Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  He walks on, now heading for the Art Museum and National Library where he wants to look up an advertisement in an old issue of the Kilkenny People paper. "At Duke lane a ravenous terrier choked up a sick knuckly cud on the cobble stones and lapped it with new zest. Surfeit. Returned with thanks having fully digested the contents.... Mr Bloom coasted warily. Ruminants. His second course." Much in the same way will Stephen, poor dogsbody, disgorge brilliant literary theories in the library scene. Walking along the street Bloom thinks of the past and the present, and whether teco in the Don Giovanni aria means "tonight," (it does not: it means "with thee"). "Could buy one of those silk petticoats for Molly, colour of her new garters."[*] But the shadow of Boylan, of four o'clock, only two hours to go, intervenes. "Today. Today. Not think." He pretends not to see Boylan passing.

  Nabokov's map of the blind stripling's route in Ulysses, part two

  Towards the end of the chapter you will notice the first appearance of a minor character who will walk through several chapters as one of the many synchronizing agents in the book; that is, characters or things whose changing place marks the flow of time throughout that particular day. "A blind stripling stood tapping the curbstone with his slender cane. No tram in sight. Wants to cross.

  —Do you want to cross? Mr Bloom asked.

  The blind stripling did not answer. His wall face frowned weakly. He moved his head uncertainly.

  —You're in Dawson street, Mr Bloom said. Molesworth street is opposite. Do you want to cross? There's nothing in the way.

  The cane moved out trembling to the left. Mr Bloom's eye followed its line and saw again the dyeworks' van drawn up before Drago's [the barber]. Where I saw [Boylan's] brilliantined hair just when I was. Horse drooping. Driver in John Long's. Slaking his drouth.

  —There's a van there, Mr Bloom said, but it's not moving. I'll see you across. Do you want to go to Molesworth street?

  —Yes, the stripling answered. South Frederick street. [Actually he heads for Clare Street.]

  —Come, Mr Bloom said.

  He touched the thin elbow gently: then took the limp seeing hand to guide it forward....

  —Thanks, sir.

  Knows I'm a man. Voice.

  —Right now? First turn to the left.

  The blind stripling tapped the curbstone and went on his way, drawing his cane back, feeling again."

  Nabokov's notes on the routes followed by Bloom, Farrell, and the blind stripling

  Bloom having crossed the Liffey again by another bridge at about half past one, walks south and runs into Mrs. Breen and presently they both see the insane Mr. Farrell striding by. After lunching at Byrne's pub, Bloom walks on, heading for the National Library. It is here in Dawson Street that he helps the blind stripling to cross, and the youth continues east towards Clare Street. In the meantime, Farrell, who has gone by way of Kildare Street and reached Merrion Square, has turned back and brushes by the blind youth. "As he strode past Mr Bloom's dental windows [another Bloom] the sway of his dustcoat brushed rudely from its angle a slender tapping cane and swept onwards, having buffeted a thewless body. The blind stripling turned his sickly face after the striding form.

  —God's curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You're blinder nor I am, you bitch's bastard!"

  Thus madness and blindness meet. Shortly, the viceroy driving to open the bazaar, "passed a blind stripling opposite Broadbent's." Still later, the blind youth will be tapping his way back, westward back to Ormond's where he had been tuning the piano and has forgotten his tuning fork. We shall hear the approaching tip-tap throughout the Ormond chapter around four o'clock.

  PART TWO, CHAPTER 6

  Time: Around two o'clock.

  Place: The National Library.

  Characters: Stephen has sent Buck Mulligan a telegram implying that he should relinquish the tower to him, and in the meantime, at the library, is discussing Shakespeare with certain members of the Irish Revival group of writers and scholars. There is Thomas Lyster (real name), here dubbed the quaker librarian because he wears a broad-brimmed hat to cover a big bald head; there is in the shadow George Russell, pen name A.E., a tall figure and well-known Irish writer in bearded homespun whom Bloom saw passing in the precedent chapter; there is John Eglinton, a merry puritan; there is Mr. Richard Best, who gets mixed up with the second-best bed that Shakespeare left to his widow Anne Hathaway (this Best is depicted as a somewhat shallow and conventional man of letters); and presently comes, primrose-vested, the mocking Malachi Mulligan with Stephen's cryptic telegram just received.

