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UniversiV Micrc5nlms International

Shanahan, Dennis Michael

THE WAY OF THE CROSS IN JAMES JOYCE'S "ULYSSES"

The Ohio State University Ph.D.

University Microfilms I nternstional300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml48106

Copyright 1983 by Shanahan, Dennis Michael All Rights Reserved

THE WAY OF THE CROSS IN JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Dennis Michael Shanahan, A.B., M.A.

The Ohio State University

1983

Reading Committee: Approved By:

Dr. Suzanne Ferguson

Dr. Morris Beja

Dr. John Muste

Deo<^tment of English January 28, 1949. Born— Brooklyn, New York

1971...... A.B., The University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana

1977-197 8 ...... University Fellow, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1979...... M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1978-198 1 ...... Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University, Columbus,

1982-1983...... Presidential Fellow, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

PUBLICATIONS

"The Way of the Cross in Ulysses. " James Joyce Quarterly, 20 (Spring 1983).

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Twentieth-Century Literature. Professor Suzanne Ferguson.

Minor Fields : Critical Theory. Professor Walter Davis The Novel. Professor Ernect Lockridge English Renaissance Literature. Professor TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

VITA ...... ii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER

I. The Eucharistie Aesthetics of The Passion ...... 26

II. Signs of the Cross; The Spiritual Exercises of the First Three Chapters ...... 57

III. The Day's Stations: "Calypso" to "Ithaca" ...... 89

1 "Calypso": Jesus is condemned to death ...... 93 2 "Lotus-Eaters": Jesus is made to bear his cross ...... 96 3 "Hades": Jesus falls the first time ...... 98 4 "Aeolus": Jesus meets his afflicted mother ...... 103 5 "Lestrygonians": The Cyrenian helps Jesus carry his cross ...... 107 6 "Scylla and Charybdis": Veronica wipes the face of Jesus ...... 112 7 "Wandering Rocks": Jesus falls the second time ...... 115 8 "Sirens": Jesus speaks to the daughters of Jerusalem ...... 120 9 "Cyclops": Jesus falls the third time ...... 124 10 "Nausicaa": Jesus is stripped of his garments ...... 128 11 "Oxen of the Sun"; Jesus is nailed to the cross ...... 133 12 "Circe": Jesus dies on the cross ...... 142 TABLE OF CONTENTS (Continued)

PAGE

13 "Eumaeus"; Jesus is taken down £rom the cross ...... 149 14 "Ithaca": Jesus is placed in the sepulchre ...... 154

IV. Molly's Countersign: Circling the Cross ...... 168

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 190 INTRODUCTION

Joyce uses the Christian myth in Ulysses to give his

characters universal stature and to illuminate his own

themes with the Christian conceptions of the Incarnation

and the Redemption. The images of this religious myth are

not for Joyce the details of ultimate truth but metaphors

for human realities, realities which, if expressed, must

be expressed in human metaphor. His themes are not

religious but human and secular; that is, he writes of

what he considers the universels of human life, the same

universels embedded within the particulars of social,

national, religious, and literary myths. As he does the

Homeric myth, Joyce transposes the Christian myth "sub

specie temper is nostri, and this transposition, along

with the super imposition of a number of myths and metaphors, serves to expose the universally human behind

the local, religious fiction.

For the Christian, Christ's passion embodies the essence of the Incarnation and the Redemption; through his passion, Christ frees himself of the burden of his assumed human nature, achieves victory over sin and death, and reconciles God the Father and his human sons. Similarly, 2

and without the Christian otherworldliness, in the course

of the day in Ulysses, Stephen seeks to free himself of

spiritual encumbrances to his personal and artistic growth. Bloom achieves moral victory over his own weakness and over the sins of a life-denying society, and father and son are figuratively reconciled. In the same way that

the universal human "body" of Ulysses "lives" the myth of

Ulysses, that "body" "lives" the myth of Christ.

Understood as a metaphor for the plight of a spirit

inextricably bound to mortal flesh, Christ's passion is also Bloom's and Stephen's, and every man's.

This study attempts to plot the route of the passion through the novel, identifying a specific Catholic image of the passion that in part structures the novel and

interacts thematically with other elements of the work.

The study argues that Ulysses in its entirety uses a correspondence to the Way of the Cross (Stations of the

Cross; Via Crucis), a formula of the passion, in order to shape the affirmation of suffering incarnate spirit and the reconciliation of father and son by means of that spirit (the "redemption" of Stephen and Bloom). Although the Way of the Cross is a formalized, ritualistic figure of the passion, the effect in Ulysses is not one of constriction or of a recipe repeated by rote, of an

"inhuman voice" in "pale service to the a l t a r . "2 Part of the point in Ulysses is that a ritualistic, inhuman 3

relationship, or non-relationship, with life opens up

imaginatively to a broader human faith, mediated or

influenced, but not controlled, by inherited forms and

conditions.

Unlike the Mass, the Way of the Cross is not a

liturgical rite; the Roman Ritual does not include it.

The Way of the Cross is a "pious exercise" which has

received papal sanct i o n . 3 Despite the fact that the

Stations is not considered a liturgical ritual, the

Catholic Church has issued instructions for the proper method of making the Stations and has attached indulgences

to its practice. During the Stations, a priest and at least one acolyte, usually two acolytes and a crossbearer, move around the inside of the church, stopping at each of fourteen images of Christ's sufferings on Calvary (these

images hang on the walls of every Catholic church). The priest and congregation recite prayers at each station and

"consider" the incident represented. While the priest moves between stations, the Stabat Mater is usually sung^

(during his peregrinations. Bloom several times remembers

Molly's performance of Rossini's setting of this h y m n 5;

Molly also recalls the event— U748). The movement of the priest is approximately circular, beginning and ending at the altar, just as Bloom's movement on June 16, 1904 begins and ends at 7 Eccles Street. A lay person may make the Stations privately, following the same basic 4

prescription as the priest's: movement from station to

station, prayer and sorrowful reflection on the passion at

each station. Whether made publicly or privately, the

Stations involve both a prescribed form (the movement; the

number, order, and content of the individual stations) and

a freedom to respond to the passion according to personal

imagination and empathy.

Once devoutly Catholic in a devoutly Catholic

country, Joyce was very familiar with the Way of the

Cross. It is probable that he served as an acolyte or

crossbearer for the Stations while an altar boy at

Clongowes; assisting at Benediction or the Stations

usually precedes an altar boy's assisting at Mass.

Joyce's using a reference to the Stations in order to make

a point was even more natural than it is for the

protestant Buck to do (U16). In his second lecture on

Mangan (1907), Joyce underscored the wretchedness of

Mangan's life with an allusion to the Stations: "His

nights were so many Stations of the Cross among the

disreputable dives of 'The Liberties'"6. the Stations

provided an easy metaphor before his Italian (mostly

Catholic) audience.

Of all the elements of "the Christian fable" and of all the rites and exercises of the Catholic Church, Joyce seems most often to employ in his works those that involve

the passion and resurrection, passiontide and Easter. One thinks, for example, of the crucifixion imagery at the end of "The Dead" and of Stephen's humming to himself the Good

Friday Gospel, "the chant of the passion," in Stephen

Hero.7 Critics of Ulysses have pointed out Joyce's uses of the Holy Thursday and Good Friday Tenebrae service and

Holy Saturday services; several direct references to

individual stations (Buck's in "Telemachus" ; at least four

in "Circe") and numerous references to the crucifixion, notably in "Circe," are immediately evident to many readers of the novel. In Part Three of Finnegans W a k e , the Stations of the Cross figures thematically and structurally, as Joyce explains in a letter to Harriet

Weaver: "It is written in the form of a via crucis of 14 stations but in reality it is only a barrel rolling down the river Liffey."®

The liturgy of passiontide apparently attracted Joyce throughout his life. He would often attend services of

Holy Week, especially those of Thursday, Friday, and

Saturday. During his first stay in Paris, on the day he received the telegram urging him to return to his dying mother, he attended Tenebrae at Notre Dame.® Later, in

Trieste, according to Alessandro Bruni, Joyce regularly attended Holy Week services:

In his house there is no religious practice, but on the other hand there is much talk of Christ and religion and much singing of liturgical chants. I can go even further. You had better not look for Joyce during the week before Easter because he is not available to anyone. On the morning of Palm Sunday, then during the four days that follow Wednesday of Holy Week, and especially during all the hours of those great symbolic rituals at the early morning service, Joyce is at church, entirely without prejudice and in complete control of himself, sitting in full view and close to the officiants so that he won't miss a single syllable of what is said, following the liturgy attentively in his book of the Holy Week services, and often joining in the singing of the choir.

Bruni writes that he has seen Joyce cry "secret tears" at

hearing Jesus' words on the cross, "Eli, Eli, lamma

sabactani. Joyce's sisters also noted James "devotion"

to the liturgies of the Easter Vigil: "During Easter week he behaved in a way that seemed odd to his sisters. Too

fond of the liturgy and music to forgo them, but determined to make clear his indifference, he avoided going with Eileen and Eva or sitting with them. Instead he came by himself and stood in a corner; and when the mass was over left quietly without waiting. He did not attempt to dissuade his sisters from going, but made clear that his own motive was esthetic, not p i o u s . "12

A firm opponent of Catholic dogma and literal belief

in the rituals, Joyce's devotion was certainly not piety.

The Catholic Church was at best a "coherent absurdity"

(CW169; see also P244). He thought the Church inhumane and uninvolved with life; the Church in "pale service to the altar" coldly detached itself from the real concerns of individuals. Individuality was the greatest threat to the Church's tyranny over people's minds: "there is no 7

heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to my church

as a human b e i n g . "13

The Catholic religion, that logical absurdity, was

absurd if taken literally, logical if understood as a

system of metaphors that hold universal truths. Joyce

once told Jacques Mercanton "that Good Friday and Holy

Saturday were the two days of the year when he went to

church, for the liturgies, which represented by their

symbolic rituals the oldest mysteries of humanity."14 The

rituals and doctrines were figurative expressions of an eternal dynamics of truth, the same interplay Joyce saw as best embodied in "drama": "By drama I understand the

interplay of passions to portray truth; drama is strife, evolution, movement in whatever way unfolded; it exists, before it takes form, independently; it is conditioned but not controlled by its scene" (CW41).

"Scene" is the collection of social, historical, or symbolic forms constituting a human situation at any moment in truth's unfolding. Every scenic element contributes to the conditioning of the "statement" of truth. A set of conditions provides "story," "image," or

"symbol" to the abstract truth, inexpressible outside the forms of one scene or another. Scene conditions truth by giving it "sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul" (P207). Some of these conditions are what Joyce referred to in conversation with Frank Budgen: "Tell me why you think I aught to wish to change the

conditions that gave Ireland and me a shape and a

destiny?"15

Just as the truth of drama is conditioned by the

scene that unfolds it, so is the truth Joyce saw within

Catholic liturgy and doctrine conditioned by its "scene,"

the particular images of Catholic myth. When the scene is

taken as a literal expression of truth, it binds and

limits truth. Joyce and Stephen Dedalus were both

conditioned by the Catholic "scene." Joyce eluded the control and used the conditioning of truth that had determined him; Stephen, at the beginning of Ulysses, is a servant to the controlling power of Catholicism (and

Ireland and family). Throughout the novel he grows toward

the position occupied by Joyce and Bloom, a position beyond control, a freedom and individuality despite conditions, a relationship with truth within the scene.

Conditions are the necessary accidents in the embodiment of essence, a literal expression which, when organized for artistic ends as a metaphor, articulates the underlying eternal verities. Catholicism, for Joyce both bound the spirit and gave to the imagination "artistic sacraments" (SH185) and metaphors by which the artist could exceed the bounds. The artist's environment, the conditions in which he finds truth embodied, provides the

"accidents" of ordinary life that arc to be translated 9

into the images of dramatic literature, and provides the means of transforming the accidents.

Joyce's "eucharistie" art theory, stated in Ulysses,

implies its complement, the idea of Christ's passion, the bloody sacrifice re-enacted in each celebration of the eucharist, the unbloody sacrifice of the M a s s . Chapter

One of this study explores this implication of Joyce's

image of art. Joyce once said to his brother Stanislaus,

Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying . . . to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own . . . for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.

If the "bread of everyday life" is transfigured (or transubstantiated) into the "body" of Ulysses (or Christ,

Bloom, Stephen, or Joyce), then the other species of the eucharist, the wine (Stephen's "mead" in "Oxen") is the blood of the daily passion played out in ordinary life.

Because blood is a manifestation of the body's suffering and because blood and body are substantially the same, blood is the natural "expression" of the spirit of the struggling body. As a member of humanity, the artist shares the "passion" of life and sheds a shared blood.

The individual artist imposes form on this shared blood and, using the blood as his ink, expresses the human verities incarnated in the passion of warmblooded flesh.

On the basis of Joyce's and Stephen's image of art. 10

Chapter One, then, argues the presence of a passion in

Ulysses.

Early in his career, writing about Munkacsy's painting "Ecce Homo," Joyce praised the aesthetic rendering of Christ's passion as a human "drama," as opposed to a pious expression:

It will be clear from all this that the whole forms a wonderful picture, intensely, silently dramatic, waiting but the touch of the wizard wand to break out into reality, life and conflict. As such too much tribute cannot be paid to it, for it is a frightfully real presentment of all the baser passions of humanity, in both sexes, in every gradation, raised and lashed into a demonic carnival. So far praise must be given, but it is plain through all this, that the aspect of the artist is human, intensely, powerfully human. To paint such a crowd one must probe humanity with no scrupulous knife. . . . If there is to be anything superhuman in the picture, anything above and beyond the heart of man, it will appear in Christ. But no matter how you view Christ, there is no trace of that in his aspect. There is nothing divine in his look, there is nothing superhuman. . . . [Munkacsy's] view of the event is humanistic. Consequently his work is drama. Had he chosen to paint Christ as the Incarnate Son of God, redeeming his creatures of his own admirable will, through insult and hate, it would not have been drama, it would have been Divine Law, for drama deals with man. . . . The face of Christ is a superb study of endurance, passion, I use the word in its proper sense, and dauntless will. . . . It is Christ, as the Man of Sorrows. . . . It is literally Behold the Man. . . . Belief in the divinity of Christ is not a salient feature of secular Christendom. But occasional sympathy with the eternal conflict of truth and error, of right and wrong, as exemplified in the drama at Golgotha is not beyond its approval (CW35-37). 11

It is not difficult to see Ulysses, with Bloom (and

Stephen) as Man of Sorrows, in this appraisal of

Munkacsy's "drama," and to see Ulysses as to some extent a

converging of Joyce's great interest in the passion with

his view of drama as the humanly dynamic unfolding of

truth and with his understanding of the passion as a drama

symbolic of a struggling human spirit fastened to time's

conditions.

In Ulysses, one of the metaphors for life's drama is

Christ's passion, and, as I will argue, the Stations of

the Cross brings to the idea of the passion a

formalization, a structure and a series of concrete images

or incidents implicit within the idea. The Stations also

gives to the gospel narrative an episodic organization, much like that of the Odyssey.

Chapter Two of the study begins the discussion of the

Way of the Cross as a structural as well as thematic

correspondence in Ulysses. In the Telemachia, Joyce embeds a pattern of "spiritual exercises"--medi tat ions on

personal and original sin, on the life of Christ, and on

the passion— primarily through Stephen's Catholic-educated

intellectualizations. Stephen's spiritual and intellectual wandering establishes the passion metaphor, primarily as an idea to be actualized fully later, as the figure becomes immanent in the facts of concrete reality through the artist's representations in the rest of the novel. The "exercises" arise out of Stephen's passion and at the

same time define the terms by which the passion within the

narrative of the entire day is expressed. The

"meditation" on Christ's passion, in the form of a

correspondence between the first three chapters and the

first three stations of the cross, provides some basic

figurative definitions essential to Stephen's narrow

worldview and to Joyce's universalization of the passion.

Stephen's mind gives Joyce a most appropriate matrix for

the abstract operation of creating metaphor.

In Chapter Three, I follow all fourteen stations

through the next fourteen episodes of Ulysses ("Calypso"

to "Ithaca"). Detached and reluctant, Stephen stumbles

through three stations ("Telemachus," "Nestor,"

"Proteus"), but Bloom manages to complete all fourteen

("Calypso," "Lotus-Eaters," and "Hades" repeat the

stations of the previous three chapters, with a

difference). Stephen shares in the stations of "Aeolus,"

"Scylla and Charybdis," and "Wandering Rocks," and in

"Oxen" he meets the exemplary bearer of crosses. Bloom,

and they complete the remaining stations together. The

following scheme lists the fourteen stations of the cross and their corresponding episodes in Ulysses;

1 Jesus is condemned to Telemachus death Calypso

2 Jesus is made to bear his cross Nestor Lotus-Eaters 3 Jesus falls the first time Proteus Hades

4 Jesus meets his afflicted mother

5 The Cyrenian helps Jesus carry Lestrygonians his cross

6 Veronica wipes the face of Scylla and Charybdis

7 Jesus falls the second time Wandering Rocks

8 Jesus speaks to the Daughters of Jerusalem

9 Jesus falls the third time Cyclops

10 Jesus is stripped of his garments Nausicaa

11 Jesus is nailed to the cross Oxen of the Sun

12 Jesus dies on the cross Circe

13 Jesus is taken down from the cross Eumaeus

14 Jesus is placed in the sepulchre

Chapter Four discusses Joyce's "fifteenth station,"

the final episode's promise of a figurative resurrection.

In "Penelope," through Molly's confirmation of Bloom's victory, Joyce completes the pattern of the Christian myth

in his own fashion. For the Christian, Christ's

resurrection is the necessary justification and glorification of the Incarnation and passion. For Joyce,

the eternal renewal of life guarantees the eternal

returnof the spirit that is brutalized on the roads

throughout the day in Ulysses. 14

The "Way of the Cross" in Ulysses refers to Bloom's

and to Stephen's episodic journeys through Dublin on June

16, 1904. It refers also to each of their lives ("Life is

many days"— U214; each day is a passion or only a step

along the way). In its widest metaphor ic implications,

the "Way of the Cross" includes the universally shared

plight that Bloom and Stephen experience on an individual

While Bloom and Stephen, struggling with their

personal histories and suffering crucifixions, are most

obviously the figurative Christs of the Way of the Cross metaphor, their Stations are also individual illustrations

of a generalized Way of the Cross. Human history is an ongoing passion. Each chapter not only places Bloom or

Stephen at one of the stations but also exposes, in the

terms of that station, a characteristic of the human passion from the perspective of that station. According

to the corresponding station, each chapter contributes to

the exposition of the universal Way of the Cross. On both

the individual and universal levels, similar themes recur,

themes perhaps summed up in the most visible and dominant symbol of the passion--the cross.

The cross is the work of man, though it is sunk in the earth, "a stake in the country" (U655) erected by one who has "feet of clay" (U649). Its intersecting horizontal 15

and vertical represent not the intersection of human and

natural worlds but the union of spirit and its activities

in the historical dimension. The traditional symbol of

the hypostatic union, the union of divine and human

qualities in one person, the cross, in Ulysses, symbolizes

the union of human conditions and the human spirit which

is capable of being divine or Satanic, depending on its

relationship with the eternity of nature.

The Way of the Cross is one of "the twin eternities of

spirit and nature in the twin eternities of male and

female" (SH210). The Way of the Cross is "masculine," the

historical actualization of nature's undifferentiated

cycle of life. It is temporal, the masculine dimension,

but it is also spatial to the extent that natural space

becomes history-formed place. Stephen concludes that

history is "an actuality of the possible as possible"

(U25). The "masculine" way is spiritual, determined by

the spirit of denial ("Ich bin der Geist der stets

verneint"17), spirit that informs, restricts, or

constrains, the denial of some possibilities in order to

actualize others. The spirit produces art and medicine as

well as persecution and war. Bloom realizes that it is "a

task for a superior intelligence to substitute other more

acceptable phenomena in place of the less acceptable phenomena to be removed" (U697). 16

Nature is the "feminine" stream of life, non- modalized, undifferentiated matter and energy, possible life. It is all-fertile and all-affirmative; corruption and creation, growth and decay are phases of its unending, all-inclusive fertility ("Ich bin das Fleisch das stets bej_ahjb"l®). This cycle, of which human flesh partakes, courses through and activates the daytime Way of the

Cross; Ulysses is concerned with both eternities: the novel is "at the same time the cycle of human body as well as a little story of a day (life)."19

Within the horizontal dimension of history, man may actualize the corruptive possibilities of nature or the creative. Because he is rooted forever in earth, autochthonous man may rise on the natural creativity he possesses or he may destroy, in either case giving form to a phase of nature's cycle. Whatever the conscious rational spirit contrives is constructed "upon the incertitude of the void" (U697), a void that holds no ultimate truth other than its irresistible urge to be filled.

Spirit is crucified simply because it is historical and mortal. By denying the natural altogether through its abstractions or by denying the human through its brutality

(only apparently two different sins), spirit debases itself. By denying the brutish and the factiously 17

transcendental, spirit rises. The Way ofthe Cross in

Ulysses formulates this struggle of spirit.

The individual stations are not stages in an allegory

but figuratively used elements whose accumulated effects construct a metaphor, affording a coherent view of the events and the world of Ulysses. As he does with the

Odyssey, Joyce freely adapts the Way of the Cross to his purposes. Every station, in Joyce's hands, has a

figurative relevance to the world depicted in the novel; each station helps to characterize the human Way of the

Cross. Some stations seem to be more adaptable than others to the narrative action and themes of their corresponding chapters; accordingly, the methods and

intricacy of each station's development varies. However, each of the stations is woven into an episode; the Way of the Cross metaphor depends on the accumulation of fourteen consecutive images of the passion, and the metaphor is sustained throughout.

The bearer of the cross in the stations of Ulysses is not always, or rather, not exclusively. Bloom. With regard toa particular station, in a particular chapter

Bloom is not necessarily the "Christ-f igure. " In the first three chapters, as I have already stated, Stephen assumes the role of Christ as he proceeds through three stations, and in "Eumaeus" a Christ role perhaps belongs to him more appropriately than to Bloom; in "Circe" the 18

identification is equally appropriate to both. In other

chapters, the "Christ" of the corresponding station is one

or more of the Dubliners surrounding Bloom or Stephen, in

all of whom exists a shared humanity. In Ulysses, as in

life, Everyman drags the cross from station to station.

Or, to speak of one metaphor in terms of another, as Joyce

seems to have intended us to do, Ulysses makes the

Stations. Fusing the narrow Dublin setting, the

constricted Catholic frame of mind, and the Christian

metaphor with the Homeric metaphor opens up the novel to a

"Jewgreek" catholicity. Dubliner, Christ, Ulysses: each

of the three is an avatar or prefigurement of the others,

and each is conditioned by a "scene," a set of historical

or formal elements; to limit the truth to any single

"scene" denies the universality of truth; to avoid this

limitation, Joyce has superimposed his metaphors and

myths.

The Homeric, Christian, and other correspondences co­

exist and work together, at times so integrally that

complete separation of the elements is impossible. My

foregrounding of specific Catholic ceremonies and beliefs

is rhetorical, designed to highlight a hitherto unobserved

pattern, and should not be construed as a diminution of

the a^ least equally significant Homeric pattern. In

choosing the title he did and in stressing the Homeric episodes in his schema, Joyce clearly wanted to emphasize 19 a thematic priority of the Odyssean parallel and its contribution to the novel's expression. However, a Way of the Cross, expanding and expanded by the Odyssean dimension, shares thematic importance and contributes to the choice of vocabulary and style. With regard to some aspects of organization, the correspondence to the

Stations might claim a greater explanatory power. While the order of the corresponding Homeric episodes in Ulysses does not reflect the order of those episodes in the

Odyssey, the order of the corresponding stations in the novel does reflect the order of those stations in the Way of the Cross.

Both the Homeric episodes and the stations appear in the chapters of Ulysses in the form of situation, theme, character identifications, and style and vocabulary. The last of these, perhaps the most tenuous link to a correspondence, results in the floral vocabulary of

"Lotus-Eaters," the wind vocabulary of "Aeolus," the optic vocabulary of "Cyclops," and so on. A corresponding station often affects a chapter in a similar manner. My discussion in Chapters Two and Three sometimes includes the support of such verbal clues. But the overall pattern does not depend upon these patterns of vocabulary.

Joyce's purposes can be discerned on all levels, even in the wordplay. As Leo Knuth writes, "To dismiss such small verbal correspondences as coincidental and 20

irrelevant is to ignore a feature which differentiates

Joyce's art from that of other writers."20 Knuth is

responding to Robert M. Adams who, in Knuth's words, says

"that there is a regrettable tendency among Joyceans to

seek large structural symbols in small verbal

correspondences."21 With Knuth, I find the "chasing of

clues . . . a rewarding experience."22 And with Knuth, I

remember Joyce's words: "I've put in so many enigmas and

puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for

centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the way of

insuring one's immortality."23

Why Joyce chose to reveal the Homeric connections and

to remain silent about a correspondence to the Stations is

a question that requires at least some speculation. First

of all, few authors would want to divulge all their works'

secrets : keep the professors busy and insure one's

immortality. Furthermore, Ulysses can stand as the all- around man--father, son, husband, wanderer, artist24-_ whereas Christ would not do so well. The title and

Joyce's public attention to the Odyssey parallel guaranteed that readers would focus on the widest possible

implications of his themes. Ulysses is a universal and literary hero, and in the minds of twentieth-century readers the Odyssey stands free of dogmatic religious or nationalistic associations. Joyce did not want to be accused of writing a "Catholic novel," but he seems to 21 have found the figure of the Way of the Cross irresistible as a structural and thematic device. Ulysses uses many

Catholic elements, but it is not a Catholic novel; it is not even a "Christian" novel, in the orthodox religious sense. Joyce renders these elements as universally human as he does those of the Odyssey. Despite the lack of

Joyce's unequivocal extra-textual endorsement, I believe the Way of the Cross to be one of those Catholic ingredients important to the themes and structure of

Ulysses. NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1 Letter to Carlo Linati, September 21, 1920, Letters of James J oyce, vol. I. ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: The Viking Press, 1958), pp. 146-47.

2 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young M a n . The Viking Critical Edition, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), p. 169. Subsequent references to A Portrait of the Artist (P) will be cited in the text.

2 The devotion has origins as early as the fifth century and became popular in the twelfth or thirteenth century; "the number of stations in each series, the place and circumstances of their erection, and the mode of practicing the devotion became stabilized by the monita issued under the authority of Clement XII in 1731." "Way of the Cross," The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York : McGraw-Hill, 1967), pp. 832-33.

A text of the "considerations" and prescribed prayers for each station was included, in Joyce's day as it is today, in nearly every lay person's missal or prayerbook. The text most often printed is one by St Alphonsus Liguori, an author whom Joyce recognized also as the author of Visits to the Most Blessed Sacrament (see P152).

^ The following English translation is commonly sung :

At the cross her station keeping. Stood the mournful Mother weeping. Close to Jesus to the last.

Thru her heart. His sorrow sharing. All His bitter anguish bearing, Lo! the piercing sword has passed.

0, how sad, and sore distressed. Now was she, that Mother blessed Of the sole begotten One.

Woe-begone, with heart's prostration. Mother meek, the bitter Passion Saw she of her glorious Son. 22 Who could mark, from tears refraining, Christ's dear Mother, uncomplaining. In so great a sorrow bowed?

Who, unmoved behold her languish. Underneath His cross of anguish, 'Mid the fierce, unpitying crowd?

