define clichés as bits of dead prose and of rotting poetry. However, the parody has its interruptions. Now what Joyce does here is to cause some of that dead and rotten stuff to reveal here and there its live source, its primary freshness. Here and there the poetry is still alive. The description of the church service as it passes transparently through Gerty's consciousness has real beauty and a luminous pathetic charm. So has the tenderness of the twilight, and of course the description of the fireworks—the climactic passage quoted above—is really tender and beautiful: it is the freshness of poetry still with us before it becomes a cliché.
But Joyce manages to do something even more subtle than that. You will mark when Gerty's flowing stream of consciousness starts on its course, her thought lays great stress on her dignity of being and tasteful clothes, for she is a votary of the fashions suggested to her by the magazines the Woman Beautiful and the Lady's Pictorial: "A neat blouse of electric blue, selftinted by dolly dyes (because it was expected in the Lady's Pictorial that electric blue would be worn), with a smart vee opening down to the division and kerchief pocket (in which she always kept a piece of cottonwool scented with her favorite perfume because the handkerchief spoiled the sit) and a navy threequarter skirt cut to the stride showed off her slim graceful figure to perfection," etc. But when we realize with Bloom that the poor girl is hopelessly lame, the very cliché's of her thought acquire a pathetic shade. In other words, Joyce manages to build up something real—pathos, pity, compassion—out of the dead formulas which he parodies.
Joyce goes even further. As the parody glides on its sweet course, the author with a demon's flash of gaiety leads Gerty's thought to a number of subjects dealing with physiological matters that would of course never be alluded to in the kind of novelette with which Gerty's consciousness is permeated: "Her figure was slight and graceful, inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welch's female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to get and that tired feeling." Moreover, when she becomes aware of the gentleman in deep mourning with "the story of a haunting sorrow ... written on his face," a romantic vision comes into her mind: "Here was that of which she had so often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy on her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he was like no-one else. The very heart of the girlwoman went out to him, her dreamhusband, because she knew on the instant it was him. If he had suffered, more sinned against than sinning, or even, even, if he had been himself a sinner, a wicked man, she cared not. Even if he was a protestant or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved her.... Then mayhap he would embrace her gently, like a real man, crushing her soft body to him, and love her, his ownest girlie, for herself alone." Nevertheless, this romantic vision (of which there is much more) is quite simply continued in her mind with very realistic ideas about naughty gentlemen. "His hands and face were working and a tremor went over her. She leaned back far to look up where
the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up and there was no-one to see only him and her when, she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse breathing, because she knew about the passion of men like that, hotblooded, because Bertha Supple told her once in dead secret and made her swear she'd never about the gentleman lodger that was staying with them out of the Congested Districts Board that had pictures cut out of papers of those skirtdancers and highkickers and she said he used to do something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed. But this was altogether different from a thing like that because there was all the difference because she could almost feel him draw her face to his and the first quick hot touch of his handsome lips. Besides there was absolution so long as you didn't do the other thing before being married."
Of the stream of Bloom's thought little need be said. You understand the physiological situation—love at a distance (Bloomism). You recognize the stylistic contrast between the rendering of Bloom's thought, impressions, recollections, sensations, and the vicious parody of a literary girlishness in the first part of the chapter. His batlike thoughts vibrate and zigzag in the twilight. There is always, of course, his thought about Boylan and Molly; and there is also the earliest mention of Molly's first admirer in Gibraltar, Lieutenant Mulvey, who kissed her under the Moorish wall beside the gardens, when she was fifteen. We also realize with a pang of compassion that Bloom did notice, after all, the newsboys in the street near Nelson's Pillar in the newspaper-office chapter, who imitated him as he walked. Bloom's highly artistic definition of a bat ("Like a little man in a cloak he is with tiny hands") is absolutely enchanting, and an equally charming and artistic thought comes to him about the sun: "Stare the sun for example like the eagle then look at a shoe see a blotch blob yellowish. Wants to stamp his trademark on everything." This is as good as Stephen. There is the touch of the artist about old Bloom.
The chapter ends with Bloom dozing away for a few winks, and the clock on the mantelpiece of the priest's house nearby (the service in the church now over) proclaims with its cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo the plight of Bloom, the cuckold. It was very odd, he finds, that his watch had stopped at half past four.
PART TWO, CHAPTER 11
Time: Around ten o'clock at night.
Place: The first line means in Irish, "Let us go south [of the Liffey] to Holies Street," and it is thither that Bloom wanders. In the second paragraph the pun in Horhorn refers to the head of the maternity hospital in Holies Street, Sir Andrew Horne, a real person. And in the next paragraph in "hoopsa boyaboy" we hear a generalized midwife elevating a generalized newborn baby. Bloom comes to the hospital to visit Mrs. Purefoy in the throes of childbirth (her baby is born in the course of the chapter). Bloom is not able to see her but instead has beer and sardines in the medical mess.
Characters: Nurse Callan whom Bloom talks to; the resident doctor, Dixon, who once treated Bloom for a bee sting. Now, in keeping with the grotesquely epic tone of the chapter the bee is promoted to a dreadful dragon. There are also various medical students: Vincent Lynch, whom we and Father Conmee saw around three with a girl in a suburban field, Madden, Crotthers, Punch Costello, and a very drunken Stephen, all sitting at a table where Bloom joins them. A little later Buck Mulligan appears with his friend Alec Bannon, the Bannon from whom came the postcard in the first chapter that he was attracted by Milly, Bloom's daughter, in Mullingar.
