Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  LYDIA DOUCE: (Her mouth opening) Yumyum. O, he’s carrying her round the room doing it! Ride a cock horse. You could hear them in Paris and New York. Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream.

  KITTY: (Laughing) Hee hee hee.

  BOYLAN’S VOICE: (Sweetly, hoarsely, in the pit of his stomach) Ah! Gooblazeqruk brukarchkrasht!

  MARION’S VOICE: (Hoarsely, sweetly, rising to her throat) O! Weeshwashtkissimapooisthnapoohuck!

  BLOOM: (His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself) Show! Hide! Show! Plough her! More! Shoot!

  BELLA, ZOE, FLORRY, KITTY: Ho ho! Ha ha! Hee hee!

  LYNCH: (Points) The mirror up to nature. (He laughs.) Hu hu hu hu hu!

  (Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall.)

  SHAKESPEARE: (In dignified ventriloquy) ’Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind. (To Bloom) Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible. Gaze. (He crows with a black capon’s laugh.) Iagogo! How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun. Iagogogo!

  BLOOM: (Smiles yellowly at the three whores) When will I hear the joke?

  ZOE: Before you’re twice married and once a widower.

  BLOOM: Lapses are condoned. Even the great Napoleon when measurements were taken next the skin after his death…

  (Mrs Dignam, widow woman, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with deathtalk, tears and Tunney’s tawny sherry, hurries by in her weeds, her bonnet awry, rouging and powdering her cheeks, lips and nose, a pen chivvying her brood of cygnets. Beneath her skirt appear her late husband’s everyday trousers and turnedup boots, large eights. She holds a Scottish widow’s insurance policy and a large marquee umbrella under which her brood run with her, Patsy hopping on one shod foot, his collar loose, a hank of porksteaks dangling, Freddy whimpering, Susy with a crying cod’s mouth, Alice struggling with the baby. She cuffs them on, her streamers flaunting aloft.)

  FREDDY: Ah, ma, you’re dragging me along!

  SUSY: Mamma, the beeftea is fizzing over!

  SHAKESPEARE: (With paralytic rage) Weda seca whokilla farst.

  (The face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, refeatures Shakespeare’s beardless face. The marquee umbrella sways drunkenly, the children run aside. Under the umbrella appears Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and kimono gown. She glides sidling and bowing, twirling japanesily.)

  MRS CUNNINGHAM: (Sings)

  And they call me the jewel of Asia!

  MARTIN CUNNINGHAM: (Gazes on her, impassive) Immense! Most bloody awful demirep!

  STEPHEN: Et exaltabuntur cornua iusti. Queens lay with prize bulls. Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first confessionbox. Forget not Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions of the house of Lambert. And Noah was drunk with wine. And his ark was open.

  BELLA: None of that here. Come to the wrong shop.

  In what ought to be a moment of total degradation, Poldy pleasures himself by watching through a keyhole the plowing of Molly by Blazes Boylan. To a chorus of laughing whores, Stephen’s intoxicated companion Lynch points to a mirror and laughingly quotes Hamlet: “The mirror up to nature.” Then mystery intervenes. Stephen and Bloom, components of James Joyce, gaze in the mirror and their reflection is the face of Shakespeare, beardless, rigid in facial paralysis, with the image of the cuckold formed by the reindeer antlers of a hat rack. With amiable dignity, the Bard reproves the mindless Lynch by misquoting Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Deserted Village”: “ ’Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind.” To Poldy he says, “Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible,” a mild reproof to a Peeping Tom. But then Shakespeare emphasizes to Poldy: “Gaze.” With the dark laughter of the tragedian of supposed cuckoldry, he warns Poldy, “Iagogo! How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun. Iagogo!” Poldy is hardly likely to treat Molly as Desdemona, but that is not Shakespeare’s point. Stephen was born on a Thursday; he and Poldy fuse, Shakespeare is the ghost of Hamlet’s father warning the composite figure not to meld Hamlet with Othello, which would make Molly into a complex mix of Gertrude, Desdemona, and Stephen’s dead mother.

  But why is the image of Shakespeare so transmuted that he is beardless, a frozen face, and a capon? I think that Shakespeare as precursor mocks his disciple Bloom/Joyce/Stephen so as to say, “You are trying to see yourself in me, but, staring in the mirror, you behold what you are; being beardless, you lack my potency, and, being rigid in facial paralysis, you are void of my gentle countenance.” Shakespeare then adds, in a prophecy of the Wake, “Weda seca whokilla farst,” which reworks “None wed the second but who kill’d the first,” taken from The Murder of Gonzago, as revised by Prince Hamlet. Stephen quotes from Psalm 75:10 in the Vulgate: “And the horns of the righteous shall be exalted.” He goes on to the copulation of Pasiphaë with a prize bull, and to a wordplay on Noah’s Ark and the Ark of the Covenant of Moses. Bella’s response to “his Ark was open” is a brusque and strangely virtuous “None of that here. Come to the wrong shop.”