For His people's sins rejected. She, her Jesus, unprotected. Saw with thorns, with scourges rent.

Saw her Son from judgement taken. Her beloved in death forsaken Till His Spirit forth He sent.

Fount of love and holy sorrow, Mother, may my spirit borrow Somewhat of thy woe profound.

Unto Christ, with pure emotion, Raise my contrite heart's devotion. Love to read in ev'ry wound.

Those five wounds on Jesus smitten. Mother! in my heart be written. Deep as in thine own they be.

Thou, my Saviour's Cross who bearest. Though thy Son's rebuke who sharest. Let me share them both with Thee !

In the Passion of my Maker, Be my sinful soul partaker. Weep till death, and keep with thee.

Mine with thee be that sad station. There to watch the great salvation Wrought upon th' atoning Tree.

Queen of virgins, heav'n adorned. Let me not of thee be scorned. Let me share thy grief and woe.

Jesus' death my study making, In His agony partaking. Make me all His tortures know. All His bitter torments feeling. In the cross my spirit reeling. In this blood my senses drown.

That, all glowing with affection, I may find in thee protection. When to judgement He comes down.

In the cross, salvation yield me. And in Jesus' Passion shield me. Cherish me with mercy's aid.

When my earthly frame shall perish. Grant around my soul to flourish Eden's joys that never fade.

Translated by E. Caswall, in The St. Cecilia H ymnal, ed. J. Alfred Schehl (New York : Frederick Pustet, 1935), p. 34.

5 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York; Random House, 1961), pp. 82, 282, 661, for example. Subsequent references to Ulysses (U) will be cited in the text.

6 James Joyce, The Cri tical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), p. 178). Subsequent references to The Critical Writings (CW) will be cited in the text.

7 James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York; New Directions, 1963), p. 189. Subsequent references to Stephen Hero (SH) will be cited in the text.

8 May 24, 1924, Letters of James Joyce, vol. I, p. 214.

9 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 133.

10 "Joyce Stripped Naked in the Piazza," in Portraits of the Artist in Exile, ed. Willard Potts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979) pp. 35-36.

11 "Joyce Stripped Naked in the Piazza," p. 38.

12 Ellmann, James J oyce, p. 320.

11 Letter to Lady Gregory, November 1902, Letters, I, p. 53.

14 "The Hours of James Joyce," in Portrai ts of the Artist in Exile, p. 214. 15 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Bloomington; Indiana Univ. Press, 1960), p. 152.

16 Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1958), pp. 103-04.

17 Richard Ellmann cites these words of Goethe's Mephistophiles in identifying the presence of the spirit of denial. Mulligan, at the beginning of the novel. Ulysses on the Liffey (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), p. 8. For Ellman, "the spirit of denial" seems irremediably opposed to the affirmation, embodied in Molly, toward which the novel moves. In my view, the spirit of denial is simply human spirit, sometimes working to affirm life.

18 Letter to Frank Budgen, Aug. 16, 1921, Letters, I, p. 170.

19 Letter to Carlo Linati, Sept. 21, 1920, Letters, I, p. 146.

20 "Joyce's Verbal Acupuncture," James Joyce Quarterly, 10 (Fall 1972), 64.

21 "Joyce's Verbal Acupuncture," 61.

22 "Joyce's Verbal Acupuncture," 65.

23 Ellmann, James J o yce, p. 535.

24 Ellmann, James J o yce, pp. 405, 430. CHAPTER ONE

THE EUCHARISTIC AESTHETICS OF THE PASSION

As if the cross were being borne throughout Ulysses,

through the streets of Dublin, references to this symbol

of Christ's and man's passion recur frequently in the

novel; the two shafts of sunlight spreading a cross over

the "Telemachus" chapter, "crosstrees" of a threemaster,

"crucified shirts," criss-crossing tram rails, crossed

keys, "crossblinds," the cemetery's stone crosses, among

others. Suggesting crosses less directly, by metaphoric

or metonymic relationship, are Stephen's ashplant, the

blindman's wooden cane that taps through Dublin all day,

and less obviously. Bloom's potato, his lemon soap, and

the book. The Sweets of S i n , which he purchases for Molly

and carries for eleven hours.

The cross' journey begins with the first sentence of

the novel: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the

stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed" (U2-3). Of course Buck is first of all parodying the Catholic Mass--"Introibo ad altare

Dei"--but on another level he is also "bearing" a cross.

Later in the chapter. Buck more explicitly and consciously

26 27

parodies the Stations of the Cross: "Mulligan is stripped

of his garments" (U16). Buck's travesties of the Mass and

of the Stations mock what Ulysses more seriously enacts.

Not by coincidence is Buck made to burlesque these

two particular Catholic practices; it is significant that

the opening sentence can be read as a reference to both

the Mass and the Way of the Cross. In an important sense,

important to Catholic belief and to Joyce's conception of

Ulysses, the Mass is a Way of the Cross, a repetition of

the passion. The Deharbe Catechism, one of the catechisms

Joyce studied as a boy, declares :

The Mass is the perpetual Sacrifice of the New Law, in which Christ our Lord offers Himself, by the hands of the Priest, in an unbloody manner, under the appearances of bread and wine, to His Heavenly Father, as He once offered Himself on the Cross in a bloody manner. The Sacrifice of the Mass is essentially the same Sacrifice as that of the Cross; the only difference is in the manner of offering...... On the Cross Christ offered Himself in a bloody manner; but in the Mass He offers Himself in an unbloody manner, whilst He renews the Sacrifice accomplished on the Cross, without suffering or dying any more.l

In its basic form, the Mass is also a re-enactment of

the last supper, a repetition of Christ's institution of

the Eucharist, the transubstantiation (substance changes, accidents remain) of bread and wine into his own body and blood. According to the Catholic belief, the Eucharist

"renews," not merely symbolizes, Christ's Incarnation. At

the last supper and in the Mass, through the priest,

Christ repeats his taking on physical being for the 28

salvation of mankind. Re-enacting Christ's celebration,

the priest speaks at every Mass the consecrating words of

the Last Supper; "This is my body" and "This is the

chalice of my blood of the new and eternal covenant: the

mystery of faith, which shall be shed for you and for many

unto the forgiveness of sins." The words imply Christ's

foreknowing that his blood would be shed, drained, by his

torture and death. The passion that Christ anticipated

and the priest renews is actually another form of the

Incarnation^: his being sentenced to torture and death is

a consequence of the divine nature's assuming human form

with all the natural shocks flesh is heir to (that death

comes by crucifixion, an "unnatural" death, adds an

element of symbolic drama to the fact of mortality). The

passion on Calvary expresses concretely and memorably the

full sense of the Incarnation; it is the essential image

of the Christian myth. Thus, the Mass repeats ritually,

and actually, according to the Catholic Church, the

sacrifice of the cross, the only difference being that the

crucifixion was a bloody sacrifice and the Mass is a

bloodless one.

In this chapter, my subject is this identity and this

difference between the artist's Mass that Ulysses and

the passion represented in Ulysses. In later chapters, it

is my task to show that the passion in Ulysses takes the specific shape of the Stations. 29

That a Mass of sorts indeed occurs in the novel at a

formal and theoretical level is a position held by some of

the numerous readers noting the many allusions to the

ceremony. The novel, it is said, is a eucharistie

celebration changing the bread of life into art, and a few

readers claim that Ulysses is even structured according to

a parallel to the Mass. Among those who see this Mass

structure in the novel are Paul L. Briand and Patrick A.

M c C a r t h y . 3 Briand locates the Introit in "Telemachus,"

the Kyrie in "Aeolus," the Credo in "Scylla and Charybdis"

(or "Cyclops"), the Gloria in "Scylla and Charybdis," and

so on. Briand argues that, "Just as James Joyce uses the myth and episodic framework of Homer's Odyssey to help him

' forge upon the smithy of his soul the uncreated

conscience of his race'— Ulysses, so does he use the

Catholic Mass as another structure for the same purpose."

He writes further that Joyce is affirming, "through jocund mockery," "the union of head (Intellect-Stephen) and body

(Flesh-Molly) in the 'mystical' body of mankind (Intellect and Flesh-Bloom)."^ McCarthy adds to and disputes

Briand's identifications of the parts of the Mass, and expands on Briand's statement of Joyce's aims; "Joyce was concerned not only with relating the over-all structure of

the mass to the novel as a whole, but also with using

individual prayers and rituals to point up the thematic 30

significance of individual events within the novel." The

Mass parallel, for example, helps to reveal Stephen's character and development; he begins as a server at Mass

(Buck's parody) and ends as "the priest of his ritual."5

The fact that at least most of these allusions to the

Mass are there in Ulysses and that most are in the

"correct" order cannot be disputed, but instead of serving as a parallel that strictly structures the novel, the Mass seems to be suggested, not always rigorously followed, for purposes of theme and character development. Perhaps most importantly, the impression that Ulysses, as a whole, is a

Mass supports the notion that art is the eucharistie transformation of life. Ulysses is a successful example of the aesthetic theory Stephen adumbrates in "Scylla and

Charybdis" and "Oxen of the Sun." Ulysses is the body of

Joyce-Bloom-Stephen or the body of Odysseus-Christ. A. M.

Klein writes that "Ulysses was in a sense intended . . . as a body of Christ, rendered literature," and in support of this statement he quotes Eugene J o l a s ' description of

Joyce's fiftieth birthday celebration: "The birthday cake was decorated with an ingenious candy replica of a copy of

Ulysses, in its blue jacket. Called upon to cut the cake,

Joyce looked at it a moment and said: Accipite et manducat ex hoc omnes: Hoc est enim corpus meum. 31

Though I do not agree completely with Briand and

McCarthy, I cannot subscribe to Ruth M. Walsh's remark at

the beginning of her article in response to Briand;

"[Joyce] teases his critics to commit aesthetic fallacy by

ignoring differences between creative art (Homer's

Odyssey) and religious ritual (the Catholic Mass). . . .

To argue Mass Structure in Ulysses is as tenuous as

hypothesizing philosophical similarities between Homer's

Ithacan world and Catholic doctrine on the basis of the

players and the action."7 While Walsh's article succeeds

in discouraging a too-firm faith in a rigorously

allegorical Mass structure, remarks such as the above seem

to introduce only red herrings. There certainly is a

difference between creative art and religious ritual, and

this difference, I think, is part of Joyce's point in

setting the transubstantiation of the creative process

against that of the formal ritual of Catholicism. And the only significant "philosophical similarities" are those

Joyce proposes in uniting the Ithacan and Catholic metaphors. He may not be strictly adhering to a Mass structure, but to suggest its structure or to evoke the

Mass for thematic reasons is not inconsistent with art.

Unlike Walsh, I am convinced that Joyce uses, flexibly, a Mass structure, suggesting it in key places,

in order to create the sense that the novel as a whole is 32

a kind of eucharistie event. However, I agree with Walsh

that references to the Mass provide "a thematic link with

A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man," emphasize

realistic detail of a very religious Dublin- portray

character, and suggest, "by parallel, the theme of the

search of the father for the son, and the son, for the

father" and "the idea of redemption." Walsh writes also

that "the Mass is a drama which re-enacts on a religious

level what Joyce was demonstrating on the social level: man's need for communion in the form of, at least, mutual

recognition of common states of being."® To her summary I would add that this use of the Mass indicates Joyce's view

that Ulysses transforms life into an eternal essence ("a

rose upon the rood of time"), just as Catholics believe

that the Mass transforms ordinary bread into Christ and

that Christ at the last supper and at every Mass changes his human suffering into an eternal pattern incarnated in man, an essence that transcends and outlives the suffering. Joyce is not preaching Catholic doctrine or faith in everlasting life. He is rather recording the human will to transcend its circumstances and to find sense in the chaotic here and now, and more specifically, he is demonstrating art's ability to transfigure the facts of ordinary life and the necessity for the artist to accept, if not be satisfied with, his raw material--what will satisfy is in the aesthetic transfiguration. 33

In 1906, according to Richard Ellmann, Joyce planned

to write two short stories: "Ulysses," about "a dark- complexioned Dublin Jew named Hunter who was rumored to be a cuckold," and "The Last Supper," a "story with a mock- heroic, mythic background."9 Judging from the little we know of these two projected stories, we are likely to conclude that they merged in Joyce's mind and grew into

Ulysses. Stephen, the aspiring artist-priest, in a central scene in "Oxen," stages his own last supper, accepting only the consecrated "wine." In "Lotus-Eaters," the man of passion. Bloom, repeats (without Stephen's depth of understanding) the words consecrating the eucharistie bread: "This is my body" (U86). Despite

Bloom's ignorance of Catholicism and of the Mass in particular, he embodies in his ordinary life, better than does Stephen, the ultimate reference of the Mass, the human Way of the Cross. Stephen, with his image of art as ordinary life consecrated by the artist, gives us a metaphor that helps to explain the complementary relationship between the eucharistie aesthetics and the ordeals of Bloom and Stephen.

In the matenity hospital episode, Stephen, sitting

"at head of the board" (U388), replays the last supper, mimicking Christ's consecration of bread and wine : "Now drink we, quod he, of this mazer and quaff ye this mead which is not indeed parcel of my body but my soul's 34

bodiment. Leave ye fraction of bread to them that live by

bread alone" (U391). His words a few lines later liken

the incarnation of the Catholic Eucharist to the

incarnation effected in art through the power of the

priest-artist: "Know all men, he said, time's ruins build

eternity's mansions. What means this? Desire's wind

blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a

bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me

now. In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit

of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that

shall not pass away" (U391).10

Stephen's mock celebration of the eucharist takes

place in the chapter whose central subject is sexual

fertility. The eucharist and sexual reproduction (an

"incarnation") serve as complementary metaphors of

aesthetic creation, reinforcing each other and assuming

figurative equivalence (paralleling the equivalence of the

Catholic Mass and the Incarnation). In A Portrait of the

Artist as a Young Man, Stephen says that Aquinas'

philosophy is adequate to explain artistic apprehension

and beauty, but "when we come to the phenomena of artistic

conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction

[he] require[s] a new terminology and a new personal experience" (P209). The words "conception," "gestation," and "reproduction" themselves introduce a new terminology of sexuality, the interaction of masculine and feminine 35 elements within the artist. The Stephen of "Oxen" suggests both this reproductive metaphor and a figurative equivalent, the eucharist.

Although Stephen would know that, according to

Catholic belief, both body and blood of Christ are present under either species, his pointedly distinguishing the bread from the "wine" and his taking only the latter represent his self-exile from those who are involved more concretely with everyday existence. Only the priest receives the wine during Mass, and so the "priest of eternal imagination" is set apart in a similar manner.

But the priest at Mass receives the bread also; Stephen's rejection of the bread has additional significance.

Stephen's gesture during this last supper excludes himself from and is directed against those like the usurper Buck, present at the supper. A man of science, dealing with the "hardheaded facts" (U418), Buck lives by bread alone. That Stephen's mother is "beastly dead" is a physical and irreversible fact of our existence: "And what is death, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissecting room. It's a beastly thing and nothing else.

It simply doesn't matter. . . . To me it's all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning"

(U8). Buck is preoccupied with fact, and his cynical 36 mockery of nearly everything leaves the world a shell of hard fact devoid of meaning. This attitude repels the aspiring artist-priest, steeped in ritual and accustomed to giving empirical reality a sacramental depth.

Ineluctable fact, decay, change, and history oppress

Stephen. To his Catholic mentality, the world and humanity are "fallen," fallen from some original ideal unity into history, a changing diversity and a struggling of opposites, a thrusting toward some sort of reunification. What should have been Eden is for Stephen a Gethsemane where he falters at the thought of having to face his history and his sins, where he wishes that the bitterness of life would pass away. He is in danger of becoming a "beautiful ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts" (U184).

According to Stephen and Joyce, "time's ruins" become

"eternity's mansions." The transformation takes place in the artist's womb of imagination. In this womb, the soul,

"form of forms" (U26), "entelechy" of history (U189), shapes the events and existants of time into "history," into meaningful wholes. The intellect and imagination infuse sacramental meaning into the chaotic array of accident. The imaginative process is an imposition of abstraction onto the facts of environment, the creation of metaphor, which is the creation of significant relationships. The artistic imagination absorbs the 37

barrage of life and environment that conditions it and

then controls that collection of data with metaphor or

abstraction, producing art: "life purified in and

reprojected from the human imagination" (P125). The work

of art, only conditioned by historical situation,

expresses a truth above or beyond conditioned time, a

"claritas" inherent in its harmony and principle of unity

(see P212-13).

The image of the creative process proposed by Stephen

in "Oxen of the Sun" recalls those of the Stephen of A

Portrait of the Artist. Art is "forged" in the "smithy" of the artist's soul (P253). In the artist's "workshop,"

"sluggish matter of the earth" receives a "new soaring

impalpable imperishable being" (P169). The "priest of eternal imagination" "[transmutes] the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of overliving life"

(P221). In A Portrait of the Artist, we find an early version of the image used in "Oxen": "In the Virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh" (P217). In

Ulysses, the image is refined; "the word was made flesh" now reads "all flesh . . . becomes the word." The earlier images suggest little more than a vaguely alchemical process; Joyce himself offers the comparison to alchemy in his youthful essay "A Portrait of the Artist": "Like an alchemist he bent upon his handiwork, bringing together 38

the mysterious elements, separating the subtle from the gross.

"Flesh becomes word," instead of "the word becomes flesh," because in a sense the artist reverses the

Incarnation. He brings eternal spirit out of the decaying material universe. The images of the creative process as eucharist and incarnation are further refined in this passage in "Oxen of the Sun": only the eucharistie wine is taken, and it is the "soul's bodiment." The fact that

Stephen accepts only the wine has more than a negative significance (that it is not bread); the wine is a species more appropriate to the creative act because it indicates some more spiritual and lasting essence which is still of the nature of the body. Father Robert Boyle explains this passage:

Stephen is thinking of the mead as the symbol of the artist's ink and comparing the activity of the artist in his ink with that of Christ under the appearance of wine (or of bread). . . . He is saying that my body is not in or under this mead because my body has done what, in the Eucharist, the substance of wine has done, i.e., disappeared...... So Stephen's words in "Oxen" become clear when we see that, unlike the passing of substance in the real Eucharist, the artist suffers a passing of accident so that his substance may enter into the ink and operate there as in a new body. Thus in the artistic consecrated ink of the artist, there are two substances but only one set of accidents. The artist's accidents have faded altogether away, and his substance has entered jji, not under the ink. . . . This new magic being is the ink just as it was, substance and accidents, but now marvelously informed by the artist's subtance, his form, his soul.12 39

Father Boyle's explanation is, in my opinion,

illuminating and correct. However, he does not explore

certain implications important to the present study. The

equation of eucharistie mead and artist's ink has skipped

over an intermediary element linking mead (wine) and ink.

This element is the blood that, as eucharist, the mead

becomes through transubstantiation. In this aesthetic

eucharist, wine becomes blood becomes ink. Christ's words

are supposed to have changed the wine into the blood that was to be shed the next day during his passion. Likewise,

the artist's ritual transubstantiation places on the page

the essence of his human existence, the blood-become-ink which is of the same substance as the living physical body and which is indicative of and expressive of its life- struggle. Within the historical and environmental situation, the body struggles and thereby gains a

"spirit," a consciousness of eternal truth, and within

that struggle (passion) the body "bleeds" that spirit onto

the page as ink. The blood-ink expresses the soul, the eternal verities apprehended or formed in the body's passion. The image, it seems to me, is the eucharistie version of Stephen's theory on Shakespeare and the suffering artist ("Scylla and Charybdis").

Father Boyle does not take the image this far, does not find it stated clearly enough. In his opinion, a more satisfactory development of Joyce's eucharistie image can 40 be found in Finnegans Wake, where Shem concocts black ink out of his own body wastes : "from the vile crap mixed with

the pleasantness of the divine Orion, after the mixture had been cooked and exposed to the cold, he made for himself imperishable ink."13 with this beastly material,

Shem expresses the spirit of mortal humanity: "thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidented through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal" (FW186). Father

Boyle considers this a more apt expression of the aesthetic eucharist because it better indicates "the concealment, sublimation perhaps, of the creating artist in his art, and the quasi-sacramental victory over time and space."1^

The eucharistie image of art, I believe, is as fully and aptly developed in Ulysses as Father Boyle believes it to be in Finnegans Wake. While Father Boyle does point out the sacramental quality of Molly's confection of blood and urine in the chamberpot, he does not develop a connection between this blood and the mead-blood-ink of

Stephen's chalice. The body's waste products or effusions--blood, sweat, urine--throughout Ulysses are the evidence of a common humanity and mortality and, figuratively, are the medium by which the timeless spirit of that humanity is recorded. 41

Joyce's carefully engineered coincidence of metaphor

and narrative content produces one of the keys allowing

the figurative blood of the passion to be viewed as the

enduring substance by which that passion is expressed. In

"Scylla and Charybdis," whose "art" is literature and

whose characters discuss the creative process, Stephen

speaks of art as the expression of the " redconecapped,

buffeted, brineblinded" artist (U195), and as I show in

Chapter Three, the episode corresponds to the sixth station, "Veronica wipes the face of Jesus." I can think of no better image to express the view of art expounded in

this episode, and in Ulysses generally, than that of the veronica, with its bloody portrait painted by the sufferer himself with the visible manifestation of the body's pain.

The similarity of this image in Ulysses and the eucharistie image of Finnegans Wake discussed by Father

Boyle might be seen clearer when we remember that Issy's love letter to her brother is written on her "veronique"

(FW457-58), a piece of her drawers, presumably with an ink similar or identical to Shem's concoction; this section of

Chapter XIV of Finnegans Wake corresponds to the sixth station of Shaun's via crucis.

Postponing further elaboration on the sixth station within "Scylla and Charybdis" until Chapter Three, I will only assert at this point that the idea of Christ's face imprinted on the veil completes the eucharistie image. 42

The blood of the artist's shared humanity, the essence of

his body's lot, becomes the ink that flows from his hand.

Of the same substance as the mortal body, yet permanent

when shaped by art, the blood marks the universally shared

truth of humankind; the particular form it takes on the

"veil" reflects the artist's blood-blinded face, or the

conditioned individual imagination that transforms fact

into claritas. Art considered as eucharist refers us to

the bloody drama the Mass is meant to re-enact (the drama

of Christ-man, representing all men); the veil's unfading

imprint of the suffering human face refers us to the work

of art, an affirmation of the human spirit. The aesthetic

creation can be thought of as a union of the "masculine"

"form of forms" and "feminine" flesh and blood in the womb

of imagination, and as a eucharistie transformation in

which the "masculine" artist-pr iest forms the word out of

the species of blood, the flowing sign and symbol of the

life of the body. In Ulysses, the eucharist possesses two

facets, two image-species--body and blood.

So far, I have introduced, for the most part, implied

figurative instances of blood in the novel. But Ulysses

is a blood-drenched novel. The word "blood" and forms of

the word occur at least two-hundred times, not to mention less direct occurrences of such words as "corpuscles,"

"sanguine," and "gorescarred," or only implied references to the blood of birth or menstruation. If Ulysses is a 43

"body," consisting of chapter-organs, it is appropriate

that blood would course throughout; it is perhaps more

fitting to say that the novel is expressive of the body,

but its means of expression is the body's blood. The

soul's giving meaning to its body's exertions and using

the body's excretions to embody that meaning is the

"soul's bodiment." Ulysses presents the body of naturalistic fact, but the Word that makes the presentation a meaningful one is formed out of the body's blood. The "flesh becomes word" (truth that does not pass

The most notable instance of blood in Ulysses occurs

in "Penelope." Molly begins to menstruate, and the blood flows like the unstaunched writing of the chapter. Joyce thought of the female mind as a f l o w , 17 and it is difficult not to equate the flow of blood with the flow of words. The blood flows from her womb, her thoughts flow from her memory and active imagination, and "Jamesie" transcribes the flows into words. Stephen claims that in the womb of the maker's imagination flesh becomes word.

Within "Penelope" all of the novel's eucharistie changes become explicit: bread of ordinary life, flesh, blood, ink, word. The organ of this chapter is flesh, but flesh becomes word at the instigation of blood-flow. The blood that flows into the chamberpot seems to be the blood of 44

the body formed by Ulysses. The novel expires as the

life-blood drains away.

The blood in Molly's chamberpot is figuratively one

with the consecrated blood in Stephen's chalice in "Oxen"

and on the veronica, the same blood that forms the Word in

Ulysses, the sacramental expression of human life, of the

beleaguered Ulysses, universal man. Richard Ellmann

writes that "the body of God and the body of woman share

blood in common. In allowing Molly to menstruate at the

end Joyce consecrates the blood in the chamberpot."18 The

bodies of woman and man, humanity, a "fallen" race, share

this consecrated blood in common. Although Molly's

portrait is of a unique person, her menstruation assumes a

symbolic dimension because of Bloom's speculation in

"Nausicaa" ("How many women in Dublin have it today"

U368) and because of its consistency with the patterns of

blood and eucharistie consecration in the novel. Her menstruation represents more than simply her shared womanhood; it also represents her shared humanity. Her menstruation is the mark of a race that must procreate,

suffer, and die. It is the bleeding of a wound

symbolizing the wounds of every member of the race. All possess something eternally "feminine," as the "Circe" chapter makes clear. Bloom's transsexual experience might

reflect Joyce's apparent belief that Jewish men are

"womanly men,but Bloom and Jews in general only 45

represent, because more notably and consistently

victimized, the "womanliness" of all people. Human

beings--in this case. Bloom, Stephen, Molly— are all

passive victims of a "curse" (pain, history, persecution,

the conditions of life); all are women and Jews.

In "Oxen," Stephen is not fully aware of these

implications of his eucharistie image. He seems even less aware earlier, in "Telemachus" and "Proteus," where he draws back at the thought of the bowl of green bile, a sign of his mother's disease, a symbol of his own guilt and mortality. This bowl and its contents become associated in his mind with the "bitter waters" of life, the deathly green sea, in "Proteus" connected with the figurative bitter cup Stephen is then pondering, as if in

Gethsemane: "In cups of rocks it slops. . . . It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling" (U49). This bitter water in the cups of rocks is of the same nature as the blood and ink of Stephen's cup in "Oxen" and of Molly's chamberpot. Through the imagination of the artist the foamy water becomes an unfurling flower, a rose-Bloom on the rood of time.

Through nature's creativity, flowers blossom from the flood of life and wither in time. This blossoming and withering of individual existences expresses the spirit of existence ("Still, the flowers are more poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses 46

nothing. Immortelles"--U113). The flower unfurling in

water is, in "Lotus-Eaters," Bloom's "floating flower," of

which Bloom silently proclaims, "This is my body" (U86).

The body and the blood share a single substance; the body

suffers its passion and the blood thereby shed is the ink

that captures the body's spirit.

The unity of feminine nature is reflected in the

feminine imagination's aesthetic goal of restoring coherence to the chaos of life. When spirit works to affirm nature's creativity, masculine form effects this

restoration of "unity." In the eucharistie infusion of meaning into the "accidents" of life, contraries unite to re-establish the state lost when the world "fell" into two sexes, into consciousness and nature, into time and pure streaming life. Unfortunately, Stephen's inherited conception of "fallen" nature presents to him only the corruption in the world around him and little of the actual and potential fertility, with which the human artificer must be associated.

Stephen feels himself to be a victim of nature and history, that is, of beastly nature and human nature which, in trying to rise above the beastly, establishes conditions equally confining. Nature and history constitute man's "fallen" state. Nation, Church, and family have enslaved Stephen and have become to him another given condition he has to cast off. His past 47

continues in the present to hold him down. History controls his thoughts and emotions, determines how he perceives and conceives reality.

Within the hard facts of empirical reality, in all

its ineluctable modalities, Stephen reads the "signatures of all things." But what he is reading are the indelible

imprints of the nets that criss-cross his eyes, an Irish-

Catholic-Jesuit-literary grid that signs, through him, the modalities of unaccommodated life. His experience takes the shape of the metaphors his history and education have

imposed. In particular. Catholic rituals, practices, and theology dictate the substance and form of his behavior, his attitude toward himself, his theory of literature, his entire worldview. The effect of Catholic education on him is so strong that even his rejection of Catholicism is couched in Catholic imagery and ritual.

His grief and guilt emerge in the words and images his religion has provided ("Liliata rutilantium . . .").

In the role of a learned. Catholic Lady Macbeth, he confronts his guilt; "Agenbite. . . . Yet here's a spot"

(U16). Like the Stephens of A Fortrait of the Artist and

Stephen Hero, this Stephen is "supersaturated" with the religion he disbelieves (P240); Catholicism is in his blood (SH206). He is destined to encounter "the reality of experience" through a sacramental screen: "In vague sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed 48

drawn to go forth to encounter reality: and it was partly

the absence of an appointed rite which had always

constrained him to inaction whether he had allowed silence

to cover his anger or pride or had suffered only an

embrace he longed to give" (P159). His thoughts are

clothed in "the vesture of a doubting monk" (P176). The

fastidious and godlessly mystic Stephen of Ulysses gives

the impression of having been a Catholic adolescent who

laid out his life "in devotional areas," storing up benefits of indulgences, fingering his rosary beads as he walked the streets, assigning one of the seven gifts of

the Holy Ghost to each day of the week (P147-48). In

"Telemachus," the "proud potent titles changed over

Stephen's memory the triumph of their brazen bells" because "rite and dogma" have subjected "his own rare

thoughts" (U20-21). The Jesuit strain in him presents people to him as betrayers, usurpers, Satans, Virgins,

Mothers; people and events are materializations of secret sacramental or anagogic patterns.

Stephen continually acts a role in one ritual drama or another; he plays at being priest, Christ, Lucifer, spurned artist, or tormented romantic hero. He is, as Buck points out, a "lovely mummer" (U5), using his ashplant and

Latin quarter hat as props. With irony and frustration, he is conscious of his histrionic alienation from himself:

"God, we'll simply have to dress the character. I want 49

puce gloves and green boots" (U17); "Who walking like"

(U41).

Stephen compulsively distances the immediate,

ritualizes and mediates the here and now, with sacramental

frameworks and neat formulations. Humans endlessly

intellectualize, create form and meaning, but at a too distant remove from the concrete world, metaphor or form becomes ritualistic, an expression of polarity between historical concreteness and an illusory great goal toward which history moves. Stephen seems to understand that life is more than simply a pale ritual reflection of an ultimate meaning, that history's sense lies within what

the imagination makes of the "shout in the street," but his ritualistic interpretations and behavior belie this understanding. His heritage fetters him, though his understanding prods him to seek freedom of imagination from inherited abstractions and guilt.

Once his imagination is liberated and open to a universal human truth beyond Catholic dogma (even though it might be dressed in the drama of religious form), then he can fulfill his calling as priest of art. In comparing the artist and art with the priest and the eucharist,

Stephen in a way is breaking free of the dogma that binds his art; the bloodless rituals themselves are transmuted into symbols of his artistic freedom. He begins to control and use for art his religious and familial 50

conditions, instead of allowing them to control and block

his creativity. For Stephen, freedom should mean evading

the narrow myth and embracing the universal "myth" (but

universal and therefore "truth") which imagination

constructs from the materials of history.

At the beginning of Ulysses, he is still in the

throes of defiance and dis-belief. His mind is not free

enough to believe in a shared spirit arising out of and despite the material conditions of life. When asked by

Haines if he is "a believer in the narrow sense of the word," Stephen responds, "There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me" (U19). At this point, for Stephen, who feels trapped by his circumstances, there is either belief or disbelief in those nets restraining him, and his disbelief is merely a negation of the positive terms of

faith, not a real freedom. "You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free

thought" (U20), a horrible example because his Lucifer- like rebellion is a denial that depends upon what it denies and is not an affirmation of himself. Like the

Stephen of A For trai t of the Artist, he seems to hold a

Jansenist position regarding free will: "I also am sure that there is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own laws" (P187).

Stephen cannot yet affirm a faith on his own terms, a wider unrestricted faith, like Bloom's, beyond 51

uncompromising dogmatism, which would have allowed Stephen

to "pray" at his mother's side because humanity, not

intellectual pride and rebellion, would have governed his

action. His freedom depends not upon his forgetting his

education and history but upon his redefining and

broadening the terms and patterns he has inherited.

History's "indelible marks," like those spiritual

"indelible marks" of the sacraments of the Church, have

scarred Stephen, Bloom, and Molly--and Joyce. They cannot

erase history, but perhaps they can read beneath its

surface. Stephen aims to extricate himself, as Joyce did,

from the nets of history, but he may never remove the

imprints they left, as Joyce never did. In Ulysses, Joyce

uses history to transcend history, or see beyond the view

history has given him. His use of ritual goes beyond the

formality and bloodless detachment of the Catholic rites

he grew up with. Ulysses is not a black mass, although it

opposes the Catholic Church. It opposes Catholicism in

the sense that it exceeds and includes all narrow human categories.

And it employs a Catholic formula of the passion in order to universalize and secularize the Incarnation and

the sufferings on Calvary. Joyce once called the Mass "a very great drama,"20 no doubt thinking of "the deathless passions, the human verities" (CW45) an imaginative, sympathetic observer might see in the rite. The passion 52

play symbolized or restaged in the Mass is performed more

concretely in the Way of the Cross. Both dramas, actually

the same with different scenic developments, are woven

into Ulysses.

In the Telemachia, the text I consider in my next

chapter, Stephen is lost in his pride and guilt, trapped

by his past, and unable to communicate with others in life

or to others in art. He is immersed in a narrow sense of

belief so deeply that his rebellion against it only

confirms its strength. In relation to a wider, profounder

faith, he remains an ignorant infidel. In the structural

correspondences to the Mass in Ulysses, the first three

chapters must certainly correspond to the first part of

the Mass (from beginning through Gospel and Creed), known

(to any young Catholic) as the Mass of the Catechumens,

"i.e., of those who were still in the first rudiments of

Christianity, because they were permitted to assist at it

thus far before they were baptized."21 Only the baptized,

fully instructed members could stay for the second part of

the Mass, the Mass of the Faithful, consisting of the offertory, consecration, and communion. Thus, after three chapters, Stephen departs, temporarily, and faithful Bloom

If Ulysses is a Mass of sorts, an artistic eucharist,

it consecrates life and celebrates spirit. The eucharistie aesthetic implies a passional metaphysics, the 53

application of a passion metaphor to life. As a "Mass,"

Ulysses represents the passion; Stephen repeats the form

but turns away from the content. In my next chapter, I

begin to analyze how the bread of everyday life is

transformed, by means of the passion figure, into the drama of the "body" of Ulysses, expressed in the

figurative "blood" of that same passion. In the

Telemachia, Stephen is only a catechumen, because he only studies and observes, and remains proudly detached and self-pitying. However, his deliberations provide to the novel the abstractions or metaphors that raise concrete, warm fullblooded life to meaningful drama. Stephen's inherited allegorical formulas of the fall, carnality, and divine intervention become, in Joyce's hands, the material for a metaphorical Way of the Cross that is a humanistic drama in which flesh becomes word, instead of an allegory in which word becomes flesh. NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

1 A Full Catechism of the Catholic Religion, translated from the German of the Rev. Joseph Deharbe, S.J. by Rev. John Pander (New York: The Catholic Publication Society, 1880), pp. 263-64. See also the Roman Ri tual : "Our Eucharist, therefore, is the unbloody renewal, or better, the sacramental making present of the sacrifice of the Cross"; translated and edited by Rev. Philip T. Weller, Vol. I (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Co., 1950), p. 246. According to the Council of Trent : "In this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass that same Christ is contained and immolated in an unbloody manner Who once offered Himself in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross"; quoted in Martin Cochem, Explanation of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, translated by Camillus Paul Maes, 2nd ed (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1896), p. 115. Cochem makes an observation that is reminiscent of the crosses that recur in Ulysses: "That the passion of Christ is renewed in holy Mass must be clearly apparent to every one. Everything recalls it and points to it, and preeminently the sign of the cross, which meets our eye continually. In the altar-stone five crosses are engraven. . . . The sacred vessels and the sacerdotal vestments are all marked with the cross. During the celebration of Mass the priest crosses himself sixteen times, and blesses the oblation with the same sign twenty- nine times. What is this constant reiteration of the sign of the cross intended to signify if not that the sacrifice of blood offered by Christ upon the cross, that is, the bitter passion and death, is represented, repeated, renewed upon the altar?" (pp. 114-15).

2 "The Eucharist continues and perfects the purpose of the Incarnation." Roman Ritual, p. 242.

3 Paul L. Briand, Jr., "The Catholic Mass in James Joyce's Ulysses," James Joyce Quarterly, 5 (Summer 1968), 312-22; Patrick A. McCarthy, "Further Notes on the Mass in Ulysses," James Joyce Quarterly, 7 (Winter 1970), 132-37.

4 Briand, 312.

5 McCarthy, 135-37. 6 "The Black Panther (A Study in Technique)," Accent, X (1949-50), 154.

7 Ruth M. Walsh, "In the Name of the Father and of the Son . . . Joyce's Use of the Mass in Ulysses," James Joyce Quarterly, 6 (Summer 1969), 321.

8 Walsh, 324, 328.

9 Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 238.

10 The idea of the Catholic Eucharist as a renewal of the Incarnation has been expressed in words similar to Stephen's: "If I am asked how bread is changed into the body of Christ, I answer : The Holy Ghost overshadows the priest, and operates that in the elements which He effected in the womb of the Virgin Mary" (St. John Damascene, who is referred to in Ulysses, p. 689); "As often as thou sayest or hearest Mass it ought to seem to thee as great, as new, and as delightful as if Christ, that same day first descending into the womb of the Virgin, had been made man" (St. Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ). Both quoted in Cochem, pp. 74-75.

In the Viking Critical Por trai t of the Artist as a Young M a n , p. 261.

12 James Joyce's Pauline Vision (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), pp. 56-57.

11 "... ex stercore turpi cum divi Orionis iucunditate mixto, cocto, friqorique exposi to, encaustum sibi feci t indelibile." James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), p. 185. Subsequent references to Finnegans Wake (FW) will be cited in the text. Translated from the Latin by Father Boyle, in "Miracle in Black Ink : A Glance at Joyce's Use of His Eucharistie Image," James Joyce Quarterly, 10 (Fall 1972), 56.

I'* "Miracle in Black Ink," 58.

15 "Miracle in Black Ink," 56.

18 The two species of the Eucharist has prompted, among Catholic theologians, a consideration of the separate significances of body and of blood. The "precious blood" (Joyce uses this traditional Catholic term in "Cyclops"-- U309) is an emblem of the suffering itself, the "bloody death" of the body (see Deharbe Catechism, p. 264), "because the life of the flesh is in the blood : and I have given it to you, that you may make atonement with it upon the altar of your souls, and the blood may be for an 56

expiation of the soul" (Lev. 17:11). The term "precious blood" derives from the First Epistle of St. Peter: "you were not redeemed with corruptible things as gold and silver, from your vain conversation of the tradition of your fathers : but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled" (1:18-19). Redemption, "a right to the tree of life," lies in being washed in "the blood of the Lamb" (Apoc. 22:14; see also Apoc. 7:14).

St. Paul writes: "And through him to reconcile all things unto himself, making peace through the blood of his cross" (Col. 1:20); "And to Jesus the mediator of the new testament, and to the sprinkling of blood which speaketh better than that of Abel" (Hebrews 12:24). This last passage refers to a tradition of a blood that cries out, pleads, or speaks: "the voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the earth" (Gen. 4:10). Martin Cochem is certainly consistent with the traditional Judeo- Christian metaphor when he writes: "The same divine blood cries to God every day on holy Mass, not with one voice only, but with as many as He shed drops from His sacred body" (pp. 150-51). The last supper consecration mentions the blood of a new "covenant," a reconciliation or agreement effected by means of words, or the Word. Joyce was undoubtedly aware of this special connotation of the blood of the passion, the blood's association with justification or redemption, and with verbal articulation.

Ellmann, James J oyce, p. 387.

13 Ulysses on the Liffey, p. 171.

13 Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 477.

20 Stanislaus Joyce, ^ Brother's Keeper, p. 104.

21 Deharbe Catechism, p. 266. Although an ancient designation and now serving no practical purpose, it is still commonly taught to young Catholics. CHAPTER TWO

SIGNS OF THE CROSS; THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES OF THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS

The previous chapter attempts to show that the eucharistie image of artistic production implies, in

Ulysses, the development of the corresponding image of

Christ's passion, the lived content of the eucharist.

This chapter demonstrates that the novel's first three chapters initiate the development of that corresponding

image by anticipating and laying the foundation for a particular expression of the passion in a parallel to the

Stations of the Cross.

The presentation of Stephen in these opening chapters

is not of lesser importance nor of a lesser narrative actuality than that of Bloom in later chapters, but because of Stephen's detachment and extreme introversion these episodes generally present signs of the Way to come and not the thing itself. Of course Stephen's own passion begins in these first chapters (and later "merges" with

Bloom's), but it receives a different kind of development.

Once Stephen's predicament is introduced and once he has made an abstract sign of the cross in his thoughts, it

57 58

will be left to Bloom to show Stephen how to bear the

burden of life instead of signing himself in self-absorbed

isolation.

These first three chapters are complexly constructed,

with a number of parallels and patterns of allusion

operating simultaneously. The Homeric and schematic

correspondences perhaps come first to mind. However, I

wish to draw attention to what I call the "spiritual

exercises" because they originate in Stephen's religious

training, provide form and content to his cerebral

wanderings in these episodes, and are reminiscent of

Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises (to which Joyce

gives an important function in A Portrait of the Artist^).

Loyola's Spiritual Exercises opens with its own

definition;

This expression "Spiritual Exercises" embraces every method of examination of conscience, of meditation, of contemplation, of vocal and mental prayer, and of other spiritual activity that will be mentioned later. For just as strolling, walking, and running are bodily exercises, so spiritual exercises are methods of preparing and disposing the soul to free itself of all inordinate attachments, and after accomplishing this, of seeking and discovering the Divine Will regarding the disposition of one ' s^ life, thus insuring the salvation of his

In the morning hours, Stephen might be thought to be

"preparing and disposing the soul to free itself of all

inordinate attachments"; in the course of the day he does succeed in casting off many attachments, ending the day a 59

freer, if not completely free, person. This freedom, for

Stephen, is salvation.

Loyola's Spiritual Exercises outlines a retreat of

four "weeks," consisting of four subjects of meditation:

sin and its reward, hell; the life and ministry of Christ;

the passion of Christ; and the Resurrection and Ascension.

While the last of these is alien to Stephen's mind at this

point in the novel, the other three are reflected in his

thoughts and situations throughout the Telemachia. In

these three chapters, the exercises take the form of

disguised and sometimes overt references to Catholic

notions of sin and hell, to major incidents or aspects of

Christ's ministry, and to Christ's passion, usually the

formalized expression of the passion in the Stations.

Through Stephen's own view of himself and through

situations and expressions external to Stephen, Joyce

stages a life of Christ in brief in the opening three

chapters. A. M. Klein has written that "behind its

comparatively innocent and routine action, behind the

small talk and big words of Telemachus, there is figured,

in abbreviated form, a contemporary counterpart of the

life of Christ.In his concentration on the one

chapter, Klein makes some significant identifications,

which I endorse: Stephen corresponds to Christ; Buck

Mulligan to John the Baptist; Haines to Satan, the tempter of Christ in the wilderness. Some of Klein's evidence 60

bears repeating; Malachi (from Hebrew malach,

"announcer") Mulligan's mirror, reflecting sunlight,

"flash[es] tidings abroad" (U6); Buck says to Stephen,

"I'm the only one who knows what you are" (U9); Buck's

immersion at the end of the chapter suggests a baptism;

Stephen's "usurper," in reference to Buck, plays on the

observation of one of the gospels: "He was not the light,

but was to give testimony of the light" (John 1:8). As

for Haines, his name "is an Anglicization of the French

word for 'hate,'" that is, Satan, whose nightmare

visitation would be Christ, the black panther.^

In "Nestor," Stephen performs the role of Christ the

teacher. Like Christ, he suffers the children to come

unto him, but he seems less self-assured, more helpless

and self-concerned than the ministering Jesus. Within the

chapter's general reference to this phase of Christ's

life, the chapter contains some passing allusions to

other, more specific events of the gospels: "Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves" (U26); "To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's" (U26). Caesar's coins, and other coins mentioned throughout the chapter,

remind us of the betrayal purchased for pieces of silver, and of the materialism Stephen sees as usurping the honor he deserves as artist-priest-Christ. Stephen's nonsense

riddle ("The cock crew/The sky was blue ..." --U26-27) stands as a poor parable from a not very well played 61

Christ. Deasy doubts Stephen's natural aptitude for

teaching (U35), but perhaps he is wrong; in any case,

Stephen must first be "a learner." Apparently never to

return to teach at Deasy's school (U617), Stephen goes off

to try other features of his role : artist-priest,

suffering redeemer, son seeking to atoned with the father.

In "Proteus," the narrative situation and several

allusive clues place Stephen in a Garden of Gethsemane.

In part, the gospels give this account:

Then Jesus came with them into a country place which is called Gethsemani; and he said to his disciples: Sit you here, till I go yonder and pray .... [H]e began to grow sorrowful and to be sad. . . . And going a little further, he fell upon his face, praying, and saying : My. father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt. And he cometh to his disciples, and findeth them asleep, and he saith to Peter: What? Could you not watch one hour with me? Watch ye, and pray that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh weak (Matt. 26:36-41). [A] nd he prayed, that if it might be, the hour might pass from him. And he saith: Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee: remove this chalice from me (Mk. 14:35-36). And his sweat became as drops of blood, trickling down upon the ground (Lu. 22:44).

Stephen, brooding, afflicted with guilt and grief and

fear, thinks, "I am quiet here alone. Sad too" (U49). He ponders things terrible to meditate ("terribilia meditans"--U45) . He questions how free his will is if he 62

was not able to choose the conditions of his existence nor

existence itself: "From before the ages He willed me and

now may not will me away or ever. A lex eterna stays

about him. Is that then the divine substance wherein

Father and Son are consubstantial?" (U38). Shortly after

this, Christ's "sirring his father" in the garden seems to

be the intended association: "And skeweyed Walter sirring

his father, no less. Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir. Jesus

wept: and no wonder, by Christ" (U38). The words "Jesus

wept" are taken from the gospel story of Christ's learning

of Lazarus' death, but they might also apply to the

sadness and human weakness in Gethsemane (in Stephen Hero,

Stephen remembers a passage from Yeats that claims Jesus

wept in the garden: "Why do you fly from our torches

which were made out of the wood of the trees under which

Christ wept in the garden of Gethsemane?"— SH178). At one

point Stephen makes an unmistakable alius ion--"Abbas

F.'ther" (U39) — to the gospel episode, in addition to the

reference to the immediate context where Stephen has just

tho ght of Joachim Abbas.

Stephen's thoughts reveal his uncertainty about the

future, his hesitancy about life, his unwillingness to

drink of the chalice handed to him by history. Stephen does not seem to realize fully or to accept that the cup

of bitter waters is the same cup he must hold in his celebration of the eucharist of art: the chalice Christ 63 speaks of in the garden refers to his destined passion and crucifixion and to the chalice of the last supper.

Stephen is a reluctant Christ, unprepared to resign himself to what his humanness requires: "His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. . . . I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable" (U48)). At

this stage, his way of rising above the uneluctable modalities of existence is still to reject them.

The chapter includes other references to the life of

Christ, such as Stephen's sighting "two maries" (U45; compare the Maries who look on at the crucifixion) and his repeating to himself two of Christ's words on the cross,

"I thirst" (U50). Perhaps Stephen thinks he is already on a cross, and in a way he is, since life, the rood of time, certainly torments him. But from another perspective, he remains in Gethsemane; he cannot accept the chalice and would like it to pass away. He is more reluctant than the

Jesus of the gospel stories, who actively surrenders to destiny after his moment of weakness. In contrast,

Stephen walks toward town at the end of "Proteus," passive and spiritually listless.

Gethsemane is the dominant Christ-image of "Proteus," but in all three opening chapters Stephen's silent agonizing, his meditations on guilt, death, and destiny, recall the Christ tortured by thoughts of his mission and imminent execution for the sins of mankind. Stephen's 64

meditations, which begin in the tower, constitute another

spiritual exercise: the contemplation of sin and hell.

The sins preoccupying Stephen are his own sins,

particularly that which he has committed against his dying

mother, and the "original sin," the notion that everyone

is in a state of sin when born, because one is born, that

is, because one is human and "fallen." This obsession

with his guilt, as well as with his grief and servitude,

itself constitutes a hell. The two exercises--meditat ions

on sin and hell and on the life of Chr ist--then, run

simultaneously and are embedded within each other; Joyce

has Stephen enact Christ's Gethsemane (a role Stephen is

to some extent conscious of playing) and this Gethsemane

itself is a private hell whose most painful torments are

the stings of sin and its offspring death.

In "Telemachus," Stephen's sense of guilt toward his

mother haunts him. He may not be guilty literally of

killing her, as Buck's aunt thinks, but "someone killed

her" (U5), and Stephen feels he must take responsibility.

His real sins--inhumanity and pride--remain unacknowledged

and are just as well categorized, made intellectually manageable, under the word "murder" since he has denied human life in his mother and himself. Ironically, he deals with the guilt by formalizing it--"Agenbi te of

inwit"--and transforming it into a part he plays: "Yet here's a spot" (U16). The "spot," of course, is a 65

fiction, appropriately so because his sin results from his

intellectual negation of an abstraction. For the sake of

principle he has disregarded love and his mother's

humanity. In trying to kill the constraints she and her

faith represent, he killed his human relationship with

her. The "spot" is a pale reflection of the stains on his

mother's "fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed

lice from her children's shirts" (UlO). Like many other

occurrences of blood in the novel, the blood on her

fingernails, blood sucked by the parasites from her

children, represents bonds of love and a common humanity.

Stephen can see only the parasites, symbols of what he

feels are life-draining forces in his life--family,

Church, the Jesuits.

By the time he walks along the strand, Stephen's

sense of personal sin has become generalized; his sin and

individual hell exemplify a state permeating fallen nature. The "something sinister" in him (U5) is within all: "Darkness is in our souls . . . shame-wounded by our sins" (U48). His private grief at his mother's death becomes a mourning for mortality: "Omnis caro ad te veniet (U48). His mother, in "Proteus" is a "womb of sin," a link in the "strandentwining cable of all flesh"

(U38), his connection to sin and death. In "Telemachus,"

Stephen summons the unpleasant images of her illness and death: ". . . her wasted body within its loose brown 66

graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her

breath . . . a faint odour of wetted ashes. . . . the

green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting

liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting" (U5). In

"Proteus," the unsavory images of decay pervade all

nature, from the decomposing carcass of "dogsbody" to the

drowned man's corpse Stephen imagines being pulled from

the sea and decomposing into elements that go a progress

through all things; "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 urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the

gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave,

his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun" (U50). Stephen

grieves for his mother and laments mortality, a hell-like

punishment for sin, from which he would exclude himself, a

"lex eterna" from which he would like to declare his

freedom: "I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of

horror of his death. I . . . With him together down. . .

I could not save her. Waters: bitter death : lost"

(U46).

At least in Joyce's mind, even if we do not identify

the two Stephens as the same, the macabre imagery in these chapters owes something to the description of hell in A

Portrait of the Artist;

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer. . . . Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. . . . And then imagine this sickening stench . . . from the . . . fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus...... Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth. . . . In hell all laws are overturned: there is no thought of family, of country, of ties, of relationships. The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging like themselves. All sense of humanity is forgotten. . . . The mouths of the damned are full of blasphemies against God and of hatred for the fellowsufferers and of curses against those souls which were their accomplices in sin (P120-22).

(The last sentence calls to mind the blasphemies, hatred, and curses of Buck, Haines, and Deasy.) Additional spiritual pains include that of conscience and, "the greatest," "the pain of loss" (P127-28). Hell was created

in response to Lucifer's first sin, "an instant of rebellious pride of the intellect" (P133), a grander version of Stephen's sin. The preacher of this sermon points out that this reflection upon hell and sin was 68 inspired by the "book of spiritual exercises" of "our holy founder" (P127).

Near the conclusion of the sermon, the preacher introduces but does not develop another of the spiritual exercises: "A sin, an instant of folly and weakness, drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and brought death and suffering into the world. To retrieve the consequences of that sin the Only Begotten Son of God came down to earth, lived and suffered and died a most painful death, hanging for three hours on the cross" (P134). In Ulysses, this third exercise— a reflection on Christ's passion--seems present in these same three chapters, along with the meditations on the life of Christ and on sin and hell.

While the parallel to the passion (by way of a correspondence to the Stations of the Cross) most clearly and fully works itself out in the later chapters, beginning with "Calypso," the novel's opening chapters also correspond to the first three stations.

Because of Stephen's abstract and Jesuitical mental operations, the allusions to the Stations in "Telemachus,"

"Nestor," and "Proteus" introduce the abstract notions surrounding the idea of the passion and redemption.

Stephen's intellectualizing is Joyce's opportunity to establish certain metaphoric equations between narrowly religious, bloodless concepts and broadly human, lived actualities. Stephen copes with the latter by distancing 69

them by means of the former, while Bloom accepts the

latter without recourse to the intellectual frameworks of

the former, at least without a conscious, refined

understanding of them. Stephen, in the Telemachia,

foreshadows and introduces the terms of the passion more

concretely experienced later, just as Christ in Gethsemane

foresees and foresuffers his passion, his sentence of death on the cross because of man's fall.

Stephen's thoughts involve the figurative ideas of

the death-sentence and of the hardships of mortal and historically situated humanity (its "crosses") resulting

from his original fall. These notions — the death- sentence, the crosses that must be borne, the fall--are elements of the Christian myth that have been firmly

impressed upon the Irish-Catholic Stephen, and Joyce.

Joyce apparently found that the literal senses of these three key terms offered a felicitous connection to the first three stations of the cross : 1. Jesus is condemned to death; 2. Jesus is made to bear his cross; 3. Jesus falls the first time. These first three stations correspond to "Telemachus," "Nestor," and "Proteus," respectively, and introduce the terms whose figurative senses, broadly interpreted, lie at the center of

Stephen's view of the world.

One of the governing themes of "Telemachus" is mortality, in specific and general applications, literal 70 and figurative senses; his mother's death, about which

Stephen is feeling guilty and grief-stricken; his own mortality as an offensively physical creature; death as a beastly thing that Buck can describe so matter-of-factly; the living deaths of spiritual atrophy and of servitude to masters whose authority is no longer recognized. Death hovers over the entire chapter; even the remembrance of an apparently good-natured gathering in Clive Kempthorpe's rooms resembles, in Stephen's thoughts, the macabre jollity of a dance of pale and bony death: "Palefaces: they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another,

0, I shall expire! Break the news to her gently, Aubrey!

