Exhibition guest curated by Colm Tóibín and co-organized with Sheelagh Bevan, Andrew W. Mellon Associate Curator, Department of Printed Books and Bindings, and Philip S. Palmer, Robert H. Taylor Curator and Department Head, Literary and Historical Manuscripts, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Accompanying catalogue edited by Colm Tóibín, with contributions by Ronan Crowley, Maria DiBattista, Derick Dreher, Catherine Flynn, Anne Fogarty, Rick Gekoski, Joseph M. Hassett, James Maynard, and John McCourt. Catalogue published in association with Penn State University Press, “History of the Book” series, 184 pages, 94 illustrations, 2022.
Reviewed by James Leggio
The centenary of James Joyce’s modernist milestone Ulysses, first published in book form on February 2, 1922, has been widely celebrated. The hundredth year began with Merve Emre’s fresh take on the novel’s often underappreciated generosity, in her article “The Seductions of Ulysses,” printed in The New Yorker in February with the cheeky teaser line “Getting to Yes.” In addition, a number of new books about Ulysses and its author have appeared this year, some for specialists, some for the rest of us. Among the new books, in my view four stand out. Colin MacCabe’s James Joyce: A Very Short Introduction offers a more lucid, and inviting, overview than do most Joyce-related books many times its length. David Collard’s Multiple Joyce: 100 Short Essays About James Joyce’s Cultural Legacy supplies a hundred breaths of fresh air to the jaded Joycean, while also enticing Joyce-curious cultural critics. John McCourt’s Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of “Ulysses” in Ireland, tracing the book’s reception in the author’s homeland, tells, among many other things, the fascinating story of how the novel about “dear dirty Dublin” — which Joyce wrote from a safe distance, in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris — has nonetheless become a major marketing tool for the Irish tourism industry. Finally, Catherine Flynn’s edition, The Cambridge Centenary “Ulysses”: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes, comes equipped with extensive and clearly written explanatory annotations. At the same time, that 1922 text, which was famously riddled with textual errors (Joyce’s subsequent corrections are indicated by Cambridge in the margins), reminds us what a challenge Ulysses posed to the mechanical technology of metal typesetting a century ago.
The Ulysses exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum must be counted among the great successes of the centenary, and for two particular reasons.
First, it demonstrates what an unlikely triumph of mind over matter the writing and publication of Ulysses comprised, as the show places original manuscripts, and even marked galley proofs, within a compelling narrative of Joyce’s unusually challenging ways of writing and revising.
And second — of special interest to me in this review — the curatorial team has wisely included, and in playable form, both of Joyce’s audio recordings of passages from his works. The curators have thereby helped open up Ulysses to a media-based generation of culture consumers not necessarily already drawn to this canonical modernist author.
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The crux of the manuscript’s story is this: Joyce was a maniacal rewriter of his own emerging texts, chapter by chapter and line by line, not only revising passages innumerable times, but also adding in heavy doses of entirely new material at every stage of the composing and publishing process. Over the seven-year course of its creation, the text of Ulysses — even the chapters he had supposedly “finished” and advance-published in literary magazines — remained in flux, ever-changing and ever-expanding.
For us, living in the digital age, when altering a text couldn’t be easier, it requires a serious act of historical imagination to understand what an epic, agonizing struggle the physical writing of the book and the production of the first edition, a century ago, truly was.
For evidence of the struggle, look no further than this manuscript page for the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses, on view at the Morgan Library. Back in the analogue era, I remind the born-digital, changes had to be painstakingly marked on paper, by hand. As a result, this graphically marked-up page of second and third thoughts looks more like a tactical battle map of troop movements at Waterloo than like a precious literary artifact. Pity the poor typist who had to make sense of all this, only to see the author mark further corrections, revisions, and additions on the resulting typescript.
