Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)
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THE CHAPEL OF FREEMAN TYPESETTERS: Hear! Hear!
JOHN WYSE NOLAN: There’s the man that got away James Stephens.
A BLUECOAT SCHOOLBOY: Bravo!
AN OLD RESIDENT: You’re a credit to your country, sir, that’s what you are.
AN APPLEWOMAN: He’s a man like Ireland wants.
BLOOM: My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future.
(Thirtytwo workmen, wearing rosettes, from all the counties of Ireland, under the guidance of Derwan the builder, construct the new Bloomusalem. It is a colossal edifice with crystal roof, built in the shape of a huge pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms. In the course of its extension several buildings and monuments are demolished. Government offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds. Numerous houses are razed to the ground. The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all marked in red with the letters: L. B. Several paupers fall from a ladder. A part of the walls of Dublin, crowded with loyal sightseers, collapses.)
THE SIGHTSEERS: (Dying) Morituri te salutant. (They die.)
(A man in a brown macintosh springs up through a trapdoor. He points an elongated finger at Bloom.)
THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH: Don’t you believe a word he says. That man is Leopold M’Intosh, the notorious fireraiser. His real name is Higgins.
BLOOM: Shoot him! Dog of a christian! So much for M’Intosh!
(A cannonshot. The man in the macintosh disappears. Bloom with his sceptre strikes down poppies. The instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies, graziers, members of parliament, members of standing committees, are reported. Bloom’s bodyguard distribute Maundy money, commemoration medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges, expensive Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in sealed envelopes tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock, billets doux in the form of cocked hats, readymade suits, porringers of toad in the hole, bottles of Jeyes’ Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days’ indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes, season tickets available for all tramlines, coupons of the royal and privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the World’s Twelve Worst Books: Froggy And Fritz (politic), Care of the Baby (infantilic), 50 Meals for 7/6 (culinic), Was Jesus a Sun Myth? (historic), Expel that Pain (medic), Infant’s Compendium of the Universe (cosmic), Let’s All Chortle (hilaric), Canvasser’s Vade Mecum (journalic), Loveletters of Mother Assistant (erotic), Who’s Who in Space (astric), Songs that Reached Our Heart (melodic), Pennywise’s Way to Wealth (parsimonic). A general rush and scramble. Women press forward to touch the hem of Bloom’s robe. The lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts through the throng, leaps on his horse and kisses him on both cheeks amid great acclamation. A magnesium flashlight photograph is taken. Babes and sucklings are held up.)
THE WOMEN: Little father! Little father!
THE BABES AND SUCKLINGS:
Clap clap hands till Poldy comes home,
Cakes in his pocket for Leo alone.
The glorious center of this bravura celebration is Poldy’s vision of the new Bloomusalem. The only sentence that baffles me remains, “There’s the man that got away James Stephens.” Joyce and James Stephens had a curious and long-enduring friendship, partly founded on the mistaken notion that they had been born on the same day. I do not think that anyone who has read James Stephens’s poetry and his best-known novel, The Crock of Gold (1912), could think that Stephens might have finished the Wake had Joyce not lived to do so. Yet that became an obsession of Joyce as his eye troubles increased the painful labors of composition. Still, that is a minor detail compared with this marvelous proclamation:
BLOOM: My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future.
These days readers might well prefer to live in the new Bloomusalem rather than the new Jerusalem. I have not been in Dublin since the mid-1980s but was dismayed, during my final visit, not to find so many Georgian houses and squares that had been part of the Dublin of Yeats and Joyce. Since then there has been a movement to preserve what still was there. But, then, I have not been in Jerusalem since 1985, and from my friends there I gather I would not recognize most of it.
The new Bloomusalem vaporizes with startling rapidity:
LENEHAN: Plagiarist! Down with Bloom!
THE VEILED SIBYL: (Enthusiastically) I’m a Bloomite and I glory in it. I believe in him in spite of all. I’d give my life for him, the funniest man on earth.
BLOOM: (Winks at the bystanders) I bet she’s a bonny lassie.
THEODORE PUREFOY: (In fishingcap and oilskin jacket) He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature.
THE VEILED SIBYL: (Stabs herself) My hero god! (She dies.)
(Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their veins, refusing food, casting themselves under steamrollers, from the top of Nelson’s Pillar, into the great vat of Guinness’s brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads in gasovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of different storeys.)
ALEXANDER J. DOWIE: (Violently) Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery, recalling the cities of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. This vile hypocrite, bronzed with infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the Apocalypse. A worshipper of the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is the very breath of his nostrils. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him. Caliban!
Alexander J. Dowie, delightful American evangelist, cannot get much right. There is no white bull mentioned in the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. There is of course that splendid damozel the Whore of Babylon, but why drag in the much-tried Caliban? Joyce’s proclivity for esoterica doubtless prompts Dowie’s “stinking goat of Mendes,” derived from Éliphas Lévi Zahed, a professional mystifier whose name was Alphonse Louis Constant and who was a friend of Nerval and the young Gautier. Éliphas Lévi concocted the goat of Mendes, who supposedly copulated with the priestesses in that ancient Egyptian hovel.
