Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  The offer is declined, but apparently Stephen does agree to coach Bloom's wife in Italian, although the proposal and its acceptance are given in a curiously problematic way. And presently Stephen prepares to leave.

  "For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?

  For a cat.

  What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

  The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit." Both men for an instant see the sky in the same way.

  After the two men part we shall never discover how and where Stephen the wanderer spent the rest of the night. It is almost 2 A.M. by now, but he will not go to his father's house nor will he go back to the brick tower, the key of which he has relinquished to Mulligan. Bloom is half inclined to remain outside and wait for the diffusion of daybreak, but he thinks better of it and returns to the house, where we have a description of the contents of the living room and, later, a wonderful catalogue of his books, clearly reflecting both his haphazard culture and his eager mind. He makes out his budget, item by item, of expenditures and receipts for 16 June 1904, balancing at £2.19.3. Each entry has been described in the course of his wanderings that day. After the famous description of the contents of two drawers that he examines, we have some recapitulations concerning the fatigues of the day:

  "What past consecutive causes, before rising preapprehended, of accumulated fatigue did Bloom, before rising, silently recapitulate?

  The preparation of breakfast (burnt offering): intestinal congestion and premeditative defecation (holy of holies): the bath (rite of John): the funeral (rite of Samuel): the advertisement of Alexander Keyes (Urim and Thummin): unsubstantial lunch (rite of Melchisedek): the visit to museum and national library (holy place): the bookhunt along Bedford row, Merchants Arch, Wellington Quay (Simchath Torah): the music in the Ormond Hotel (Shira Shirim): the altercation with a truculent troglodyte in Bernard Kiernan's premises (holocaust): a blank period of time including a cardrive, a visit to a house of mourning, a leavetaking (wilderness): the eroticism produced by feminine exhibitionism (rite of Onan): the prolonged delivery of Mrs Mina Purefoy (heave offering): the visit to the disorderly house of Mrs Bella Cohen, 82 Tyrone street, lower, and subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver street (Armageddon): nocturnal perambulation to and from the cabman's shelter, Butt Bridge (atonement)."

  Bloom walks from the living room into the bedroom, which is nicely described both as to Molly's attire scattered about, and the furniture. The room is lighted; Molly is dozing; Bloom enters the bed.

  "What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?

  New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed."

  His entering the double bed wakes up Molly:

  "What followed this silent action?

  Somnolent invocation, less somnolent recognition, incipient excitation, catechetical interrogation."

  To the question, implied, what have you been doing all day? Bloom's answer occupies a singularly brief space, compared to the length of Molly's meditation in the next chapter. He deliberately omits mention of three things: (1) the clandestine correspondence between Martha Clifford and Henry Flower; (2) the altercation at Kiernan's bar; and (3) his onanistic response to Gerty's display. He tells three lies: (1) that he had been to the Gaiety Theatre; (2) that he had supper at Wynn's Hotel; and (3) that the reason for his bringing Stephen home for a moment was that Stephen had suffered a temporary concussion caused by a falsely calculated movement in the course of an after-dinner gymnastic performance. As appears later from Molly's mental monologue, Bloom also tells her three authentic things: (1) about the funeral; (2) about meeting Mrs. Breen (Molly's former friend Josie Powell); and (3) about his desire to have Stephen give her lessons in Italian.

  The chapter ends with Bloom gradually falling asleep.

  "In what posture?

  Listener [Molly]: reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head, right leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed. Narrator: reclined laterally, left, with right and left legs flexed, the indexfinger and thumb of the right hand resting on the bridge of the nose, in the attitude depicted on a snapshot photograph made by Percy Apjohn, the childman weary, the manchild in the womb.

  Womb? Weary?

  He rests. He has travelled.

  With?

  Sindbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Mindbad the Mailer and Henbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

  When?

  Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

  Where?"

  No answer is forthcoming. But it would be—Nowhere: he is asleep.

  PART THREE, CHAPTER 3

  It is around two in the morning, or a little later. Bloom in the position of a foetus has fallen asleep, but Molly remains awake for forty pages. The style is a sustained stream of consciousness running through Molly's lurid, vulgar, and hectic mind, the mind of a rather hysterical woman, with commonplace ideas, mote or less morbidly sensual, with a rich strain of music in her and with the quite abnormal capacity of reviewing her whole life in an uninterrupted inner verbal flow. A person whose thought tumbles on with such impetus and consistency is not a normal person. Readers who want to break down the flow of this chapter need to take a sharp pencil and separate the sentences, as illustrated in this quotation that begins the chapter: "Yes / because he never did a thing like that before / as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs / since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice / doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing / all for masses for herself and her soul / greatest miser ever was / actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit / telling me all her ailments / she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world / let us have a bit of fun first / God help the world if all the women were her sort / down on bathingsuits and lownecks / of course nobody wanted her to wear / I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice / I hope I'll never be like her / a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces / but she was a weleducated woman certainly / and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there / I suppose he was glad to get shut of her / and her dog smelling my fur and always edging to get up under my petticoats especially then / still I like that in him [Bloom] / polite to old women like that and waiters and beggars too / hes not proud out of nothing but not always" etc.