As in the manuscript, so in the subsequent printers’ proofs (i.e., the now-archaic term “galleys”) provided by Sylvia Beach’s production team: the relentless rewriting and expansion continued, only now with the further complication of professional typesetters. Even features as conspicuous as the large headlines breaking up the text of the newspaper-office chapter were added very late in the game, written in the author’s hand on the proofs. Sometimes, Joyce handwrote so much new material in the margins of the proofs that no space remained for further scribbling. In such cases, Joyce helpfully provided his longer additions written out on separate sheets of paper, like this one for the “Cyclops” episode, also at the Morgan Library.
The addition is labeled with the red letter “A” to show where to insert the new copy into the correspondingly marked eight-page form proofs (called placards in French), visible in the detail of placard 34, below. One can scarcely imagine what Beach’s Francophone typesetters made of all this.
The author’s frantic, uncontrollable rewriting continued, unabated, until the printing deadline required by his own nonnegotiable publication date, his fortieth birthday, finally stopped him.
In the end, “roughly one-third of the novel was revised and amplified in the placards . . . and final page proofs,” as contributor Maria DiBattista writes in her eye-opening chapter, “Revisioning Ulysses,” in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, 100 Years of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” edited by Colm Tóibín. The chapter immediately becomes essential reading for anyone interested in Joyce’s methods, or in what is now called “genetic” criticism — the study of how literary works come into being.
Considering the mindboggling revisions/additions, the challenges of reading Joyce’s sometimes minuscule handwriting, the cumbersome nature of setting type, and of course the mounting time pressure, putting out the first edition became an ordeal for all concerned in the long run-up to February 2, 1922.
At the Morgan Library, seeing the original materials, with all their Benjaminian “aura,” up close and personal, reveals the book as a hard-won victory over the brute physical realities of undertaking a vast experimental novel — starting with a leaky fountain pen and a clattering manual typewriter — in a now near-mythic world long ago and far away.
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To me, the other great success of the Morgan Library exhibition — explored in the remainder of this review — is its inclusion of the only two phonograph recordings Joyce made. The two are: an excerpt from the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses, privately recorded at the facilities of His Master’s Voice (La Voix de Son Maître), in Paris, with costs underwritten by Beach, in 1924; and the last paragraphs of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” from Finnegans Wake, recorded by C.K. Ogden at the studio of the Orthographical Society, Cambridge, in 1929, when the book was still known as “Work in Progress.”
Original pressings of both resulting 78-RPM disks figure prominently in the Morgan show, put up in a Janus-faced two-sided display case. As their presence within the gallery space suggests, the two records function as valuable tools for understanding why Joyce wrote prose the way he did, and how we may go about reading it. QR codes on the two object labels summon the audio files for listening on your smartphone.
Joyce’s Voice(s)
Before discussing the two records in more detail, let’s be careful not to confuse what we hear on these disks with the author’s ordinary speaking voice. They are, instead, carefully calculated performances wherein Joyce heightened particular auditory qualities for aesthetic effect, as we’ll see.
In fact, no known recording exists of the author speaking in his everyday manner, and we’ll never know precisely what he sounded like when talking with friends and family.
We do, however, have a few helpful reminiscences about the character of his everyday speaking voice. Upon first meeting him, in the summer of 1920, Sylvia Beach took special note of his voice’s “sweet” vowel tones and “exceptionally clear” consonantal markers, as she later recounted in her Paris memoir, Shakespeare and Company (1959):
Joyce’s voice, with its sweet tones pitched like a tenor’s, charmed me. His enunciation was exceptionally clear. His pronunciation of certain words such as “book” (bōō-k) and “look” (lōō-k) and those beginning with “th” was Irish, and the voice particularly was Irish. Otherwise there was nothing to distinguish his English from that of the Englishman. He expressed himself quite simply but, as I observed, with a care for the words and the sounds — partly, no doubt, because of his love of language and his musical ear, but also, I believe, because he had spent so many years teaching English.
Joyce spoke a version of so-called Anglo-Irish: a set of English dialects (sometimes also known as Hiberno-English) in general use within, and indigenous to, Ireland. In making his recordings, however, he chose to heighten somewhat the Irish side of his Anglo-Irish, as Adrian Curtin has demonstrated.