I shall die!" (U7).

Stephen's ritualized grief seems to control the chapter : "Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virqinum chorus excipiat"

(UlO; 23).5 Very specific memories of his mother's sickroom haunt him. His brooding evokes the "bowl of white china" standing beside her deathbed and "the green sluggish bile" she vomited into it (U5). The formless threatening sea becomes to Stephen "a bowl of bitter waters" (U9), holding

"a dull green mass of liquid" (U5). The sea gives back only a "swollen bundle"--"Puf fy face, salt whi te"--a drowned man with whose condition Stephen now identifies

("Here I am"; U21). From the water, at the end of the 71

chapter, a voice calls to him, the voice of Buck, the

priest of the beastly dead world of fact and necessity.

The green liquid of death opposes and eventually

overwhelms the blood that runs through the veins of Dublin

(blood is the corresponding body organ for "Wandering

Rocks"), the blood of life that beats back the green sea's

waves, Cuchulain-like. Blood breaks down into the white corpuscles Buck mentions (U3) and eventually, after life gives way to death, reverts to bitter water and bile. The bowl of bitter water and bile is associated with the chalice which Stephen, as a Christ in Gethsemane, would

like to see pass from him. Blood and bitter water are of

the same substance, and this same chalice will contain the blood Stephen will later wish to change into overliving art. To Stephen at this point, maternal nature is fluid corruption, extending itself into the human world in the

form of spiritual death. His obsession with the fact that he is fastened to a dying animal ( "dogsbody"--U6) weakens his intent to create an artifice of eternity, one that will replace the Catholic Church's inhuman eternity, no longer an artifice with power to suspend disbelief.

Despite his disbelief and his spiritual isolation from others, Stephen remains bound to the forms of Church, country, family, and friends. He is being tried in this chapter by these forces and his sentence is death, because these powers of man deny that "the great sweet mother" is 72

also the source of life and of unlimited growth of the

spirit. Within he is fearful and constricted, a "fearful

Jesuit," afraid of his shadow. On the outside, Stephen

puts on a hard, silent, curt pose, which falls away in

"Proteus" to expose a burdened spirit. The outward

courage is possibly meant to remind us of a Christ on

trial and receiving sentence: "Jesus had a very pure

tragic manner: his conduct during his trial was

admirable" (SH185).

"Nestor" corresponds to the second station: "Jesus

is made to bear his cross. " History is the art of the

chapter and consists, for Stephen, of the "crosses" humans

bear; history is the rood of time. Out of the materials

of nature, mankind has constructed his cross: "an

actuality of the possible as possible" (U25). The cross

symbolizes all of the forms shaped by man's soul, "the

form of forms" (U26).

Stephen has been made to bear the burden of his past :

"History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to

awake" (U34). For Deasy, "all history moves toward one

great goal, the manifestation of God" (U34). This removal

of God or meaning from the actual conditions of life is

part of what Stephen objects to in the Irish-Catholic vision. Meaning or truth or God, for Stephen, is here and now, within everyday existence: - That is God . . . - A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders (U34).

Truth is incarnate within the passion in the streets; it

grows out of actual situations and does not exclude on the

basis of some single abstract "great goal" (Deasy's

position is consistent with his anti-semitism and anti­

feminism). The crosses of history, out of which meaning

arises, have to be shouldered in a present. Stephen

understands this and can formulate it in polemic but

cannot yet apply it. Only in his words to Deasy, so far, does he actively accept his cross, "shrugging his

shoulders." Deasy, distancing the material present from his vague sometime-future manifestation of God, takes

"dancing coins" "on his wise shoulders" (U36).

Details planted within the chapter might serve to compose the scene of the second station; "Per vias rectas" and "The rocky road to Dublin" (U31) provide the path; a crowd of Jews (in Stephen's memory) provide the convicted (and the onlookers, inseparable), Christs, crowned with thorns, mockingly dressed in purple robes, pressed on all sides, patient:

They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew the years of wandering and. patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh (Ü34).

This "composition of place" reinforces the identification

of literal history with the figurative cross shouldered in

the second station.

In the third episode, "Proteus," the previously proud

Stephen is fallen, crushed by the weight of his past.

With all of the complexity of Stephen's mind, the series of his past downfalls expands and universalizes into a general condition of nature. The specific sense of "fall"

in the third station of the cross--"Jesus falls the first

time"--assumes the figurative but clearly defined significance Stephen's background brings to it.^ Because of "the fall," Eden, blighted, degenerates into a Garden of Gethsemane.

The first paragraphs of "Proteus" present Stephen experiencing and philosophizing about the physical world around him, the "limit of the diaphane," ineluctable modalities (U37). Human space is "coloured signs," natural bodies transfigured by human "signatures": "Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured."

Nature offers only matter; man proposes significance.

Time is man's ("I's") relation to space, measured by his steps along its hard surface: "You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space" (U37). Out of a uniform flood of matter and energy, whose only "time" is 75 a repeating process of growth and decay, "I" creates the modalities of the audible and visible, conscious' relationship to and difference from original unity. These forms, space and time, constitute the figurative form of history, the cross. The Way of the Cross, human life, is the "walking through it," through space, measuring time by the distance covered. Hard reality is characterized by limitation and necessity; "Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably" (U37). Stephen's conception of a "fallen" nature underlies this dread and restricts his view of the natural to corruption and necessity, closing out the creativity of nature and the possibility of freedom in human nature.

Seconds later he sees what he imagines are two midwives coming down the steps toward the shore. A bag carried by one diverts his train of thought onto another track, headed in the same direction: "What has she in the bag? A misbirth with trailing navelcord. . . . The cords of all linking back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. .

. . You will be as gods? . . . Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville" (U37-38). All births are "misbirths" because they are ineluctably linked to the original sinners, the first fallers, and to the "Womb of sin"

(U38). Kinch, the knifeblade, can never cut the tie.

Stephen sees himself fallen, bound by "a lex eterna," 76

because the "cable of all flesh" passes from him through a

dead mother, a womb of sin: "Wombed in sin darkness I was

too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice

and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath"

(U38).

After this, his thoughts change shape, but they

continue to be colored by notions of falling (or failing),

inadequacy, and the imperfection of the human and natural

worlds. His family and others' seem a petty and

strangling source of pain: "Houses of decay, mine, his and all" (U39). Memories of schooldays focus on the

sterility of the "basiliskeyed," "tonsured and oiled and gelded," "fat" priests, on the empty rituals ("Down, up,

forward, back"), and on his own falls from grace: "Cousin

Stephen, you will never be a saint. . . . You were awfully holy, weren't you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in

Serpentine avenue that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet street. . . . On the top of the Howth train alone crying to the rain: naked women! " (U40). And then he thinks of his failure as an artist: "Books you were going to write with letters for titles. . . . Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?"

(U40). When he left Ireland for the continent, he was 77

"going to do wonders" as a "missionary to Europe after

fiery Columbanus"; but he received a telegram reading

"Mother dying come home father" (U42), and death brought

him back down to reality. His review of his history

brought up to date, halfway through the chapter, Stephen's

thoughts now linger, for the most part, on his present

condition, particularly as they are reflected back to him

in the immediate sights and sounds on the beach.

Stephen's recollections and the associations incited by his immediate perceptions are "seaspawn and seawrack" deposited by time's tides and constituting the "signatures of all things" (U37) on his past. He is like Sandymount's sand, "heavy of the past," a "language tide and wind have silted here" (U44). The heaviness of history, the crosses of "Nestor," weigh down Stephen and the sand. From the beginning of this chapter, he and his fellow beings on the beach are "sinking in the silted sand" (U37; see also 41,

44, 47); this image can be read figuratively as both a falling into the muck of ruined time and a sinking under the weight of time's cross.

On this strand lived Danevikings and Stephen's ancestors, people with whom he shares a humanity, by way of the cable of flesh; "Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves" (U45; blood and bitter seawaters of lust are metaphorically equivalent). In the present, a woman and a man pass by, like Christ, "shouldering" their burdens, the 78

woman's "spoils slung at her back," like Adam and Eve

taking their solitary way from Eden, she following "behind

her lord his helpmate, being awast, to Romeville. When

night hides her body's flaws calling under her brown shawl

from an archway where dogs have mired." Momentarily,

playfully, Stephen makes this Eve an object of his lust,

but "unfallen Adam rode and not rutted" (U47). As she

"trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load,"

Stephen returns to the image of tides bringing heaviness

to the sand and governed by physical law, echoing the

earlier "waves of lust": "Behold the handmaid of the

moon. In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her

rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled"

(U47-48). She and his mother are of the fallen race, and

the same blood is within him; "Omnis caro ad te veniet"

(U48).

Stephen reads the signs of his fallen lot even in the dog which, like himself, sniffs along the sand, "looking

for something lost in a past life" and finding only his

reflection in the "bloated carcass" of another dog:

"sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal" (U46)--a "poor dogsbody," like

Stephen.

The physical necessity and decay and the "darkness

[that] is in our souls . . . shame-wounded by our sins" 79

(U48), extend to a general state of nature: "Under the

upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly

and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats. . . .

Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and let

fall. Lord, they are weary: and, whispered to, they

sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves,

waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac

noctibus iniurias patiens inqemiscit" (U49). The Latin,

from St. Ambrose's Commentary on Romans, translates:

"Days and nights it patiently groans over wrongs."? The

passage on which this is a commentary reads: "For we know

that every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain, even

till now" (Romans 8:33). This chapter of Romans speaks of

the "servitude of corruption" and the deliverance from it

through Christ.^

Sexuality, as well as death, is for Stephen a result

of the original fall. Stephen is a link in the cable of

flesh, the essential feminine connection among all human

beings, and he shares the feminine waves of "lust" in his

blood. The "rutting" of male and female reflects the

larger drama of truth about the fallen universe: feminine

life "lusts" and masculine spirit is "shame-wounded" by

the sins it defines in reference to its own ideas. As J.

Mitchell Morse observes, Joyce borrowed Erigena's heretical notion that the fall resulted in "the history- 80

making interaction of contraries, most fundamentally the

male and the female."9

Dedalus is Icarus (the fabulous artificer his own

son), fallen into the sea, with its waves of lust and its

briny water that is chemically similar and figuratively

identical to human blood. Because Stephen is born of

woman and because he is guilty of "rebellious pride of the

intellect," like Lucifer, he is fallen and falls

continuously: "Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the

intellect, Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum" (U50).

Lucifer's fall prefigures and results in man's fall, and

acts as Stephen's model ("non serviam"). This reference

to Lucifer unites the literal and figurative senses of

"fall" dispersed throughout the chapter : Lucifer falls in

sinning and therefore falls from heaven through physical

space to hell. A similar equation is created by the

correspondence to the third station: Christ suffers for

the fall of man and physically falls under the weight of

that suffering. And yet, it is through this fall ( felix

culpa), through human life, that human spirit receives

expression. "The womb of sin" is in a sense the womb of

imagination: imaginative creation restores the lost

perfection and gives meaning to existence; and,

furthermore, Stephen's sin, his "non serviam," frees his

imagination from the lifeless obedience which stifles "the word that shall not pass away." 81

A number of incidental details contribute to the

scene of the station or at least to a sense of the general

scene of the Stations. Near the beginning of the chapter,

Stephen's "pace slackened" (U38), later he " [sits] on a

stool of rock, resting his ashplant" (U44), and still

later he " [lies] back at full stretch over the sharp

rocks" (U49). "His shadow [lies] over the rocks" (U48);

that is, his weaker, physical "fallen" nature is cast

down. In the distance, on a dryingline, Stephen sees "two

crucified shirts" (U41), recalling the two criminals

crucified with Christ. To Stephen's imagination, "the

boulders of the south wall" are "piled stone mammoth

skulls" (U42), possibly an allusion to "Golgotha," " the

place of the skull." On the strand, a dog barks

frantically at Stephen, and while Thornton identifies

Stephen's reaction as a reference to the Acteon legend,

the reaction can also be seen to depict a tortured yet

dignified Christ: "I just simply stood pale, silent,

bayed about" (U45). At the end of the chapter, like a

Christ picking himself and his cross back up, Stephen

" [takes] the hilt of his ashplant," although "dallying

still," unlike the actively resigned Christ (U50).

The "spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed upon

the crosstrees,"10 which Stephen sights "over a shoulder," moves on the distant horizon, as the "crosses" of the human Way of the Cross move purposefully over nature's 82

fluid surface (U51; a threemaster, that is, with three

sets of crosstrees, in reference to Christ and the two

crucified with him, or to the Trinity, or to the three

main characters of the novel, who suffer and are

figuratively crucified). With a cross over his shoulder,

he goes on his way toward Dublin, and Nighttown. But he

has not fully recovered from his fall, nor has he accepted

his burden, except in tentative intellectual fashion.

Like the ship's sails, he is "brailed," in more than one

sense of the word; he is fastened to or reefed around the

crosstree, and he has been netted like a fish (like

Icarus, he has tried to fly by the nets of "nationality,

language, religion," and family^). Stephen remains a

passive, reluctant, overly rationalizing victim. He does

not recover from his fall and shoulder his cross with dignity and patience until Bloom, who himself falls and

recovers repeatedly, helps Stephen to his feet in

Nighttown. In relation to Stephen, the remote crosstree

is a sign of the cross floating in the air, over his

shoulder not on it, pending not pressing. The cross moving in the distance is Stephen's posssible future and points to Bloom, who at the moment, 11:00 a.m., already moves through his stations and who moves into the reader's view after "Proteus."

The detail of the threemaster's crosstrees looks forward to the fuller expression of the passion to come. 83

and so do the "spiritual exercises" running throughout

"Telemachus," "Nestor," and "Proteus." These three

chapters serve a purpose different from that of the later

chapters, as Joyce hinted in, for example, forming a body

from the schema-organs of the later chapters and listing

no organs for earlier chapters. The novel's first three

episodes represent intellect, or better, the womb of

imagination. Intellect is a womb of sin because it

abstracts the concretely human, but when its forms serve

in the restoration of meaning to the concrete, in art for

instance, it is a womb of imagination.

The difference between Stephen's abstractions in

these chapters and Joyce's aesthetic use of the same abstractions as metaphors with which to organize concrete experience in the entire novel, parallels the difference between "a lex eterna" and drama (in his essay on

Munkacsy's painting "Ecce Homo," Joyce writes that "had

[Munkacsy] chosen to paint Christ as the Incarnate Son of

God, . . . it would not have been drama, it would have been Divine Law, for drama deals with man"--CW36). In drama is human freedom, at least the freedom of spirit to struggle against odds. Divine law determines every thought and action. Stephen is not yet able to assert his individuality against what he perceives as "lex eterna"; for Joyce, only the human drama and nature are eternal, and "laws" (human fictions) often restrict the creativity 84 of both. From Stephen's point of view, everyone shares in death, the common lot of Adam and Eve's descendents; from a more humanistic position, which Stephen cannot yet take, all share in life, the possibility of rising above beastly conditions.

In the first chapters, Stephen is equally removed from two opposite attitudes: one that comprehends the meaning of his mother's bloodied fingernails and one in sympathy with the pointless blasphemy and mockery of Buck, who "cross[es] himself piously with his thumbnail at brow and lips and breastbone" (U22). Unlike Buck, Stephen

"crosses" himself in painful seriousness; and only an imaginary, terrible "spot" stains his hand.

I have argued in Chapter One that the eucharist metaphor implies a passion metaphor. In this chapter, I have argued that Stephen's mental exercises anticipate a passion, specifically in the form of the Way of the Cross.

They anticipate a passion, first of all, by establishing a framework of metaphoric equations that lay a foundation for a correspondence between the Stations and the represented events of the novel. And Stephen's exercises anticipate a passion in another way. The presentation of a life of Christ up to the agony in the garden creates an expectation of the passion, the cause of the anguish in the garden. The first three stations of the passion traced by Stephen's first three chapters identify both 85

Stephen's flaws and the way he has to travel in order to

rise above them. Furthermore, the meditation on sin and

hell woven into the Telemachia creates an expectation of

redemption, a son finding atonement with a father; in the

Christian myth, Christ's passion and death accomplishes

this victory over the fall. The realization of this path

to "redemption" occurs as the Way of the Cross works out

fully in the remaining chapters of the novel.

In the Ordo Commendationis Animae, the ritual

"commending a departing soul" to God from which Stephen

remembers "Liliata rutilantium . . .," the lines that haunt his memory are followed in the rite (after five prayers of paragraph-length) by the story of the passion

(John 17-19). This fact seems to reflect the order in

Ulysses, Stephen's solemn, prayer-like turning away from

the things of the earth countered by the novel's concern with a ground-level where a cross is dragged: vertical versus horizontal; "prayer" versus a narrative whose meaning is immanent. Stephen is wrapped up in a verticality without substance; the novel's and Bloom's horizontality is involved with the world. NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

1 Although the content is based on Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti's Hell Opened to Christians, To Caution Them from Enter inq into 11, the structure of the retreat is derived from the first week's exercises of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. See Don Gifford, Joyce Annotated ; Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 2nd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 177-78.

2 The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, translated by Anthony Mottola (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1964), p. 37.

3 "The Black Panther," 140.

^ "The Black Panther," 140-44.

5 Much of the prayer seems appropriate to the thoughts of one who feels that his soul has been surrendered and who is obsessed with the idea that his physical self is corruptible earth. The opening lines of the prayer follow (the lines Stephen remembers are emphasized here):

I commend thee, dearest brother (sister) to the almighty God, and entrust thee to Him Whose creature thou art. And having repaid humanity's debt by surrendering thy soul, mayest thou return home to thy Maker Who formed thee from the slime of the earth. At thy soul's departure, may the radiant choir of angels hasten to meet thee, the court of the apostles come forward to plead for thee, the triumphant army of white-robed martyrs receive thee, the lily bedecked host of illustrious confessors surround thee, the chorus of jubilant virgins escort thee (Roman Ritual, p. 411).

6 In order to give a Catholic view of the fall and its consequences, which here and in my next chapter I consider important to my argument, and in order to give a sense of Joyce's indoctrination regarding this subject, I quote from the Deharbe Catechism;

84. What punishment came upon Adam and Eve? 1. They forfeited all their supernatural gifts, and at the same time were also weakened in the faculties of their souls; 2. They were expelled from Paradise, in which God had placed them; and 3. They became liable to eternal damnation. 85. Did our first parents lose these supernatural gifts for themselves only? No; as by their obedience they would have preserved them not only for themselves, but for all their descendants, so by their disobedience they lost them not only for themselves, but also for us all, and have thereby plunged the whole human race into the greatest misery. 86. In what does the misery consist into which our first parents have plunged the whole human

In this: that sin, with its fatal consequences, has passed from Adam to all mankind, insomuch that we now all come into this world infected with sin. . . . 87. What do we call this sin in which we are all born? We call it Original Sin, because we have not actually committed it, but have, as it were, inherited it from our first parents, who were the origin or source of all mankind. 88. Is original sin, though not actually committed by us, nevertheless truly sin? Yes, it is the death of the soul--it is truly and properly sin. . . . 89. What fatal consequences have, with original sin, passed to all men? 1. Their disgrace with God, and at the same time their loss of the sonship of God, and of the right of inheriting the kindgom of Heaven; 2. Ignorance, concupiscence, and proneness to evil; and 3. All sorts of hardships, pains, calamities, and at last death. 90. Did the fatal consequences of sin fall upon man only? The punishment of God was also inflicted upon the earth, which had been created for man (pp. 98-100). ^ Weldon Thornton, Allusions in Ulysses, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 65.

® This chapter of Romans provides a significant context, including statements which, when secularized or decentered, echo important themes of Ulysses :

For the law of the spirit of life, in Jesus Christ, hath delivered me from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh; God sending his own Son, in the likeness of sinful flesh and of sin, hath condemned sin in the flesh; That the justification of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit (8:2-4).

For the wisdom of the flesh is death; but the wisdom of the spirit is life and peace (8:6).

For you have not received the spirit of bondage again in fear; but you have received the spirit of adoption of sons, whereby we cry : Abba (Father) (8:15).

And if sons, heirs also; heirs indeed of God, and joint heirs with Christ: yet so, if we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with him (8:17).

As it is written: For thy sake we are put to death all the day long. We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter (8:36).

9 The Sympathetic Alien: James Joyce and Catholicism (New York: University Press, 1959), p. 39.

10 Joyce insisted on the word "crosstrees" when Budgen pointed out the inaccuracy of its use in this passage. See Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1960), p. 56.

11 "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets" (P203). CHAPTER THREE

THE DAY'S STATIONS: "CALYPSO" TO "ITHACA"

The crosstrees in the distance at the end of

"Proteus" announce Bloom on the horizon making his way to

Nighttown and to his tomb in the rock of "Ithaca."

Earlier in the chapter, another foreshadowing of the

Stations enters Stephen's mind. He remembers the Fenian

exile and betrayed husband, Kevin Egan: "In gay Paree he

hides, Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making

his day's stations, the dingy printingcase, his three

taverns. . . . Loveless, landless, wifeless.

Spurned and undespairing" (U43). Stephen unwittingly

describes Bloom, a landless and wifeless "outcastman,"

scorned and undaunted, "remembering . . . Sion" (U44).

And Joyce names what it is Bloom is doing later on,

"making his day's stations." In "Hades," at roughly the

same time (11:00 a.m.), John Henry Menton in conversation

with Ned Lambert recalls that Bloom is, or at least was,

"in the stationery line" (U106).

Stephen goes through the motions of carrying his cross in the Telemachia, but his method of taking on life

is flawed from the beginning. Bloom accepts his cross. 90

makes the same three stations Stephen has tried, and,

faltering occasionally, goes on indomitably (there are a

number of echoing details in "Calypso" and "Telemachus,"

in "Nestor" and "Lotus-Eaters," and in "Proteus" and

"Hades"; some of these echoes support my claim that the

same stations are repeated in the two sets of three

chapters). However, the Way from "Calypso" to "Ithaca" is

not Bloom's alone. He is a messiah to Stephen, but if

Stephen is saved it is because the potential Bloom-Christ

in Stephen is recognized or actualized.

Demonstrating the strength it takes to get through

the day's struggle. Bloom, though imperfect, certainly

embodies the novel's idea of virtue. He is the most

suitable "Christ" we see walking Dublin's streets. The

stations of these chapters, beginning with "Calypso," are

those of the "body" constituted by the organs listed in

Joyce's schema. These stations are the actualization of

the potential in the Telemachia, where the body's

intellect or womb of imagination foresees or projects the

stations. Stephen's immature perspective, his rituals and metaphors, becomes the basis for the more mature passion

in later chapters.

The tolerant and compassionate Bloom, in the course of the day, shows himself more "Christian" than

Christianity has proven itself to be, a better Christ than

Stephen is in all his religious, ritualistic histrionics 91

and self-proclaimed martyrdom. The differences between

Bloom and Stephen parallel the fact that the stations

initiated by Bloom in "Calypso" differ in quality from the

three stations Stephen participates in in preceding

chapters.

Stephen's suffering is real and painful, but his

unrelenting intellectual considerations of death, history,

and fallen nature leave him little reason or energy to

pick himself up and go on. His conceptual and emotional

framework, in which life seems too much of a burden, seems

to paralyze him. After three stations, Stephen is down

and in danger of not getting back up. In contrast.

Bloom's response to life and the questions it poses is not

mediated by the abstractions leading Stephen to a dead

end. With intelligence. Bloom keenly observes his

surroundings, but fortunately he does not have Stephen's

education. Bloom, an empiricist, notes, absorbs, and

speculates, and does not allow abstract conclusions or a

priori principles to block continued speculation and

enjoyment, continued life.

The thought of death saddens but does not completely

overwhelm Bloom. Natural functions he treats matter-of-

factly. He is able to experience and imagine the details

of physical mortality as well as Stephen is, but Bloom is not thrown into senseless despair. Bloom's eucharistie participation in life is symbolized by his taste for 92

"grilled mutton kidneys which gave his palate a fine tang

of faintly scented urine" (U55), an example of his general

unsqueamish acceptance of life's natural joys as well as

its natural sorrows; we recall Stephen's disgust at the

thought of "devour[ing] urinous offal from all dead"

(U50), symbolizing his refusal of the bitter contents of

life's cup. In "Calypso," we are shown that Bloom too is

a servant, a slave to family and nature, but unlike

Stephen he does not seek his freedom in a futile rebellion

that only tightens the bondage.

Bloom does not possess Stephen's ritualistic mind,

though of course he organizes his perceptions, notes

patterns, conceptualizes. He possesses only random

knowledge of the rites and dogma of Protestantism,

Catholicism, and Judaism; baptized a Catholic, previously

a Protestant, of Jewish heritage (yet uncircumcized), he

belongs to all and none. Rituals and forms are simply

another environmental feature he observes and wonders

about. For Bloom, the events of his day are not part of a

ritual; they are life.

The persistence of life is the point and the object

of Bloom's continuation through the day. The "virtues"

that permit him to suffer through fourteen stations are

the human spirit transcending the mortal sentence handed down to him. The spirit of history is not a great goal but the shouts in the street. 93 I "Calypso": Jesus is condemned to death

Bloom is preoccupied in "Calypso" with natural aging

and death. Thoughts of aging and the passage of time are

instigated by a moustachecup that he received as a

birthday gift from Milly when she was five years old and a

letter from the now-fifteen-year-old Milly thanking him

for the birthday gift he has recently sent h e r . Bloom dwells upon her reaching maturity: "Fifteen yesterday. .

Her first birthday away from home. Separation.

Remember the summer morning she was born" (U66). Thoughts of his daughter lead to thoughts of his son, Rudy, another victim of time: "He would be eleven now if he had lived"

(U66). The idea of Milly "ripening now," sexually (U66), also gives rise to thoughts of Molly and the letter from

Boylan, and suspicions of his wife's impending infidelity.

It is possible that Molly's own attempt to regain lost youth prompts her adultery; Bloom notes the signs of age

in her face: "She rubbed her handglass briskly on the woolen vest against her full wagging bub. Peering into

it. Lines in her eyes. It wouldn't pan out somehow"

(U69). He is haunted by the loss of Rudy to death, of

Milly to maturity, and of Molly to another man, and by his own impotence in the face of time: "A soft qualm regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will happen, yes.

Prevent. Useless: can't move" (U67). 94

The notion of the corruption and metamorphosis of

human ideals into lower forms is implied in Bloom's

explanation of "metempsychosis" to Molly: "They used to

believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for

instance. What they called nymphs, for example" (U65).

His example comes to him as he glances at the Bath of the

Nymph hanging above the bed. The idealized woman framed

in wood commands Bloom's subservience, but, actualized,

metamorphosed, this ideal rules Bloom in the shape of the

lazy, sloppy woman lolling in the bed below the picture.

His idealization places him in a less than manly position,

makes him less human, more beastly. Polled "Poldy" obeys

Molly's call as quickly and conscientiously as he obeys

nature's: he is condemned at this point to being less

than pure spirit and less than a man. In "Calypso," Bloom

is shown to be sentenced to imprisonment in the body of a

dying animal and to captivity to an unliving ideal.

As he returns from the butcher's in this chapter.

Bloom considers the Agendath Netaim project, a plan to

transform "vast sandy tracts" into fertile groves and

gardens. Although he is sceptical, he recognizes "an idea

behind it" (U60). As a cloud covers the sun, that idea behind Agendath Netaim decomposes, falls into a condition worse than simply "vast sandy tracts":

A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea : no fish, sunk deep in the earth. . . . Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could be no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world. Desolation. Grey horror seared his flesh. . . . Cold oils slid along his veins, chilling his blood : age crusting him with a salt cloak (U61).

Thoughts of aging, degeneration, and inevitable death

have cast a shadow over Bloom's mood in this chapter, like

the cloud that covers the sun and instantly colors his

revery. In "Telemachus," Stephen notices the same cloud,

"shadowing the bay in deeper green," darkening that "bowl

of bitter waters" (U9: Gilbert points out that Calypso's

isle, according to some, was located in the strait of

Gibraltar, Molly's birthplace, and that the Greek name for

Gibraltar was Kalpe, meaning "bowl," the shape of

Gibraltar viewed from a certain angle!).

Bloom's recollection of Ponchielli's "Dance of the

Hours" near the end of the chapter restates the theme of

time's evanescence and nature's process : "Explain that

morning hours, noon, then evening coming on, then night

hours. . . . Still true to life also. Day, then the

night" (U69). Bloom condemned to dance the hours, the

dark cloud in "Calypso" only foreshadows the obscuring of

the light, literally and figuratively, that continues

until the near-total sepulchral darkness of "Ithaca."

On his way to the butcher's early in the chapter.

Bloom considers traveling "round in front of the sun," 96

stealing "a day's march." If he were to stay ahead of the

sun he would "never grow a day older." He would "wander

along all day." He thinks of _In the Track of the Sun (a book standing on his bookshelf next to The Hidden Life of

Christ--U709), and then about the "homerule sun," looking ahead to the symbol of homerule introduced later, the crossed keys of Keyes' ad. At this moment, "the sun was nearing the steeple of George's church" (U57), where at

the close of the chapter the bells "toll" the hour.

Apparently, the son has reached the steeple where his sentence rings out; the "Heigho! Heigho!" returns in

"Circe" to echo Bloom's sentence to death by hanging

(U471). In "Calypso," the bells remind Bloom of the dead

Paddy Dignam; his last thought of the chapter is of "Poor

Dignam." After Bloom's meditations in this chapter, the bells seem to toll for all those condemned by nature to aging and its end, death.

2 "Lotus-Eaters": Jesus is made to bear his cross

In the "Lotus-Eaters" chapter. Bloom begins his daylong walk through Dublin which will end in unconsciousness in "Ithaca," and in the second station

Christ begins his walk toward Calvary. Bloom's trek through the streets will provide occasion for us to view his struggling with the losses, guilts, and desires of his existence, the crosses he must bear. 97

An important theme in this chapter is the pain and

hardship of life, not only Bloom's, but everyone's. In

the first paragraph. Bloom notices a girl scarred by

eczema and a poverty-stricken boy whose life. Bloom

thinks, "is no bed of roses" (U71). Bloom enters A l l

Hallows church, where he observes a notice regarding a

sermon on Saint Peter Claver. According to Butler's Lives

of the Saints, Peter Claver endured many hardships in his

work among the slaves in South America and "would pray

alone in his cell with a crown of thorns pressed to his

head and a heavy cross weighing down his shoulders."2 The

congregation listening to the Mass in All Hallows kneel

"with heads still bowed in their crimson halters" (U81).

In Bloom's mind, the "I.H.S." on the back of the priest's vestments means "I have suffered" (U81). Also emphasizing

the theme of supporting or bearing weight are Bloom's

thoughts, early in the chapter, explaining to himself how water supports a floating object in terms of weight and

the law of falling bodies (U72).

But perhaps most frequent in the chapter are

recurring references to devices or methods of mitigating

the pain or lightening the weight of existence: lotus,

"the flowers of idleness" (U71); suicide (U76, 77); a cigar as a narcotic (U78); "barrels of porter" (U79);

"Lourdes cure, waters of oblivion" (U81); the opiate of religion (U80-83); castration (U77, 82); drugs (U84); 98

"Poison the only cure" (U84); a soothing bath (U86). The celebration of the eucharist (Joyce's symbol for the chapter) in All Hallows church symbolizes the human methods of lightening history's weight, of easing pain or transforming fact into soothing fiction. The prevalence of the methods of bearing reality, of making life tolerable, testifies to the extremity of the suffering that demands that alleviation, the weight of the crosses that must be borne until death. Bloom makes life bearable for himself partly through his imaginative escapes--in his dream of an eastern paradise (U71) and in his pseudonymous fantasy affair with Martha, whose letter he receives and reads in this chapter; he stops to read the letter at "the station wall," "near the timberyard" (U77; in "Nestor"

Stephen is in earshot of the "lumberroom"--U28).

3 "Hades"; Jesus falls the first time

Upon arriving at the cemetery in the "Hades" chapter.

Bloom notices that the carriage bearing Dignam has already reached the gravesi te : "Got here before us, dead as he is" (UlOl). These words link Dignam to Elpenor, one of

Odysseus' men who has died and whom Odysseus encounters during his visit to the underworld, the incident from the

Odyssey corresponding to the "Hades" chapter.^ Elpenor's death resulted from a fall from Circe's rooftop. 99

The image of dropping or descent prevails in this

chapter. Raindrops fall (U90). Bloom remembers that his

father "slipped down to the foot of the bed" (U97) after

taking an overdose. Mr. Power speaks of a past funeral

when, in route to the cemetery, "the corpse fell about the

road" (U98). "Breaking down," "stumbling a little in his

walk," Simon Dedalus passes his wife's grave (U105). From

the carriage. Bloom recognizes a "dullgarbed old man" and

pities his "terrible comedown" (U93). The cause of

Dignam's death was "Breakdown. Heart" (U95). Onto

Dignam's grave "clay fell" (Ulll). A punning vocabulary

sustains the idea of descent; people fall back, fall foul,

or fall into step. Above all, the setting reinforces the

falling motion; the caretaker, Oconnell, "has seen a fair

share go under in this time, lying around him field after

field" {U108); Dignam's coffin "dived out of sight"

(UllO); Bloom thinks of people "dropping into a hole one

after the other" (Ulll). Stuart Gilbert identifies this

falling with the "technic" of the chapter, "incubism":

"The air presses down upon the mourners; the very earth

seems to open in fissures to receive them"; "There is a downward movement, thestifling pressure of an incubus

from beginning to end.

The theme of the "Hades" episode is death and, as the

Telemachia has informed us, death is a result of man's

"fall," the original sin (Stephen's image of the 1 0 0

"navelcord" trailing back to the original sinners is a

reasoned association of sin, birth, and death; Bloom,

probably not fully aware of the implications Stephen sees,

uses a similar image : "Silently at the gravehead another

coiled the coffinband. His navelcord"--U112). The

Deharbe Catechism lists the "fatal consequences" of

original sin "passed to all man"; "loss of the sonship of

God. . . . Ignorance, concupiscence, and proneness to evil. . . . All sorts of hardships, pains, calamities, and at last death."5

Like Stephen's in "Proteus," Bloom's meditations on death consider its universality. Bloom's preoccupation with Dignam's death soon extends to the deaths of his father and son. Reading the paper, he scans the Dublin obituaries. Arriving at the cemetery, he tries to calculate the daily number of funerals at Glasnevin, and then loses count when he includes other cemeteries, other countries: "Must be twenty or thirty funerals every day.

Then Mount Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world" (UlOl). Looking over the stones of the dead, he marvels: "How many! All these here once walked round Dublin" (U113). Other creatures of nature are included in his reflections: "Dead animal even sadder.

Silly-Milly burying the little dead bird in the kitchen 1 01

matchbox, a daisychain and bits of broken chainies on the

grave" (U113).

Bloom ponders the realities of mortality and decay,

maybe more than does Stephen; "I daresay the soil would

be quite fat with corpse manure, bones, flesh, nails,

charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink,

decomposing. Rot quick in damp earth. The lean old ones

tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy. Then

begin to get black, treacle oozing out of them. Then

dried up" (U108); "But they must breed a devil of a lot of

maggots. Soil must be simply swirling with them" (U109);

"Flies come before he's well dead. Got wind of Dignam.

They wouldn't care about the smell of it. Saltwhite

crumbling mush of corpse: smell, taste like raw white

turnips" (U114). Stephen is thrown into dread and despair

by similar thoughts. Bloom turns to life, not without

compassion but with a concern for what can yet be helped :

"More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the

living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody

really? Plant him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot. Then lump them together to save time" (U113).

The world of death in this chapter is male. Joyce

follows the masculine conversation of a group of men

riding to a cemetery overseen by a man carrying death's two keys at his back. We see and hear only men in this funereal, fallen world. But feminine life, even if 1 02

temporarily contained by man, obtrudes. Interrupting the

funeral cortege, "a divided drove of branded cattle passed

the windows, lowing, slouching by on padded hoofs,

whisking their tails slowly on the clotted bony croups.

Outside them and through them ran raddled sheep bleating

their fear" (U97). Branded and driven by men, these

symbols of fertility nevertheless stop man's death march.

Bloom's depression is earlier interrupted by the

uplifting feminine, by thoughts of his surviving child,

Milly; "Yes, Yes: a woman too. Life. Life" (U89). And

later, imagining "love among the tombstones," he thinks,

"In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet"

(U108). In nature's scheme, death fertilizes life; life

rises out of putrefaction. Both ends meet in Bloom's

resilience, his vitality after burying the dead.

Bloom falls in this chapter, sunk in a contemplation of mortality. But the memento mori experience ("As you are now so once were we"--U113) has only strengthened him:

"Read your own obituary notice they say you live longer.

Gives you a second wind. New lease on life" (U109). At

the end of the episode. Bloom gets "back to the world again" (U114), back to a concern for life. Though he appears "chapfallen" (U115; he is a chap fallen), his spirit recovers: "They are not going to get me this

innings. Warm beds : warm fullblooded life" (U115). 1 03

4 "Aeolus": Jesus meets his afflicted mother

Allusions to Mary, the mother of Christ, to Stephen's mother, and to Mother Ireland in "Aeolus" sustain the

correspondence to the fourth station. Early in the chapter, a tableau is rendered that might suggest the meeting of Jesus and his mother on the road to Calvary;

"Our Saviour: beardframed oval face: talking in the dusk.

Mary, Martha" (U117; the more obvious direct allusion is

to the eleventh chapter of John, where Jesus visits the house of Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus). Later

(U138), Stephen recalls words from Dante's Paradiso describing the moment when Dante beholds Mary in her heavenly glory (canto xxxi, lines 127, 142). In this chapter, Stephen's thoughts continue to touch on his mother, her death, and the guilt he feels toward her. He remembers Mulligan's description of her a "beastly dead"

(U134), and Stephen's poem, concerning death and his mother, is presented in completed form in this chapter.

A central issue in "Aeolus" is the rhetoric of Irish nationalism, and Ireland is an afflicted mother. Ireland is associated in the course of Ulysses with Mother Grogan and with Old Gummy Granny, " the old sow that eats her farrow!" (U595). Stephen's parable of the two Dublin virgins is a commentary upon afflicted Mother Ireland's paralysis and subservience. Another linking of Ireland to

Christ's mother is within the epithet for Ireland, "Erin, 104

Green Gem of the Silver Sea," used as a heading for one of

the sections of this chapter. Mary is often called the

Star of the Sea (Mar is Stella ; the church near which Bloom

and Gerty sit later in the day is called Star of the

Sea6--U346).

In "Aeolus," the afflicted mother is Ireland and also

nature, mankind's helpless mother, suffering in the forms

of and at the hands of her progeny. "Ireland" only names

arbitrarily "the same people living in the same place,"

according to Bloom's definition of "nation" in "Cyclops"

(U331). The same human tendency that creates names and

nations builds the network of tramlines crisscrossing "in

the heart of the hibernian metropolis" (U116) and devises

the machines "working away, tearing away" (U118)

throughout Dublin and all urban civilization.

Man has constructed civilization out of and on top of

the raw material of nature, restricting nature's unstinting growth and plenty, enclosing life, damming up

the stream: "The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot. . . only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: I_t ^s meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset" (U131). Ireland's "ancient ancestors," those unspoiled by "municipal sin" (FW5),

"were partial to the running stream." Although descended from "nature's gentlemen," the Irish ("civilized" man) 1 05

"have also Roman law," that is, a "cloacal" obsession with

order and legalities, a law imposed by invaders,

plunderers of nature, among whom the Irish too must be

numbered. This man-made order is ruler, "and Pontius

Pilate is its prophet" (U131): as Pilate is to Christ and

his mother, so foreign rule is to the Irish people, and so

the rule of civilization (foreign to natural forces) is to

the "running stream." The history of civilization--of man's order and "urban" const ructions--is a Way of the

Cross decreed by the Pilâtes of humanity, descendants of

"nature's gentlemen" who afflict the mother in the sons and in life generally.

In Ulysses, the present manifestation of Mother

Ireland's history bears the design of the cross. The Isle of Man (and Irish homerule) is symbolized by two crossed keys within a circle (U120). Dublin itself is marked by

the Circular roads surrounding "the heart of the hibernian metropolis" where the tramlines cross (Leo Knuth points out that "with the North and South Circular Roads and the

Royal and Grand Canals encircling it, Dublin appears on

the map as a disk" and that " the routes of the representatives of Christ and Caesar" in "Wandering Rocks"

"form an 'X' on the disk of Dublin"^).

The symbol of the Isle of Man is to adorn the ad for

Alexander Keyes, the ad that concerns Bloom during much of the novel. The ad's symbol is communicating "the whole 1 06 bloody history" of man and of Bloom (the cross; the generally circular movements of Bloom, the Catholic

Stations, and humanity's "cycles of generations that have lived"— U414), just as the great Gallager once communicated to New York "the whole bloody history" of the

Phoenix Park murder by referring to an ad in the Weekly

Freeman (U135-37). Bloom's ad is a map of bloody history, of the Way of the Cross in Ulysses.

Newspaper headlines (like rhetoric, the human world's self-aggrandizement) report the "significant" events of the isle of man, stories about "a harassed pedlar . . . gauging. . . the symmetry of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall" (U121; see also U278). The "symmetry under a cemetery wall" defines the human world and its history:

"symmetry" suggests the ideals of the civilized world and the balanced design of the cross, the symbol of the Order of Man, an order rendered trivial by nature and death, an order that builds the wall and too often helps to fill the cemetery.

Ulysses' men, unloosing "the ways of all the noisy winds" from Aeolus' wallet, "were undone through [their] own heedlessness"®; in Ulysses, man has afflicted maternal nature with his random inspirations. 1 0 7

5 "Lestryqonians"; The Cyrenian helps Jesus carry his

cross

In "Lestrygonians" are numerous examples of

generosity, compassion, and assistance to those in need.

The symbol for this chapter, according to Joyce's schema,

is the "constables," a word derived from the Latin for

"companion" (the constables, "sweating helmets, patting

their truncheons," are "making for the station"--U162; the more secret police "are always courting slaveys"--U163).

Samari tanism runs throughout the chapter. Bloom

feeds the gulls. While conversing with Mrs. Breen, Bloom

remembers the ten shillings he lent her on Monday and her

"little brother's family" she might be feeding (U157).

Bloom listens to her speak of Mina Purefoy's difficult labor with "heavy pitying gaze" (U159). With compassion, he watches the many-named Farrell, obviously bearing the cross of insanity (U159). His thoughts a few pages later are a compassionate consideration of the sufferings of others; "Useless words. Things go on same; day after day. . . . Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second.

Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb bawling maaaaaa" (U164). Later, he again sympathetically 108

identifies with another sufferer: "Sad booser's eyes.

Bitten off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See

ourselves as others see us. Hungry man is an angry man"

(U169). Bloom recalls a number of acts of kindness:

Dixon's dressing a sting for him (U163); his own returning

to its owner a bag left on a train (U166); Davy Byrne's

cashing a check for him (U171). Nosey Flynn, in this

chapter, speaks of the Freemasons as "a fine order. . . .

They stick to you when you're down" (U177). Nosey Flynn

says of Bloom, "He has been known to put his hand down too

to help a friend" (U178). Near the end of

"Lestrygonians," before extending his pity to the victims

of a New York disaster and reading a placard announcing a

charity bazaar (U182-83), Bloom helps a blind stripling,

tapping his wooden cane along the pavement, "to cross" the

street, as the Cyrenian helps Christ to bear his wooden

cross along the road to Calvary (noting that the stripling

senses a van blocking his way. Bloom wonders, "Kind of

sense of volume. Weight. Would he feel it if something was removed? . . . Bloodless pious face like a fellow going in to be a priest"--U181).

Bloom's compassion and charity stem from his perception of life as fundamentally a "stream," a flowing

together of individual lives : "It's always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream" (U153). The stream 109

consists of the always moving, always changing

actualizations of history, civilization and urbanization;

"Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away

too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of

houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks,

stones" (U164).

Individuals, with their particular crosses, come and

go; and as people are born and die, history's cross is

passed on, to a Cyrenian, another Christlike victim:

Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. . . . Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves. Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt, Kerway's mushroom houses, built of breeze. Shelter for the night. No one is anything (U164).

The forms, the crosses, may remain and be taken over by others, but no one and no thing is anything more than life's uninterrupted passing. Although human beings stake out claims on the river, name themselves lords of the land, and post self-serving "ads," any division of the stream is arbitrary and fades, for "how can you own water really?" (U153). Trying to enclose life and time, building "waterclosets, " is "like holding water in you hand" (U168).

For Bloom, "I have suffered" (IHS) should be "we have sinned, we have suffered" (U154). Sharing mortality, sexuality, and the conflicts of history, individuals all 110

contribute to, or constitute, life's common stream of

blood: "All are washed in the blood of the lamb. God

wants blood victim. Birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation

of a building, sacrifice, burnt offering, druid's altars"

(U151).

Because people often ignore this common bond, the

Lestrygonian scene Bloom views in this chapter represents

history's way. "Angry" because hungry, the patrons of

Burton's are savagely "swilling" and "wolfing," "working

tooth and jaw"; they remind Bloom of the inhumanity and

"cannibalism" of history and everyday life: "Every fellow

for his own, tooth and nail. Gulp. Grub. Gulp.

Gobstuffs"; "Eat or be eaten. Kill! Kill!" (U170). In matters of dining as well as of life in general, the edibles are the products of nature but the choice of menu and the manners are not : "God made food. The devil the cooks" (U172). Bloom observes the characteristics of the dayworld, ruled by a "dayfather" "that he sees every day"

(U156; see also U122), that is, ruled by "men, men, men"

(U169). In this world, poor Mrs. Breen follows her "lord and master" in his ludicrous quest for law books and lawyers (U157-58); law is one of the mad means of defining the arbitrary issues over which men will devour each

After Bloom eats in a more "moral pub" (U171), Davy

Byrne's, his ruminations begin to reflect the natural I l l

"peristaltic" movements of digestion, a more "feminine"

stream of consciousness, contrasting with the "masculine"

world, red in tooth and claw, of aggression, competition,

and business. His thoughts, in sympathy with his body,

return to Howth and the seed cake and rhododendrons and

"yes." The contents and even the style, to some extent,

resemble the content and style of parts of Molly's

monologue (U176).

With the final recollection of the acknowledgement of

his individuality ("she kissed me"). Bloom resumes his

"worldly" consciousness--"Me. And me now"--and, to

escape, he thinks of "beauty," "shapely goddesses,"

"curves the world admires," "lovely forms of woman sculped

Junonian"; "masculine" ideas of symmetry and ideal

womanhood, "immortal lovely" (U176). Fearing the natural

fertility of Howth lost. Bloom attempts to escape the

immediate infertility--a "me" and a "now" seemingly cut

off from the timeless source of fertility--by embracing

the spiritual abstraction. "Feminine" in his compassion

and generosity. Bloom feels a flow of life more essential

than Dublin's world of appearances; but also characteristically "masculine," he etherealizes the natural. 1 12

6 "Scylla and Charybdis": Veronica wipes the face of

Jesus

On his way to Calvary, blood and sweat streaming down his face, Christ is said to encounter Veronica, who wipes his face with her veil, on which is left a permanent image of the tortured countenance. There seems to be a correspondence between this legendary incident and the aesthetic theory propounded in "Scylla and Charybdis."

The artist, "redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded," creates "his own image," "repeat[s] himself" (U195-96):

"As we . . . weave and unweave our bodies, . . . so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. . . . [I]n the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be" (U194).

The artist reads "the book of himself" (U187).

The word "Veronica" derives from the Latin words meaning "true image," and the idea of the artist's creating the "true image" of himself as a man suffering the nightmare of history is the basis of Stephen's theory.

This re-creation of the self in art is an extension of every man's projection of himself onto the world in making sense of that world : "If Socrates leave his house today 113

he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go

forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend" (U213).

The individual's suffering features are impressed on his

creation, "as a painter of old Italy set his face in a

corner of his canvas" (U209). Joyce works out the

correspondence with the sixth station also through a heavy

concentration of vocabulary referring to the faces, facial

features, and expressions of the characters of this

chapter, and through allusions to veils (the references to

Isis Unveiled, for example),^ cloth (including the imagery of weaving that Stephen uses in speaking of his theory), cerecloth, and, perhaps most interesting, a "sheeted mirror" (U190).

Stephen's theory on Shakespeare's plays suggests that

the masculine image is imprinted on or woven into the everchanging surface of feminine nature. The "masculine" side of the artist is the historical individual who leaves his Warwickshire doxy and gains "the world of men" (U191), where, bearing personal crosses, he becomes a "noise in

the street: very peripatetic" (U186). In order to give birth to art, the living and suffering artist must share

in a "feminine" creativity. From his mother, Socrates learned "how to bring thoughts into the world" (U190).

The creative force is "mother Dana," the weaver of our bodies, or the feminine future, "sister of the past," sister of masculine history (U194). The spirit of the 114 artist, the bloodied face of the form of forms, bringing ideas into the world, fills the blank page or the canvas- veil.

An art attempting to reproduce untouched nature would produce "formless spiritual essences" (U185). The nature mysticism of Russell ignores the masculine imposition of form onto natural material. In sympathy with the simplicity of the peasants, Russell rejects the

"exploitation," aesthetic or otherwise, of nature: "For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother" (U186-87). "Denying" the formless essence by informing it, for Russell, is a violent denial of life, but for Stephen, and Joyce, it is a denial that affirms both the "denying" spirit of the artificer and the creativity of nature. The meeting of the formless passive and active form creates art: "The truth is midway."

Since Shakespeare is both an "exploited" child of nature and history and an "exploiter" reproducing his spirit, he dramaturgically portrays himself in both victim and victimizer: "He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion" (U212). And as an artist, he embodies both active and passive, male and female. He is

"glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself" (U213).10

Extending his aesthetic argument to include his own situation and the human situation generally, Stephen in 1 15

this chapter claims that the maternal relationship "may be

the only true thing in life," whereas "paternity may be a legal fiction" (U207). Nature and her creation persist underneath and beyond the paternal fictions of man,

fictions that form history and man's naturally formless essence. The fictive truths giving meaning to the

instants of "blind rut" (U208) only fictionalize nature's motions and pretend to name nature's secrets. On the surface of the maternal unity of life, spirit etches the rules that create differences and relationships, denying the essential unity.

7 "Wandering Rocks": Jesus falls the second time

Again, I think that Christ's fall, his stumbling under the weight of the cross, is metaphorically related to man's original fall. I should say, rather, that the relationship between the two senses of "fall" is metonymic, for the Christian myth makes Christ's sufferings an inseparable consequence of Adam's sin. The

Dublin of "Wandering Rocks" is a fragmented world characterized by ignorance, error, solitude, and an inability to reconcile inner and outer realities. The

Deharbe Catechism, cited earlier, mentions ignorance as a result of man's fall. The Maynooth Catechism, another catechism that Joyce studied as a young Catholic, preaches a similar lesson: "Our whole nature was corrupted by the 1 16 sin of our first parents— it darkened our understanding, weakened our will, and left in us a strong inclination to evil"ll (in the library scene, Stephen recalls these words

--U212).

The chapter includes references, usually indirect or figurative, to a fall and to "the sweets of sin" (Bloom purchases the book of this title in this chapter). Mr.

Kernan quotes a poem referring to "dark and evil days" and then only a few lines later recites a line from "The

Croppy Boy" : "At the siege of Ross did my father fall"

(U241). The dust of a lapidary shop evokes from Stephen this meditation: "Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil lights shining in the darkness.

Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows.

Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest them" (U241).

Ignorance and error mark the chapter. In the first section. Father Conmee refers to "invincible ignorance"

(U221) and "the ways of God which were not our ways" and asks, "Who could know the truth?" (U223). Ben Bollard unclogs his ears in an attempt "to hear aright" (U245).

The blind stripling curses a passer-by who has bumped him:

"God's curse on you . . . whoever you are ! You're blinder nor I am" (U250). Signs of man's resistance to ignorance

(though also of his persistence in error), books, are a motif in the chapter. "Wandering Rocks," too, is full of 1 17

secrets and false identities, misleading the reader as

well as the characters, as Stuart Gilbert has n o t e d . 12

Beginning with Father Conmee, Joyce emphasizes the

solitude of each of his characters, each isolated except

for curt salutes and superficial exchanges. The

characters struggle to survive with dignity in the fallen

inner and outer worlds; we observe, on one hand, private

crosses and individual humanity and, on the other hand,

the surface functioning of isolated parts within the large

political and social machine. Stephen, urged on by "the

whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from

the powerhouse," thinks: "Beingless beings. Stop! Throb

always without you and the throb always within. Your

heart you sing of. I between them. Where? Between two

worlds where they swirl, I. Shatter them, one and both.

But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me you who can"

(U242).

The individuals that wander through Dublin also are

rocks in a sea, often crashing against one another,

sometimes being drowned in a "salt green" sea. These

"rocks" are the wills Stephen observes in the previous

chapter: "My will, his will. . . . Seas between" (U217).

For Stephen, those intervening waters are "salt green death" (U243), not the waters of life that bind

individuals together; he requires the apparent solidity and safety of man-made forms, the rocks of individuality 1 18

and abstraction. These rocks, this will against will,

become the "force against force" of "Cyclops" (U329). In

"Sirens," Bloom translates this image of opposing forces

floating in a sea of death into an image of islands distinct yet linked, because together they make up the sea of life in which they float: "The blood is it.

Well, it's a sea. Corpuscle islands" (U281). But the

fallen world of "Wandering Rocks," the world of men, cities, and history, is characterized by the violent wandering of rocks and the physical and spiritual deaths of individuals.

On a larger, social scale, legalities and business control the fallen world. Here where the "dayfather" governs, the legal fictions of men constrain the movements of life. Law preoccupies many of the characters in

"Wandering Rocks." Denis Breen, for example, shuttles from one lawyer to another seeking assistance in the matter of the "libelous" postcard (U240). Ben Bollard and

Father Cowley discuss a landlord-tenant dispute (U245).

Another group of Dubliners speak of the deliberations in the council chamber, where there was no order and no quorum (U247).

Order, law, and form are fixed ideas, like Stephen's

"idée fixe," the topic of conversation between Haines and

Buck Mulligan in this chapter. Buck claims that "they drove his wits astray . . . by visions of hell. . . . He 119

can never be a poet." Stephen, Buck believes, is unable

to experience "the joy of creation." Stephen's idée fixe,

according to Haines and Buck, is "eternal punishment," a

need for a "moral idea" (U249). They may be wrong in

assuming that Stephen will never be a poet, but "fixed"

ideas have distanced him from streaming life, from "the

joy of creation," which brings ideas into the world but which can also be stifled by an obsession with only the

forms of ideas.