  The crisis of “Circe” comes with the apparition of Stephen’s mother:

  STEPHEN: Ho!

  (Stephen’s mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor in leper grey with a wreath of faded orange blossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with grave mould. Her hair is scant and lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly.)

  THE CHOIR:

  Liliata rutilantium te confessorum…

  Iubilantium te virginum…

  (From the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured jester’s dress of puce and yellow and clown’s cap with curling bell, stands gaping at her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand)

  BUCK MULLIGAN: She’s beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the afflicted mother. (He upturns his eyes) Mercurial Malachi!

  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 capbel) 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.

  ZOE: (Fanning herself with the grate fan) I’m melting!

  FLORRY: (Points to Stephen) Look! He’s white.

  BLOOM: (Goes to the window to open it more) Giddy.

  THE MOTHER: (With smouldering eyes) Repent! O, the fire of hell!

  STEPHEN: (Panting) The corpsechewer! Raw head and bloody bones!

&n
bsp; THE MOTHER: (Her face drawing near and nearer, sending out an ashen breath) Beware! (She raises her blackened, withered right arm slowly towards Stephen’s breast with outstretched finger) Beware God’s hand! (A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen’s heart)

  STEPHEN: (Strangled with rage) Shite! (His features grow drawn and grey and old)

  BLOOM: (At the window) What?

  STEPHEN: Ah non, par exemple! The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. Non serviam!

  FLORRY: Give him some cold water. Wait. (She rushes out)

  THE MOTHER: (Wrings her hands slowly, moaning desperately) O Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, O Divine Sacred Heart!

  STEPHEN: No! No! No! Break my spirit, all of you, if you can! I’ll bring you all to heel!

  THE MOTHER: (In the agony of her deathrattle) Have mercy on Stephen, Lord, for my sake! Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary.

  STEPHEN: Nothung!

  (He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry)

  THE GASJET: Pwfungg!

  The interplay between the deathly mother, the stricken Stephen, and the flamboyant Buck Mulligan in his final manifestation is masterly. I have never understood why this passage hurts me. It is so remote from my memories of my long-ago departed mother that I have to reflect on the limits of my emotional understanding of an author who had a Jesuit education, against which he reacted so formidably. Perhaps it should be read as a mock apocalypse, since Stephen’s ashplant merely tears the paper off the cheap chandelier, for which Poldy gives Bella one shilling, and yet the stage directions are almost Blakean: “Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.” We could be in Night the Ninth of The Four Zoas, except that the gasjet punctures illusion with a limp “Pwfungg!”

  STEPHEN: (Turns) Eh? (He disengages himself) Why should I not speak to him or to any human being who walks upright upon this oblate orange? (He points his finger) I’m not afraid of what I can talk to if I see his eye. Retaining the perpendicular.

  (He staggers a pace back)

  BLOOM: (Propping him) Retain your own.

  STEPHEN: (Laughs emptily) My centre of gravity is displaced. I have forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle for life is the law of existence but but human philirenists, notably the tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. (He taps his brow) But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.

  BIDDY THE CLAP: Did you hear what the professor said? He’s a professor out of the college.

  CUNTY KATE: I did. I heard that.

  BIDDY THE CLAP: He expresses himself with such marked refinement of phraseology.

  CUNTY KATE: Indeed, yes. And at the same time with such apposite trenchancy.

  PRIVATE CARR: (Pulls himself free and comes forward) What’s that you’re saying about my king?

  It is again very Blakean that Stephen taps his forehead and announces: “But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.” That cheers us, but the soldiers are as drunk as Stephen is, and the young poet is felled by a blow:

  BLOOM: (Over Stephen’s shoulder) Yes, go. You see he’s incapable.

  PRIVATE CARR: (Breaks loose) I’ll insult him.

  (He rushes towards Stephen, fists outstretched, and strikes him in the face. Stephen totters, collapses, falls, stunned. He lies prone, his face to the sky, his hat rolling to the wall. Bloom follows and picks it up.)

  No matter how often I reread Ulysses, I am always startled when the recumbent Stephen provokes Bloom’s vision of his lost son, Rudy:

  (He stretches out his arms, sighs again and curls his body. Bloom holding his hat and ashplant stands erect. A dog barks in the distance. Bloom tightens and loosens his grip on the ashplant. He looks down on Stephen’s face and form.)

  BLOOM: (Communes with the night) Face reminds me of his poor mother. In the shady wood. The deep white breast. Ferguson, I think I caught. A girl. Some girl. Best thing could happen him…(He murmurs.)…swear that I will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any part or parts, art or arts…(He murmurs.) in the rough sands of the sea…a cabletow’s length from the shore…where the tide ebbs…and flows…

  (Silent, thoughtful, alert, he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)

  BLOOM: (Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!