Thus, when he wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver, on August 18, 1926, about his vocal performance on the “Aeolus” recording, he made a telling remark at the end:
If you ever put on my disk I would be much obliged if you or Miss Marsden would note the points of the Irish brogue in it, chiefly on the consonants. I asked Mrs Pound to do so but she may forget it. This would be very useful to me though I did not speak in my natural voice.
As the Morgan’s exhibition label for the “Aeolus” disk tells us, the text is here “recited by the author in a Cork accent.”
Whatever his “natural voice” sounded like, Joyce was able to turn the “points” in “the Irish brogue” up or down as the context required. They could be set at a moderate level, largely confined to the way he attacks consonants, in the “Aeolus” recording. Or they could be set quite high, becoming all-pervasive, almost generating a language of their own, in the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” disk. (Listen to the recording.) In another letter to Weaver, Joyce summarized the “Anna Livia” passage as “a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone”; in this 1929 recording, he adopts a broader brogue, which some say sounds more characteristic of Dublin, befitting a scene set on the banks of the River Liffey.
As a listening exercise in how a single speaker can differentiate between the two implied voices in the dialogue/duet of “Anna Livia,” compare Joyce’s disk with Siobhán McKenna’s articulation; she successfully distinguishes between the two washerwomen, in their pacing, emphasis, and pitch, to an extent that Joyce’s more incantatory reading generally did not. (Listen to Siobhán McKenna, who performs the entire episode.) In Patrick Ball’s version, it may seem strange to hear the passage recited by a male performer with a heavier voice than the author’s, but Ball does give a finely differentiated reading nonetheless, by using his baritone register more for one washerwoman and his low-tenor register more for the other. (Listen to Patrick Ball clip.)
To be clear, “natural voice” has nothing to do with linguistic purity, let alone the dominance of a single language, dialect, or tone. While writing the early chapters of Ulysses, Joyce lived in the cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian port city of Trieste, where he and his growing family all spoke the local Italian dialect of triestino. The experience had an effect; John McCourt writes in “Finding Ulysses in Trieste,” his revealing chapter in the catalogue: “The impossibility of national or linguistic purity is a theme in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and that is partially the result of Joyce’s immersion in the liminal space of Trieste that at times seemed to belong to everyone and no one.” As Audrey Magee wrote in TLS, marking the centenary: “By the time he moved to Paris with Nora Barnacle and their children, the family had its own hybrid language, a mixture of Triestine Italian, English, French and some Swiss German. Irish, though, was never far away. . . . Joyce was able to draw on Nora’s latent knowledge of Connemara Irish, her mother’s mother tongue.”
Still, a simple, “impure” notion of a characteristic default-setting for each individual’s voice matters, because Joyce pays preternaturally close attention to precisely how his various fictional characters — and his various narrators — habitually talk. Even when they’re silently thinking to themselves, in what have long been called “interior monologues,” they still think in a related version of the outward voices they use every day. Moreover, as scholars have long pointed out, there are often several different identifiable voices weaving their way around each other within countless convoluted passages of Ulysses. Indeed, sometimes the “action” of the book is more a matter of figuring out who’s talking, and in which of Joyce’s many vocal styles, than about what’s supposedly going on, actually happening, in the mundane meanderings of Leopold and Molly and Blazes, or Stephen and Mulligan and the Professor, or the denizens of several Dublin pubs, across about 18 hours on the particular day of June 16, 1904.
Voices in “Aeolus”
In his typewritten schema of Ulysses, displayed at the Morgan and shown above, Joyce assigned Rhetoric as the particular art of the “Aeolus” episode, since the chapter takes place in a newspaper office awash in the rhetoric of the day.
The famous speech Joyce recorded from “Aeolus” reflects the vigorous debate in turn-of-the-century Dublin about teaching Gaelic versus English in the curricula of Irish colleges (the word Gaelic defined technically as “the Celtic language of Ireland, especially as used since the later medieval period,” though often popularly called “the Irish language”). As the website of the James Joyce Centre notes: “On 24 October 1901 John F Taylor made a speech in defence of the Irish language. Joyce may have been present on the evening of 24 October to hear Taylor’s speech.”
However, Joyce abandoned his early study of Gaelic, largely out of discomfort with the nationalist ideas of the Gaelic League. (He did learn Norwegian, in order to read his hero Henrik Ibsen’s plays in their native tongue.)
Whether or not Joyce himself in fact attended that 1901 speech, in his novel the character known as Professor MacHugh, a classics scholar often seen at the newspaper’s offices, vividly recalls being there (like Hugh MacNeill, the real-life model for the Professor). Since there’s apparently no written document of the speech as delivered, the Professor will re-create it from memory. He prefaces it this way: “Let me say one thing. The finest display of oratory I ever heard was a speech made by John F. Taylor at the college historical society. Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, the present lord justice of appeal, had spoken and the paper under debate was an essay (new for those days), advocating the revival of the Irish tongue.”
Taylor’s speech, as resurrected in Joyce’s imagination, is short, but rich in themes that matter throughout the larger context of Ulysses. It compares the subjugation of the Jews by the ancient Egyptians, in the time of Moses, to the subjugation of Ireland by contemporary Great Britain. The theme becomes whether the distinctive Irish language can or should continue as an alternative to the dominant “colonial” English, even as Hebrew continued its own life as a language and was not replaced by Egyptian.
The text of this passage is printed below, as it appears in the 1922 edition. It might be useful to follow along with the text, as you play Joyce’s “Aeolus” recording. (Listen to “Aeolus” clip.)
Note that, brief as the speech is, others interrupt Professor MacHugh no fewer than six times, during the four minutes of running time. The interrupters include the narrator, Stephen Dedalus (in interior monologue), and one of the newspaper headlines that Joyce had inserted.
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He began:
— Mr chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses.
His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smokes ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. And let our crooked smokes. Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?
— And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard his words and their meaning was revealed to me.
FROM THE FATHERS
It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That’s saint Augustine.
— Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen ; we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth : our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions : we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.
Nile.
Child, man, effigy.
By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes : a man supple in combat : stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.
— You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe. and humbleness : ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children : Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called : the world trembles at our name.
A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it boldly:
— But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.
* * *
In the first interruption, the narrator speaks in florid terms about rising cigarette smoke.
Then Stephen continues with his own (silent) interruption, as the words printed in italics flit through his mind — “and let our crooked smokes” — quoted from the final speech in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, celebrating a political reconciliation between ancient Romans and Britons. It bears on the subjugation theme and on Stephen’s saying, in the “Telemachus” episode, that “I am a servant of two masters . . . an English and an Italian. . . . The imperial British state . . . and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.” Stephen is both mock-fearful (“Look out”) of the “noble words coming” and yet aware of his own flowering talent: “Could you try your hand at it yourself?”
Continuing to read out the passage, Joyce surprisingly minimizes the interruptive effect of the newspaper headline, as Michael Gordon pointed out in Focus on “Ulysses” (2010), by making it part of Stephen’s succeeding bit of interior monologue, paraphrasing Saint Augustine. In the author’s disk, the passage now seems to read: “From the fathers it was revealed to me that those things are good which . . .” and so on, making Augustine, named at the end, one of “the fathers” (i.e., the Fathers of the Church, from the Patristic Era) from the beginning of the passage. Joyce thereby resourcefully accommodated the printed headline to the medium of sound.
Some interruptions, even when fragmentary, can bring in a world of ramifications. Stephen’s later (silent) interruption, the choppy block of lines including “stonehorned, stonebearded,” refers to Michelangelo’s famous marble sculpture of Moses. Supposedly through an ancient translation error later adopted as canonical, the biblical Moses was thought to have come down from Mount Sinai not with horn-like rays of divine light emanating from his head, but rather with actual horns: hence “stonehorned.” Although Stephen generally responds with smirky derision to “noble words” like the Professor’s about Moses, his own smattering of reflections on the stone statue seems to betray something like awe, and unusually for him, he makes no attempt here to resist its long tradition of reverence. Not without pertinence to the themes of Ulysses, four years after Michelangelo’s death Giorgio Vasari reported: “The Jews still go every Saturday in troops to visit and adore it as a divine, not a human thing.” Considering the undisguised anti-Semitism of numerous Ulysses characters, we may wonder what Leopold Bloom, had he returned to the newspaper offices in time, would have thought of the speech’s idealization of ancient Judaism — homage or hypocrisy?