  Action: Stephen discoursing on Shakespeare argues (1) that the Ghost in Hamlet is really Shakespeare himself, (2) that Hamlet is to be identified with Hamnet, Shakespeare's little son; and (3) that Richard Shakespeare, William's brother, had an intrigue with Anne, Shakespeare's wife, thus accounting for the bitterness of the play. When he is asked if he believes his own thesis, Stephen promptly answers: no. Everything is fouled up in this book.[*] The discussion in this chapter is one of those things that is more amusing for a writer to write than for a reader to read, and so its details need not be examined. However, it is in this chapter at the library that Stephen first becomes aware of Bloom.

  Joyce has intertwined the Stephen and Bloom patterns much more closely than is generally thought. The connection begins in the book long before Bloom passes Stephen on the library steps. It begins in a dream. Nobody has noticed yet—it is true not much has been written about the real Joyce, Joyce the artist—no commentator has noticed yet that as in Tolstoy's Anna Karenin there is in Ulysses a significant double dream; that is, the same dream seen by two people at the same time.

  On an early page, Stephen complains to Mulligan, who is shaving, that Haines awoke him during the night by raving about shooting a black panther. The black panther leads to Bloom, in black, the kindly black cat. This is how it goes. Walking along the beach after being paid by Deasy, Stephen observes the cocklepickers and their dog, who has just enjoyed the simple pleasures of the poor by cocking his leg against a rock. In a reminiscence of his riddle to his pupils about the fox, Stephens stream of thought is at first colored by his guilt: "His hindpaws then scattered sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved. Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand, dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spousebreach, vulturing the dead.

  After [Haines] woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who."

  Now this is a prophetic dream. But let us mark that near the end of part two, chapter 10—a chapter where Bloom is also on a beach, Bloom briefly and dimly recalls the dream he saw the same night as Stephen saw his. At first his stream of thought, caught by an advertisement, hovers over his old flame, now the aging and unattractive Mrs. Breen, with her husband who was tricked and went off to see a lawyer about the insulting anonymous message he had received. "Ladies' grey flannelette bloomers, three shillings a pair, astonishing bargain. Plain and loved, loved forever, they say. Ugly: no woman thinks she is. Love, lie and be handsome for tomorrow we die. See him sometimes walking about trying to find out who played the trick. U.p.: up. Fate that is. He, not me. Also a shop often noticed. Curse seems to dog it. Dreamt last night? Wait. Something confused. She had red slippers on. Turkish. Wore the breeches." And then his thought wanders on in another direction. In chapter 11, the maternity hospital chapter, another reference is slipped in although without further detail: "Bloom there for a languor he had but was now better, he having dreamed tonight a strange fancy of his dame Mrs Moll with red slippers on in pair of Turkey trunks which is thought by those in ken to be for a change....

  So on the night of 15 June to 16 June, Stephen Dedalus in his tower
at Sandycove, and Mr. Bloom in the connubial bed in his house on Eccles Street dream the same dream. Now, what is Joyce's intention here, in these twin dreams? He wishes to show that in his Oriental dream Stephen foresaw a stranger offering him the opulent charms of his, the dark stranger's, wife. This dark stranger is Bloom. Let us look at another passage. During his walk before breakfast to purchase a kidney, Bloom conjures up a very similar Oriental vision: 'Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at dawn, travel round in front of the sun, steal a day's march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically. Walk along a strand, strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker too, old Tweedy's [Molly's father's] big moustaches leaning on a long kind of a spear. Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged smoking a coiled pipe. Cries of sellers in the streets. Drink water scented with fennel, sherbet. Wander along all day. Might meet a robber or two. Well, meet him. Getting on to sundown. The shadows of the mosques along the pillars: priests with a scroll rolled up. A shiver of the trees, signal, the evening wind. I pass on. Fading gold sky. A mother watches from her doorway. She calls her children home in their dark language. High wall: beyond strings twanged. Night sky moon, violet, colour of Molly's new garters. Strings. Listen. A girl playing one of these instruments what do you call them: dulcimers. I pass."