THE MOB: Lynch him! Roast him! He’s as bad as Parnell was. Mr Fox!
(Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom. Several shopkeepers from upper and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value, hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheep’s tails, odd pieces of fat.)
BLOOM: (Excitedly) This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again. By heaven, I am guiltless as the unsunned snow! It was my brother Henry. He is my double. He lives in number 2 Dolphin’s Barn. Slander, the viper, has wrongfully accused me. Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan capall. I call on my old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex specialist, to give medical testimony on my behalf.
DR MULLIGAN: (In motor jerkin, green motorgoggles on his brow) Dr Bloom is bisexually abnormal. He has recently escaped from Dr Eustace’s private asylum for demented gentlemen. Born out of bedlock hereditary epilepsy is present, the consequence of unbridled lust. Traces of elephantiasis have been discovered among his ascendants. There are marked symptoms of chronic exhibitionism. Ambidexterity is also latent. He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in consequence, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth. In consequence of a family complex he has temporarily lost his memory and I believe him to be more sinned against than sinning.
I have made a pervaginal examination and, after application of the acid test to 5427 anal, axillary, pectoral and pubic hairs, I declare him to be virgo intacta.
Having found in Gogarty his true black beast, Joyce exploits him to the limit. The Dublin mob seeking to lynch Poldy associates him with the fallen Charles Stewart Parnell, who died at forty-five in the arms of Katharine O’Shea, with whom he had enjoyed a long adulterous relationship. During the romance, he had used “Mr. Fox” as one pseudonym in his correspondence with her. Cast out by the Roman Catholic Church, Parnell died in disgrace, though he had long been the leader in the Irish struggle for emancipation from England.
Gogarty, that is to say Buck Mulligan, is as funny as ever. Joyce, who had suffered much from Gogarty, nevertheless was artist enough to endow Mulligan with eternal life. Buck’s rhetoric, though pompous, is orotund: it has the rolling gusto of the great Falstaff, though Buck is no Sir John. Closer perhaps is Panurge, though that great Daemon in Books Three and Four of Rabelais, while shrewd and licentious, is a coward, whereas Gogarty—to grant him that much—was courageous in action.
The pageant swirls on, and Poldy again manifests Messianic gestures towards oblation:
A VOICE: Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David?
BLOOM: (Darkly) You have said it.
BROTHER BUZZ: Then perform a miracle like Father Charles.
BANTAM LYONS: Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger.
(Bloom walks on a net, covers his left eye with his left ear, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson’s Pillar, hangs from the top ledge by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells included), heals several sufferers from king’s evil, contracts his face so as to resemble many historical personages, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, eclipses the sun by extending his little finger.)
BRINI, PAPAL NUNCIO: (In papal zouave’s uniform, steel cuirasses as breastplate, armplates, thighplates, legplates, large profane moustaches and brown paper mitre.) Leopoldi autem generatio. Moses begat Noah and Noah begat Eunuch and Eunuch begat O’Halloran and O’Halloran begat Guggenheim and Guggenheim begat Agendath and Agendath begat Netaim and Netaim begat Le Hirsch and Le Hirsch begat Jesurum and Jesurum begat MacKay and MacKay begat Ostrolopsky and Ostrolopsky begat Smerdoz and Smerdoz begat Weiss and Weiss begat Schwarz and Schwarz begat Adrianopoli and Adrianopoli begat Aranjuez and Aranjuez begat Lewy Lawson and Lewy Lawson begat Ichabudonosor and Ichabudonosor begat O’Donnell Magnus and O’Donnell Magnus begat Christbaum and Christbaum begat ben Maimun and ben Maimun begat Dusty Rhodes and Dusty Rhodes begat Benamor and Benamor begat Jones-Smith and Jones-Smith begat Savorgnanovich and Savorgnanovich begat Jasperstone and Jasperstone begat Vingtetunieme and Vingtetunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely begat Virag and Virag begat Bloom et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel.
A DEADHAND: (Writes on the wall) Bloom is a cod.
CRAB: (In bushranger’s kit) What did you do in the cattlecreep behind Kilbarrack?
A FEMALE INFANT: (Shakes a rattle) And under Ballybough bridge?
A HOLLYBUSH: And in the devil’s glen?
BLOOM: (Blushes furiously all over from frons to nates, three tears falling from his left eye) Spare my past.
THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS: (In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with Donnybrook fair shillelaghs) Sjambok him!
(Bloom with asses’ ears seats himself in the pillory with crossed arms, his feet protruding. He whistles Don Giovanni, a cenar teco. Artane orphans, joining hands, caper round him. Girls of the Prison Gate Mission, joining hands, caper round in the opposite direction.)
THE ARTANE ORPHANS:
You hig, you hog, you dirty dog!
