(General commotion and compassion. Women faint. A wealthy American makes a street collection for Bloom.)"
Etc. At the end of the scene Bloom in the book's reality follows Zoe into the brothel in search of Stephen. We have now found how the machinery of the chapter works. This or that detail of reality bursts into elaborate life; an allusion starts to live on its own. Thus the "real" conversation at the door of the brothel between Zoe and Bloom is interrupted in order to interpolate the Rise and Fall of Bloom before his entrance into the house.
Scene IV: In the house of ill-fame Bloom meets Stephen and Lynch. Various visions appear. The author conjures up Bloom's grandfather Leopold Virag. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress with a sprouting moustache in yet another authorial hallucination evokes Bloom's past sins and in an amusing exchange of sexes is horribly cruel to impotent Bloom. Also water nymphs and waterfalls appear with the liquid musical theme so dear to Joyce. A glimpse of reality starts. Bloom gets back his talisman, the potato, from Zoe. Stephen attempts to squander his money. (Note that neither Stephen nor Bloom has any interest in the women around them.) Bloom manages to retrieve the money and to save it for Stephen. One pound seven "Doesn't matter a rambling damn," says Stephen. More authorial hallucinations follow—even Boylan and Marion appear in a vision. In the real life of the scene Stephen very comically imitates the Parisian brand of English. Then the author's hallucinations begin to harass Stephen. Stephen's mother horribly appears.
"THE MOTHER: (With the subtle smile of death's madness.) I was once the beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.
STEPHEN: (Horrorstruck.) Lemur, who are you? What bogeyman's trick is this?
BUCK MULLIGAN: (Shakes his curling capbell.) The mockery of it! Kinch killed her dogsbody bitchbody. She kicked the bucket. (Tears of molten butter fall from his eyes into the scone.) Our great sweet mother! Epi oinopa ponton.
THE MOTHER: (Comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of wetted ashes.) All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men in the world. You too. Time will come.
STEPHEN: (Choking with fright, remorse and horror.) They said I killed you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny.
THE MOTHER: (A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth.) You sang that song to me. Love's bitter mystery.
STEPHEN: (Eagerly.) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.
THE MOTHER: Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the strangers? Prayer is all powerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the Ursuline manual, and forty days' indulgence. Repent, Stephen.
STEPHEN: The ghoul! Hyena!
THE MOTHER: I pray for you in my other world. Get Dilly to make you that boiled rice every night after your brain work. Years and years I loved you, O my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb."
After more of this, Stephen with his cane smashes the lamp.
Scene V: Stephen and Bloom leave the house and are now in Beaver Street, not far from it. Stephen still drunk raves, and the two English soldiers Carr and Compton decide he has insulted their king, King Edward VII (who also appears in the author's hallucination). One of the soldiers, Carr, attacks Stephen and knocks him down. Watchmen loom. This is reality. Also in reality Kelleher, the undertaker's assistant, happens to be around and helps them to convince the watchmen that Stephen has merely been out on a spree—boys will be boys. At the end of the scene Bloom bends over fallen Stephen, who murmurs "Who? Black panther vampire" and quotes fragments of Yeats's "Who Goes with Fergus." The chapter ends with the hallucination appearing to Bloom of his dead son Rudy as an eleven-year-old fairy boy, a changeling, who gazes unseeing into Bloom's eyes and kisses the page of the book he is reading from right to left.
PART THREE, CHAPTER 1
Time: After midnight.
Place: Still near Nighttown, in the vicinity of Amiens Street, northeast Dublin, near the docks and the customhouse; then the cabman's shelter near Butt Bridge, its keeper said to be Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris who took part in the Phoenix Park political assassination. Fitzharris was one of the so-called Invincibles who in 1882 murdered Lord Frederick Cavendish, chief secretary, and Thomas H. Burke, under secretary, in Phoenix Park. Fitzharris was only the driver of the carriage and we are not even sure it is he.
Characters: Bloom and Stephen, who have now finally been brought together alone in the solitary night. Among the incidental night characters they meet, the most vivid one is the red-bearded sailor Murphy, back from his voyages in the three-master Rosevean which Elijah had met when it was at last swept into the bay.
Style: Most of the chapter is again a parody, an imitation of a jaunty journalistic style with masculine clichés replacing the woman's magazine clichés of the Gerty MacDowell chapter, which it otherwise resembles.