  Around two o'clock Bloom visits the National Library, and Stephen, walking out with Mulligan, sees Bloom, whom he knows slightly, for the first time that day. Here is Stephen seeing the dream stranger Bloom: "A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting.

  —Good day again, Buck Mulligan said.

  The portico.

  Here I watched the birds for augury. Aengus of the birds. They go, they come. Last night I flew. Easily flew. Men wondered. Street of harlots after. A creamfruit melon he held to me. In. You will see.[*]

  —The wandering jew, Buck Mulligan whispered with clown's awe. Did you see his eye?" and he cracks an obscene joke. A few lines down: "A dark back went before them. Step of a pard, down, out by the gateway, under portcullis barbs.

  They followed."

  Bloom's dark back, his step of a pard. The link is complete.

  Further on, in the nightmare chapter in the house of ill-fame, we find an echo of the Bloom-Stephen twin dream. The stage direction reads: "([Bloom] looks up. Beside hermitage of datepalms a handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before him. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet trousers and jacket slashed with gold. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her. A white yashmak violet in the night, covers her face, leaving free only her large dark eyes and raven hair.)" Bloom calls out, "Molly!" Then mulch later in the same scene Stephen says to one of the girls: "Mark me. I dreamt of a watermelon," to which the girl replies, "Go abroad and love a foreign lady." The melons Stephen dreamed of, originally the creamfruit offered him, are finally identified as Molly Bloom's opulent curves in the question-and-answer chapter 2 of part three: Bloom "kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation."

  The twin dreams of Stephen and Bloom prove prophetic, because in the next to last chapter of the book it is Bloom's intention to do exactly what the stranger in Stephen's dream wished to do—namely, Bloom wishes to bring Stephen and Marion, Bloom's wife, together as a means of displacing Boylan, a theme which is especially stressed in the chapter of the cabman's shelter at the beginning of part three.

  PART TWO, CHAPTER 7

  This consists of nineteen sections.

  Time: Five minutes to three.

  Place: Dublin.

  Characters: Fifty characters, including all our friends and their various activities within the same time limits, around three in the afternoon of 16 June.

  Action: These characters cross and recross each other's trails in a most intricate counterpoint—a monstrous development of Flaubert's counterpoint themes, as in the agricultural show scene in Madame Bovary. So the device here is synchronization. It starts with the Jesuit Father Conmee of Saint Xavier's Church, Upper Gardiner Street, an optimistic and elegant priest, nicely combining this world and the other, and concludes with the viceroy, the governor of Ireland, driving through the town. Father Conmee is followed on his rounds, blessing a one-legged sailor, speaking to parishioner after parishioner as he walks, passing the O'Neill funeral establishment, until at Newcomen Bridge he boards a tramcar that takes him to the Howth Road stop, to Malahide, northeast of Dublin. It was a charming day, elegant and optimistic. In a field a flushed young man came from a gap in the hedge, and after him came a young woman with wild nodding daisies in her band. The young man, a medical student, named Vincent Lynch we learn later, raised his cap abruptly; the young woman abruptly bent and with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig (marvelous writer). Father Conmee blessed both gravely.

