The River Capture

by Mary Costello

  What sudden illumination regarding his Joyce project does he now experience?

  It comes to him with the force of an undoubtable and certifiable truth: that his Joyce project is not the much-dreamed-of but hopelessly unachievable book he has longed to write, but this – the Ardboe Academy for Excellence. Or the Ardboe Academy for Excellence Featuring Ulysses. What better way to pay homage to Joyce than to found a school in his honour and use his work and his brain to nourish the minds of future generations? And how had he not thought of this before?

  What first surprised and amused him about Leopold Bloom?

  That he relished the tang of porcine urine in a fried kidney.

  What first moved him most about Bloom?

  His nature: the sight of him feeding the gulls, his compassion for Mina Purefoy in her long labour, his concern for the starving Dedalus children and for Dante Riordan in her bath-chair, his memory of his dead son Rudy, his worry that when he eats a steak the eyes of the cow will pursue him through all eternity.

  What similarities do Luke and Bloom share?

  The years on earth, similar but not the same (Bloom’s thirty-eight to Luke’s thirty-four), the delight in the sensual life, the love of water, the weave of the mind, the ruminations, the pity of love, the jealousy of love, the downward slides into self-doubt and self-pity interspersed with moments of pride, indignation, illumination. The temperamental assonance: the ranking of kindness above all virtues, the abhorrence of cruelty. The loss of sons they never knew (most miscarried foetuses are male). Both have walked the corridors of the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street. Both are aware they may be the last male in the family line. Both have fond memories of their fathers. Both are linked to the agricultural economy (Bloom was once a clerk at the Dublin cattle market at Hanlon’s Corner). Both are protective of young men and boys as evidenced by Bloom’s concern for Stephen in Nighttown and by Luke’s heartsickness for the thin, pale, hungry, fatherless youths who hang around the town and the used, abused, surplus-to-requirement boys in tracksuits who drift around city shopping centres and whose hurt eyes may pursue him through all eternity.

  What else?

  Both are womanly men, unafraid of their feminine side, unafraid of women’s bodies or minds or emissions – taking delight in women’s bodies, minds and emissions. Molly claims that Bloom – whose middle name is Paula – feels what a woman is. He even contemplates sewing the one-and a-half-inch fissure in Stephen’s jacket after the Nighttown adventure. (A black mark against Bloom, however, is his view of women’s ‘deficient mental development’ and his disdain towards Molly for her reluctance to read literature, but this, Luke thinks, should be interpreted as a symptom of a long marriage – which requires ‘the mutual toleration of personal defects’, as Bloom says – and its accompanying frustrations, such as Bloom’s valiant attempts to get Molly to take up some intellectually challenging pursuits, rather than as evidence of misogyny.) Bloom thinks disparagingly of those men who think themselves ‘wits’ when they spout belittling and sexist remarks about women. He asserts the need for state-inspected and medically controlled male brothels for the clandestine satisfaction of women’s erotic irritation. Both Bloom and Luke have gone so far as to fantasise about being a woman and being pregnant; they have celebrated female desire, seminal warmth, the preordained frangibility of the hymen; both have worshipped at that altar where the back changes name. In the realm of the everyday, both relish their food and despite giving much thought to and having great sympatico with the suffering of animals remain, to date, carnivorous. Both have a fondness for cats and water and the taking of baths (or showers). Both fantasise about the ideal life and ways to become financially independent. Once, driving through the Burren, Luke came upon what appeared to be the exact replica of the cottage Bloom envisioned as his dream home, causing him such mental arrest that he almost crashed. Both are idealists, visionaries, dedicated to rectitude, social justice, utopian dreams – evidenced in Bloom’s desire to rid the world of poverty, avarice, international animosity, and in Luke’s almost filial affection and protectiveness towards the lost youth of the town, his dream of starting a school, his campaigns against the construction of pylons and wind farms, his occasional thoughts of entering politics in order to effect change. Luke is certain that if he and Poldy were to write their manifestos for life – on politics, religion, art, music, literature, birth, death, sex, love, pleasure, fantasy, the sacred and the profane – their beliefs, ideas and strategies would be almost identical. On the issue of sexuality too there are intimations of overlap: was not Bloom’s masculinity questioned, and did he not possess a surfeit of feminine plasms in the brain, and was he not suspected by the men of Dublin of being a repressed homosexual? And in the realm of science, does not Luke’s interest in and fascination with the multiverse, quantum mechanics, the Higgs Boson, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, his own nascent theories and notions as to the existence of a compound that makes up the code of everything – the nucleus of the nebula – neatly parallel Bloom’s interest in involutions increasingly vast, in microbes and cells and infinitely divisible particles until nought nowhere is ever reached and the whatness of our whoness is never known, in his theory of alien possibility, his meditation on the stars, the ramifications of number and his elaborate calculations of 99x99x99 which might bring man to the divine? Indeed such are the similarities of the soarings and rhapsodic episodes that lead both men to frequent illuminations that, in certain moments at the height of his own flights, Luke could swear that Bloom is his brother from another mother.