Action: Dixon leaves the company to attend to Mrs. Purefoy. The rest sit and drink. "A gallant scene in truth it made. Crotthers was there at the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing from the briny airs of the Mull of Galloway. There too, opposite to him was Lynch, whose countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity and premature wisdom. Next the Scotchman was the place assigned to Costello, the eccentric, while at his side was seated in stolid repose the squat form of Madden. The chair of the resident indeed stood vacant before the hearth but on either flank of it the figure of Bannon in explorer's kit of tweed shorts and salted cowhide brogues contrasted sharply with the primrose elegance and townbred manners of Malachi Roland St John Mulligan. Lastly at the head of the board was the young poet who found a refuge from his labours of pedagogy and metaphysical inquisition in the convivial atmosphere of Socratic discussion, while to right and left of him were accommodated the flippant prognosticator, fresh from the hippodrome [Lenehan], and that vigilant wanderer [Bloom], soiled by the dust of travel and combat and stained by the mire of an indelible dishonour, but from whose steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril or threat or degradation could ever efface the image of that voluptuous loveliness which the inspired pencil of Lafayette [the photographer who took a picture of Molly] has limned for ages yet to come."
Mrs. Purefoy's child is born. Stephen suggests that they all go to Burke's, a bar. The hullabaloo at the bar is rendered in a manner where I find reflected the grotesque, inflated, broken, mimicking, and punning style of the author's next and last novel, Finnegans Wake (1939), one of the greatest failures in literature.
Style: To quote from Richard M. Kain's Fabulous Voyager (1947): "The style of this chapter is a series of parodies of English prose from Anglo-Saxon down to modern slang....[*]
For what they are worth, here are the most important parodies which have been identified: Anglo-Saxon, Mandeville, Malory, Elizabethan prose, Browne, Bunyan, Pepys, Sterne, the Gothic novel, Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Macaulay, Dickens (one of the most successful), Newman, Ruskin, Carlyle, modern slang, evangelistic oratory.
As the young medical students go off for drinks at Stephen's expense, the prose tumbles into broken sounds, echoes, and half-words, ... a rendition of the stupor of intoxication."
PART TWO, CHAPTER 12
I do not know of any commentator who has correctly understood this chapter. The psychoanalytical interpretation I, of course, dismiss completely and absolutely, since I do not belong to the Freudian denomination with its borrowed myths, shabby umbrellas, and dark backstairs. To regard this chapter as the reactions of intoxication or lust on Bloom's subconscious is impossible for the following reasons:
1. Bloom is perfectly sober and for the moment impotent.
2. Bloom cannot possibly know of a number of events, characters, and facts that appear as visions in this chapter.
I propose to regard this chapter 12 as an hallucination on the author's part, an amusing distortion of his various themes. The book is itself dreaming[*] and having visions; this chapter is merely an exaggeration, a nightmare evolution of its characters, objects, and themes.
Time: Between eleven and midnight.
Place: Nighttown starts at the Mabbot Street entrance, in east Dublin, north of the Liffey, near the docks, exactly one mile west of Eccles Street.
Style: A nightmare comedy, with implied acknowledgement to the visions in a piece by Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, written some fifty years earlier.
Action: The action can be split into five scenes.
Scene l: Main characters: Two English soldiers, Carr and Compton, who will attack Stephen later in scene 5. There is a streetwalker impersonating the innocent Cissy Caffrey of chapter 10, and there are Stephen and his friend the medical student Lynch. The two privates already in this first scene heckle Stephen: "Way for the parson." "What ho, parson!" Stephen looks like a priest, being in mourning for his mother. (Both Stephen and Bloom are in black.) Another prostitute resembles Edy Boardman. The Caffrey twins also appear: street urchins, phantasms resembling the twins, climbing up street lamps. It is worth notice that these thought associations do not occur in the mind of Bloom, who had noticed Cissy and Edy on the beach but who is absent from this first scene, whereas Stephen who is present cannot know of Cissy and Edy. The only real event in this first scene is the fact that Stephen and Lynch are heading for a house of ill-fame in Nighttown after the others, among them Buck Mulli
gan, have dispersed.
Scene II: Bloom appears on a stage, representing an oblique street with leaning lamps; he is anxious about Stephen and is following him. The beginning of the scene is a description of a real entrance: puffing from having run after Stephen, Bloom does buy a pig's foot and a sheep's trotter at the butcher Othousen and does narrowly miss being hit by a trolley. Then his dead parents appear—this is the author's hallucination, and Bloom's. Several other women known to Bloom, including Molly and Mrs. Breen, and Gerty, also make an appearance in this scene as well as the lemon soap, sea gulls, and other incidental characters, including even Beaufoy, the author of the story in Titbits. There are also religious allusions. One will remember that Bloom's father was a Hungarian Jew who turned Protestant, whereas Bloom's mother was Irish. Bloom, who was born a Protestant, was baptized a Catholic. He is, incidentally, a Freemason.
Scene III: Bloom reaches the house of ill-fame. Zoe, a young harlot in a sapphire slip, meets him at the door on Lower Tyrone Street, a landmark that no longer exists. Presently in the author's hallucination Bloom, the world's greatest reformer (an allusion to Bloom's interests in various civic improvements) is crowned emperor by the citizens of Dublin to whom he explains his schemes for social regeneration but then is denounced as a fiendish libertine and finally proclaimed a woman. Dr. Dixon (the resident at the maternity hospital) reads his bill of health: "Professor Bloom is a finished example of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable. Many have found him a dear man, a dear person. He is a rather quaint fellow on the whole, coy though not feebleminded in the medical sense. He has written a really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court missionary of the Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up everything. He is practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer's peas. He wears a hairshirt winter and summer and scourges himself every Saturday. He was, I understand, at one time a firstclass misdemeanant in Glencree reformatory. Another report states that he was a very posthumous child. I appeal for clemency in the name of the most sacred word our vocal organs have ever been called upon to speak. He is about to have a baby.
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