Action: Throughout the chapter kindly Bloom does his best to be friendly towards Stephen but is regarded by Stephen with a slightly contemptuous indifference. In this chapter and in the next, Joyce carefully outlines and illustrates the various differences in character, education, tastes, etc., between Bloom and Stephen. The differences between them far outweigh the main similarity that each has rejected the religion of his fathers.[*] However, Stephen's metaphysical aphorisms are not unrelated, generally, to Bloom's pseudoscientific tags. Both men have keen eyes and ears, both love music, both notice details such as gestures, colors, sounds. In the events of that particular day, a door key plays a curiously similar part in the lives of both men—and if Bloom has his Boylan, Stephen has his Mulligan. Both harbor phantoms in their respective pasts, retrovistas of loss and betrayal. Both Bloom and Stephen suffer from loneliness; however, Stephen is lonely not because he has quarreled with his family's beliefs, revolted against the commonplace, etc., and certainly not in consequence (like Bloom) of any social condition, but because he has been created by the author as a budding genius, and genius, by necessity, is lonely. Both see their enemy in history—injustice for Bloom, a metaphysical prison for Stephen. Both are wanderers and exiles, and finally in both runs the singing blood of James Joyce, their maker.
In their dissimilarities, to put it very roughly, Bloom is the middlebrow; Stephen the highbrow. Bloom admires applied science and applied art; Stephen pure art and pure science. Bloom is the delighted reader of the Believe It or Not column; Stephen the maker of profound philosophic aphorisms. Bloom is the man of running water; Stephen of opalescent stone. There are also emotional contrasts. Bloom is the kindly, diffident, humane materialist; Stephen the ascetic, hard, brilliant, bitter egotist who in rejecting his God has also rejected mankind. Stephen's figure is built on contrasts. He is physically repulsive but intellectually exquisite. Joyce emphasizes his physical cowardice, dirt, bad teeth, untidy or disgusting manners (the whole play on his dirty handkerchief and later, on the beach, his lack of one), his physical lust and humiliating poverty with all its degrading implications. Yet set against all this is his lofty soaring mind, his enchanting creative imagination, fantastically rich and subtle frame of reference, freedom of spirit, unbending proud integrity and truthfulness, which calls for moral courage, his independence carried to the point of obstinacy. If there is a streak of the philistine in Bloom, there is something of the ruthless fanatic in Stephen. To Bloom's questions full of solicitude and fatherly tenderness Stephen retaliates with his hard aphorisms. Bloom says in the elegant journalese of the chapter, "I don't mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why did you leave your father's house?
—To seek misfortune, was Stephen's answer." (Incidentally, look at one characteristic of elegant journalese—the variety of synonyms for he said: observed, responded, ejaculated, returned, repeated, ventured to throw out, etc.)
Then in a rambling talk, Bloom who is very diffident about his own shallow culture and is trying to be as nice as possible to Stephen, suggests that your country is the place where you can live well if you work, a simple prac
tical approach. Count me out, Stephen answers. Work in the widest sense, Bloom hastens to explain, literary labor ... poets have every bit as much right to live by their brain as the peasant by his brawn: both belong to Ireland. You suspect, Stephen retorts with a sort of half-laugh, that I may be important because I belong to Ireland, but I suspect that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me. Bloom is taken aback and thinks he has been misunderstood. And Stephen rather rudely says; "—We can't change the country. Let us change the subject."
But the main subject of this chapter is Molly, whom we shall soon meet in the last chapter of the book. With a gesture analogical to that of the wave-worn sailor producing a picture postcard of Peruvians or showing the tattoo on his chest, with much the same gesture Bloom shows Stephen her photograph: "Carefully avoiding a book in his pocket Sweets of, which reminded him by the by of that Capel street library book out of date, he took out his pocket book and, turning over the various contents rapidly, finally he ...
—Do you consider, by the by, he said, thoughtfully selecting a faded photo which he laid on the table, that a Spanish type?
Stephen, obviously addressed, looked down on the photo showing a large sized lady, with her fleshy charms on evidence in an open fashion, as she was in the full bloom of womanhood, in evening dress cut ostentatiously low for the occasion to give a liberal display of bosom, with more than vision of breasts, her full lips parted, and some perfect teeth, standing near, ostensibly with gravity, a piano, on the rest of which was In old Madrid, a ballad, pretty in its way, which was then all the vogue. Her (the lady's) eyes, dark, large, looked at Stephen, about to smile about something to be admired. Lafayette of Westmoreland street, Dublin's premier photographic artist, being responsible for the esthetic execution.
—Mrs Bloom, my wife the prima donna, Madam Marion Tweedy, Bloom indicated. Taken a few years since. In or about '96. Very like her then."
Bloom discovers that Stephen had last dined on Wednesday. One night Bloom brought home a dog (breed unknown) with a lame paw, and now he decides to bring Stephen to Eccles Street. Although Stephen is sort of standoffish—not effusive at all—Bloom invites him to his house for a cup of cocoa. "My wife, he intimated, plunging in medias res, would have the greatest of pleasure in making your acquaintance as she is passionately attached to music of any kind." They walk to Bloom's house together—and this takes us to the next chapter.
PART THREE, CHAPTER 2
"The studied dulness of the preceding chapter is now reduced to the completely impersonal tone of questions phrased in scientific fashion and answered in an equally chilly manner" (Kain). The questions are set in a catechistic pattern, and the phrasing is more pseudoscientific than scientific. We are given a good deal of material in the way of information and recapitulation, and perhaps it would be wisest to discuss this chapter from the point of view of the facts it contains. It is a very simple chapter.