The final interruption comes from the narrator, noting the Professor’s “dumb belch of hunger.” Oddly, the narrator employs the rather lofty word “cleft” to describe how the belch momentarily breaks up the speech, and then gives the Professor credit for “lifting his voice above it boldly.” Joyce’s narrators are sometimes neutral, but other times they pick up a nearby speaker’s style of speech, as the narrator here “boldly” reflects the Professor’s.
When we listen to exactly the same passage in the Irish station RTÉ Radio’s dramatization of Ulysses, the passage flows as it would in a radio play, a broadcast genre that came into existence beginning in 1922-23, in the years after Ulysses was published. (Listen to an RTÉ clip.)
Assigning different actors to the different voices of the “Aeolus” passage — the narrator, the Professor, the headline, Stephen — can be a great help to the reader/listener in keeping track of who’s talking and when. (Here, in a special touch of realism, the RTÉ’s Professor actually does belch.)
A complete recording like the RTÉ’s — available free on YouTube — offers benefits. The experienced Joycean meets old friends intoning their written lines with the newfound power of speech. And the perhaps intimidated general reader can hear, especially when following along with the printed text, what a genius at dramatizing a room full of voices Joyce really was.
Voices in “Sirens”
In Shakespeare and Company, Beach presents Joyce’s choice of what to record from Ulysses as clear and definitive: “Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was ‘declamatory’ and therefore suitable for recital. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses.”
However, as the recording date approached, he apparently considered reciting, instead, something from the “Sirens” episode, a little later in the novel. He writes in a letter of November 16, 1924, that he is “trying to learn a page from the Sirens for the record.” Then, on November 24, only a week before the recording date, in another letter he says: “I have to read part of the Sirens for a gramophone record.”
The art indicated for “Sirens” in Joyce’s typewritten schema (reproduced above) for Ulysses is Music. Although it’s apparently not known which particular “Sirens” passage he may have had in mind, if any, a plausible candidate might have been that part of the scene at the Ormond Bar in which, amid the impromptu music-making, Simon Dedalus sings the aria “M’apparì” from Friedrich von Flotow’s then-popular opera Martha (premiered in 1847).
Early in the twentieth century, Martha’s leading tenor role, Lionel, was closely associated with the celebrated Enrico Caruso (1873-1921), for whom the Metropolitan Opera in New York mounted a production of Martha in 1906. (Listen to Caruso’s subsequent 1917 recording of “M’apparì.”)
You have to admire Simon’s pluck, in taking on such a demanding piece, often sung by the greats of the day.
As is well known, James Joyce’s father, John Joyce, was renowned in Dublin for his splendid tenor singing voice, and his son James inherited that talent — just as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus inherited Simon Dedalus’s fine tenor.
Listen to this clip from “Sirens.” Simon’s singing of the aria (in English) audibly weaves in and out of the dialogue (among several Ormond Bar customers), interior monologues (mostly Bloom’s), and narration (featuring some gratuitous musical commentary) — presenting Joyce with a tempting opportunity to imitate his father while acting out the scene.
In an alternative-reality universe where he did indeed wind up recording a bit of Simon Dedalus in “Sirens,” we could have been confronted by James Joyce’s own physical voice, inherited from John Joyce, speaking/singing the Ulysses role that is based on his actual father. It would have been a kind of auditory analogue of Stephen’s Hamlet theory, whereby, as Buck Mulligan mangles the idea: “He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.”
No wonder Stephen so often expresses his antipathy for his father in terms of their inescapable vocal similarity, as when in the “Proteus” episode Stephen thinks bitterly about “the man with my voice” and “my consubstantial father’s voice.” Stephen fears that the filial similarity will reduce him to “the ghost of his own father.”
Molly’s Math
In the late chapters, the Homeric encounter between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, as Odysseus the father meets Telemachus the son, would form the climax of Ulysses, were it conceived as a conventional story. Joyce, however, was much less interested at this point in storytelling per se, and instead aimed to defeat our received expectations of how a story should, or could, be told. Thus, he chose to screen the human interaction from us, while the two men are together, by means of the prolix, obtuse prose style of the “Eumaeus” episode and the impersonal catechism format of the “Ithaca” episode. Distanced by Joyce’s experimental practice, we no longer hear what we’ve come to recognize as their characteristic ways of speaking.
But as my final hypothesis in the present essay, I suggest that certain, perhaps surprising things can be learned about the Bloom/Stephen encounter — thanks to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.
Recall that at the end of the “Circe” episode, Bloom is still standing guard over the unconscious Stephen, who had been felled a few minutes earlier by excessive drink and a punch in the face from Private Carr. While standing there, alone with the collapsed Stephen after the little crowd has dispersed, Bloom has a vision of his and Molly’s lost son, Rudy, who, though he died only a few days after birth, is here seen as “a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling.”
Now, in “Penelope,” as her remembrance of Simon Dedalus’s singing flows into speculation about Stephen, Molly suddenly remembers seeing Stephen as a boy, when he and his father passed in a carriage while she was in mourning for Rudy, and she goes on to make a rough calculation of his present age. (Listen to a clip from “Penelope.”)
I saw him driving down to the Kingsbridge station with his father and mother I was in mourning that’s 11 years ago now yes hed be 11 though what was the good in going into mourning for what was neither one thing nor the other of course he insisted hed go into mourning for the cat I suppose hes a man now by this time he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his lord Fauntleroy suit and curly hair like a prince on the stage
And then a little later:
I wonder is he too young hes about wait 88 I was married 88 Milly is 15 yesterday 89 what age was he then at Dillons 5 or 6 about 88 I suppose hes 20 or more Im not too old for him if hes 23 or 24
Molly’s calculation is near the mark: Stephen is in fact now 22 years old. When she saw him with Simon in the carriage while she was in mourning, 11 years ago, Stephen was then 11 years old.
Following up on her numerical reverie raises the possibility that when, at the end of “Circe,” Bloom sees what is apparently an 11-year-old Rudy, what he may actually be seeing is Molly’s (and presumably his own) memory of what the 11-year-old Stephen looked like in the carriage with his father, at the time of the Blooms’ bereavement. Bloom is seeing Stephen double: both as a 22-year-old man lying on the ground and as a hallucination based on Stephen as an 11-year-old.
For once not attending to numbers, Bloom is only subliminally aware of the providential coalescence of two 11-year-olds, created by the novel’s author, at the end of “Circe.” (Listen to “Circe” clip.)
(Silent, thoughtful, alert, he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)
BLOOM
(Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly.) Rudy!
RUDY
(Gazes unseeing into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambskin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)
The child’s “slim ivory cane” even echoes Stephen’s ever-present “ashplant” walking stick — which, along with his hat, Bloom is holding for Stephen at this moment.
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As often in Ulysses, puzzles posed by the author in one chapter may lead to possible hints or signals many pages after — or before.
That may be the case when, in “Ithaca,” the two question-and-answer voices, for no apparent reason, called attention to Molly’s math skills. In a casual put-down, when asked, in harsh, clinical language, to identify “instances of deficient mental development in his wife,” the comically patronizing Bloomian answer came back: “In calculating the addenda of bills she frequently had recourse to digital aid.” That is, Bloom supposedly thinks her mentally “deficient” because she sometimes counts with her fingers.
That’s the narrators’ oblique way of alerting the reader to watch out for any attempt by Molly at counting. And indeed, soon enough, in her soliloquy she’ll get much closer to figuring out the numerical key to the climactic moment of Bloom’s quest for a son than Bloom himself does. Though her calculations cannot, like Stephen’s Hamlet theory, demonstrate a son’s identity by means of algebra, they nonetheless manage to accomplish as much by means of arithmetic.
There’s a lot about Molly’s mind that Bloom will never understand.
(September 2022)