  Readers are unduly impressed by the stream-of-thought device. I want to submit the following considerations. First, the device is not more "realistic" or more "scientific" than any other. In fact if some of Molly's thoughts were described instead of all of them being recorded, their expression would strike one as more "realistic," more natural. The point is that the stream of consciousness is a stylistic convention because obviously we do not think continuously in words—we think also in images; but the switch from words to images can be recorded in direct words only if description is eliminated as it is here. Another thing: some of our reflections come and go, others stay; they stop as it were, amorphous and sluggish, and it takes some time for the flowing thoughts and thoughtlets to run around those rocks of thought. The drawback of simulating a recording of thought is the blurring of the time element and too great a reliance on typography.

  These Jo
ycean pages have had a tremendous influence. In this typographical broth many a minor poet has been generated: the typesetter of the great James Joyce is the godfather of tiny Mr. Cummings. We must not see in the stream of consciousness as rendered by Joyce a natural event. It is a reality only insofar as it reflects Joyce's cerebration, the mind of the book. This book is a new world invented by Joyce. In that world people think by means of words, sentences. Their mental associations are mainly dictated by the structural needs of the book, by the author's artistic purposes and plans. I should also add that if punctuation marks be inserted by an editor into the text, Molly's musings would not really become less amusing or less musical.

  There is one thing that Bloom told Molly just before going to sleep, one thing which is not mentioned by the bedside report in the precedent chapter, one thing which has much struck Molly. Before going to sleep Bloom coolly asked her to bring him his breakfast in bed tomorrow—with a couple of eggs. Now that the crisis of Molly's betrayal is past, Bloom, I suggest, decides that by the mere fact of knowing about, and tacitly condoning the situation, and allowing his wife to go on next Monday with that sordid intrigue with Boylan, he, Bloom, has acquired, in a way, the upper hand, has a certain power over Molly—and thus need not bother about her breakfast anymore. Let her bring him his, in bed.

  Molly's soliloquy starts with her irritated surprise at his request. She returns to that thought several times through the monologue. For instance, "then he stares giving us his orders for eggs and tea Findon haddy and hot buttered toast I suppose well have him sitting up like the king of the country pumping the wrong end of the spoon up and down in his egg wherever he learned that from...."(You will have noticed that Bloom has a leaning towards all kinds of special little devices, methodical tricks. From Molly's soliloquy we learn that when she was pregnant he attempted to milk her into his tea, and of course his posture in sleeping and other little habits such as kneeling to the chamber pot are all his own.) Molly cannot get over that breakfast request and the eggs become new-laid eggs—"then tea and toast for him buttered on both sides and newlaid eggs I suppose Im nothing any more"—and it again bubbles up in her mind later, "and Im to be slooching around down in the kitchen to get his lordship his breakfast while hes rolled up like a mummy will I indeed did you ever see me running Id just like to see myself at it show them attention and they treat you like dirt...." But somehow the idea sinks in, and Molly reflects "Id love a big juicy pear now to melt in your mouth like when I used to be in the longing way then Ill throw him up his eggs and tea in the moustachecup she gave him to make his mouth bigger I suppose hed like my nice cream too...." and she decides to be very sweet to him and get him to give her a cheque for a couple of pounds.

  In the course of her soliloquy, Molly's thought shuttles between the images of various people, men and women, but one thing we shall mark at once, namely, that the amount of retrospective meditation that she devotes to her newly acquired lover Boylan is much inferior to the quality and quantity of the thoughts she devotes to her husband and to other people. Here is a woman who has had a brutal but more or less satisfactory physical experience a few hours ago, but her thoughts are occupied by humdrum recollecting that reverts constantly to her husband. She does not love Boylan: if she loves anyone it is Bloom.

  Let us go rapidly through these close packed pages. Molly appreciates the respect Bloom has for old women and his politeness to waiters and beggars. She knows of the dirty photo of a toreador and a woman made to look like a Spanish nun which Bloom keeps in his desk; and she also suspects he has been scribbling a love letter. She meditates on his weaknesses, and she disbelieves some of the things he has told her about his day. She recalls in some detail an abortive intrigue which Bloom started with a maidservant they had: "like that slut that Mary we had in Ontario terrace padding out her false bottom to excite him bad enough to get the smell of those painted women off him once or twice I had a suspicion by getting him to come near me when I found the long hair on his coat without that one when I went into the kitchen pretending he was drinking water 1 woman is not enough for them it was all his fault of course ruining servants then proposing that she could eat at our table on Christmas if you please O no thank you not in my house...." For a moment her thought switches to Boylan, when he first squeezed her hand, this mingling with fragments of song words as so often her thoughts do, but then she reverts to Bloom. Details of desirable lovemaking engage her attention and she remembers a virile-looking priest. She seems to be comparing the singular ways of Bloom, the delicate ways of a conjured-up goy (preparing the theme of Stephen), and the incense-smelling vestments of the priest—she seems to compare all this to the vulgarity of Boylan's ways-"I wonder was he satisfied with me one thing I didn't like his slapping me behind going away so familiarly in the hall though I laughed Im not a horse or an ass am I...." She craves, poor girl, for delicate tenderness. The rich liquor Boylan had tasted at the Ormond bar emits its perfume on his breath and she wonders what it was: "Id like to sip those richlooking green and yellow expensive drinks those stagedoor johnnies drink with the opera hats" and the potted meat, remnants of which Bloom encountered in the bed, is accounted for now: "he had all he could do to keep himself from falling asleep after the last time we took the port and potted meat it had a fine salty taste." We learn that the thunder of the ten o'clock thunderstorm which one hears with Bloom in the hospital chapter awoke Molly after her first beauty sleep upon Boylan's departure, a Joycean synchronization. She recalls various physiological details concerning Boylan's lovemaking.

  Her thoughts shift to Josephine Powell, now Mrs. Breen, whom Bloom met, as he told her, during the day. She is jealous about what she thinks was Bloom's interest in Josie—before their marriage—which she imagines could be continuing. Then she recalls Bloom as he was before their marriage and his conversation, which was on a higher cultural level than hers. And she conjures up his proposal of marriage, but her memories of Bloom at that time are all mixed up with her jealous satisfaction about Josie's unfortunate marriage and that lady's dotty husband who is as likely as not to go to bed with his muddy boots on. A murder case, a woman poisoning her husband, is also recalled, and back we go to the beginning of her romance with Bloom, and to a singer who kissed her, and to the way Bloom looked in those days, his brown hat and his gypsy-bright muffler. And then, in connection with some early lovemaking with Bloom, Gardner is mentioned for the first time, a former lover of hers, unknown to Bloom. We hear reminiscences of her marriage to Bloom, and the eight poppies he sent because she was born on 8 September 1870, and the marriage took place on 8 October 1888, when she was eighteen, a nice litter of eights. Again Gardner is evoked as a better lover than Bloom, and she switches to thoughts about her next date with Boylan, at four o'clock on Monday. There are allusions to things we know, such as the port and peaches Boylan sent to her, the Dedalus girls coming from school, and the one-legged sailor singing his song to whom she has thrown a penny.

  She thinks of the planned concert trip, and the thought of a train trip reminds her of an amusing incident: "the time going to the Mallow Concert at Maryborough [Bloom] ordering boiling soup for the two us then the bell rang out he walks down the platform with the soup splashing about taking spoonfuls of it hadnt he the nerve and the waiter after him making a holy show of us screeching and confusion for the engine to start but he wouldn't pay till he finished it the two gentlemen in the 3rd class carriage said he was quite right so he was too hes so pigheaded sometimes when he gets a thing into his head a good job he was able to open the carriage door with his knife or theyd have taken us on to Cork I suppose that was done out of revenge on him OI love jaunting in a train or car with lovely soft cushions I wonder will he [Boylan] take a 1st class for me he might want to do it in the train by tipping the guard well...." Gardner—Lieutenant Stanley Gardner—who died of enteric (intestinal) fever in South Africa some five years earlier, and their last kiss, are charmingly recalled: "he was a lovely fellow in khaki and just the right
height over me Im sure he was brave too he said I was lovely the evening we kissed goodbye at the canal lock my Irish beauty he was pale with excitement about going away... We get back to Boylan and to some disgusting details of those and other ardors, and Boylan's rage "like a perfect devil for a few minutes after he came back with the stoppress tearing up the tickets and swearing blazes because he lost 20 quid he said he lost over that outsider that won and half he put on for me on account of Lenehans tip, cursing him to the lowest pits... She remembers how Lenehan "was making free with me after the Glencree dinner coming back that long joult over the featherbed mountain after the Lord Mayor looking at me with his dirty eyes," an episode that Lenehan had recounted to M'Coy with some glee. Items of lingerie are evoked and the visit of the Prince of Wales to Gibraltar where she spent her childhood and youth: "he was in Gibraltar the year I was born I bet he found lilies there too where he planted the tree he planted more than that in his time he might have planted me too if hed come a bit sooner then I wouldn't be here as I am...." Money matters intrude: Bloom "ought to chuck that Freeman with the paltry few shillings he knocks out of it and go into an office or something where hed get regular pay or a bank where they could put him up on a throne to count the money all the day of course he prefers pottering about the house so you cant stir with him any side...." Physiological and anatomical details tumble along and there is even a glint of metempsychosis, the word Molly had asked Bloom about when he brought her her breakfast that morning and she was reading: "and that word met something with hoses in it and he came out with some jawbreakers about the incarnation he never can explain a thing simply the way a body can understand then he goes and burns the bottoms out of the pan all for his Kidney... More physiology and anatomy, and a train whistles by in the night. Back to Gibraltar and a girl friend Hester Stanhope (whose father had courted Molly a little) and then Mulvey's photo, Mulvey her first love. A novel by Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868), and the novel Moll Flanders (1722) by Defoe are mentioned.