  RUDY: (Gazes unseeing into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)

  Uncomprehending that Stephen is murmuring a Yeatsian lyric, Poldy is prompted to repeat part of his Masonic oath of silence and then beholds a changeling Rudy, now eleven years though he died at eleven days, in fairy garb and evidently reading Torah or Talmud, since he goes from right to left, “inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.” He does not recognize his father, who remembers heartbreakingly that the infant had been buried in a white lambkin.

  Though Ulysses goes on for three more episodes, culminating in Molly’s rapturous monologue, for me the vision of Rudy, which counters the apparition of Stephen’s mother, is a destination attained. Poldy wants a son in Stephen but will not find one. Stephen goes forth unaltered, so that jewgreek does not become greekjew. Leopold Bloom returns to his unfaithful Penelope and falls asleep cheerfully enough, resting upon her. Molly’s long soliloquy deserves all the admiration it has been accorded and ends quite gloriously with its repeated chorus of “yes,” one after another.

  I have not read all the critical studies of Finnegans Wake, but I have learned most from Joyce’s Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake by John Bishop (1986). I recall purchasing it in London and reading it straight through and back again for several days. During the last thirty years, I have made a number of returns to it and have found it perpetually fresh.

  John Bishop teaches us to accept that the obscurities of the Wake are deliberate and inevitable. Joyce sets himself to write the epic of Night and Dream. The daylight of Ulysses is gone. Like Sigmund Freud, Joyce writes his Dream Book. I have studied the Wake formally only once, throughout an academic year when I took part in Thornton Wilder’s seminar on the Wake, conducted in his house at 50 Deepwood Drive in Hamden, overlooking New Haven. I was a graduate student at Yale, but Wilder’s seminar was independent of Yale, and you joined by invitation. Mostly we listened, as the dramatist’s immersion in Joyce was impressive. Later, at Pembroke College, Cambridge, my tutor and friend was Matthew J. C. Hodgart, who wrote both on song and on Shakespeare’s endless presence in the Wake.

  Shem the Penman, in Book 1, Chapter 7, of the Wake, is the author James Joyce at work. But he is the author working under the shadow of Shakespeare:

  But would anyone, short of a madhouse, believe it? Neither of those clean little cherubum, Nero or Nobookisonester himself, ever nursed such a spoiled opinion of his monstrous marvellosity as did this mental and moral defective (here perhaps at the vanessance of his lownest) who was known to grognt rather than gunnard upon one occasion, while drinking heavily of spirits to that interlocutor a latere and private privysuckatary he used to pal around with, in the kavehazs, one Davy Browne-Nowlan, his heavenlaid twin, (this hambone dogpoet pseudoed himself under the hangname he gave himself of Bethgel
ert) in the porchway of a gipsy’s bar (Shem always blaspheming, so holy writ, Billy, he would try, old Belly, and pay this one manjack congregant of his four soups every lass of nexmouth, Bolly, so sure as thair’s a tail on a commet, as a taste for storik’s fortytooth, that is to stay, to listen out, ony twenny minnies moe, Bully, his Ballade Imaginaire which was to be dubbed Wine, Woman and Waterclocks, or How a Guy Finks and Fawkes When He Is Going Batty, by Maistre Sheames de la Plume, some most dreadful stuff in a murderous mirrorhand) that he was avoopf (parn me!) aware of no other shaggspick, other Shakhisbeard, either prexactly unlike his polar andthisishis or procisely the seem as woops (parn!) as what he fancied or guessed the sames as he was himself and that, greet scoot, duckings and thuggery, though he was foxed fux to fux like a bunnyboy rodger with all the teashop lionses of Lumdrum hivanhoesed up gagainst him, being a lapsis linquo with a ruvidubb shortartempa, bad cad dad fad sad mad nad vanhaty bear, the consciquenchers of casuality prepestered crusswords in postposition, scruff, scruffer, scrufferumurraimost andallthatsortofthing, if reams stood to reason and his lanka-livline lasted he would wipe alley english spooker, multapho-niaksically spuking, off the face of the erse.

  I do not want to try to decipher this phrase by phrase, word by word, as there are a plenitude of such translators. Go with the drift, chanting this aloud, and what matters most will reveal itself to you. Shaggspick and Shakhisbeard return us to the mirror up to nature in which Stephen and Bloom beheld a beardless Shakespeare staring out at them and thus proclaiming his priority and his continuance. Shem’s pretentions nevertheless prevail. Joyce will not rewrite Shakespeare, though he cannot stop utilizing him.

  What rises above all this are the strongest pages Joyce ever wrote, where Anna Livia Plurabelle—great mother, river-of-rivers, wife to Everyone—flows home as the Liffey empties into the Irish Sea: