Sir Leopold that was the goodliest guest that ever sat in scholars’ hall and that was the meekest man and the kindest that ever laid husbandly hand under hen and that was the very truest knight of the world one that ever did minion service to lady gentle pledged him courtly in the cup.
(Leopold Bloom’s character done in medieval style)

morbidminded esthete and embryo philosopher
(Stephen Dedalus’s character in Romantic style)

A plumper and a portlier bull, says he, never shit on shamrock.
(Vincent Lynch in demotic mode)

The words of their tumultuary discussions were difficultly understood and not often nice.
(Too true)

Irish by name and irish by nature, says Mr Stephen, and he sent the ale purling about, an Irish bull in an English chinashop.
(Stephen Dedalus unwittingly summarising the format of the entire book: Irish content causing mayhem in the English language and literary tradition)

A quick reminder of the chapter numbers and names in ‘Ulysses’. (Note: none of the Greek chapter titles are actually indicated in the text of ‘Ulysses’; they were given by Joyce to early commentators who published them in books and articles about the novel and have been used by critics and commentators, including me, ever since, but none of them actually appear in hard copies or online versions of the text):

Part 1. Telemachiad or the odyssey of Telemachus

1. Telemachus
2. Nestor
3. Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

4. Calypso
5. Lotus Eaters
6. Hades
7. Aeolus
8. Lestrygonians
9. Scylla and Charybdis
10. Wandering Rocks
11. Sirens
12. Cyclops
13. Nausicaa
14. Oxen of the Sun
15. Circe

Part 3. Nostos or Return

16. Eumaeus
17. Ithaca
18. Penelope

Plot

Middle-aged advertising salesman Leopold Bloom visits the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street in Dublin, where a friend of his family’s, Mina Purefoy, is giving birth. She has been in the hospital for several days having a difficult labour and he is worried about her (kindly Bloom cf his active charity to Paddy Dignam’s widow). Here he finally meets over-educated, unemployed graduate Stephen Dedalus, who has been drinking with his medical student friends and is awaiting the promised arrival of of his frenemy Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan. As the only father in the group of men, Bloom is concerned about Mina Purefoy in her labour. He starts thinking about his wife, Molly Bloom, and the births of his two children. He also thinks about the loss of his son and heir, Rudy, who died aged just 11 days.

The young men are drunk and rowdy, and start discussing topics relating to fertility, contraception and abortion. There is also a suggestion that Milly, Bloom’s daughter, is in a relationship with one of the young men, Bannon. Half way through a nurse announces that Mina has given birth to a son so, after some more banter, the drunken crew leaves the hospital to go on to a pub to continue drinking.

Homeric (and literary) parallels

In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew land on the island of Thrinacia, home of Helios the sun god’s immortal sheep and longhorn cattle. Both Circe and Tiresias have warned Odysseus to avoid the island but if they go there, not to harm Helios’s oxen – sacred symbols of fertility – or the gods will punish the offenders with annihilation. After making his crew swear that they will leave the cattle alone, Odysseus hikes inland, prays to the gods for help getting home and falls asleep. Meanwhile, contrary to orders, his men kill and eat some of the oxen of the sun. Odysseus returns and is horrified and as his ships leave the island, Zeus strikes them with a devastating lightning storm, killing everyone except Odysseus, the only one innocent of violating sacred fertility.

In ‘Ulysses’ the rowdy behaviour of the gang of drinkers – Stephen Dedalus, Dixon, Lynch and Madden, Lenehan, Punch Costello, and Crotthers – effectively ‘profanes’ the sanctity of the maternity hospital, resulting in their ‘annihilation’ in the form of a collapse into complete incoherence at the end of the chapter. Bloom alone remains compos mentis by virtue of not having drunk anything and acted respectfully throughout.

On another level, you can see it this way. The inconsiderate drunk party not only disturbs the mums-to-be, it represents waste as against fertility. The pregnant women have fulfilled their destiny, whether you see that as ordained by God and his Catholic Church or Darwin and the scientists, women are made to breed and the women in the maternity hospital have fulfilled their fate. Which is completely unlike the eight or so young men who should be setting off on productive careers but instead are frittering away their evenings in dissipation.

It is an allegory of Fertility versus Infertility and this rings throughout the varied topics of conversation, underpinning for example Bloom’s memory of losing his virginity to a prostitute, or the couple of pages of facetious banter about contraceptives, or the story about the bull sent to fertilise Ireland’s women, or Mulligan’s joke plan to set up a fertility clinic.