You think the ladies love you!
THE PRISON GATE GIRLS:
If you see Kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.
HORNBLOWER: (In ephod and huntingcap, announces) And he shall carry the sins of the people to Azazel, the spirit which is in the wilderness, and to Lilith, the nighthag. And they shall stone him and defile him, yea, all from Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the land of Ham.
(All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him. Mastiansky and Citron approach in gaberdines, wearing long earlocks. They wag their beards at Bloom.)
MASTIANSKY AND CITRON: Belial! Laemlein of Istria, the false Messiah! Abulafia! Recant!
Ancient Jewish apocalyptic theology features two Messiahs. The first is the Messiah ben Joseph whose function is to prelude the coming of the true Messiah of the House of David. Whereas the first Messiah, after ingathering the exiles and retaking Jerusalem, is destined to be slain in battle, the second will bring about a new heaven and earth. When Poldy darkly says, “You have said it,” Joyce implies Luke 23:3, where Jesus avoids the indictment of the priests that he calls himself Christ a King or the Messiah of the House of David, by subtly answering, “Thou sayest it.”
There is always more to Leopold Bloom than I can hope to understand. Ulysses or Odysseus is more than comprehensive but finally less complete than Poldy. Dante’s Ulysses, who becomes Tennyson’s, is like Dante the Poet rather than Dante the Pilgrim. When Ulysses speaks to the Pilgrim out of the double flame he shares with Diomed in Canto 26 of Inferno, he tells the story of his last voyage beyond the limits set by the gods. Dante’s reaction is silence. The implication is that he recognizes the affinity between the audacity of Ulysses and his own ambitious voyage from Inferno to Purgatorio to Paradiso.
Though Dante may fuse the allegory of the theologians with the allegory of the poets, he thinks of himself as the supreme poet, transcending even his beloved father Virgil. He places Joachim of Flora in Paradise even though Thomas Aquinas refuted The Everlasting Gospel, which Joachim bequeathed to the Franciscans. Dante thought of his Commedia as a Third Testament, completing the Old and the New, and confirming Joachim’s prophecy of the Third Age of the Spirit, replacing the Ages of the Father and the Son.
Joachim’s Age of the Spirit contaminated the radical sectaries of the English Revolution who fought on the side of Cromwell but then protested any restrictions on their access to the Inner Light. These revolutionaries—Ranters, Diggers, Muggletonians, Levellers—were the matrix from which John Milton evolved his highly intricate and personal final religious stance. The line goes from Milton to William Blake, who wrote another “Everlasting Gospel” and who criticized both Dante and Milton in his illustrations to them.
James Joyce, who somehow seems to have known everything, like Shakespeare before him, transmuted Dante and Blake into the anti-Messianic vortices of Ulysses and the Wake. It is blasphemous fun to behold Poldy accused of Messianic imposture. Is it not more than that? Since Joyce, Poldy, Shakespeare form a new Trinity or three-in-one, and Shakespeare is God the Father, James Joyce the Son, then Poldy may indeed be an omen of Advent for the approach of the Age of the Spirit.
After the insanely jubilant and inventive chant of “begats,” various insults and enunciations are hurled at Poldy. Most significantly, Mastiansky and Citron denounce Bloom as the false Messiah Abraham Abulafia. In the most colorful moment of his bizarre career, the prophetic Kabbalist Abulafia arrived in Rome in 1280 and announced that he had come to convert Pope Nicholas III to the true faith of Judaism the day before the Jewish New Year. At that time Pope Nicholas was in Suriano and cheerfully ordered the burning of the Jewish fanatic as soon as he reached that town. Nevertheless, Abulafia marched on Suriano, where a stake had been prepared for him at the inner gate. Miracle! As the unshrinking Abulafia went through the o
uter gate, he was told that the Pope had died suddenly the night before, of a stroke. After weathering a month’s imprisonment in Rome, the prophetic poet Abraham Abulafia went on to Sicily, where he proclaimed himself to be the Messiah.
I return to Poldy the cuckold and by way of him to Shakespeare:
MARION: Let him look, the pishogue! Pimp! And scourge himself! I’ll write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the bearded woman, to raise weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed and stamped receipt.
BOYLAN: (Clasps himself.) Here, I can’t hold this little lot much longer. (He strides off on stiff cavalry legs.)
BELLA: (Laughing) Ho ho ho ho.
BOYLAN: (To Bloom, over his shoulder) You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times.
BLOOM: Thank you, sir. I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot? (He holds an ointment jar) Vaseline, sir? Orangeflower…? Lukewarm water…?
KITTY: (From the sofa) Tell us, Florry. Tell us. What.
(Florry whispers to her. Whispering lovewords murmur liplapping loudly, poppysmic plopslop.)
MINA KENNEDY: (Her eyes upturned) O, it must be like the scent of geraniums and lovely peaches! O, he simply idolises every bit of her! Stuck together! Covered with kisses!