As for the facts, some elaborate or recapitulate information already contained in the book, but some are new. For example, two questions and answers about Bloom and Stephen:
"Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?
Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen's collapse.
Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions to experience?
Both were sensitive to artistic impressions musical in preference to plastic or pictorial.... Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admitted the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual magnetism."
Bloom's sudden (to the reader) interest in civic duties exhibited in his conversation with Stephen at the cabman's shelter is shown by a question and answer that goes back to discussions with various people he had as early as 1884 and on various other occasions up to 1893.
"What reflection concerning the irregular sequence of dates 1884, 1885, 1886, 1888, 1892, 1893, 1904 did Bloom make before their arrival at their destination?
He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction of the converse domain of interindividual relations."
Arriving at 7 Eccles Street, Bloom realizes he has forgotten his key, left in his other trousers. He climbs over the area railings and gains access to the basement kitchen through the scullery, and then:
"What discrete succession of images did Stephen meanwhile perceive?
Reclined against the area railings he perceived through the transparent kitchen panes a man regulating a gas flame of 14 C P, a man lighting a candle, a man removing in turn each of his two boots, a man leaving the kitchen holding a candle of 1 C P.
Did the man reappear elsewhere?
After a lapse of four minutes the glimmer of his candle was discernible through the semitransparent semicircular glass fanlight over the halldoor. The halldoor turned gradually on its hinges. In the open space of the doorway the man reappeared without his hat, with his candle.
Did Stephen obey his sign?
Yes, entering softly, he helped to close and chain the door and followed softly along the hallway the man's back and listed feet and lighted candle past a lighted crevice of doorway on the left [Molly had left the light on in the bedroom] and carefully down a turning staircase of more than five steps into the kitchen of Bloom's house."
Bloom prepares the cocoa for Stephen and himself, and there are various references to his fondness for gadgets, riddles, clever devices, word games, as in the anagrams to which he had subjected, his name, the acrostic poem he had sent to Molly in 1888, or the topical song he had started to compose, but not completed, for one of the scenes of the Gaiety Theatre's Christmas pantomime, Sinbad the Sailor. The relation between the ages of the two is given: in 1904 Bloom is thirty-eight and Stephen twenty-two. Conversations and recollections are referred to in the next pages. We learn their respective parentages and even the rather pathetic facts about their baptisms.
Throughout the chapter both men are acutely aware of racial and religious differences, and Joyce overstresses a little this awareness. Fragments of verse from ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish languages are cited by guest to host and by host to guest.
"Was the knowledge possessed by both of each of these languages, the extinct and the revived, theoretical or practical?
Theoretical, being confined to certain grammatical rules of accidence and syntax and practically excluding vocabulary."
The next question is "What points of contact existed between these languages and between the peoples who spoke them?" The answer reveals the existence of a natural bond between Jew and Irish in that each is a subjugated race. After a pseudolearned discourse on the kinds of the two literatures, Joyce ends the answer, "the proscription of their national costumes in penal laws and jewish dress acts: the restoration in Chanan David of Zion and the possibility of Irish political autonomy or devolution." In other words, the movement for a Jewish homeland is the same as that of Ireland for independence.
But then religion, the great divider, enters. In answer to two lines of lament that Bloom quotes in Hebrew, and his paraphrase of the rest, Stephen with his usual detached cruelty recites a little medieval ballad about the Jew's daughter dressed in green, who lures the Christian little boy Saint Hugh to his crucifixion, and then proceeds to discuss it from a rather absurd metaphysical angle. Bloom feels offended and sad, but at the same time he still pursues his curious vision of Stephen ("He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future") as
teaching Molly correct Italian pronunciation and perhaps marrying Bloom's daughter, blonde Milly. Bloom suggests that Stephen spend the night in the living room:
"What proposal did Bloom, diambulist [walker by day], father of Milly, somnambulist [walker in sleep], make to Stephen, noctambulist [walker by night]?
To pass in repose the hours intervening between Thursday (proper) and Friday (normal) on an extemporised cubicle in the apartment immediately above the kitchen and immediately adjacent to the sleeping apartment of his host and hostess.
What various advantages would or might have resulted from a prolongation of such extemporisation?
For the guest: security of domicile and seclusion of study. For the host: rejuvenation of intelligence, vicarious satisfaction. For the hostess: disintegration of obsession, acquisition of correct Italian pronunciation.
Why might these several provisional contingencies between a guest and a hostess not necessarily preclude or be precluded by a permanent eventuality of reconciliatory union between a schoolfellow and a jew's daughter?
Because the way to daughter led through mother, the way to mother through daughter."
Here we have an intimation of Bloom's obscure thought that Stephen would be a better lover for Molly than Boylan. The "disintegration of obsession" is presumably Molly's cooling to Boylan, and the next answer, though it can be read innocently enough, can also carry a hidden meaning.
Lectures on Literature Page 44