Even tiny details contribute to this binary. Even the fact that it was flashy but shallow Buck Mulligan who was invited to George Moore’s soiree while Stephen spaffs away his God-given talents getting pissed with medical students, is an avatar of the central opposition between fruitful labour (literally labour, as in women giving birth) and sterile drunken wasters.

The oxen theme is present throughout insofar as the drunken party discuss the foot and mouth outbreak among Ireland’s cattle, prompted by Lenehan’s news that the letter Stephen took to the newspaper from Mr Deasy on the subject has been published in the evening paper.

So it is this theme, this binary between purposeful fecundity and funny sterility, which is subjected to a comic variation when the crew pile in to elaborate a long drunken comic fantasy about a mighty bull sent to Ireland which turns out to be sexually attractive to women. This is a farcical allegorical skit about papal bulls and Henry VIII, the Reformation and England’s relationship to Ireland.

But when Stephen jokily describes it as ‘an Irish bull in an English chinashop’ he is unwittingly summarising the format of the entire book: anarchic boisterous Irish content barely contained in a genre associated with England (the novel) and causing mayhem with the English language (a concern of Stephen’s ever since the ‘tundish’ episode in ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’).

Also, anyone who remembers one of the most unruly books in the English literary canon, Tristram Shandy, knows that it ends after 500 pages with the comic punchline that the whole thing has been a story about a cock and a bull.

Format

As explained, all the chapters subsequent to ‘Sirens’ are subject to big formatting ideas (over and above the challenges of the stream of consciousness technique which Joyce deployed in the first 10 or chapters, the so-called ‘initial style’).

The dominant mode of these later chapters is parody and let’s just remind ourselves what that means. Parody = ‘an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.’ I think the key word here is exaggeration.

Thus it is that the text of Aeolus, set in a newspaper office, is punctuated by 63 newspaper headlines giving mockingly exaggerated summaries of the sections they precede. The text of Cyclops is interspersed with 33 extended passages which describe the main narrative’s events in the style of, among many others, Irish mythology and legend, legal jargon, journalism (again), sports commentaries and gossip columns, the Bible and even nursery rhymes.

It’s no surprise, then, if still striking, to find that most of the next chapter, Nausicaa, which describes a series of events focused round a naive and sentimental young woman, is written entirely in the style of a popular ladies romance ‘with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.’ Previously the parodic elements had been episodic: now they take over the first half of an entire chapter. And so it is with the next one.

Parody in the Oxen of the Sun

Chapter 14. Oxen of the Sun, is something else again. From start to finish a third-person narrator or the ‘initial style’ don’t make an appearance, as the entire chapter consists (after an initial invocation) of a tissue of parodies which recapitulate the entire history of the English language. There are parodies of Anglo-Saxon, medieval romance, Elizabethan and Jacobean prose, Daniel Defoe, Addison and Steele’s Spectator, Oliver Goldsmith, Edward Gibbon, Gothic prose, Charles Lamb, Thomas de Quincy, Charles Dickens and Cardinal Newman to mention only the highlights. I can’t find online an exact list of the targets of all of the paragraphs; this is the nearest I could find, which omits half a dozen of the early ones.

• Joyce’s Stylistic Parodies in the “Oxen of the Sun” Chapter of Ulysses (1922)

That in itself is a graspable idea, and in fact I found it very enjoyable. But the chapter opens with a sort of invocation and there’s no way you could understand this (or the chaotic way it ends) without consulting a guide.

The opening incantations

The chapter opens with a made-up incantation which mixes Gaelic and Latin elements:

Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.

You have to look this up to discover that ‘Deshil is an Anglicization of the Irish deasil which carries the general meaning of ‘turning to the right’ or ‘turning toward the sun’, while Eamus is Latin for ‘Let us go’ – so ‘Deshil Eamus’ means something like ‘Let us turn to the right’ or possibly ‘toward the sun’. Since ‘Holles’ Street is the location of Dublin’s National Maternity Hospital, the whole thing can be broadly translated as ‘let us turn to the sun in Holles Street’, which both references the oxen of the sun, but also the book’s insistent theme of paternity, namely the son Stephen looking for a father, and the birth of a baby boy which happens half way through the chapter.

This incantation is followed by two more incantatory sentences, each of them performing a threefold repetition of a threefold sentence: 3 x 3 x 3. Which are themselves followed by two paragraphs of highly Latinate prose, one in the prose style of historians Sallust and Tacitus, the second in medieval Latin prose. All this before we get to the start of the parodies.

It always confused me that the chapter didn’t just start at the beginning with Anglo-Saxon, but the commentaries explain that these preliminaries amount to 1) a parody of a religion incantation (fair enough) and 2) combine Celtic, Latin and English as a kind of forewarning of the three linguistic elements out of which Irish English grew.

Also, I couldn’t detect a distinctly Viking-Danish section, which I thought odd because it was the Vikings who founded Dublin: the internet tells me they established a fortified settlement around 841 AD at the ‘black pool’ (the Dyflin or Dubh Linn) where the Rivers Liffey and Poddle meet. But maybe it’s there and I just didn’t get it.

To recap: there is 1) a religious invocation, 2) 3 paragraphs representing the Latin of the Roman conquerors of ancient Britain, before 3) Anglo-Saxon announces the start of the series of paragraphs each of which represents a different era in the development of English prose.

And this chronological sequence is mapped onto the growth of a baby in the womb because we are in a maternity hospital.

The plot

In the plot what seems to have happened is Bloom caught a tram from Sandymount into the centre of Dublin meaning to check up on Mina Purefoy. He bumped into a Dr Dixon who treated him the previous month for a bee-sting and tells him to come along to the common room where a few of the lads are gathered and are drinking and carousing so this is what Bloom does, although he is careful to tip his glass away without drinking, just as he dodged having to drink anything in Cyclops (‘For he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and anon full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour glass and his neighbour nist not of this wile.’)

Stephen is there and he is hammered. He has been drinking for 6 hours on an empty stomach, victim of all kinds of frustrations and resentments. He is the wildest of the crew. His heart is full of bitterness – ‘for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away.’

Further to the numbers mentioned above (3 x 3 x 3), Hugh Kenner points out that it takes Bloom 11 paragraphs to get into the common room; there follow 40 paragraphs of prose pastiches, representing the 40 week gestation of a foetus; and then 11 paragraphs describe the breaking up of the party in the common room and everyone going their separate ways – Bloom and Stephen separately making their way into Nighttown, the red light district of Dublin. So it is another example of Joyce’s favourite rhetorical device, chiasmus: ‘a rhetorical device that reverses the order of words, phrases or ideas in two parallel clauses, creating an A-B-B-A pattern’. In other words, symmetry: 11 opening, 40 central, 11 closing.

The parodies

So the chapter consists of forty paragraphs each one done in the styles of different eras of English prose, presented in chronological order. Apparently, Joyce relied heavily on reference books like Saintsbury’s ‘History of English prose Rhythm’ (1912). To see what happens (if patterns emerge), and as a quick overview you can skim through to get the effect, I’m going to quote the first sentence of all 40:

Before born bliss babe had. Within womb won he worship…
(Anglo-Saxon alliterative prose of Aelfric)

Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night’s oncoming.
(Anglo-Saxon)

Of that house A. Horne is lord [see Cast, below]. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale so God’s angel to Mary quoth.
(Medieval)

In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid…
(Alliterative Middle English of Piers Ploughman)

Loth to irk in Horne’s hall hat holding the seeker [Bloom] stood. On her stow he ere was living with dear wife and lovesome daughter that then over land and seafloor nine years had long outwandered…

As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefor sorrow she feared. Glad after she was that ere adread was…

Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman…

The man that was come in to the house then spoke to the nursingwoman and he asked her how it fared with the woman that lay there in childbed…

And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came against the place as they stood a young learningknight yclept Dixon.
(Medieval travel stories from the 1400s)

And in the castle was set a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move more for enchantment.
(Arthurian legend from the 1400s)

And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopold a draught and halp thereto the while all they that were there drank every each..

This meanwhile this good sister stood by the door and begged them at the reverence of Jesu our alther liege Lord to leave their wassailing for there was above one quick with child, a gentle dame, whose time hied fast.

Now let us speak of that fellowship that was there to the intent to be drunken an they might.

For they were right witty scholars. And he heard their aresouns each gen other as touching birth and righteousness…

But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had pity of the terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their labour and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art could save so dark is destiny.

About that present time young Stephen filled all cups that stood empty so as there remained but little mo if the prudenter had not shadowed their approach from him that still plied it very busily who, praying for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff, he gave them for a pledge the vicar of Christ which also as he said is vicar of Bray.
(Elizabethan history chronicles)

Hereupon Punch Costello dinged with his fist upon the board and would sing a bawdy catch Staboo Stabella about a wench that was put in pod of a jolly swashbuckler in Almany which he did straightways now attack… [until Nurse Quigley comes and tells him to stop singing]

To be short this passage was scarce by when Master Dixon of Mary in Eccles, goodly grinning, asked young Stephen what was the reason why he had not cided to take friar’s vows and he answered him obedience in the womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all his days….
(Miltonic Latinate prose from the 1600s)

Thereto Punch Costello roared out mainly Etienne chanson but he loudly bid them, lo, wisdom hath built herself a house, this vast majestic longstablished vault, the crystal palace of the Creator, all in applepie order, a penny for him who finds the pea.

A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled back. Loud on left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler.

But was young Boasthard’s fear vanquished by Calmer’s words? No, for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away.
(Religious Allegorical prose of John Bunyan)

This was it what all that company that sat there at commons in Manse of Mothers the most lusted after and if they met with this whore Bird-in-the-Hand (which was within all foul plagues, monsters and a wicked devil) they would strain the last but they would make at her and know her.

So Thursday sixteenth June Patk. Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy and after hard drought, please God, rained, a bargeman coming in by water a fifty mile or thereabout with turf saying the seed won’t sprout, fields athirst, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the quags and tofts too…
(17th century English diarists such as Samuel Pepys)

Lenehan announces that the letter Mr Deasy gave Stephen in chapter 2 has indeed been published in the newspaper which triggers a long discussion about one of the real life issues of the book, the outbreak of foot and mouth disease among Ireland’s cattle and how to treat it.

With this came up Lenehan to the feet of the table to say how the letter was in that night’s gazette and he made a show to find it about him (for he swore with an oath that he had been at pains about it) but on Stephen’s persuasion he gave over the search and was bidden to sit near by which he did mighty brisk.
(English journalist Daniel Defoe)

Enter Buck Mulligan and Alec Bannon. They’ve been caught in a shower of rain.

Our worthy acquaintance Mr Malachi Mulligan now appeared in the doorway as the students were finishing their apologue accompanied with a friend whom he had just rencountered, a young gentleman, his name Alec Bannon, who had late come to town, it being his intention to buy a colour or a cornetcy in the fencibles and list for the wars.
(Early 1700s periodical essays in the style of the Tatler and Spectator)

Mulligan presents a farcical plan to set up a hospital to inseminate women wanting a baby.

He proposed to set up there a national fertilising farm to be named Omphalos with an obelisk hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt and to offer his dutiful yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life soever who should there direct to him with the desire of fulfilling the functions of her natural. Money was no object, he said, nor would he take a penny for his pains.

He’s gone so far as to have a card printed:

Whereat he handed round to the company a set of pasteboard cards which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell’s bearing a legend printed in fair italics: Mr Malachi Mulligan. Fertiliser and Incubator. Lambay Island.

After which he is referred to by various jokey names such as Le Fécondateur. Back to the first sentences of each paragraph:

Valuing himself not a little upon his elegance, being indeed a proper man of person, this talkative now applied himself to his dress with animadversions of some heat upon the sudden whimsy of the atmospherics while the company lavished their encomiums upon the project he had advanced.
(18th century Anglo-Irish novelist and clergyman Laurence Sterne)

Amid the general vacant hilarity of the assembly a bell rang and, while all were conjecturing what might be the cause, Miss Callan entered and, having spoken a few words in a low tone to young Mr Dixon, retired with a profound bow to the company…
(18th century Anglo-Irish novelist, poet, and playwright Oliver Goldsmith)

At this point Nurse Callan comes to announce that Mrs Purefoy has finally had her child:

The young surgeon [Dixon], however, rose and begged the company to excuse his retreat as the nurse had just then informed him that he was needed in the ward. Merciful providence had been pleased to put a period to the sufferings of the lady who was enceinte which she had borne with a laudable fortitude and she had given birth to a bouncing boy.

After Nurse Callan leaves, Costello makes rude comments about her which triggers Dixon to make a long facetious defence of her honour and womanhood.

To revert to Mr Bloom who, after his first entry, had been conscious of some impudent mocks which he however had borne with as being the fruits of that age upon which it is commonly charged that it knows not pity…
(18th century Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke)

But with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron, has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted to civic rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our internal polity?
(18th century satirist Junius)

This is a paragraph unexpectedly containing sustained criticism of Bloom, including his penchant for masturbation: ‘A habit reprehensible at puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life’ and ticks him off for flirting with the serving girl Gerty when he has a fine wife at home, ‘Has he not nearer home a seedfield that lies fallow for the want of the ploughshare?’ and again: ‘The lewd suggestions of some faded beauty may console him for a consort neglected and debauched…’

The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial usage of the Sublime Porte by the second female infirmarian to the junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the delegation that an heir had been born…
(Philosophical historian Edward Gibbon)

Then a parody of Gothic:

But Malachias’ tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up the scene before them…
(Gothic novelist Horace Walpole)

This deals with the sudden appearance of the Englishman Haines in the common room. He’s come to tell Mulligan to meet him at the Westland Row station at 11.10pm to catch the last train back to Sandymount (location of the Martello Tower) and get back to the Martello Tower.

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood…
(Romantic essayist Charles Lamb)

Bloom reminisces about losing his virginity to Bridie Kelly, a symbol of fruitless sterile sexual encounters, compared with inseminating Molly and the next two paragraphs continue Bloom’s thoughts.

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of generations that have lived…
(Romantic essayist Thomas De Quincey)

Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood.

The next one cuts to Stephen and a query about old schoolfriends triggers an important statement of the power of the author to conjure up characters.

Francis [Costello] was reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at school together in Conmee’s time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades, Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard, am lord and giver of their life.
(In the style of Walter Savage Landor’s ‘Imaginary Conversations’)

‘Bullockbefriending bard’ being the joke nickname he imagines funny Buck Mulligan giving him after he’s told him about the letter from Deasy about foot and mouth disease. But also continuing the theme of oxen of the sun, and the cock and bull joke thread. In fact this paragraph evolves away into a detailed description of the Gold Cup race in which Lenahan and others lost money when the outsider Throwaway won in the final furlongs.

However, as a matter of fact though, the preposterous surmise about him being in some description of a doldrums or other or mesmerised which was entirely due to a misconception of the shallowest character, was not the case at all…
(Essayist and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay)

The debate which ensued was in its scope and progress an epitome of the course of life. Neither place nor council was lacking in dignity. The debaters were the keenest in the land, the theme they were engaged on the loftiest and most vital. The high hall of Horne’s house had never beheld an assembly so representative and so varied nor had the old rafters of that establishment ever listened to a language so encyclopaedic…

Which of course refers to this chapter, this text itself, with its encyclopedic ambition.

It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus’ (Div. Scep.) contentions would appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs directly counter to accepted scientific methods…
(Biologist and essayist Thomas Henry Huxley)

Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a happy accouchement. It had been a weary weary while both for patient and doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave woman had manfully helped…
(Charles Dickens)

There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait…
(Cardinal Newman)

The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an unhealthiness, a flair, for the cruder things of life…
(English essayist Walter Pater)

Mark this farther and remember. The end comes suddenly. Enter that antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their faces. Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent.
(Art critic John Ruskin)

After a lull, Stephen suggests they leave the hospital and move on to a local pub:

Burke’s! outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry, and a tag and bobtail of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor, punctual Bloom at heels with a universal grabbing at headgear, ashplants, bilbos, Panama hats and scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and what not…
(Scottish essayist and satirist Thomas Carlyle)

And they pile out of the boozy common room and into a corridor of the hospital.

Nurse Callan taken aback in the hallway cannot stay them nor smiling surgeon coming downstairs with news of placentation ended… The door! It is open? Ha! They are out, tumultuously, off for a minute’s race, all bravely legging it…

Only Bloom pauses to tell the nurse to give his best wishes to the mother, and then asks Nurse Callan: ‘Madam, when comes the storkbird for thee?’

The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum. God’s air, the Allfather’s air, scintillant circumambient cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee.

Coda

The procession of historical parodies having (apparently) reached the present day, as the drunken crew bursts out into the night air, the text disintegrates into drunken chaos, barely comprehensible. As stated at the start, this collapse of thought and expression into complete chaos is Joyce’s equivalent of the annihilation of Odysseus’s sailors by the angry gods, in Homer.

All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street. Bonafides. Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered naggin. Like ole Billyo. Any brollies or gumboots in the fambly? Where the Henry Nevil’s sawbones and ole clo? Sorra one o’ me knows.

You need a guide to understand almost all of this. As well as the Homeric parallel, maybe it’s also intended to reflect the atmosphere of a packed pub in central Dublin near to closing time?

Query. Who’s astanding this here do? Proud possessor of damnall. Declare misery. Bet to the ropes. Me nantee saltee. Not a red at me this week gone. Yours?

Hurroo! Collar the leather, youngun. Roun wi the nappy. Here, Jock braw Hielentman’s your barleybree. Lang may your lum reek and your kailpot boil!

Waiting, guvnor? Most deciduously. Bet your boots on. Stunned like, seeing as how no shiners is acoming. Underconstumble? He’ve got the chink ad lib.

’Tis, sure. What say? In the speakeasy. Tight. I shee you, shir. Bantam, two days teetee. Bowsing nowt but claretwine. Garn!

You move a motion? Steve boy, you’re going it some. More bluggy drunkables? Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate one expensive inaugurated libation? Give’s a breather. Landlord, landlord, have you good wine, staboo?

I think closing time comes to the pub and everyone’s chucked out onto the street:

Closingtime, gents. Eh?… Bonsoir la compagnie… Where’s the buck and Namby Amby?Skunked? Leg bail. Aweel, ye maun e’en gang yer gates. Checkmate. King to tower.

‘King to tower’ meaning Buck Mulligan has left the group to catch the last tram back to his Martello tower.

Golly, whatten tunket’s yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep at his wearables. By mighty! What’s he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril, by James.

Your attention! We’re nae tha fou. The Leith police dismisseth us. The least tholice. Ware hawks for the chap puking. Unwell in his abominable regions. Yooka. Night. Mona, my true love. Yook. Mona, my own love. Ook.

Which Hugh Kenner annotates: ‘The Leith police dismisseth us’ is a test the police administer to late night revellers to test how drunk they are. And Yooka, yook and ook are Joyce’s words for someone puking.

Hark! Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap! Pflaap! Blaze on. There she goes. Brigade! Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up! Pflaap! Tally ho. You not come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap!

In which Pflaaaap! indicates a clap of thunder. In other words this is an ironic (and quite submerged) reference to the thunder and lightning Zeus sent after the departing Odysseus and his men after they had slaughtered the sun god’s cattle (see above).

The final paragraph indicates that drunk Stephen persuades drunk Lynch to accompany him to Nighttown, Dublin’s red light district, to seek out a brothel:

Lynch! Hey? Sign on long o’ me. Denzille lane this way. Change here for Bawdyhouse. We two, she said, will seek the kips where shady Mary is. Righto, any old time…

And so off they stagger towards the next chapter, ‘Circe’:

Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy!

Cast

The group of drinkers are listed several times, in different voices, in styles appropriate to the era being parodied:

So were they all in their blind fancy, Mr Cavil and Mr Sometimes Godly, Mr Ape Swillale, Mr False Franklin, Mr Dainty Dixon, Young Boasthard and Mr Cautious Calmer.

Leop. Bloom of Crawford’s journal sitting snug with a covey of wags, likely brangling fellows, Dixon jun., scholar of my lady of Mercy’s, Vin. Lynch, a Scots fellow, Will. Madden, T. Lenehan, very sad about a racer he fancied and Stephen D. Leop. Bloom there for a languor he had but was now better

As to individual characters in the chapter:

Leopold Bloom – ‘Mr Canvasser Bloom’, ‘staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds’, the main protagonist of ‘Ulysses’. The Oxen of the Sun directly follows Nausicaa in which Bloom was on the beach at Sandymount Strand outside Dublin and had a sexual encounter with a young woman he’d never met before (he masturbates while she, from a distance, shows him her stockinged legs and knickers).

In the gap between the two chapters he catches a tram back into central Dublin and walks to the maternity hospital in Holles Street because he’s concerned for a family friend, Mina Purefoy, who’s been in labour for several days. Here a doctor he knows, Dr Dixon, recognises him and invites him to join a drinking party in the doctors’ common room. Here half a dozen lads-about-town are having a riotous party, led by young Stephen Dedalus who Bloom has heard about but never met.

It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted years [i.e. past 35] that he had passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and a man of rare forecast he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at..

Dr Horne – a real-life figure, Sir Andrew J. Horne, a prominent Dublin obstetrician and the Joint Master of the National Maternity Hospital.

Nurse Quigley – continually telling the drunken gang off for keeping the pregnant women in the ward above awake with their racket. ‘an ancient and a sad matron of a sedate look and christian walking, in habit dun beseeming her megrims and wrinkled visage,’

Dr Dixon – junior doctor at the hospital. Recognises Bloom and invites him to join the party in the common room. Later goes to attend Mrs Purefoy who’s finally had her baby.

Vincent Lynch – friend of Stephen’s when they were students. Recipient of Stephen’s long disquisition about aesthetics in ‘Portrait’, now just another drunk medical student – ‘Lynch whose countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity and premature wisdom.’

Lenehan – ‘He was a kind of sport gentleman that went for a merryandrew or honest pickle and what belonged of women, horseflesh or hot scandal he had it pat. To tell the truth he was mean in fortunes and for the most part hankered about the coffeehouses and low taverns with crimps, ostlers, bookies, Paul’s men, runners, flatcaps, waistcoateers, ladies of the bagnio and other rogues of the game or with a chanceable catchpole or a tipstaff often at nights till broad day of whom he picked up between his sackpossets much loose gossip.’

Crotthers – ‘the Scotch student, a little fume of a fellow, blond as tow’ – ‘Crotthers was there at the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing from the briny airs of the Mull of Galloway’

Madden – ‘the squat form of Madden’ another drunk medical student.

Stephen Dedalus – ‘of all them, reserved young Stephen, he was the most drunken that demanded still of more mead’ – ‘he was of a wild manner when he was drunken’ – ‘so grieved he [Bloom] also in no less measure for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and murdered his goods with whores.’ Stephen is very drunk and dominates the table with a series of facetiously learned disquisitions. He is very frustrated that after his clever Shakespeare presentation at the National Library it was flashy, superficial Mulligan who was invited to a soirée at the home of Irish writer George Moore (4 Upper Ely Place, just a few blocks from the maternity hospital). Using his wits to entertain drunk medical students is a pitiful waste of his god-given gifts.

Suddenly I realised that Stephen isn’t Hamlet, as he fancies himself to be. He is young Prince Harry, son of Henry IV, isn’t he? An educated man wasting his days hanging round with lowlifes and routinely getting trolleyed – except, unlike young Prince Hal, Stephen has no kingdom to inherit to redeem himself.

Frank ‘Punch’ Costello – ‘Costello, the eccentric’ – ‘From a child this Frank had been a donought that his father, a headborough, who could ill keep him to school to learn his letters and the use of the globes, matriculated at the university to study the mechanics but he took the bit between his teeth like a raw colt and was more familiar with the justiciary and the parish beadle than with his volumes. One time he would be a playactor, then a sutler or a welsher, then nought would keep him from the bearpit and the cocking main, then he was for the ocean sea or to hoof it on the roads with the romany folk, kidnapping a squire’s heir by favour of moonlight or fecking maids’ linen or choking chicken behind a hedge.’

Malachi Buck Mulligan – ‘the primrose elegance and townbred manners of Malachi Roland St John Mulligan’. Comes fresh from a literary soiree at the house of George Moore which Stephen jealously wishes he had been invited to. ‘Valuing himself not a little upon his elegance, being indeed a proper man of person’ he wears a primrose vest. His coat is spotted with rain because they were caught in a shower. Eternal joker.

Alec Bannon – ‘the figure of Bannon in explorer’s kit of tweed shorts and salted cowhide brogues’ – in ‘Calypso’ we learned that he is dating Bloom’s daughter, Milly, from a letter she sent him (Bloom)

Nurse Callan – a nurse working at the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street. She is an acquaintance of Leopold Bloom who opens the gate for him and provides updates on Mina Purefoy’s difficult, three-day labour.

Haines – the Englishman, staying with Buck Mulligan in the Martello Tower. Terrified Stephen overnight with his nightmare shoutings, then in the morning insulted him with his casual English dismissal of our mistreatment of Ireland for centuries.

Bridie Kelly – young working class woman Bloom lost his virginity to and reminisces about here (she also appears in Circe and Eumaeus), in one of the Gothic paragraphs described as ‘the bride of darkness, a daughter of night’.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

Related links

• Ulysses on Planet Gutenberg
• Ulysses guide: section 14
• Sparks notes: section 14

Related reviews

• Dubliners (1914)
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Ulysses by James Joyce: introduction
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Cyclops
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Nausicaa
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun