—Very good. Where?
The boy's blank face asked the blank window."
Stephen's stream of thought takes over. "Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake's wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then?"
In the space of one moment, while a schoolboy pauses in blankness of mind, Stephen's vivid thought evokes the torrent of history, shattered glass, falling walls, the livid flame of time. What's left us then? Apparently the comfort of oblivion: "—I forget the place, sir. 279 B.C.
—Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the gorescarred book" (red-inked, bloody history book).
The fig rolls that one of the boys is eating are what we call fig newtons. The young idiot makes a poor pun: Pyrrhus—a pier. Stephen launches one of his typical epigrams. What is a pier? A disappointed bridge. Not all the students understand this.
All through the chapter the events at school are interrupted, or better say annotated, by Stephen's stream of inner thought. He thinks of Haines and England, of the library in Paris where he had read Aristotle "sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night." "The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms." The soul is the form of forms will be the leading theme in the next chapter. Stephen asks a riddle:
The cock crew
The sky was blue:
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
'Tis time for this poor soul
To go to heaven.
At eleven that morning Patrick Dignam, a friend of his father's, is to be buried, but Stephen is also obsessed with the memory of his mother's recent death. She has been buried in that cemetery; his father at Dignam's funeral will be shown sobbing as he passes his wife's grave, but Stephen will not go to Paddy Dignam's funeral. He answers his riddle,"—The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush."
He goes on brooding on his mother and his guilt: "A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped." The sophist Stephen can prove anything, for instance that Hamlet's grandfather is Shakespeare's ghost. Why grandfather and not father? Because of grandmother, meaning to him mother, in the line about the fox. In the next chapter Stephen, walking on the beach, sees a dog, and the dog idea and fox idea merge as the dog foxily scrapes up the sand, and listens, for he has buried something, his grandmother.
While the boys play hockey, Stephen talks to the schoolmaster Mr. Deasy and is paid his salary. Study the beautifully detailed way in which Joyce describes this transaction. "He brought out of his coat a pocketbook bound by a leather thong. It slapped open and he took from it two notes, one of joined halves, and laid them carefully on the table.
—Two, he said, strapping and stowing his pocketbook away.
And now his strongroom for the gold. Stephen's embarrassed hand moved over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar: whelks and money cowries and leopard shells: and this, whorled as an emir's turban, and this, the scallop of Saint James. An old pilgrim's hoard, dead treasure, hollow shells.
A sovereign fell, bright and new, on the soft pile of the tablecloth.
—Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his hand. These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is for shillings, sixpence, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.
He shot from it two crowns and two shillings.
—Three twelve, he said. I think you'll find that's right.
—Thank you, sir, Stephen said, gathering the money together with shy haste and putting it all in a pocket of his trousers.
—No thanks at all, Mr Deasy said. You have earned it.
Stephen's hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols too of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket. Symbols soiled by greed and misery."
You will notice with a little pang of pleasure the shell of Saint James, prototype of a cake in Proust, the madeleine, la coquille de Saint Jacques. These shells were used as money by the Africans.
Deasy asks him to take a letter he has typed and have it printed in the Evening Telegraph. Mr. Deasy, a philistine and a busybody, not unlike M. Homais in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Mr. Deasy pompously discusses in his letter a local cattle plague. Deasy is full of vicious political clichés taking a philistine's usual crack at minorities. England he says "is in the hands of the jews.... As sure as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction." To which Stephen very sensibly replies that a merchant is one who buys cheap and sells dear, Jew or Gentile: a wonderful squelching answer to bourgeois anti-Semitism.
PART ONE, CHAPTER 3
Time: Between ten and eleven in the morning.
Action: Stephen walks to the city by way of the beach, Sandymount strand. We shall glimpse him later, still walking steadily, on our way to Dignam's funeral when Bloom, Cunningham, Power, and Simon Dedalus, Stephen's father, drive in a carriage to the cemetery; and then we shall meet him again at his first destination, the (Telegraph) newspaper office. As Stephen walks on the beach he meditates on many things: the "ineluctable modality of the visible," ineluctable meaning "not to be overcome" and modality "form as opposed to substance"; the two old women, midwives, whom he sees; the resemblance of the cocklepicker's bag to a midwife's bag; his mother; his uncle Richie; various passages from Deasy's letter; Egan the Irish revolutionary in exile; Paris; the sea; his mother's death. He sees two other cocklepickers, two gypsies (Egyptians means "gypsies"), a man and a woman, and his mind immediately supplies him with samples of rogues' lingo, rogue words, gypsy talk.[*]
White thy fambles, red thy gan
And thy quarrons dainty is.
Couch a hogshead with me then.
In the darkmans clip and kiss.
A man has been recently drowned. He has already been mentioned by the boatmen when Mulligan and Haines were bathing and Stephen watching; he is a character who will reappear. "Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At once he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now.
Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwhale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun....
My handkerchief. He threw it. I remember. Did I not take it up?
His hand groped vainly in his pockets. No, I didn't. Better buy one.
He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully. For the rest let look who will.
Behind. Perhaps there is someone.
He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship."
In chapter 7 of part two we learn that this is the schooner Rosevean from Bridgwater, loaded with bricks. It is bringing Murphy, who will meet Bloom in the cabman's shelter, like two ships meeting at sea.
Nabokov's map of Bloom's and Stephen's travels in Ulysses, part two
PART TWO, CHAPTER l
Style: Joyce logical and lucid.
Time: Eight in the morning, synchronized with Stephen's morning.
Place: 7 Eccles Street, where the Blooms live in the northwest part of the town; Upper Dorset Street is in the immediate vicinity.
Main characters: Blo
om; his wife; incidental characters: the pork-butcher Dlugacz, from Hungary like Bloom, and the maid servant of the Woods family next door, 8 Eccles Street. Who is Bloom? Bloom is the son of a Hungarian Jew Rudolph Virag (which means "flower" in Hungarian), who changed his name to Bloom, and of Ellen Higgins, of mixed Irish and Hungarian descent. Thirty-eight years old, born in 1866 in Dublin. Attended a school conducted by a Mrs. Ellis, then high school with Vance as a teacher, finished schooling in 1880. Because of neuralgia and loneliness after his wife's death, Bloom's father committed suicide in 1886. Bloom met Molly, the daughter of Brian Tweedy, when they were paired off in a game of musical chairs in Mat Dillon's house. He married her on 8 October 1888, he being twenty-two and she eighteen. Their daughter Milly was born on 15 June 1889, son Rudy in 1894, died when only eleven days old. At first Bloom was an agent for the stationery firm of Wisdom Hely's, at one time he had also been with a firm of cattle dealers working at the cattle market. Lived in Lombard Street from 1888 to 1893, in Raymond Terrace from 1893 to 1895, at Ontario Terrace in 1895 and for a period before that at the City Arms Hotel, and then in Holles Street in 1897. In 1904 they live in 7 Eccles Street.
Their house is narrow, with two front windows in each of its three front stories. The house no longer exists, but was actually empty in 1904, the year which Joyce some fifteen years later after correspondence with a relative, Aunt Josephine, selected for his invented Blooms. When a Mr. Finneran took over in 1905, he little imagined (says my informer Patricia Hutchins who wrote a charming book on James Joyce's Dublin [1950]) Mr. Finneran little imagined the literary ghosts which were yet to have lived there. The Blooms occupy two rooms on the hall floor (if seen from the front, Eccles Street; in the second story if seen from the rear), of their three-story rented house (if seen from the front), with the kitchen in the basement (or first story, if seen from the rear). The parlor is the front room; the bedroom is on the other side, and there is a little back garden. It is a cold-water flat with no bathroom, but a water closet on the landing and a rather mouldy privy in the back garden. The two stories above the Blooms are empty and for rent—in fact the Blooms have put a card on the front room window sash of the hall floor, saying "unfurnished apartments."
Nabokov's notes on the Bloom's house at 7 Eccles Street
Action: Bloom in the basement kitchen prepares breakfast for his wife, talks charmingly to the cat; then while the kettle sits sideways on the fire "dull and squat, its spout stuck out," he walks up to the hallway and, having decided to buy for himself a pork kidney, tells Molly through the bedroom door that he is going round the corner. A sleepy soft grunt answered: "Mn." A certain slip of paper is safe in the leather headband of his hat, "the sweated legend in the crown of his hat told him mutely: Plasto's high grade ha" (sweat has obliterated the t). The slip of paper is the card with a phony name Henry Flower which he will produce in the next chapter at the postal substation on Westland Row to obtain a letter from a Martha Clifford, pseudonym, with whom he is carrying on a clandestine correspondence that originated in the lovelorn column in the Irish Times. He has forgotten his key left in his everyday trousers, for he is wearing today a black suit in view of Dignam's funeral, which is scheduled for 11 A.M. He has, however, not forgotten to transfer into his hip pocket a potato which he carries, a mascot, a talisman, poor mother's panacea. (It saves him much later in the day from a sand-strewing trolley.) His stream of consciousness trickles over various pebbles of thought. "Creaky wardrobe. No use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that time. He pulled the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf dropped gently over the threshold, a limp lid. Looked shut. All right till I come back anyhow." He turns the corner of Dorset Street, greets the grocer, "lovely weather," in passing, enters the butcher's shop and notices the next-door servant girl buying sausages at the counter. Shall he and Dlugacz, both from Hungary, shall they hail each other as compatriots? Bloom puts it off again. No, another time. He reads the advertisement of a planter's company in Palestine and his thought wanders east to the Orient. The synchronizing cloud. "A cloud began to cover the sun wholly slowly wholly. Grey. Far." This is a synchronization. Stephen saw the same cloud before breakfast: "A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters." The green is a bitter memory in Stephen's mind, the gray of the cloud suggests to Bloom a gray desolation, a barren land in the Orient unlike the voluptuous orchards of the advertisement.
He returns with the kidney; meantime the mail has come, two letters and a postcard. "He stooped and gathered them. Mrs Marion Bloom. His quick heart slowed at once. Bold hand. Mrs Marion." (The letter is in a bold hand, and Mrs. Marion is a bold hand.) Why did his heart miss a beat? Well, as we shortly discover the letter is from Blazes Boylan, Marion's impresario. He is coming around four o'clock with the program for her next tour, and Bloom has a hunch that if he, the husband, does not interfere and keeps away that afternoon, four o'clock will prove to be a critical time mark: that afternoon Boylan will become Molly's lover. Mark Bloom's fatalistic attitude: "A soft qualm regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will happen, yes. Prevent. Useless: can't move. Girl's sweet light lips. Will happen too. He felt the flowing qualm spread over him. Useless to move now. Lips kissed, kissing kissed. Full gluey woman's lips."
The other letter and postcard are from Milly, Bloom's daughter, now in Mullingar, Westmeath County, central Ireland. The letter is for him, the card for her mother to thank her for a 15 June birthday present, a lovely box of chocolate creams. Milly writes "I am getting on swimming in the photo business now." When Mulligan was swimming after breakfast a young friend told him he had received a card from Bannon in Westmeath: "Says he found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her." Milly's letter continues: "There is to be a concert in the Greville Arms on Saturday. There is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his cousins or something are big swells he sings Boylan's... song about those seaside girls." In a sense, to Bloom, Blazes Boylan, Molly's four o'clock lover, is what, to Stephen, Buck Mulligan is, the gay usurper. All of Joyce's pieces fit: Molly, Bannon, Mulligan, Boylan. You will enjoy the wonderfully artistic pages, one of the greatest passages in all literature, when Bloom brings Molly her breakfast. How beautifully the man writes!
"—Who was the letter from? he asked.
Bold hand. Marion.
—O, Boylan, she said. He's bringing the programme.
—What are you singing?
—Lá ci darem with J. C. Doyle, she said, and Love's Old Sweet Song.
Her full lips, drinking, smiled. Rather stale smell that incense leaves next day. Like foul flowerwater.
Would you like the window open a little?
She doubled a slice of bread in her mouth, asking:
—What time is the funeral?
—Eleven, I think, he answered. I didn't see the paper.
Following the pointing of her finger he took up a leg of her soiled drawers from the bed. No? Then, a twisted grey garter looped round a stocking: rumpled, shiny sole.
—No: that book.
Other stocking. Her petticoat.
—It must have fell down, she said.
He felt here and there. Voglio e non vorrei. Wonder if she pronounces that right: voglio. Not in the bed. Must have slid down. He stooped and lifted the valance. The book, fallen, sprawled against the bulge of the orangekeyed chamberpot.
—Show here, she said. I put a mark in it. There's a word I wanted to ask you.
She swallowed a draught of tea from her cup held by nothandle and, having wiped her finger tips smartly on the blanket, began to search the text with the hairpin till she reached the word.
—Met him what? he asked.
—Here, she said. What does that mean?
He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail.
—Metempsychosis?
—Yes. Who's he when he's at home?
—Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It's Gree
k: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls.
—O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.
He smiled, glancing askance at her mocking eye. The same young eyes. The first night after the charades. Dolphin's Barn. He turned over the smudged pages. Ruby: the Pride of the Ring. Hello. Illustration. Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor naked. Sheet kindly lent. The monster Maffei desisted and flung his victim from him with an oath. Cruelty behind it all. Doped animals. Trapeze at Hengler's. Had to look the other way. Mob gaping. Break your neck and we'll break our sides. Families of them. Bone them young so they metempsychosis. That we live after death. Our souls. That a man's soul after he dies. Dignam's soul ...
—Did you finish it? he asked.
—Yes, she said. There's nothing smutty in it. Is she in love with the first fellow all the time?
—Never read it. Do you want another?
—Yes. Get another of Paul de Kock's. Nice name he has.
She poured more tea into her cup, watching its flow sideways.
Must get that Capel street library book renewed or they'll write to Kearney, my guarantor. Reincarnation: that's the word.
—Some people believe, he said, that we go on living in another body after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That we all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or some other planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their past lives.
The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea. Better remind her of the word: metempsychosis. An example would be better. An example?
The Bath of the Nymph over the bed. Given away with the Easter number of Photo Bits: Splendid masterpiece in art colours. Tea before you put milk in. Not u; like her with her hair down: slimmer. Three and six I gave for the frame. She said it would look nice over the bed. Naked nymphs: Greece: and for instance all the people that lived then.
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