  To what does Luke credit his frequent illuminations?

  To a specific but unknown spot in the folds of his cerebral cortex where the numerical faculties nestle; to long hours spent in solitude, to certain moments in childhood spent observing his mother, inspecting specks of dust, rays of slanting sun, the grain of wood, the variations of emerald in various cats’ eyes; to the moment he discovered, at age twelve, that time travel is consistent with the laws of physics and the consequent realisation that past events and past lives are not really past but can be revisited over and over; to his infatuation with the lives of great artists, musicians, physicists who, in moments of transcendence, enter an eternal realm of abstract forms, a Platonic heaven far from the ordinary reality we inhabit, from which they bring back their knowledge and insights.

  In what ways are Bloom and Luke dissimilar?

  Physically, Luke is taller and proportionately slenderer, carrying 11 stone 3 pounds on his 6 feet 1 inch frame as opposed to Bloom’s 11 stone 4 pounds on his 5 feet 9½ inch frame; Bloom’s greater girth of neck is evidenced in his collar size of 17 against Luke’s 15½. Sartorially, Bloom is smarter and better groomed and while there hangs in Luke’s wardrobe a Paul Smith suit, several designer shirts, ties, shoes, the Hubie Clark apparel from the US, a brown slim-fitting Vivienne Westwood suit he especially loves, and though, during his life in the city – most notably during his gay period – he revelled in a well-coiffed, well-groomed appearance, he acknowledges there is little call for self-grooming these days and he has, consequently, grown increasingly rakish. Temperamentally, Bloom is more disciplined, more measured, less prone to excess of impulse or appetite, less likely to rant about injustice or fantasise about violent revenge. Philosophically, Bloom believes the universe is infinite and fathomless, and while Luke also believes it is infinite, he thinks man is edging towards fathoming it. Educationally, Luke, a graduate, is better schooled, but Bloom, with his knowledge of maths and science, astrology and astronomy and enormous quantities of general knowledge of innumerable subjects – including saints’ feast days, the cubic area of Roundwood reservoir, the precise times of sunrise and sunset five days in advance – is more learned. Epicurally, Luke has never relished the inner organs of either beast or fowl.

  Does Luke suspect Bloom is a repressed homosexual? Or a bisexual? What about Stephen? Or Joyce himself?

  When younger, Luke harboured such or similar suspicions and doubts about
all three men. Now he views Stephen as accepting of homosexual desire and attraction as part of his own and every man’s nature, as is Bloom, though not explicitly. As was Joyce himself: nothing that was human was alien to him. Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. Joyce showed no signs of homosexual panic or, indeed, practice. The love between men is implicit and is everywhere evident in his work.

  What character traits or attributes of Stephen’s – in either Portrait or Ulysses – does Luke, to a greater or lesser extent, admire or find moving?

  He admires to a greater extent Stephen’s genius, his erudition, his exhaustive and enviable knowledge of literature, history, languages, theology, philosophy, psychology, philology, astrology, esoteric teachings, the Gospels and the finer points of Church doctrine and dogma; his longing to understand life and love in an intellectual sense; his full and fully-fledged renunciation of the Church after the full and fully-fledged devotion to the Church of his early youth; his continuous worship at the altar of female flesh, drawn to the swoon of sin and suffering; his intense personality. The life of his mind. His mystical elements, his thoughtful meditations, his creative impulse, his ability to read the divine signature in the snotgreen sea. Rare moments of self-deprecation too, remembering the books he was going to write containing his deeply deep epiphanies on green oval leaves, to be sent in the event of his death to the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria. Luke admires to a (far) lesser extent Stephen’s immaturity, his (mostly) selfish disregard for his hungry sisters, his enormous ego, his precocious, brittle self, his bumptious, arrogant self, his pompous, sore-loser style of argument. Luke is moved by Stephen’s fretful heart, his sensitive, shame-wounded soul, his agenbite of inwit, his susceptibility to the word foetus. His fear of thunder, his fragile self. His memory of his mother. His fears for his sister – She is drowning. His tears for himself, alone in the rain on the top of the Howth tram.

  Who does Molly remind him of?

  His mother. The cat that got the cream. The Queen of Sheba. Joyce, the womanly man. Himself, the womanly Luke.

  To what wistful pondering does Luke occasionally succumb?

  He often ponders on the activities of the residents of No. 7 Eccles Street on the morning of 17 June 1904 and wonders whether Poldy’s uncharacteristic request for breakfast in bed the previous night might indicate a new accretion of authority, of potency even. Poldy might, on waking, find the sole of Molly’s foot beat up against his face. He might sniff her toes, finger her instep, her fallen arch. Run a hand up her plump calf, around the back of her knee, up her thigh to her plumpen rumpen lumpen backside. And behold, a new dawn might herald at No. 7 Eccles Street.

  What errors, issues or inconsistencies in Ulysses perplex or indeed irritate Luke?

  Why does Bloom, at thirty-eight, seem so old – old enough for Stephen to pronounce him ‘a profound ancient male’? Why is Moses Dlugacz, a Jewish butcher, selling pork kidneys? How long can a man carry a potato in his pocket before it rots? Why is Deasy, the headmaster of a Dalkey boys’ school, writing an article on foot and mouth disease in cattle? Why does Joyce say that the priest kneels when he means genuflects? Why does he write sweat-pea for sweet-pea and call a tap a faucet? Why does he call the Ascot Gold Cup a handicap race when even the dogs in the street know it’s not? Why does it take four minutes for Bloom to climb the back stairs from his basement kitchen in 7 Eccles Street to the hall-door level? How can Stephen recline against the area railings of 7 Eccles Street and simultaneously have a view into the kitchen? What possessed Joyce to situate a bunch of rowdy men in a room in the National Maternity Hospital at ten o’clock at night drinking beer, eating sardine sandwiches and spouting lewd remarks while down the corridor several Dublin women are in the throes of labour? But by far the most baffling question is how, at the end of the night, on the walk from Beresford Place to Eccles Street (via Gardiner Street, Mountjoy Square, Temple Street North), a route that Luke knows well and estimates at fifteen to twenty minutes at normal pace and which Google Maps put at twenty minutes (and which would surely take no more than thirty to forty minutes at a slow and dawdling pace), can Bloom and Stephen, even allowing for ‘interruptions of halt’, possibly discuss – no, deliberate on – at least twenty subjects of substantial conversational heft, i.e. music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, women, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight on the growth of paraheliotropic trees, corporation bins, the Roman Catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, Jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the influence of the pre-Sabbath, Stephen’s collapse? Average per topic time: one minute. And, concurrent with these subjects, Bloom also privately recalls similar subjects discussed with other friends on previous nocturnal perambulations. Impossible!

  Why is he doubly sceptical of these ‘errors’?

  Because ‘A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.’

  Has Luke located any of the portals?

  He has not. Yet.

  What surprises Luke about Joyce?

  That he never visited ancient Greece.

  Was he surprised by Bloom’s visit to Bella Cohen’s brothel?

  No. Bloom is a sensualist, as Joyce himself was. As Luke is. In any case, he was there primarily to look after Stephen.

  Has he, Luke, ever frequented a house of ill repute?

  At the age of seventeen, during a free two-hour period on a school trip to Amsterdam in March 1995, he lost his virginity to a prostitute in a brothel on Bloedstraat. Debbie. Mixed race. Old enough to be his mother. Come for mamma. Wait wait good boy. Afterwards he felt a surge of what he thought was love for her. He told no one, ever. He occasionally thinks of her. She might be retired by now, providing a phone or online sex service. He wonders why they do it. No, he knows: money, rent, mouths to feed. Poor women and girls. Riddled with the pox in the old days. The way they’re mentioned in the biographies of famous men, as if they were sub-human, as if they weren’t daughters or sisters or mothers. Graham Greene’s list of prostitutes. Treated as vermin, as if they were the cause of the pox. Poor girls. Biddy the Clap and Cunty Kate. No word of their suffering. Joyce himself, from the age of fourteen, a regular frequenter of the kips. Metaphysics in Mecklenburg Street.

  How did Luke react to the discovery that Joyce was syphilitic?

  With devastation. It altered everything: how he saw Bloom (with greater understanding), how he saw Joyce (with greater compassion), how he read Ulysses (with greater sorrow). He is haunted by two images of Joyce: the beautiful, innocent, half-past-six boy entering Clongowes Wood in 1888, and the frail old man groping around a dark room in 7 rue Valentin in 1939. He spent hours online reading about syphilis, studying the grotesque images of the disease – the penile chancres and discharge, the scabrous fissures in unwashed crotches, the rashes, the incontinence, the impotence. Limp father of thousands, languid floating flower. The more he read the more convinced he was of the evidence for Joyce’s infection, and the deeper his sorrow grew for the man.

  What evidence?

  The daily afflictions: the failing eyes, the abdominal cramps, the joint pain, the bad teeth. Then later, the creative euphoria, electrocution by divine fire, the breeze of madness. Other symptoms too: Beckett the bastard told Ellmann that Joyce wore two newspapers inside his trousers. He was treated with Galyl, an arsenic and phosphorous compound patented by Dr A. Mouneyrat and commonly prescribed for syphilis before the discovery of penicillin. And the books are crawling with the disease – it’s embedded and encoded in labyrinthine references in Ulysses. Bloom in all likelihood had it too – he also visited prostitutes in his youth – and there are indications that he too is ill. And Bloom and Joyce are both obsessed with the body, with morbus germs and contamination. So many geniuses, all male, infected … Van Gogh, Beethoven, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire. He wonders if the pox unleashed the brilliance or if the brilliant flocked to the pox, more than half i
n love with easeful death.

  How, in Luke’s opinion, did the knowledge of his syphilitic condition affect Joyce?

  It was, Luke is certain, the single greatest presence, the gravest event, the biggest grief, in Joyce’s mature adult life; the shaper and signifier of everything – his thoughts, his work, his outer life, his secret inner life. It preoccupied and consumed him, spreading its tentacles into every corner of his psyche. Riddled with shame and guilt, constantly awaiting the re-emergence of the sinister signs and symptoms of the illness, constantly fearing madness, always guarding the secret. Worst of all he believed it to be the cause of Lucia’s madness. I have syphilis, Pappy, she said to him one day, the inexplicable access of the mad to the truth. As if in compensation – or atonement – for the sins of his youth he lived a quiet, reserved life in Zurich and Paris, never countenancing bad language or vulgarity, dining nightly with his little family in Fouquet’s and shunning the lifestyle the avant-garde expected of him. Despite his avowed rejection of the Church he went to the annual Holy Week services – he the eternal penitent and the Catholic guilt impossible to expunge. He ate blackberry jam because Christ’s crown of thorns was made from blackberry briars. From what he has read about Finnegans Wake, Luke suspects syphilis was the driving force of that novel, suffused and threaded as it is with oblique references, messages and admissions of the disease, the writing of it an act of sublimation, a straining for a cure, a metaphorical fix, as if he was trying to confess and right his wrongs, purge his soul, seek forgiveness for the damage done.