Earlier in the chapter, we witness Bloom similarly allowing an idea to pervert creative life. While he reads

The Sweets of Sin, his own images pervert the book's cheap

romantic passion into a vision of unpleasant, unnatural sexuality:

Mr. Bloom read again: The beautiful woman. Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amid rumpled clothes. Whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (for him! For Raoul!). Armpits' oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint !). Feel! Press! Crushed ! Sulphur dung of lions ! (U236).

His idealization is distorted; the words "beautiful woman" immediately evoke a bestially sexual vision, instead of a natural gesture toward a woman, Molly. Here idea reduces natural sexuality in much the same way that Father

Conmee's religious perspective reduces sexuality to "that tyrannous incontinence needed for men's race on earth"

(U223). 120

The activity of individuals in space in a chapter that disjoints and even stops time reflects the unmoving frenetic motion without progress of man's forms, his fixed ideas, like empty molds into which life is poured, or like whirring machines forming life into human shapes (the shape of a cross). This slowing of time and plot advancement might also suggest a fallen crossbearer momentarily unable to rise and advance.

Father Conmee's and the viceregal cavalcade's progresses, tracing crossed paths through Dublin, recall

Christ's steps through the streets of Jerusalem toward

Calvary, as do Bloom's and the blind stripling's daylong movements.

8 "Sirens": Jesus speaks to the daughters of Jerusalem

This station has a source in the gospel of Luke:

And there followed him a great multitude of people, and of women, who bewailed and lamented

But Jesus turning to them, said : Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not over me; but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For behold, the days shall come, wherein they will say: Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that have not borne, and the paps that have not given suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains : Fall upon us; and to the hills : Cover us (23: 27-30).

Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, the daughters of Erin

(U498), gaze "over the crossblind" (U257) at the viceregal cavalcade and laugh at one of the men in the cortege. "0 12 1 wept! Aren't men frightful idiots?" one of them says laughing and then turns "sadly," a word repeated several times in the lines immediately following. The mockery of men and the laughter are apparently defenses against their own paralysis, their own useless lives, their own infertility. The laughter quickly transforms into a more genuine sadness. They laugh at men until they cry--an ironic commentary on the people of modern Dublin-

Jerusalem--but the women, underneath, mourn their empty, futile lives and their (actually and figuratively) non­ existent children.

The motifs of sadness, lamentation, Dolores, eyes, and crying recur throughout the chapter. The lachrymose self-indulgence of the patrons of the Ormond is evident in the allusions to songs of lost love such as the "M'Appari" and "Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye." References to songs of past idealized martyrdom for the Irish nationalist cause, "The Minstrel Boy" and "The Croppy Boy," for example, point to the selfish, wasted emotion, sadness, and tears that blind these people to the present. But, paralleling the compassion displayed by the daughters of

Jerusalem for Christ, Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce show sorrow and pity for the blind piano tuner : "So sad to look at his face" (U263), one of them says, in contrast to the indifference of the other Dubliners, excluding Bloom. 122

Joyce's network of imagery appears to create a

connection between the chapter's Homeric parallel and a

parallel to the eighth station. The tears literally and

figuratively shed in this chapter represent those shed in

"this vale of tears" (Molly's repetition, while sitting on

the chamberpot, of the common phrase— U780). Like

bitter water (another figure of mortal life) tinkling in a

chamberpot, the tears create music according to "the law

of falling water": "Chamber music. Could make a kind of

pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when

she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make

most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes

according as the weight of the water is equal to the law

of falling water" (U282). One "could make a kind of pun"

on "falling water," too: nature's fluid material falls,

is fallen, actualized as the tearful stream of history, a

Way of the Cross.

The filling of "empty vessels" makes "noise," the music of man's world, and the empty vessel is feminine :

"They can't manage men's intervals. Gap in their voices

too. Fill me. I'm warm, dark, open" (U282). History,

like music, fills nature's empty vessel. Because "nature

abhors a vacuum" (U164), she is all-yielding, says "yes"

to men. And "nature . . . abhors perfection" (U208), the

perfect emptiness before history and the "perfection" of

human ideals. 123

The activity of the fallen world generates "music

everywhere" (U282). Each human activity in the

multiplicity of life contributes to the orchestration: "I

suppose each kind of trade made its own. . . . Hunter with

a horn. . . . Shepherd his pipe. . . . Policeman a

whistle. Locks and keys ! Sweep! . . . Towncrier"

(U289). Everyone in "Sirens" contributes to the

polyphony, the counterpoint of will against will. The

thoughts, conversations, songs, and movements of the

characters in the Ormond, Boylan's recurring "jingle"

motif, and the blind piano tuner's taps merge into a

composition embodying the order and laws of the city.

Human beings are instruments of nature, as men are of

women: "Ben Howth, the rhododendrons. We are their

harps. I. He" (U271).

Recalling the food-cook distinction of

"Lestrygonians," Bloom sets the nature of running streams

against the "municipal sin" (FW5) of this world of men:

"God made the country man the tune" (U284). William

Cowper's line actually reads "town" instead of "tune";

Joyce preserves both the music theme and the idea that

fallen man is "urban," a town-dweller. On one hand is

"all-yielding" creative nature and on the other is man's

all-confining, often lamentably destructive (and often meaningfully creative) world. But a univocal flow 124 underlies and is inseparable from the melodies and lyrics of civilization:

Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine. . . . Tenderness it welled : slow, swelling. Full it throbbed. That's the chat. Ha, give! Take! Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect. Words? Music? No: it's what's behind (U274).

The "flow" is not actually distinct from the composers' order and voices, from the forms, notes, and words that sluice the flood. But the genuine "language of love" is the singular unrelenting urge of nature to create :

Bloom. Flood of warm jimjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow, invading. Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o'er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrop. Now! Language of love (U274).

Out of this flood, tears of the human passion drop, generating music; the siren music of the world seduces, leads aside the water of life in human ducts. The seduction fulfills nature's purpose, or it can evoke infertile, even destructive, tears, as do the songs of dead forms and lost causes sung in the Ormond.

9 "Cyclops": Jesus falls the third time

Fallen man is again the subject in the "Cyclops" chapter. The third fall, in Ulysses, is at once a repetition of a theme, the "fallen" world, and a different 125

"stage" in a series that began in "Proteus" and "Hades"

with the intimation of the original (first) fall and the

consequent general mortality and sexuality. The second

fall of "Wandering Rocks" continues the series, presenting

the continuing fall of man into an urban mode of life,

with its complex network of inhuman machinery and its

isolated individuals serving as social fixtures; the

second fall is a metaphorical extension of the first, or

the first viewed from another angle--or ig inal sin is

"municipal sin." As if man is plummeting through space

ineluctably, because of physical necessity, in "Cyclops"

the "fall" expands into the sin of aggressive inhumanity;

natural corruption has progressed* to a self-directed

violence.

Aggression and hatred, man's commonest evil

tendencies, are depicted in various forms throughout the

episode. The first person narrator provides a possible

clue on the first page of the chapter: "How are the

mighty fallen!" (U292). On the next page begins a long

passage, in the parodie narrative voice, describing a

prelapsar ian Ireland, "Inisfail the fair," "a pleasant

land" of abundance, temperate climate, and shining palaces

(U293-94). The rest of the chapter is in contrast to

this, showing a postlapsarian world where the citizen

raves and threatens in the name of patriotism and

Christianity. The conversation in Barney Kiernan's 126 revolves around hangings, murders, fights, wars, revolutions, rape, and persecution. Bloom himself defines the fallen world of this chapter; "Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations" (U332); "But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. Any everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life" (U333). Through his compassion and pacifism. Bloom, again recovering from a fall, transcends the human condition. He rises at the end of the episode in a fiery chariot like Elijah (U345).

In this chapter, the fallen world's legalities and causes, its arbitrary forms inflated into gigantic "fact," are a central subject. Laws allow Geraghty, "the most notorious bloody robber you'd meet in a d a y 's walk (U292; my emphasis), to rob "the little jewy." In the interspersed "gigantic" passages, human causes, such as the citizen's Irish nationalist cause, causes defined more by their opposition to other causes than by any independent value, achieve absolute dimensions. Rumbold's execution receives the endorsement of the heavenly powers when "the deafening claps of thunder and the dazzling flashes of lightning which lit up the ghastly scene testified that the artillery of heaven had lent its supernatural pomp to the already gruesome spectacle" 1 27

(U306). Human definitions, heuristic and stipulative, are

raised to the status of infinite truth. The same

paragraph includes a description of the violent dispute

between opposing camps, each equally adamant and equally

certain of the "truth": "An animated altercation . . .

ensued . . . as to whether the eighth or ninth of March

was the correct date of the birth of Ireland's patron

saint. . . . The baby policeman . . . quickly restored

order and with lightning promptitude proposed the

seventeenth of the month as a solution equally honourable

for both contending parties" (U307-08). The necessary yet

arbitrary human constructions hardly justify the political executions, wars, and bloody persecutions of history, as

Bloom realizes.

A burlesque account of a postmortem interview with

Dignam offers eternal counterparts of man's doings,

including brutality and even the watercloset, a symbol of

the enclosure of nature:

Questioned by his earthname as to his whereabouts in the heavenworld he stated that he was not on the path of prâlâyâ or return but was still submitted to trial at the hands of certain bloodthirsty entities on the lower astral levels. . . . Interrogated as to whether life there resembled our experience in the flesh he stated that he had heard from more favored beings now in the spirit that their abodes were equipped with every modern home comfort such as tâlâfânâ, âlâvâtâr, hâtâkâldi, wâtâklâsât (U301).

These and other passages in the inflated parodie voice serve to emphasize the manner in which history has filled 128

the natural universe with the "absolutes" of the civilized

world, moved by nature's own unpredicated need.

Life has a "thirst" and men "give it a name" (U295).

Nature wants only to be filled, and man fills all-yielding

nature with history, with names that divide the world into

camps: "The friends we love are by our side and the foes

we hate before us" (U306). In the previous chapter,

"Sirens," Bloom thinks, "Hate. Love. Those are names.

Rudy" (U285; "Rudy" recalls Stephen's "paternity may be a

legal fiction"— U207; love and hate are based on "legal

fictions," names justifying human action and

relationship).

Man, the crucifier and the crucified, and all his

works receive "ultimate" recognition in a parody of the

Apostles' Creed: "They believe in rod, the scourger

almighty, creator of hell upon earth ..." (U329). This

creed or its corollaries would make killing Bloom, "the

new Messiah for Ireland" (U337), "justifiable homicide"

(U338).

10 "Nausicaa": Jesus is stripped of his garments

In book vi of the Odyssey, a naked Ulysses approaches

Nausicaa, who covers him in fine clothes. This action is

reversed in the tenth station and in "Nausicaa." On the

level of form, this station seems to be "expressed" by the shift of style halfway through this chapter of U l y s s e s . 1 29

In Gerty's section of the chapter, truth is presented in a mawkish language of cliche, euphemism, and super­

ficialities. Gerty herself sees the world in terms of its

surface and in terms of cheap romance and sentimentality.

Nearly everyone who enters her thoughts is presented in

terms of his or her clothing. A long passage is devoted

to Gerty's manner of dress--simple, "but with the

instinctive taste of a votary of Dame fashion" (U350).

From the perspective of this study, it is significant that among Joyce's words describing this section is one

referring to clothing--"drawersy."14

In this section of "Nausicaa," we are never permitted

to see the troubled soul beyond her "rather sad downcast eyes (U349), nor is the "gnawing sorrow [that] is there all the time" (U351) defined. Bloom, though Gerty's narrator never mentions his name, is to Gerty a romantic man-in-black, a Prince Charming. She notes the "haunting sorrow . . . written on his face" (U357), but that appearance only heightens his romance; the story of his suffering is reduced to the girl's fantasy. In comparison to Bloom's section of the chapter, Gerty's and the narrator's perception of reality and the style of this section "clothe" truths in inessential fictions, truths of the body, of life, and of self, exposed uninhibitedly in

Bloom's section. 1 30

The stripping of the false surfaces of style and

subject occurs at the moment of Bloom's orgasm, as the

Roman candle bursts: "everyone cried 0! 0! in raptures

and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads

and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars

falling with golden, 0 so lively! 0 so soft, sweet,

soft !" (U367). The threads of concealing clothing are

"shed," and we learn that the romantic looking man is

actually Bloom ("for it is he") and that Gerty's secret

sorrow is her lameness. The narrative shifts to a figurai

medium, a more direct, "undressed" style permitting access

to Bloom's thoughts and sufferings. Through most of this

section of the chapter. Bloom's revery concerns sex, past

sexual encounters as well as his recent masturbation. The more specific focus of many of his thoughts is nudity and

the removal of clothing: "And they like dressing one

another for the sacrifice. . . . Put them all on to take

them all off" (U368); "Say a woman loses a charm with every pin she takes out" (U368); "Warm shoe. Stays.

Drawers: little kick, taking them off" (U375).

The stripping of Christ's garments is also suggested by the benediction being celebrated in the nearby church.

During benediction, the priest exposes to the congregation

the "body of Christ," a consecrated host encased in the monstrance. Gerty is exposing herself ("very charming expose for him to witness"--U359; "the wondrous 1 3 1

revealment"--U366) and Bloom is "worshipping at her

shrine" (U361). This "expose" on the beach is

exhibitionist and masturbatory, a gazing upon ideals from

a distance, not a communion (Catholic communion is not

received during benediction).

Throughout the chapter, Gerty is too caught up in her

game to be involved with the playing children; in fact,

she seems hostile toward them. Gerty's romantic

sentimentalism and "delicate" sensibilities distort the

idea of sexual love. She exposes her blessed sacrament

not for any human and natural relationship but for a

masturbatory moment with her ideal, a dehumanizing

intercourse with an insubstantial formless essence. Gerty

notices "she ha[s] raised the devil in him" (U306); this

spirit that denies is raised within them both. Gerty

accepted the onset of menstruation because a priest told

her "that Our Blessed Lady herself said to the archangel

Gabriel be it done unto me according to Thy Word" (U358).

The gospel-story "yes" and "her nature" seem to remain

only ideas to her. But she offers an inchoate, feminine,

forgiving "yes"; "She half smiled at him wanly, a sweet

forgiving smile, a smile that verged on tears" (U367).

Bloom engages in a similar introverted self-enclosed

drama: "See her as she is spoil all. Must have the stage

setting, the rouge, costume, position, music" (U370). The perfume, the insubstantial essence, not the rose. Bloom 1 3 2

has worshipped: "That's her perfume. Why she waved her

hand. I leave you this to think of me when I'm far away

on the pillow. . . . Roses, I think. . . . Sweet and

cheap: soon sour" (U374).

Bloom notes that it was also June when he wooed Molly

on Howth, and now "history repeats itself"; Molly, and

nature, says "yes" to one as well as another: "Names

change: that's all" (U377). Again, "names" are signs of a

world of appearances, the Way of the Cross played out by

individuals on the surface of the stream, where the names

change and the cross changes hands. History repeats in

nature's unchanging cyclic motion, like the natural cycle

Joyce uses to describe the "style of the chapter :

"tumescence-detumescence." The "tumescence" of the first

part of "Nausicaa" reflects the increasing intensity of

Bloom's arousal and the inflated sentimental idealism of

the prose. As does the "gigantism" of "Cyclops," it also

represents the human fabrication of ideas, ideals, causes-

-civilization. The "detumescence" reflects nature's

ultimate deflation of artifice, concept, and even

individuality. This natural cycle, tumescence-

detumescence, is the rise and fall of individual desire

(and by extension, factions, armies, cities, and nations).

Bloom, experiencing detumescence, is completely ennervated: "Drained all the manhood out of me" (U377).

Exhausted, Bloom writes a message in the sand : "I. AM. 1 3 3

A." (U381). In the sand "all fades"; the sea, the great

mother, will efface the letters. Bloom does not name the

category, does not predicate the sentence. Nature's

course completed, names now irrelevant. Bloom drifts

briefly into a "short snooze" (U382). An unaccommodated

man, stripped of desire, name, masculinity, time, the

world, he sleeps. Pulled back into the dayworld, time, by

a clock, he receives the accidental name "cuckoo," only a

word, only arbitrary, only of limited significance. Nine

"cuckoos," it is "the shepherd's hour," "the nine o'clock

postman" knocks (U379), and the post-bearing shepherd has

been stripped.

11 "Oxen of the Sun": Jesus is nailed to the cross

In "Oxen of the Sun," procreation and the incarnation

of human spirit, its becoming entangled in or fastened to

physical matter, are major themes. Spirit crucifies and

is crucified; the "hardheaded facts" that "the man of

science like the man in the street has to face" (U418) are

the nails. Evoking Christ's being nailed to the cross are

references to "Joseph the Joiner" (U391) and to Thor "the hammerhurler" (U394) and narrative and dialogue heavily

laden with words relating to thorns, spikes, blades, points, other objects sharp or "lancinating," boards, rafters, trees, joining and jointures, strokes, and raps.

The references to hands, feet, arms, and limbs might be 134

another artificial means of sustaining the connection to

the station in which Christ's hands and feet are pierced.

The one reference to the "stigmata" in Ulysses is made in

this chapter (U417). The correspondence to the slaughter

of Helios' sacred oxen in book xii of The Odyssey also

supports the correspondence to this station. Joyce

mentions the "murderers of the sun" in this chapter, a

phrase that, through the pun on "sun," evokes the murder

of the "Son of God" by the nail-driving Romans. And

prominent in the Homeric episode is the spit on which the

kine are pierced and roasted.

Once nailed to the cross, Christ looks down on his

mother and gives her a new son, the apostle John:

When Jesus therefore had seen his mother and the disciple standing whom he loved, he saith to his mother : Woman, behold thy son. After that, he saith to the disciple: Behold thy mother (John 19: 26-27).

In "Oxen of the Sun," Mrs. Purefoy, after long hours of

labor, receives to her arms her new son whom she considers a gift from God: "Those who have passed on, who have gone before, are happy too as they gaze down and smile upon the

touching scene. Reverently look at her . . . in the first bloom of her new motherhood, breathing a silent prayer of

thanksgiving to One above, the Universal Husband" (U420).

With regard to the metaphorical equation between the

Way of the Cross and the historical world of men,

"nailing" seems to be the human actualization of nature's 1 3 5

possibility. Man, the active wilier, fastens spirit to

nature, the passive, exploitable willed. In "Oxen," the

hammerhurling of Thor, the mythic embodiment of man's

spirit, resounds in the thunder (like mankind a natural manifestation mythicized), and this cracking is the sound of man's fabricating, driving the nails, forcefully

imposing spirit onto nature;

Wisdom hath built herself a house, this vast long-established vault, the crystal palace of the Creator all in applepie order, a penny for him who finds the pea.

Behold the mansion reared by dedal Jack, See the malt stored in many a refluent

In the proud cirque of Jackjohn's bivouac.

A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled, back. Loud on left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler (U394).

And to complete the job, man fastens an advertisement for himself: "iron nails ran in" (or "Jesus of Nazareth,

King of the Jews"). INRI, IHS, HELYS, I AM A name what man has contrived, his "crime," "the municipal sin business" (FW5), or individual history. The House of

Keyes, or of dedal Jack, is signed with a cross. The unfinished I AM A is enough for Bloom to say that "I have suffered" or "iron nails ran in" (only a few lines before

Bloom traces the four letters in the sand in "Nausicaa" and a page before this chapter of the nailing, he thinks,

"Must nail that ad of Keyes ' s"--U381). A string of five people, a part of the stream of life, is made an 136

"indivisible" and isolated unit, HELYS (in "Lestrygonians"

Bloom compares this advertisement to the IHS worn by the

priest celebrating Mass in "Lotus-Eaters"; during Mass,

reading the priest's chasuble. Bloom at first mistakenly

sees INRI--U81). In "Lestrygonians," Bloom notices an ad

stuck to a boat in the river and wonders how one can own

flowing water (U153). Dividing, naming, and claiming as

his own whatever he can tack a sign to, man is an "agent

of publicity," as Bloom is called in "Oxen" (U413). In

"Ithaca," Bloom's "cogitations" on "the modern art of

advertisement" are reduced to principles that seem to

outline a cross: "vertically of maximum visibility

(divined), horizontally of maximum legibility (deciphered)

and of magnetising efficacy to arrest involuntary

attention, to interest, to convince, to decide" (U683).

"Magnetising efficacy," of course, would be the virtue of

the active, effecting, decision-making "agent of

publici ty."

Civilization and history result from the relationship

between humanity and nature, between a "masculine" force

and a "feminine" phenomenon. Like Bloom and Bridie Kelly,

the two "are entwined in nethermost darkness, the wilier and the willed, and in an instant ( f iat! ) light shall

flood the world" : the light of the day world, the son of

the "bride of darkness, a daughter of night" and of a

father whose paternity is a fiction. As in the theory of 1 37

the determination of a child's sex, discussed in this

chapter, the human world is determined by "a cooperation

(one of nature's favourite devices) between the nisus

formativus of the nemasperm on the one hand and on the

other a happily chosen position, succubitus felix, of the

passive element" (U418). Nature has given birth to the

human world, but humanity has "manfully helped" (U420).

"The remarkablest progenitor barring none in this

chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle,"

Theodore Purefoy represents humanity in fertile

relationship with nature; he is an agent forced to bear what he himself has willed, in a Way of the Cross;

In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou has fructified with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog. . . . Art drooping under thy load? . . . She is a hoary pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quincy, bunions, hayfever. . . . Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison? (U423-24).

All-creative nature is a "pandemonium of ills," a "Venus

Pandemos" (U425). Man's "lifetask" is to tame this pandemonium.

Human creativity is an extension of nature's, but man forms the actualizations of nature's possibilities under the guidance of spirit. Human intervention negates some of the possibilities, such as the deformations and

"unnatural" births enumerated in this chapter (U410-11), and promotes the best of nature's offerings--the painless 138 delivery of healthy children, for example (U384). This exploitation of nature is a channeling of the stream of life for creative purposes, not a prohibition of life. It

is the spirit of denial working to affirm.

Human ideals, then, deny all-fertile nature, but this denial is not the sin against fertility Joyce identifies as the subject of this chapter.In "the land of

Phenomenon where he must for certain one day die as he was like the rest too in passing show," man must do "as men to with wives which Phenomenon has commanded them to do by the book Law." But when law and phenomenon separate, when man's law no longer coincides with or derives from nature's creative law, then the devil "Killchild" takes over (U395-96); the spirit that denies some of nature's possibilities in order to actualize other possibilities, becomes the spirit of absolute denial, a law independent of creativity, a reification of cyclopian, self-important causes. The sin against fertility in all human affairs is symbolized by the active prohibition of conception: "But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost,

Very God, Lord and Giver of Life?" (U389). This sterile spirit detached from the purely natural becomes bestial or swinish, like Costello's indiscriminate and unrestrained lust: "he would ever dishonest a woman whoso she were or 139

wife or maid or leman if it so fortuned him to be

delivered of his spleen of lustihead" (U389).

Language, a tool for pinning down the restless

potential of life, like all the arts and sciences of man,

embodies the human spirit, but it can become an instrument

of sterile aggression. Stephen, holding a "canonical"

position against the defenders of the "beastly,"

participates in the "strife of tongues," the

"discursiveness which seemed the only bond of union among

tempers so divergent" (U410), and later contributes his

ideas to a debate that reflects history's Way of the

The debate which ensued was in its scope and progress ah epitome of the course of life. . . . The debaters were the keenest in the land, the theme they were engaged on the loftiest and most vital. . . . Crothers was there at the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb. . . . There too, opposite to him was Lynch, whose countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity and premature wisdom . . . . Lastly at the head of the board was the young poet (U417).

This battle of ideas is an apparently harmless version of

the beastly "municipal abattoir" (U420). The strife

characterizes the "man's world" to the degree that it is

untempered by the source of artistic creativity or of human productivity generally.

Stephen thinks himself "lord and giver of . . . life" because he considers himself an artist and capable, through language, of calling into life "the past and its 140

phantoms" (U415), but his "perverted transcendentalism"

(U418) turns away the creative stream of phenomena.

Without the art to control the flood of his history,

Stephen himself is victimized and controlled, as he will

be more dramatically in "Circe":

There are sins or . . . evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait. . . . Yet a chance word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most various circumstances, a vision or a dream. . . at the feast at midnight when he is now filled with wine. Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful (U421).

Immediately preceding Stephen's boast ("I . . . am

lord and giver of their life"). Bloom envisions phantoms

and trooping ghosts, a fusion of ideal and bestial

suggesting a Way of the Cross that concludes in

resurrection and not ruin. "Cycles of cycles of

generations" tread through "the infinite of space," where

there are "twilight phantoms . . . moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely haunches." But these

"sad phantoms," ideas projected by the generations, fade:

"Agendath is a waste land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is no more."

Replacing these phantoms, "on the highway of the clouds

they come, muttering thunder of rebellion, the ghosts of beasts. . . . Parallax stalks behind and goads them, the 1 4 1

lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions" (the

thunder of the hammerhurling and the piercing light of the

human will). The "zodiacal host" (beasts in the circle of

the stations, nature's cycle given shape), a "moving

moaning multitude," "murderers of the sun," troop to the

dead sea, "the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood" of a

stagnant corrupted nature. When the multitude and the

creative ideal unite, life again flows: "And, lo, wonder

of metempsychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride,

harbinger of the daystar. . . . Coifed with a veil. . . .

It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it

streams . . ., writhing in the skies a mysterious writing

till after a myriad metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes.

Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon the forehead of

Taurus" (U414). The final lines describe the male-female, spirit-nature apotheosis, the human face "written" on the veil, the androgynous resurrection potential within the

Way of the Cross.

As Stephen himself states in "Scylla and Charybdis," human creativity is androgynous, but he has yet to find

the balance. He will require not only the spiritual forms and the bestial moaning multitude of his past but also the maternal creativity to affirm the human life in both. 1 42

12 "Circe"; Jesus dies on the cross

In "Circe," both Bloom and Stephen reach a climactic

confrontation with their sins and the nightmares that

history has imposed on them. The episode purges them of

their sins, as Jesus' death is to purge humanity of its

sins. Bloom and Stephen undergo a kind of death which

will enable them to transcend, in part, their painful

situations.

According to Matthew's account of the moment-: of

Christ's death,

there was darkness over the whole earth, until . the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying: . . . My God, My God, what hast Thou forsaken me? . . . And Jesus again crying with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And behold the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top even to the bottom, and the earth quaked, and the rocks were rent. And the graves were opened: and many bodies of the saints that had slept arose. And coming out of the tombs after his resurrection, came into the holy city, and appeared to many (Matt. 27:45-53).

Perhaps the most intense moment of the episode is

Stephen's "crucifixion." Stephen has a vision of his mother who says, "Have mercy on Stephen, Lord, for my

sake! Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with

love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary" (U582). Stephen

shouts, "Nothung," and then "he lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time's livid

flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all 143

space, shattered glass and toppling masonry" (U583).

Later, during the dispute with the soldiers, a

hallucinated cry goes up that "Dublin's burning," and a

description of the pandemonium follows; "The midnight sun

is darkened. The earth trembles. The dead of Dublin from

Prospect and Mount Jerome in white sheepskin overcoats and

black goatfell cloaks arise and appear to many" (U598).

The dispute ends as Stephen is knocked to the ground,

unconscious.

Hugh Kenner, stating that "the tearing of Bloom's

coat . . . recalls the rending of the Saviour's garments,"

writes in his essay on "Circe" of the possibility "that

Joyce in planning the episode may have made the sequential

hallucinations a secular Way of the Cr o s s ."16 However,

Kenner does not mention the allusion to Christ's meeting

with the daughters of Jerusalem in the eighth station

("Weep not for me, 0 daughters of Erin?"--U498), a

possible allusion to Christ's falls ("The just man falls

seven times"— U501), and the allusion to Christ's meeting

with his mother in the fourth station ("She's beastly

dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the afflicted mother"--U580). An impression of a Way of the Cross does

seem to be given in "Circe," as Kenner indicates, but the

plan for "Circe" might be only a suggestion of a larger

plan for the novel. My point is that as the hallucinations of Stephen and Bloom are the dramatic 144

rendering of the weaknesses, fears, and sins that haunt

these characters throughout the novel, so the passion and

the Way of the Cross, acted out sporadically but overtly

in "Circe," are perhaps more subtly and completely woven

into the structure of the novel in general. Just as

Joyce's use of the Shakespearean parallel becomes most explicit in "Circe," the use of the Way of the Cross as a parallel in the book as a whole becomes particularly apparent in this chapter.

In the twelfth station, the day's passion and the lifetime sufferings of an incarnated Christ reach a climax; in "Circe," the day's and history's sins and excesses are brought to a crisis in the minds of Stephen and Bloom. "Circe" realizes a drama that underlies and motivates the day's activities, just as the dramatic conflict of divine and human continues through Christ's life and is epitomized by the intense drama on the cross, symbolic of the spirit's struggle for life within a dying body. Stephen and Bloom "die" on the crosses of history in this episode; that is, they are now overwhelmed by the forces that have bound their spirits and reduced them to mere physical and historically determined beings.

However, Stephen's and Bloom's experiences in "Circe," like the death in the twelfth station, also relieve them of the sins of the past, freeing the "divinity" within them, potential lords, not enemies, of creation. 1 4 5

The swinishness of this chapter is a reduction of the

human spirit to common physicality, as is death by

crucifixion. "Opposite" to this bestiality, the

etherealization or "rarefaction" of life also leads to the

swine-love and swine-death of the chapter; both sins

demean human spirit and the creative nature of which it is

a part. As Richard Ellmann writes in Ulysses on the

Liffey, "Either body or soul, if angelified or animalized,

is monstrous," and "The real or the ideal, if pursued in

isolation, a p p a l s . "17 Both swinishness and rarefaction

are suffered and exorcised in this "death" on the cross of

space and time.

Early in the chapter. Bloom's sexual sins of the past come to accuse him. Bloom takes on all the guilt laid before him, as if taking on the sins of the world.

Ordered to "come to the station" (U455), he is tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for various sexual

transgressions. As messiah and Lord mayor of Dublin, he

then announces the establishment of the New Bloomusalem, a visionary city in which his creative and charitable efficiency is put into practice. But Bloom's sins return

in the accusations of the masses, and the abstractions and factionism undermine his idea of a human city that promotes fertile and undivided life. This messiah, attempting to institute a kingdom of love and peace, instead is indicted for all the sins that subvert that 146

institution. Wearing Christ's "seamless garment marked

Bloom speaks once to the daughters of Erin as he

burns to death "amid phoenix flames." "Mute, shrunken,

carbonised," he is reduced to the mere physical, no longer

articulate, erect, spiritual man (U498-99).

"Exhausted," womanly Bloom yields to the domination

of the "exuberant female" (528). Overwhelmed by nature

and woman, or his idealization of them. Bloom becomes less

than man, becomes swinish, before his hallucinated Circe,

Bella. Bella, as Bello, humiliates and enslaves Bloom:

"Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing

under the yoke." (U535). Under this yoke or the cross of

his history, "the sins of the past" rise against him

(U537).

The Nymph of The Bath of the Nymph appears to Bloom

and accuses him: "You bore me away, framed me in oak and

tinsel, set me above your marriage couch" (U546). Bloom's

response echoes his earlier thoughts revealing the

idealization of feminine beauty: "Your classic curves, beautiful immortal. I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of beauty, almost to pray" (U546). This masturbatory involvement with his own ideas, this

"praying," recalls his worshipping at Gerty's shrine.

Bloom and the Nymph who has been projected from his mind deplore the fallen scene she has to look down upon--

"soiled personal linen," loose quoits, "that antiquated 147

commode" (U547). The Nymph recriminates Bloom for his

"infamy" at the age of sixteen, a result of the "natural

phenomenon" of "capillary attraction" and Lotty Clarke's

"flow of animal spirits" (U549). In comparison to this

sexless Nymph, Bloom is fallen, "thirtytwo head over heels

per second," a "fall from cliff" (U550). The unfallen

Nymph, an idea sprouted from the brow of a fallen man, has

not the signs of mortality and sexuality: "We immortals,

as you saw today, have not such a place and no hair there

either. We are stonecold and pure" (U551). Not stonecold

and pure. Bloom considers himself "a perfect pig." When

the Nymph orders, "No more desire. . . . Only the

ethereal," Bloom's trouser button snaps, breaking the

spell (U552), and he defends the naturalness of sexuality.

Frustrating her attempt to unman him. Bloom rejects the

Nymph.

Bloom's irrepressible spirit is not defeated by the

sins that visit him in this chapter. He escapes because

this Ulysses is under the protection of Hermes, "god of public ways, . . . god of signposts" : "i.e., he is especially for a traveller like Ulysses the point at which

roads parallel merge and roads contrary also."^8 Listed

in the "Circe" notesheets in a sequence of notes on Hermes

is "crossways," instead of "crossroads" (the entire line

in the notesheets reads, "streets, crossways," associating city streets perhaps with ways of the cross)."Public 148

ways" suggests the world of men and history. "Signposts"

might evoke the posts on which men fasten the names of

their crimes (the signs "INRI" or "I AM A," for instance).

Although rejecting the Nymph preserves Bloom's

manhood and humanity, he remains a womanly man, an

androgyne. He might be thought of as Hermaphroditus, the

son of Hermes, god of the crossways, and of Aphrodite, goddess of love and fertility. As Hermes' son. Bloom is spiritual man condemned to walk the streets and crossways; as Aphrodite's son, he shares in nature's corruption and creativity (although the statue of Aphrodite does not have

"such a place and no hair there either," the natural model

for that frozen idea does). The double influence allows his spirituality to promote either the corruption or the creativity of life.

The "death" on the cross in this chapter is a relief from the burdens of the past, an awakening from the nightmare of history that has crucified spirit. Bloom dies to spiritual death and to the denial of natural life.

Because Joyce commends Bloom's spirit into the hands of the god of the crossways. Bloom's resurrection is imminent. Later in the chapter, Stephen rejects the guilts that have fettered his desires. With "Nothung," he frees himself from family, friends, home, country, and religion. His history in ruin around him, with no prefabricated ideas to formulate his desire, he is in 149 effect, and in reality by the end of the chapter, unconscious. It is left to Bloom to remove Stephen from

Nighttown and the cross.

13 "Eumaeus": Jesus is taken down from the cross

Another example of "expressive form," the style of

"Eumaeus" "expresses" the weariness of the characters, and, "ponderous" and "lacking vitality," the style might also "express" the action of the corresponding station: after intense exertion, Christ hangs lifeless, a deadweight to those who lift his body from the cross.

After being taken down, the body of Christ is washed and prepared for burial. "Preparatory to anything else,"

Bloom brushes Stephen off and then considers the availability of water "for their ablutions" (U612-13).

They pass "the Great Northern railway station . . . where of course all traffic was suspended at that late hour"

(U614; my emphasis). Bloom and Stephen, "pale in the face" (U613), walk past the morgue (U614). Bloom informs his companion that Nighttown is "a regular deathtrap"

(U614).

The chapter contains frequent suggestions, within passing references, figures of speech, and diction, of exhaustion after exertion, of relief from suffering, of death, and of suspension or hanging, as from a cross :

"post mortem," "petrified," "died naturally or on the 1 50

scaffold high," "positively last performance," "nipped in

the bud of premature decay," "denouement," "stiff figure,"

"Youth here has end," "hanging on a nail," "being on

tenterhooks," and "weak on his pins," for example. There

are, too, repeated indications of physical deposition, downfall, falling, dropping, and being lowered, and descriptions of the heaviness of objects or mannerisms, perhaps suggesting the deadweight being removed from the

Once removed, Christ is placed in the arms of his mother. Being in another's arms or hands and being supported are also recurring motifs in "Eumaeus":

"composing his limbs again in the arms of Morpheus"

(U639), "in safe hands" (U658), "Lean on me" (U660),

"wrapped in the arms of Murphy" (U660), "arm-in-arm"

(U661). Preparations for burial are alluded to: "She put the first nail in his coffin" (U650). The quick deposition and removal of Christ's body by his followers are recalled : "spirited away by a few friends" (U645),

"Simply absconded somewhere" (U649), "after the burial of a mutual friend when they left him alone in his glory after the grim task of having committed his remains to the grave" (U655). Finally, in this chapter Bloom reads in the newspaper that "the remains of the late Mr. Patrick

Dignam were removed. . . . for interment" (U647). 151

The errors in the report of the funeral are part of a

pattern of mistakes and lies in the chapter, "fictions"

such as Corley's claim to nobility, possibly "a complete

fabrication from start to finish" (U617), or the stories

about the keeper of the cabman's shelter, "said to be the

once famous Skin-the-Goat, Fitzharris, the invincible,

though he wouldn't vouch for the actual facts, which quite

possibly there was not one vestige of truth in" (U621).

The greatest spinner of yarns is the "soi-disant sailor,"

who claims that he has just arrived on the Rosevean ("The

threemaster Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks ....

There's my discharge"— U625; he has been discharqed--or so

he says-- from the crosstrees sighted by Stephen in

"Proteus," from a ship carrying building material).

The deceit, fictionalizing, and ambiguity running

through "Eumaeus" reflect the deceit in the corresponding

Homeric episode, but, as in other chapters, Joyce manages

to find a thematic link between the Odyssean incident and

the corresponding station. Throughout "Eumaeus," the

characters, the reader, and the narrator attempt to

extricate the fictions of human spirit from the "truth" of

space-time. In effect, this is the self-defeating project of removing man from history in order to view truth unobscured. The central events of the chapter take place

in an "unprententious wooden structure" (U621), an apt 152

setting for the pulling down of pretentions (and an

accurate description of a cross).

The probable fictionalizing of the "sailor" aside,

his "woolgathering" contains some thematic relevance:

Suffice it to say that, as a casual glance at the map revealed, [water] covered fully three fourths of it and he fully realised accordingly what it meant to rule the waves. On more than one occasion . . . he had remarked a superannuated old salt, evidently derelict, seated habitually near the not particularly redolent sea on the wall, staring quite obliviously at it and it at him . . . . And it left him wondering why. Possibly he had tried to find out the secret for himself, floundering up and down the antipodes and all that sort of thing and over and under. . . . And the odds were twenty to nil there was really no secret about it at all. . . . The eloquent fact remained that the sea was there in all its glory and in the natural course of things somebody or other had to sail on it and fly in the face of providence though it merely went to show how people usually contrived to load that sort of onus on to the other fellow like the hell idea and the lottery and insurance (U630).

The original fiction is that feminine, "mysterious"

nature, the globe, holds a "secret" that man must

penetrate, so he fathers innumerable additional paternal

fictions in order to "rule the waves." The seeming

agreement between secret and human knowledge is established by f iat. History is those fictions and the activity and civilization they produce; human time and space enforce the category "truth." Man sets out on a Way of the Cross or an Odyssean voyage in quest of the

"secret," and the journey accumulates many yarns.

"Floundering up and down the antipodes" (rising and 153

falling), worsening the sufferings of this journey, "the

rover" loads the "onus [of his fictionalizing] on to the

other fellow."

Stephen, who has been burdened by the "hell idea"

among other onuses, also stares at the sea: "Stephen

stared at nothing in particular. He could hear, of

course, all kinds of words changing colour like those

crabs about Ringsend in the morning, burrowing quickly

into all colours of different sorts of the same sand where

they had a home somewhere beneath or seemed to" (U644).

Like the yarns spun about the sea, words only seem to have

a home somewhere underneath, seem to refer to the secret.

"Sounds are impostures," Stephen says earlier in the

chapter. "What's in a name?" (U622). The modality of

the audible, time, history itself, is an imposture. But

to remove the fiction, that is, to remove the fiction- maker, in order to get at the non-fictional, is to stare blankly at the sea, the undifferentiated visible, or at an empty, disassembled cross.

In book XVi i of the Odyssey, the disguised Ulysses is

recognized by his dog. In Joyce's "Eumaeus," Stephen penetrates beyond Bloom's disguises and his adopted name:

"Christus or Bloom his name is, or, after all, any other, secundum carnem" (U643). Underneath the legal fictions, names, and changing colors, a unity of life and a single home somewhere in nature's sea make Bloom's paternity in 1 54

relation to Stephen a more essential truth than any legal

paternity coloring "an instant of blind rut."

Stephen, in this realization of the Christ in Bloom,

and Bloom, whose charity rests on a similar understanding,

are both removed from the cross of history, conflict,

factionism, ego against ego--removed at least from the

mind's bondage, through the conversation, tolerance, and

compassion that have begun to knock down the artificial

barriers between fellow sufferers. Stephen is nearly

ready to walk away from Dublin toward the life of art. He

is restored to consciousness, after dying to his tower

home, to his history, and to spiritual corruption, and he

is awakening to the source of creativity. Bloom is now prepared to slay the suitors with the arrows of his

understanding, and to lay his mortal existence to rest, with the expectation of rising on the strength of his understanding.

14 "Ithaca" : Jesus is placed in the sepulchre

Stephen, crucified in "Circe" and removed in

"Eumaeus," must be tended by Bloom and guided to a resting place at 7 Eccles Street. Bloom undertakes the custodianship of Stephen, filling the role of Joseph of

Arimathea, in whose tomb Christ is laid. Bloom of

Arimathea would give his own niche to Stephen. As Father

Robert Boyle remarks, "Stephen, deserted by Judas-Lynch, 155 now literally smashed by Private Carr, lies in the street with his face to the sky. It is a kind of crucifixion his

Judas has left him to undergo, and it is another Joseph of

Arimathea, Bloom, who will take Stephen's body to his own silent tomb, in this case one where (at least in Molly's imagination) many men have been laid."20

In "Ithaca, " both Bloom and Stephen lay to rest the artifices and distinctions that have been imposed, the conditions of history. Their conversation breaks through barriers; here, no longer a "strife of tongues," language is a human invention that promotes compassion and a recognition of the essential unity of life. The two men discover "common factors of similarity" between them

(U666), despite "separating forces" such as "name, age, race, creed" (U678), and although "their views on some points" are "divergent" (U666), a common humanity runs through them. By transcending the artificial boundaries of and between men. Bloom and Stephen defeat history, as

Ulysses defeats Penelope's suitors, and as Christ, by dying, defeats the forces of destruction and death itself.

In the latter part of the chapter. Bloom's victory is carried further. He harrows hell by eradicating the distinctions that incite envy and jealousy, human distinctions between "matrimonial violator" and

"adulterous violator" (U733). From the Ithacan perspective of infinity, ego, individual death, and all 156

human institutions are diminished in importance.

Partaking as much as humanly possible in "the apathy of

the stars" (U734), Bloom accepts Molly's adultery with

"equanimity"; "As natural as any and every natural act of a nature expressed or understood executed in natured nature by natural creatures in accordance with his, her and their natured natures, of dissimilar similarity"

(U733). Spirit affirms natural flesh, as flesh affirms spirit in "Penelope." Although a more intellectually complex quality than feminine affirmation, masculine

"equanimity" is a "yes" that accepts life and transcends the world's painful situations.

The style of "Ithaca," cold and "objective," is appropriate to a deathlike disconnection from the passion of life. Bloom, Stephen, and the narrator here engage in reminiscence, assimilation, and recapitulation (besides the evocation of the more remote past, the chapter reviews the immediate past: we see the budget for 16 June 1904--

U711; Bloom's silent recapitulation of the events of the day is presented as a series of r i tes--U728-29 ; Bloom provides Molly with an expurgated account of his activities--U735), as if they have arrived at the end of a life, of a past, at a point at which they must reckon gains and losses and locate meaning in a "retrospective arrangement." There is the sense of an ending within

Stephen's and especially Bloom's memories of failure and 1 57

loss, the sense that life has received its quietus, some

little meaning affirmed, its return intimated.

Much of this chapter explores the two characters'

past, and frequently the subject is a now-dead friend or

relative; Mrs. Riordan, Stephen's mother. Bloom's father, mother, and son, Mrs. Sinico, Paddy Dignam "(in the grave)," and "companions now in various manners in different places defunct" (U704-5). This attention to

time past and persons passed on reflects the chapter's other meditations on the evanescence of life and the

inevitability of death: "from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived" (U668); "There remained . . . the fact of vital growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis from infancy through maturity to decay" (U697); "allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity" (U698).

Stephen is a "victim predestined," like Little Harry

Hughes who "lies among the dead," and both are led "to a secret infidel apartment" (the room in the Jew's daughter's house. Bloom's home and wife, Joseph of

Arimathea's tomb; U690-92). Stephen sets out into the night to the accompaniment of the bells of St. George's church which echo, to Stephen's ears, the prayer ("Liliata rutilantium") that recalls his dead mother and marks his own departure and revival (U704). 158

Bloom, too, is a "victim predestined"--betrayed,

crucified, and exhausted. He lies down to rest in

"Ithaca" after reviewing the events of the preceding day,

the "past consecutive causes . . . of accumulated fatigue"

(U728). In the fourteenth station of the cross, Christ is

wrapped in a linen shroud and laid in the sepulchre.

After putting on a "long white nightshirt" and preparing

"the bedlinen" (U730-31), Bloom lies down next to Molly,

"the manchild in the womb" (this might recall Stephen's

rhyming of "womb" and "tomb" earlier in the novel): "He

rests. He has travelled" (U737).21 He achieves an end to

sorrow in the unconsciousness of sleep, within the rock of

Ithaca: "Going to a 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"

(U737). Christ is relieved of his sufferings and his adopted human form in the tomb "hewn in the rock" (this last detail is recorded by three of the four gospels).

In Bloom, Stephen senses "the accumulation of the past," and in Stephen, Bloom sees "the predestination of a future" (U689). This expresses not exclusive and consistent identifications for these two characters but a significant image for this chapter : past and future face each other at the still point, where time's accumulated regrets and failures are gathered and memorialized and where the future's projects may arise. 159

Past, present, and future, actual and potential, assemble in the chapter. Negating Bloom's existent resources and his dreams for the future, his life- supports, the narrator reduces Bloom "by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune . . . to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity" (Ü725; my emphasis). The increasingly degraded embodiments on the list are, for the most part, hypothetical in Bloom's case, but in Ulysses ' Way of the Cross, we encounter many of these wretched individuals (and Bloom himself could be considered, for example, an "eccentric public laughingstock seated on bench of public park"). Bloom, we are told, might escape these hypothetical miseries by death or departure; following the latter course. Bloom,

"the departed," would "reappear," a "wreaker of justice on malefactors, . . . a sleeper awakened" (U726-27).

In the Way of the Cross, there is no station for the resurrection, although at one time the Catholic hierarchy debated its inclusion. The resurrection, it was decided, is implied and promised in the final station,22 as a promise of resurrection--"rising preapprehended" (U728)-- is indirectly offered in "Ithaca." The answers to the two questions asked regarding Bloom's gymnastic entrance into his home--"Did he fall?" and "Did he rise uninjured by concuss ion?"--are both affirmative (U668-69). After

Stephen departs. Bloom thinks of his now-defunct 160 companions but remains outside to observe "the resurgent sun perceptible low on the horizon" (U704-05; again, the possibility of a play on "sun"). Bloom's plans for a country residence and his various schemes to acquire wealth are a promise of resurrection. Not that we expect him ever to accomplish these projects. But he will go on, irrepressibly. His defeats and humiliations, it seems, will have no dominion.

Before Stephen's exit from the novel, he and Bloom emerge from 7 Eccles Street into the "penumbra of the garden" to the attendant intonation of the 113th psalm, which refers to the Jews' escape from slavery in Egypt and to the incarnation and resurrection of spirit (U697-98).

Robert Day Adams argues, convincingly I think, "that in the dark garden Father Bloom and Deacon Dedalus are celebrating, in comic-symbolic mode, the Vigil of Easter; that the text of the Exultet shows us t h i s . "23 This Holy

Saturday service celebrates Christ's triumph over sin and death. The lights extinguished during the Tenebrae services of the previous days are relighted from a spark struck from a flint, representing "our Lord rising from his rock-hewn s e p u l c h r e . "24 Five grains of incense, symbolizing Christ's five wounds, are emplanted in the paschal candle while the deacon sings the Exultet, a hymn rejoicing at Christ's victory and referring to the prefiguring release of the Jews from Egyptian bondage. 1 6 1

The lighting of the paschal candle is followed by the

consecration of baptismal water, a blessing "con-

celebrated" by Stephen and Bloom, according to D a y . 25

In this same scene, there seems to be a hint also of

the Tenebrae service, a service distinct from the Exultet

but not unrelated symbolically. The Easter Vigil in a

sense picks up where the Tenebrae left off, by

illuminating the church darkened during Tenebrae. If both

of these services are present in this scene, as I think

they are, they overlap and reinforce each other's

symbolism.

Tenebrae, the Matins and Lauds of the last three days of Holy Week, includes the extinguishing, one by one, of candles placed in a triangular candlestick, a "hearse," holding fifteen candles. Fourteen of these candles are put out. The master of ceremonies takes the remaining candle, the one at the apex of the hearse, and conceals it behind the altar. Tenebrae concludes when the candle is brought back into view. Abbot Gueranger • interprets, in orthodox fashion, this ceremony:

The glory of the Son of God was obscured, and, so to say, eclipsed, by the ignominies He endured during His Passion. He, the Light of the world . . . is now robbed of all His honours; He is, says Isaias, the Man of sorrows, a leper; He is . . . a worm of the earth, and no man .... But Jesus, our Light, though despised and hidden, is not extinguished. This is signified by the candle which is placed on the altar ; it figures our Redeemer suffering and dying on Calvary. In order to express His burial, the candle is hidden behind the altar; its light disappears. . . . But the candle suddenly reappears, and homage is paid to the Conqueror of death.26

Bloom, the man of sorrows, "no man," is

inextinguishable, irrepressible. "This is signified by"

the candlestick he momentarily places down ("Bloom set the

candlestick on the floor"--UG98). Although Bloom's

"burial" follows, a candle suddenly reappears with the

next chapter ahd homage is paid to Bloom the Conqueror

with the word "yes."

In "Ithaca," Bloom is called "Noman" (U727), an

epithet identified by Thornton27 and others as a reference

to Ulysses' ruse on book ix of the Odyssey. Gueranger, in

his interpretation of Tenebrae, refers to Christ as "no

man" because the psalm (21) from which that phrase is

borrowed is one recited during the Good Friday Tenebrae

service (probably anticipated on Thursday evening in

Joyce's time; the same psalm is also among the readings

accompanying the stripping of the altar on Holy Thursday).

Verse 7 reads in full: "But I am a worm, and no man: the

reproach of men, and the outcast of the people." The

entire psalm has been considered by Christians to be a

prophecy of Christ's passion and the conversion of the

Gentiles (verse 2 is the origin of Christ's words on the cross, "0 God my God . . . why hast thou forsaken me").

Because of the double source for "Noman," Joyce was able 163 to place Bloom at the end of an odyssey and a passion, and at a Tenebrae service in commemoration of the latter.

(The prediction of the conversion of the Gentiles in the same psalm possibly suggests Stephen's conversion, his acceptance of a "faith" that requires a sharing in a passion.)

Critics of Ulysses have noticed the probable reference to Tenebrae in "Circe"; "He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier" (U583).

And John J. Peradotto claims that a passage (U393-94) in

"Oxen" "can be shown to be clearly fashioned after and inspired by the Tenebrae s e r v i c e , "28 Again, events in

"Circe" might represent events going on less explicitly throughout the novel. In "Calypso" and "Telemachus," a cloud casts a darkness over the earth, a shadow associated with Bloom's and Stephen's thoughts of the darkness of the mortality they are sentenced to; the "light" of the spirit is partially obscured, and the "light" continues to be eclipsed by the "ignominies" of the passion, as the daylight hourly wanes and as Stephen and Bloom participate in the dance of the hours. Tenebrae was once celebrated at night, but "when the hour was anticipated, the name of

Tenebrae was kept up [because] it began with day-light, but ended after the sun had s e t . " 29

The gradual loss of light, literally and figuratively, in Ulysses suggests "the gradual 164

extinguishing of the lights," to use Joyce's own w o r d s , 30

in Tenebrae. That fourteen candles are extinguished to

commemorate Christ's passion and fourteen stations

represent that passion is an accident of history; there is

no reason to believe one practice influenced the other.

If I am correctly noting the function of these services in

the novel, the coincidence was a pleasing one to Joyce.

Above, I identified the remaining lighted Tenebrae

candle with the candlestick Bloom carries and sets down in

"Ithaca." Another aspect of the Tenebrae candle's

symbolism exists in a second embodiment of the fifteenth

candle, a lamp glowing in Molly's bedroom window. This

"luminous sign," only a glare in the windowblind, calls

attention to "the mystery of an invisible person" (U702).

The light contributes to a sense of promise, of an

imminent "resurrection" (as also does the "resurgent sun perceptible low on the horizon," a flame about to climb

from behind earth's altar). The light has not yet come

from behind the altar. Stephen is perhaps better equipped

for his future, but nothing is guaranteed; Bloom has won out over forces of destruction, and he will likely have to do so regularly. The spirit of this ability to rise, the life that Bloom has and that Stephen is at least closer to possessing, manifests itself in "Penelope," the fifteenth candle, a fifteenth station. NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

1 James Joyce's Ulysses, pp. 140-43.

2 Ed. Herbert Thurston, S. J. and Donald Attwater (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1956), p. 523.

2 Upon meeting Elpenor, Ulysses says, "Elpenor, how has thou come beneath the darkness and the shadow? Thou hast come fleeter on foot than I in my black ship. " Trans. S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang (New York: Macmillan, 1930), p. 159.

4 James Joyce's Ulysses, pp. 173-74.

5 Deharbe Catechism, p. 100.

G Weldon Thornton attributes this identification of the church's name to Richard M. Kain. Allusions in Ulysses, p. 306.

7 "Joyce's Verbal Acupuncture," 64.

8 The Odyssey, pp. 140-41.

9 Immediately after remembering the first four words of the Gloria, Stephen thinks, "Veils fall" (U197-98). Briand points out that "it was probably the practice of the woman communicants in Ireland of 1904 to lower their veils" at the Gloria ("The Catholic Mass in James Joyce's Ulysses," 315). The "Gloria in excelsis Deo" lies within Stephen's brief summary of the Incarnation and passion (including the reference to the "crosstree" that confirms the identification of the "crosstrees" in "Proteus" with Christ's cross). Thus, the falling veils might be seen to be associated with the stations as well as the Mass; the image of the veil supports both correspondences and reinforces the equivalence, in Ulysses and in Catholic teaching, between the eucharist and the passion.

10 Richard Ellmann states that Scylla and Charybdis, male and female, are mated in the artist to form "the beast with two backs": "In short the artist . . . is an androgyne." The mocker Mulligan "is all penis" and the

165 mystic Russell "is all vagina": "True art is copulative." Ulysses on the Liffey, pp. 86-87.

Maynooth Catechism, 13.33ff. As quoted in Wilhelm Fiiger, "Joyce's Use of the Maynooth Catechism," James Joyce Quarterly, 13 (Summer 1976), 416.

12 James Joy c e 's Ulysses, p. 229.

13 "The technique--to which I have given the name 'expressive form'--seeks to establish a direct correspondence between substance and style. The form 'expresses' or imitates qualities of its subject. Following this ideal, Joyce tried to endow each episode of Ulysses with a form which would suggest characteristics of the setting or action." A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 44.

14 "Nausikaa is written in a namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy (alto la!) style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painter's palette, chit chat, circumlocution, etc., etc." Letter to Frank Budgen, Jan. 3, 1920, Letters, I, p. 135.

15 "The crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition." Letter to Frank Budgen, March 20, 1920, Letters, I, pp. 138-39.

15 "Circe," in James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays, ed Clive Hart and David Hayman (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), p. 360.

17 Ulysses on the Liffey, p. 124. Earlier in his study, Ellmann refers to "the two enemies of men's reason . . ., rarefaction and brutalization" (p. 83).

18 Letter to Frank Budgen, Michaelmas 1920, Letters, I, pp. 147-48.

19 J oyce's Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum, ed. Phillip F. Herring (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1972), p. 304.

20 "The Priesthoods of Stephen and Buck," in Approaches to Ulysses: Ten Essays, ed. Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), p. 59.

21 According to the O E D , "travel" and "travail" have a common etymological origin, trepâliâre, "deriv. of trepâlium, . . . an instrument or engine of torture (prob. f. L. très, tria three + palus stake, being so named from 167

its structure). The etymological sense was thus 'to put to torture, torment'." The three stakes refer to the construction of the device, but the three spikes that fasten Christ to the cross come to mind.

22 "Way of the Cross," The New Catholic Encyclopedia, p. 833.

23 "Deacon Dedalus; The Text of the Exultet and Its Implications for Ulysses," in The Seventh of J o yce, ed. Bernard Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982), p. 158.

24 Abbot Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year : Passiontide and Holy Week, trans. Dom Laurence Shepherd, O.S.B. (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1949), p. 554.

25 "Deacon Dedalus," p. 163.

26 The Liturqical Year, pp. 302-03.

27 Allusions in Ulysses, p. 481.

28 "A Liturgical Pattern in Ulysses," Modern Language No t e s , 75 (April, 1960), 322.

29 Gueranger, p. 301.

30 From Joyce's notes on Tenebrae, found with the manuscript of Stephen Hero. This page is reproduced on page 22 of the New Directions edition of Stephen H e r o . CHAPTER FOUR

MOLLY'S COUNTERSIGN: CIRCLING THE CROSS

By the end of "Ithaca," Bloom completes his passion.

Harrowing the hell of beastliness and rivalry with his

"equanimity," Bloom triumphs. Joyce wrote to Harriet

Weaver that "Ithaca" is "in reality the end" of the novel.1 "Ithaca" concludes Bloom's and Stephen's

Stations, but the significance of the Christian metaphor is still to be nailed down ("'Penelope' is the clou of the b o o k " 2 ) . In possession of a "passport to eternity," Bloom receives in "Penelope" Molly's "countersign,"3 her validation of his spirit, which has walked the via dolorosa all day and has come home victorious; she promises to endorse his already stirring reassertion.

After the falling, decaying, and darkening phase of the cycle presented in the course of the first seventeen chapters of Ulysses, "Penelope" releases the tension of a strenuous day and the blood of life's passion, signaling the beginning of the cycle's upward, restorative phase.

In "Penelope," the novel's metaphor of the passion is complemented by the metaphor of the Resurrection. For

Catholicism, the fourteen stations, or the episodes of the

168 1 69 passion, tell the story of torment, death, and burial, anda "fifteenth station" must justify that suffering, must make it an occurrence of eternal significance to humanity.

In the Christian myth, the Way of the Cross is pointless without the Resurrection; the passion of the body and the victory of the spirit must be inseparable. In using that symbolic drama to convey a similar yet human-centered theme, Joyce completed the pattern, instead of ending after fourteen stations. Despite the falling darkness in the world of crosses ("Tenebrae"), inextinguishable light burns in the Blooms' home. The Dublin world itself, depicted in Ulysses as a Way of the Cross, does not undergo a glorious renewal; it will be the same on June

17. Bloom's symbolic "resurrection" in "Penelope," however, demonstrates the possibility of spiritual transcendence within the human Way of the Cross.

"Penelope" completes the mutual affirmation of the twin eternities and replaces the earlier mutual denial (in rarefaction, spirit denies nature; in bestial physicality, nature is allowed to deny human spirit). "Penelope's" circle of nature is a "countersign" to the sign of the cross. The chapter's progress toward recognition of the spirit embodied in Bloom is the countermovement to the progressive obscuring of his spirit in previous chapters; it is life reciprocating spirit's embrace. 1 70

The renewal of the flesh--both Molly's menstruation and Bloom's sleep--mirrors the renewal of the spirit. The final "yes" of this chapter acknowledges the passion enacted in life. The flesh affirms the spirit, as the spirit has affirmed the flesh by rejecting abstraction and inhuman brutishness; the incarnation and passion valorize flesh, and the resurrection of the body now validates the passion spirit undergoes.

Although it is important to remember that Molly possesses individual spirit and humanity, the ability to discriminate and choose, she is identified with flesh, the chapter's "organ," and with earth, the chapter's symbol.

The "Penelope" notesheets describe Molly, or the feminine nature she represents, as "stupid" and as suffering from

"genitophilia.The flesh is "stupid" and geni tally centered; the natural urge embodied in Molly resides in the organs of fertility, not in the intellect or in the categories and conceptions of the spirit. Molly's self- centered circling reflects the revolutions of a natural earth regenerating itself. The "nobler" virtues extending concern beyond self derive from spirit, as do the more destructive vices.

Most often Molly appeals to the standard of

"naturalness" for justification of her actions and thoughts: "its only nature" (U776); "what else were we given all those desires for" (U777); "I suppose thats what 171

a woman is supposed to be there for or He wouldnt have

made us the way He did so attractive to men" (U780).

Molly herself is not "stupid"; rather, her thoughts are

uncluttered by what she sees as the complexities and empty

conceptualizations of the masculine mind, useless

complications of natural simplicity and beauty;

"explaining and rigmaroling about religion and persecution

he wont let you enjoy anything naturally" (U771); "Id love

to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven

theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea

and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with

fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all

the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good

to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes

and smells and colours springing up even out of the

ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them

saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two

fingers for all their learning" (U781-82). Her "sins" are

natural responses to the natural, hardly worth mentioning

in a world full of pain: "I am an adultress as the thing

in the gallery said 0 much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much"

(U780).

For Molly, there are two distinct worlds--the unnatural world of men and the more desirable world of women--and two sets of standards: " they call that 172

friendship killing and then burying one another" (U773).

If women were to govern, "you wouldnt see women going and

killing one another and slaughtering" (U778). Judged by

the standards of that harsh and moralistic male world,

Molly comes off badly. While conceding that Molly "seems

to have done the best she could, granted her limitations,"

Father Robert Boyle states that "she is not the ideal

mother, as she is not the ideal w o m a n . F a t h e r Boyle is

correct, but ideals are of the world of human artifice,

ideas of perfection in relation to which Stephen earlier

judges the world to be "fallen." From a "womanly"

perspective, by the standards of that other eternity that

flows through "Penelope," Molly is neither an ideal woman

nor a fallen woman. She lies somewhere between the

idealized nymph of The Bath of the Nymph and the

dehumanized sexual bitch of nature, between god and dog

("he said I could pose for a picture naked . . . would I

be like that bath of the nymph . . . or Im a little like

that dirty bitch in that Spanish photo he has"--U753).

Budgen writes that Molly "is out of reach of our yardsticks and scales. She dwells in a region where there are no uncertitudes to torture the mind and no Agenbite of

Inwit to lacerate the soul, where there are no regrets, no

reproaches, no conscience and consequently no sin."^ This statement applies to Molly because, as Female, she represents the indifferent earth and the undiscriminating 173

flesh, from which Molly has not been alienated by the artifices of the world. However, as an individual woman,

Molly does reproach particular men and the male world for

their "sins" against her and nature. Molly is created out of more than the "feminine elements only" to which Budgen

restricts her.7

Molly recognizes and has made concessions to the masculine world. She has favored and pities individual men. She has looked on the trials of men with compassion.

It is appropriate that, of all her singing performances, she is remembered most for her rendition of Rossini's setting of the Stabat Mater, the hymn memorializing afflicted Mary's pity for her cross-carrying son (as I mentioned earlier, the Stabat Mater is usually sung during the Catholic practice of the Stations of the Cross).

Several times in this chapter, Molly thinks of men "going the road" (U751): she remembers Mulvey sailing away to

India and Gardner to South Africa, where he died in the

Boer war (U762): hearing a passing train, she feels sorry for "the poor men" who have to work the railroads (U754); she recalls the lame sailor to whom she tosses a penny earlier in the day (U747); she thinks of her husband's struggling in one job after another (U772, for example) and of Stephen's "roving around the city meeting God knows who nightwalkers and pickpockets" (U778). The spirit of the roads and crossways has received Molly's recognition. 174 and she looks at the calls to duty and adventure with a natural compassion: "the voyages those men have to make to

the ends of the world and back its the least they might get a squeeze or two at a woman while they can going out to be drowned or blown up somewhere" (U762). In Molly's monologue, flesh assents to spirit, but spirit takes on different forms, some of which Molly alternately rejects and accepts. She represents more than an all-yielding feminine nature; she has acceded to Boylan, "the essence of vulgarity" (U266), but human flesh can also "say no for form sake" (U747), for the sake of spirit, and Molly's final affirmation is granted to Bloom's spirit, a "yes" that is the novel's "no" to the Boylans and cyclopes of the world.

Molly possesses natural desires and acts on them, but her actions cannot be entirely identified with an unrestrained, beastly nature promiscuously open to all who seek her. She says "no" to the swinishness of Boylan: "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" (U741). Molly turns away from the brutishness of Boylan, which ignores her humanity, and she also sweeps aside the life-denying excesses of spirit.

Those men who kill one another, slaughter, roll around drunk, and gamble "dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother" (U778); these men need to be more womanly. The 175

"atheists," with "all their learning," deny Molly's deity,

nature (Pan, in post-Homeric accretions to the Ulysses

myth, is the son of Penelope and Hermes®). They deny the

one certitude, life; "they might as well try to stop the

sun from rising tomorrow." If they understood what it is

to be a woman, spirit would "go and create something"

(U782), instead of committing crimes against fecundity.

Molly liked Bloom "because . . . he understood or

felt what a woman is" (U782), as Boylan does not. From

beginning to end of Molly's monologue, her approval of

Bloom waxes and wanes. He achieves sporadic victories

over Molly's other suitors because she values his

politeness, his cleanliness, his intelligence, the way he

makes love, his thriftiness, and his care of his family.

Partially through the mediation of Stephen, in

Molly's mind, her favor finally turns to and, with only

temporary reversals, rests with Bloom.® Molly's idea of

Stephen's poetic, romantic spirituality attaches to her

husband and contrasts sharply with Boylan: "no thats no way for him has he no manners nor no refinement nor no nothing in his nature slapping us behind like that on my bottom because I didn't call him Hugh the ignoramus that doesnt know poetry from a cabbage" (U776). Boylan has

"nothing in his nature," being only bestially sexual; but

Bloom's nature is filled with spirit, and Molly chooses to embrace this spirit, to try to put the form and idea back 176

into the marriage. Her idea of Stephen brings her closer

to that marital incarnation, a union of spirit and flesh.

In her imagination, Molly has not "reformed' into a

faithful wife, but the selectivity now being exercised in

her choice of lovers transfers to Bloom. She chooses the

spiritual values Stephen represents to her, selects and

affirms the approximate incarnation of them in her

husband, and seems to say "no," by the end of the chapter,

to other possible lovers.

Molly's disenchantment with Boylan coincides with the

beginning of her menstruation; her relationship with the

otherwise virile Boylan has not been a fertile one ("its pouring out of me like the sea anyhow he didnt make me pregnant as big as he is"— U769). A new cycle of

fertility begins, with the possibility of a renewal of her

relationship with her husband. This flow of blood at the end of the novel expulses the trials and sterile activities that have been occurring during the day on the streets of Dublin and in the bedroom of 7 Eccles Street.

With the cycle completed, the sun set, and the man of passion now sleeping beneath the "altar" of his earth goddess, the resurrection is symbolically as certain as tomorrow's rising of the sun.

By the end of the chapter, Molly decides to give in to Bloom's request for breakfast, promising Bloom's restoration to home rule, a resurrection. Molly's 177

"countersign" is indispensable; Bloom and human spirit do

not rise entirely by the exercise of their own power, as

the sun does not "rise" as a result of its own movement.

Molly is the "spinning earth, "10 attracted and held in

place by the sun, that will restore Bloom to the dayworld.

Spirit rises, and falls, according to the turnings of the

flesh, of a natural creative cycle; spirit rises out of

the conditions of mortal flesh.

Molly is "weaving" as well as "spinning. " An entry

in the "Penelope" notesheets states that Penelope "weaves

a deathshroud for Laertes which is Ul. coronation

robe."11 Molly's "weaving" has given Bloom a coronation

robe, just as she has "crowned" him, instead of

transforming him into a horned beast, as Circe-Bella attempts to do; Molly at one point says that with her adultery accomplished, her husband is now "coronado"

(U777), intending "cornuto."

Molly promises his restoration, promises to submit to his "orders": "then he starts giving me orders for eggs and tea Findon haddy and hot buttered toast I suppose well have him sitting up like the king of the country" (U764);

"and Im to be slooching around down in the kitchen to get his lordship his breakfast while hes rolled up like a mummy" (U778). While he is "rolled up like a mummy," or like a Christ in a deathshroud that serves as a resurrection-morning "coronation robe," the king will 1 78

receive an "Easter" breakfast from a ministering angel, a breakfast of eggs, symbol of renewed life associated

traditionally with Easter, and of tea, perhaps purchased

from Keyes, the "tea, wine and spirit merchant" whose sign

is the cross within a circle.

At the end of her monologue, Molly says "yes" to fertile liTa, an assent which renews her acceptance of

Bloom on Howth. At first "leading him on," sixteen years ago on Howth, she "looked out over the sea" and remembered

Gibraltar, silently affirming life's proliferation of shape and color:

thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing . . . and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and . . . the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe . . . and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white turbans . . . and Honda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss . . . and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras . . . and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses nd the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes (U782-B3).

This colorful parade of visions set against the backdrop of the sea, an empty expanse, parallels the old salt's

"staring quite obliviously" at the sea, wondering about its "secret" (U630), and Stephen's staring "at nothing in particular" though hearing "words changing colour like 179 those crabs . . burrowing quickly into . . . sand where they had a home somewhere beneath or seemed to"

(U644). Molly, however, looks for no secret and finds truth's and her own home not beneath the sand somewhere but in the activity of life. Her memories affirm a fertile and beautiful spirit's play on the blooded surface; "and 0 that awful deepdown torrent 0 and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets" (U783). For Molly, this simple beauty is the one

"fiction" worth affirming.

Her inclusion of Bloom in all that she has embraced and collected in memory is and was the choice of " the resurrection and the life" posible within the human Way of the Cross. On Howth, she "gave him all the pleasure [she] could" and "he understood or felt what a woman is"; they chose each other ("I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes"--U783 ), an act of spiritual flesh and fleshly spirit creating a certitude on "the incertitude of the void."

Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver that "'Penelope' has no beginning, middle or end.Since the chapter is complexly structured, Joyce apparently was writing of the non-linear, formless symbolic references: circling nature; the penelopean "temporizing," weaving and unweaving temporal life; the "spinning earth"; lunar vacillations of 1 80

a debate that, without the fictional closure imposed by

form-producing spirit, would create one "conclusion" after

another, never concluding; "a female tepid effluvium"

leaking out, "nebulous obscurity occup[ying] space"

(U507). On one of the "Penelope" notesheets, the chapter

is described as "gynomorphic, undoubtedly naming the

spiraling, fluid, unpunctuated, self-contradictory style,

the expressive counterpart to the all-accepting, unpointed

feminine "yes" which does not conform to masculine

categories.

The rest of the novel, in contrast, is another sort

of narrative representing a more "masculine" linearity,

series of events, and logic, and Joyce considered "Ithaca"

the end of that narrative. If "Penelope" can be described

as "gynomorphic, " then to describe the rest of the novel we may introduce "andromorphic," one term implying its

opposite. Contrasting with the "formlessness"

("gynomorphic": the formal expression of formlessness) of

"Penelope," the "andromorphic" part of Ulysses portrays a

temporal drama played out on Dublin's streets, a

"punctuated" series of incidents, as distinct from the unpunctuated flow of vitality that is "Penelope" and that underlies the surface activity of the city. "Ithaca" ends a series of stations; "Penelope" reveals the continuous cycle of life flowing through those stations. 1 81

In the "andromorphic" everyday reality, in the Way of the Cross, events seem to be apocalyptic, seem to move toward a "great goal." But the cross is "within" a circle; the human cross is circumscribed by nature, caught within its cyclic motion. Although history appears linear, it repeats itself, moved by the rise and fall, creation and decay of the energy and matter that constitute and exceed history. A day, an individual life, or history appears to progress from a beginning to a finish, in a sequence whose ends do not meet. The progress consists of episodes or "stations," a

"punctuated" series. With its categorizing, numbering, and arranging, "andromorphic" perception (and its

"legislation") attempts to hold life in synthesized forms, but since streaming life cannot be "owned," man succeeds only in punctuating it, giving it a point, breaking it into significant statements. At these points, life seemingly refers to some "great goal" or "secret" outside of history, to an immobile fiction holding life

"stationary." But these apocalyptic fictions are constructed on the surface of the underlying cycle of life and death, the feminine substance awaiting the fictions that inform it.

Joyce identified the "4 cardinal points" of

"Penelope" in "andromorphic" terms : "female breasts, arse, womb and cunt. " These "points" describe the form 1 82 of "Penelope" in terms of the human shape, dividing the unity of the all-embracing process that includes both growth and decay. When the undifferentiated creative and corruptive force of nature is enfleshed in historical, dimensional beings, it becomes four points on nature's circle, or maybe the four branches of the cross--the "four dimensions of the universe" (one of the traditional

Christian explanations of the symbolism of the cross^S),

The transformation of nature's circle into the "four dimensions" of the human world is a "quadrature of the circle," the enterprise Bloom has undertaken in the past

(U699) and one of his schemes for the future (U703). The quadrature of a circle alters the geometrical shape while maintaining the same area. In Ulysses, "quadrature" seems to suggest a human Way of the Cross that is of the same substance as nature and that covers the same area but that is not of the same form; man transforms nature's circle into the angled, four-sided ("dimensioned") human world

(connecting the midpoints of the parallel sides of the square superimposed on a circle of equal area forms a cross; according to the Oxford English Dictionary,

"quadrature" also refers to "the position of one heavenly body relative to another when they are 90° apart," and four points would form four 90° angles, a cross within the circle on which those points lie; in heraldry,

"quadrature" refers to "intervals of a quarter circle," 183

again quartering the circle with a cross).The failed

"quadrature" evident in the world of Ulysses distorts

nature. The successful "quadrature" of life's circle, the

complete integration and exact equivalence of the twin

eternities, would be the immanence of creative idea in

life, an "androgynous" figure, a resurrection present at

every step of the passion ("the resurrection and the

life"). But this is only a potential, partially realized

in Bloom, possibly to be embodied in art by Stephen.

The New Bloomusalem is a vision of an urban

"quadrature of the circle," a successful union of the two

eternities. Although the New Jerusalem of Apocalypse (the

obvious reference here) is a heavenly city at the end of

time and the New Bloomusalem is a state of mind or spirit within time, in each of the cities "both ends meet" and

all are washed in the blood of humanity, " the tree of

life":

I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Blessed are they that wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb: that they may have a right to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city. Without are dogs, and sorcerers, and unchaste, and murderers, and servers of idols, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie (Apoc 22:13-15).

These last named beings are encountered during the day and evening in Ulysses (most apparently in "Circe"). Like the

New Jerusalem, the New Bloomusalem is a "city" that "lieth in a foursquare" (Apoc 21:16) and where Alpha and Omega 184

meet to form an eternal circle. This "city" exists only

in Bloom's mind, although Bloom's example may have created

another citizen in Stephen.

Molly is symbolically "the spinning earth," and "the wide earth [is] an altar" (U218; in "Circe," Bloom says,

"I have paid homage on that living altar where the back changes name"--U551). Nature, earth, and flesh are remade by humanity into an "altar," a place where idols are worshipped or where "sacrifices" are performed. As the place of idol-worship and pale ritual service, the "altar"

is finally rejected by Bloom and Stephen. As the "board" on which "sacrifices" are offered, the "altar" is figuratively the "cross" (a Catholic equation based on the equivalence of the Mass and the crucifixion^^). Molly's flesh is at once the natural earth and a human "altar" (a

"cross" of space and time on which spirit is fastened), as the human body, generally, is the point of intersection of nature's cycle and the day's passion (Ulysses is "at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day"^®). To look at the metaphor of the

"altar" in another manner, Molly is the "altar" to which the celebrant of the Stations returns after walking through the passion.

Human history is man's continuously walking through space and time, visiting his own fabrications. The

"crosses" are inevitable, but they can be borne with 185

equanimity, tolerance, generosity, courage, and caution,

qualities Stephen's faulty translation of an Irish verse

implies (in words seemingly chosen by Joyce for their

pertinence to his novel's Way of the Cross): "suil, suil,

suil arun, suil go siocair agus, suil go cuin (walk, walk,

walk your way, walk in safety, walk with care)" ( U 6 8 8 ) . 2 0

The spirit of these words and of the New Bloomusalem

is spirit sharing in life's common creative motion, the

circular feminine stream. In the human form, this "female

effluvium" is the "precious blood" of the cross, flowing

in and from "blood victim[s] " as "the blood of the lamb":

"birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation of a building,

sacrifice, kidney burntoffering, druid's altars" (U151).

The blood flows through and gives life to individuals, to

Bloom, the universal individual whose name is etymologically related to "blood."21 In Joyce's notesheets, "menses" and "rose" are equated,22 and Bloom

is a "rose upon the rood of time," a "crucian rose"

(FW122). Bloom is the human flowering of life's

"effluvium," and he shares its fertility, as he shares the promise on Howth where he wooed and Molly said "yes"-- under the rhododendrons. "Rhododendron" means "rose tree"23 and, in Ulysses, is the androgynous combination of the feminine rose (creation, fertility) and the masculine tree (cross; this "rose tree," the tree of life, replaces

Stephen's "rosewood," a tree of death to Stephen because 186

he remembers his mother's "wasted body . . . giving off an odour of wax and rosewood"--U5). When Molly evokes the

rhododendrons and her "yes" at the end of "Penelope,"

Bloom receives the promise of the resurrection implicit in

the Way of the Cross. As roses bloom on a tree, so life

rises from passion, sexual and mortal, and from the passion. At the original moment on Howth and at the moment of Molly's remembering. Bloom is "glorified man, an androgynous angel" (U213). NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1 Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Oct. 7, 1921, Letters, I, p• 172 «

2 Letter to Frank Budgen, Aug. 16, 1921, Letters, I, p. 170.

3 "The last word (human, all too human) is left to Penelope. This is the indispensable countersign to Bloom's passport to eternity." Letter to Frank Budgen, Feb. 28, 1921, Letters, I, pp. 159-60.

4 Herring, p. 504.

5 "Penelope," in Hart and Hayman, pp. 418-19.

^ Budgen, p. 265.

7 Budgen, p. 265.

® Herring discusses this and other post-Homer ic elaborations on the Ulysses myth in his introductory essay to the "Penelope" notesheets (pp. 64-65).

9 Stephen's role in displacing Boylan and reinstating Bloom is analyzed in some detail in Stanley Sultan, The Argument of Ulysses (Columbus: The Ohio State Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 441-44.

10 In the "Penelope" notesheets, Joyce wrote, "MB=spinning earth"; Herring, p. 515. In a letter to Frank Budgen, he wrote that "Penelope" "turns like a huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly, round and round spinning" (Aug. 16, 1921, Letters, I, p. 170).

11 Herring, p. 496. The last six words are crossed out, usually an indication that Joyce had found a place for the note in the novel.

12 Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Oct. 7, 1921, Letters, I, p. 172.

11 Herring, p. 499.

187 Letter to Frank Budgen, Aug. 16, 1921, Letters, I, p. 1 7 0 .

15 "Cross," The New Catholic Encyclopedia.

15 Leo Knuth discusses other recurrences of the "figure of a circle and a cross" : the mirror and razor crossed on a shavingbowl, two shafts of light that cross in the circular Martello tower, Keyes' ad, the map of Dublin and the routes of "the representatives of Christ and Caesar" in "Wandering Rocks," Bloom's thinking of a "crown of thorns and cross" in "Lotus-Eaters." Knuth also notes that the figure suggests the shape of a Celtic cross and of the Buddhist mandala. Knuth's investigation of this recurrence is "triggered by the associations engendered by 18," the number of chapters in the novel: "In Hebrew the characters that spell the number 18 also spell the word chai (life), and in Greek the number 18 is spelled iota plus eta which is also used as an abbreviation of Jesus. The clou which rivets the two interpretations together is found in 'Hades, ' when M. Kernan quotes John 11:25--'I am the resurrection and the life' (U105)"; "Joyce's Verbal Acupuncture," pp. 63-64. Sultan observes that the "roc's egg" at the end of "Ithaca" is "square-round" because Bloom has "squared a circle, the impossible feat mentioned during the chapter as one means he might employ to realize his 'ambition' (U703)"; Sultan, p. 414. It seems significant that the squaring of the circle is associated with eggs, the breakfast Bloom "orders" and the symbol of renewed life.

17 "In this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass that same Christ is contained and immolated in an unbloody manner Who once offered Himself in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross." Council of Trent, as quoted in Cochem, p. 115.

18 Letter to Carlo Linati, Sept. 21, 1920, Letters I, p. 146.

18 To extend this metaphor, if Molly is an altar, the entire novel might be thought of as a "church," or as Stanislaus Joyce puts it, a "cathedral," with chapels and with the images of the Stations hung along its walls : "Thus, rather than a novel, Ulysses could be called a kind of cathedral in prose, as simple as a cross in its design . . . . But whoever studies it in detail will find that a number of generations of Irish history have been superimposed one on another, that it contains chapels dedicated to religion, to the sciences, to the arts, and even grotesque figures. The whole is one vast symbolic figure." Recollections of James Joyce, trans. Ellsworth 1 8 9

Mason (New York: The James Joyce Society, 1950), p. 19. (Stanislaus Joyce appears to be using his own analogy for the simplicity of the design of his brother's novel; he does not seem to be suggesting a structural or thematic metaphor, although his figure is so apt, from the perspective of this study, that one might wonder what he guessed or was told by his brother about the significance of the cross in Ulysses.)

20 As Thornton points out, the Irish is more accurately translated as, "Walk, walk, walk, my darling, walk with safety, walk with care." Allusions in Ulysses, p. 467.

21 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Teutonic origin of "blood" "referred to verbal root bl6-~ 'blow, bloom.'"

22 Herring, p. 496.

23 William York Tindall points out this derivation in A Reader's Guide to James Joyce (New York: Noonday, 1959), p. 236. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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