  In the second section the synchronization begins. Near Newcomen Bridge, at the undertaker O'Neill's, the undertaker's assistant Kelleher, who has taken care of the Dignam funeral, closes his daybook and chats with the constable, the same policeman who had saluted Father Conmee in passing a few moments earlier. By this time Father John Conmee has gone towards the bridge and now (synchronization!) steps into the tram on Newcomen Bridge in between the sentences referring to Kelleher. See the technique? It is now three. Kelleher sends a silent jet of hayjuice (produced by the blade of hay that he was chewing while checking figures in his daybook when Father Conmee passed a moment ago), Kelleher sends the silent jet from his mouth and at the same time in another part of the town (Section 3) a generous white arm (Molly Bloom's) from a window in Eccles Street, three miles away to the northwest, flings forth a coin to the one-legged sailor who has by now reached Eccles Street. Molly is grooming herself for her date with Blazes Boylan. And also at the same time J. J. O'Molloy is told that Ned Lambert has come to the warehouse with a visitor, a visit taken care of later in section 8.

  There is not time or space to go through all the detailed synchronizing mechanisms in all nineteen sections of this chapter. We must hit only the high spots. In section 4 Katy, Boody, and Maggy Dedalus, Stephen's young sisters (he has four in all) return empty-handed from the pawnshop while Father Conmee, walking through the Clongowes fields, has his thin socked ankles tickled by the stubble. Where is the crumpled skiff Elijah? Find her. What lackey rings what bell—barang! The man at the auction rooms—at Dillon's.

  About 3:15, we start to follow Blazes Boylan, who has begun his little journey Mollyward, to Molly Bloom whom he will reach in a jaunting car around a quarter to four. But this is still around three o'clock (he will stop at the Ormond Hotel on the way); and at Thornton's, a fruit shop, he is sending fruit to Molly by tram. It will take ten minutes to reach her. Hely's sandwich men by this time are plodding by the fruit shop. Bloom is now under Merchant's Arch, near Metal Bridge, and bends, dark-backed, over a book hawker's cart. The end of the section gives us the origin in the fruit shop of the red carnation that Boylan is to carry with its stem between his teeth throughout the chapter. At the time he cadges the carnation he begs the use of the phone, and as we later learn calls his secretary.

  Now Stephen walks. In the vicinity of Trinity College he meets his former teacher of Italian, Almidano Artifoni, and they talk briskly in Italian. Artifoni accuses Stephen of sacrificing his youth to his ideals. A bloodless sacrifice, says Stephen smiling. The seventh section is synchronized with the fifth. Boylan's secretary, Miss Dunn, has been reading a novel and now answers the telephone call Boylan makes in the fruit shop. She tells Boylan that the sports editor Lenehan has been looking for him and will be in the Ormond Hotel at four. (We shall meet them there in a later chapter.) In this section two other synchronizations occur. A disk that shoots down a groove and ogles the onlookers with the number six refers to a betting machine which Tom Rochford, bookie, demonstrates farther on in the ninth section. And w
e follow the five tall white-hatted sandwich men who having reached their limit, beyond Monypeny's Corner, eel themselves around and begin their return.

  Ned Lambert, in section 8, with Jack O'Molloy shows a visitor, a Protestant clergyman, the Reverend Love, his warehouse which was formerly the council chamber of Saint Mary's Abbey. At this moment the girl with the medical student in that country lane where Father Conmee has walked is picking the twig from her skirt. This is synchronization: while this happens here, that happens there. Soon after three o'clock (section 9) Rochford the bookie shows Lenehan his gadget and the disk slides down the groove and reveals a six. At the same time there goes Richie Goulding, a law clerk, Stephen's uncle, with whom Bloom will eat at the Ormond Hotel in the next chapter. Lenehan leaves Rochford with M'Coy (who had asked Bloom to put down his name at Dignam's funeral when he could not attend) and they visit another bookie. On their way to the Ormond Hotel, after stopping at Lynam's to see Sceptre's starting odds, they observe Mr. Bloom "—Leopold or the Bloom is on the Rye," Lenehan quips. Bloom is scanning those books on the hawker's cart. Lenehan's walking towards the Ormond Hotel is synchronized with Molly Bloom replacing the card advertising an unfurnished apartment that has slipped from the sash when she opened it to fling the one-legged sailor a penny. And since at the same time Kelleher was talking to the constable, and Father Conmee had boarded a trolley, we conclude with a tinge of artistic pleasure that sections 2, 3, and 9 occurred simultaneously in different places.