All posts tagged Gaelic

Ulysses by Hugh Kenner (1980)

The more we know of someone, the harder it is to say what he is about, he is about so many things…
(page 21)

Few writers have been more intensely, intimately autobiographical.
(p.171)

Hugh Kenner

Hugh Kenner (1923 to 2003) was a Canadian academic who spent his time teaching at universities in the United States and writing a series of critical books about modernist literature. I read his masterpiece, ‘The Pound Era’ (1971), in the late 1970s and it changed my life. It gave me a deep grounding in the modernism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the rest of them, providing handy background info for my English A-level reading of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and helping me to ace my university entrance exams. ‘The Pound Era’ is not just a dazzling overview in the mindset of the modernist moment just before the Great War, packed with insights and arcane learning, but immerses you in a whole new way of seeing the world and books.

Although Kenner did his PhD thesis on James Joyce, published as a book in 1956, he only wrote about him periodically thereafter. This book was published in 1980 as part of the then-new Unwin General Library shortly after the publication of another Joyce book by him, ‘Joyce’s Voices’ – I wonder how much overlap there is between the two.

The Unwin General Library volumes were intended as study aids but Kenner’s book is every bit as opinionated and eccentrically informative as his other works. From the blizzard of digressions and divagations, here are the bits which stood out for me, starting with the obvious and moving on to the arcane and inspired.

Learnings

Bloomsday ‘Ulysses’ is set over the course of one long day, from 8am on Thursday 16 June to the early hours of the following morning, Friday 17 June, 1904. The book’s millions of fans long ago christened 16 June ‘Bloomsday’, and celebrations are held in Dublin and elsewhere every year.

Victorian It’s worth stopping right there to reflect that although the novel was published in 1922 and had a huge impact on between-the-wars literature, it in fact depicts a world which was barely even Edwardian, was in fact late-Victorian in culture, economics and mindset (Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901; the Boer War had only just ended, May 1902).

Let’s go back to ‘Ulysses’ prequel, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and reflect that almost its entire action takes place in the reign of Queen Victoria. For example, the scene where Stephen Dedalus watches a girl on the beach is supposed to take place in 1898. Only the very last scenes in the book are not Victorian, as Kenner reckons the scenes where Stephen prepares to quit Ireland take place in 1902. So although it became a totem of the Jazz Age, all the music in ‘Ulysses’, the clothes, the culture, the political and social mood, are late-Victorian.

Daylength An awful lots happens in the minds of the protagonists of ‘Ulysses’ but then they have a lot of time. At the latitude of Dublin, the sun rises at 3.33 am and sets at 8.27 pm. The action of the novel actually starts at 8am on top of the Martello Tower at Dalkey on Dublin Bay and continues until 3am the following morning.

Mourning Both the book’s male protagonists, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, are dressed in mourning black for the entirety of the novel, Stephen mourning his recently deceased mother, Bloom in black to attend Paddy Dignam’s funeral. It is a novel about two men in mourning, or two Men in Black.

Locations Joyce began writing ‘Ulysses’ in Trieste sometime in 1914 and continued for the next 8 years, in Zurich (during the Great War) then Paris (after the war). It was published in Paris on 2 February 1922, the author’s fortieth birthday. It was promptly banned by the authorities in Britain and the USA, where it was only allowed to be published in 1936, and 1933 respectively. (It was never banned in Ireland because the authorities new they didn’t need to; no respecting publisher dared publish it or bookshop sell it.)

Modernist peers Of Joyce’s three great modernist peers:

  • T.S. Eliot admired what he called ‘the mythic method’ of basing the novel on Homer’s Odyssey, welcoming it as a whole new way of ordering ‘the panorama of anarchy and futility that is the contemporary world’ (‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, 1923)
  • Ezra Pound, on the contrary, dismissed the mythic method but welcomed the novel as an encyclopedia of contemporary stupidity, a kind of grotesque continuation of the realism of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet (‘James Joyce et Pechuchet’, 1922)
  • Wyndham Lewis saw it as a sign of how the modernism he’d helped inspire with Vorticism had gone off course, into trivia and technique, dismissing the use of interior monologue as a simple extension of Charles Dickens’s Alfred Jingle (‘Time and Western Man’, 1927)

Sui generis Kenner considers ‘Ulysses’ one of the small number of great modernist works which created a new genre for themselves, much as ‘The Waste Land’, ‘The Cantos’ and Molloy did. Personally, surveying the literary output of the 2020s and earlier, it feels like the modernist moment was a great digression or diversion. Much was learned and much fanfare was made about the revolutionising of the novel but with a decade novels, by and large, settled back into a 20th century version of the traditional mould (Waugh, Orwell, Greene).

Thoms For the geography of Dublin, Joyce in exile relied very heavily on ‘Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ published in 1904.

Chiasmus Joyce is fondness for chiasmus, the ‘a rhetorical device where grammatical structures or ideas in a sentence are repeated in reverse order, creating a mirrored or X-shaped pattern (A-B-B-A)’. Here’s a not quite perfect example.

An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs. (‘A Portrait’)

Kenner points out that the overall structure of ‘A Portrait’ is chiasmic in the sense that it both opens and closes with fragments (p.68).

Technology Ulysses is notably more mechanical than ‘Portrait’ in the sense that there is more modern technology in it. Stephen takes an electric tram into the city centre, the newspaper office has enormous printing machines, people use typewriters, telephones. In ‘A Portrait’ all transport is horse-drawn. Reflecting the sweeping technological innovations which came in between completing ‘Portrait’ in 1914 and writing ‘Ulysses’ in the later teens.

Performance Much can be made of the opening sentences:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Mulligan is an actor Kenner makes two points: 1) Mulligan is acting, he is prancing and performing for his own pleasure; 2) and he is performing a mockery of the Catholic Mass, a mockery Kenner goes so far as to say is like an invocation of the Satanic Black Mass. This feels unlikely to me, it feels more like youthful high spirits. But I agree with Kenner’s diagnosis that it 1) introduces the entire novel as an enormous performance and 2) is a cultural critique, suggesting that Ireland and Irishmen are all playing a part, cheerfully and humorously, but somehow alienated from their true selves.

Inside, outside and in-between The narrative never gives Mulligan free indirect speech from his point of view because he has no inside. He is all performance, a mummer, a mocker, a clown. In this he is in stark contrast to Stephen who is almost entirely inside, and whose stream-of-consciousness thoughts reach an early peak in chapter 3. So Stephen and the Buck are yin and yang, chalk and cheese. From this perspective, Bloom comes along, in chapter 4, as a synthesis of opposites, a happy balance of the internal (psychological) and external (sensual) worlds. Very neat. Although in later chapters, this simple model is itself superseded (p.45).

Divisions The division of the book into three parts, of 3, 12 and 3 chapters each, is clear for everyone to read in its table of contents. Kenner suggests it’s also in two parts: the first ten or so chapters are all done in a roughly similar stream-of-consciousness style: Kenner calls them ‘the naturalistic episodes’ (p.53) and tells us that Joyce himself referred to them being in ‘the initial style’ (p.62). From ‘Sirens’ onwards however, each individual chapter has not only a style, but a format of its own. And a possible reason for this? Because between chapters 11 and 12 Boyle sleeps with Molly. Up to then all the chapters are a sort of anticipation and show Bloom in what Kenner insists is virtually a state of shock; afterwards, they become extremely idiosyncratic.

Bloom’s Jewishness Kenner points out that Jewish affiliation is passed down through the mother but Bloom’s mother was Ellen Higgins, herself the daughter of Fanny Hegarty i.e. no Jewish female inheritance there. Moreover, his (Jewish) father converted to Protestantism in which Leopold was raised, and Poldy himself converted to Catholicism before marrying Marion Tweedy. So he is doubly an outsider: although he played with Jewish friends as a boy, and although he has a Jewish name and appearance, he is not part of Dublin’s small Jewish community (p.43). But although he has been baptised a Catholic, on the one occasion he briefly pops into a church, there is plenty of time to make clear that he’s never taken communion, so he is also an outsider to Dublin’s cradle Catholic culture (p.71). ‘Most readers never realise that Bloom by Jewish standards isn’t Jewish’ (p.152).

Narrative skips Despite bombarding us with ‘its din of specificity’, ‘Ulysses’ is oddly silent about key facts. I was puzzled in chapter 4 by the way we get Bloom giving milk to his cat and popping out to buy a pork kidney and then having a poo in his out-house – but we do not get a description of him running, getting into or out of his bath, although he refers to having had a bath many times later on. It is oddly omitted. Far more significant is how Bloom comes to know that Blazes Boylan is popping round to plook his wife at 4pm. He knows and all the commentators know, but how? He doesn’t take a sneaky peek at Boylan’s letter, and in fact it is weirdly absent from the entire final colloquy between Bloom and Molly before he leaves the house for the day. For all its bombardment with facts, many key aspects of the narrative are mysteriously glossed over. (p.49)

Where’s Blazes? The more commentary you read, the more central the event of Boylan shagging Molly becomes, and yet not only is this central scene not described, but Boylan himself is barely even a fleeting presence in the novel, only briefly glimpsed on a couple of occasions (chatting up girls in ‘Wandering Rocks’ and ‘Sirens’). His, also, is a deliberate and glaring absence (p.53).

Timetable of Stephen’s day

  • 8am: Stephen gets up ‘displeased and sleepy’, having been kept awake by Haines raving about shooting a black panther. Since Haines actually has a gun and Stephen is wearing black in mourning for his mother, he is justified in feeling anxious. He refuses to bathe in the sea with Buck and Haines, and makes a date to meet Mulligan at the Ship pub at 12.30.
  • 9 to 10.30am: walks to his school in Dalkey and gives a history lesson, then has the interview with the school’s head, Mr Deasy, who gives him a letter to take to the newspaper.
  • 10.30 to 12 noon: tram to Haddington Road where he toys with going to see his Aunt Sara to ask if he can stay the night with her but instead goes for a walk on Sandymount Strand.
  • 12 to 12.30pm: decides not to meet Mulligan and sends a telegram telling him so. Instead walks across the river to the offices of the Evening Telegraph.
  • 12.30 to 1pm: delivers Deasy’s letter to the newspaper editor.
  • 1 to 1.30pm: drops into Mooney’s bar a few doors down from the Ship.
  • 1.30 to 4pm moves onto another bar then goes to deliver another copy of Deasy’s letter to A.E. at the Irish Homestead where he is (probably) told the A.E. is in the National Library. So Stephen goes to find him there which is where the narrative finds him again in chapter 9 trying to impress A.E. and John Eglinton with his Shakespeare theory. Leaves the Library with Mulligan, bumps into an Italian acquaintance who tells him he should become a professional singer, bumps into his impoverished young sister Dilly but doesn’t give her any money. Given to highfalutin’ rhetoric about Irish nationalism and escaping nets, he lacks charity or fellow feeling for his own family.

Stephen’s plight Kenner sums up Stephen’s situation by 4pm, the cardinal hour when Boylan is plooking Molly: Stephen has nowhere to stay, barely has a job and no prospects, has given it his best shot to impress Dublin’s literary elite and failed miserably. It is flashy superficial Mulligan who will be going that night to George Moore’s gathering of ‘the best wits in town’. His is the bitterness of the outsider. Very depressed, he decides to carry on drinking, accepting his fate as his fluent but shiftless father’s son. We don’t meet him again till 10pm, at the maternity hospital, by which time, having been drinking all day and eaten no lunch, he is shitfaced.

David Hayman and The Arranger Kenner says the critic David Hayman was the first to nail Ulysses’ main technical innovation which was the irruption half-way through the book into the text of a voice which belongs to none of the characters nor to any narrator, but just intrudes. For example, the 63 newspaper captions in ‘Aeolus’, who is ‘saying’ that? No-one. And as the narrative continues, you realise that, yes yes yes we are getting the famous ‘stream-of-consciousness’ thoughts of the leading characters, but that there is another voice who adds phrases in among the characters’ thoughts. Hayman gives it a name, calling it The Arranger and Kenner devotes a whole chapter to describing its effects.

Parallax Parallax means viewing the same thing from different positions. Kenner explains that thousands of details, moments, perceptions, scraps of speech occur multiple times in ‘Ulysses’, but often seen from two or more angles, described hundreds of pages apart. No one reading can spot all these repetitions, but each rereading leads you deeper into the vast labyrinth of correspondences and correlations Joyce has constructed, building up the impression of infinite interconnection.

Delays Classic detective stories delay the explanation until the end, when Holmes or Poirot make everything clear in One Big Reveal which shows how all the pieces of the puzzle are connected. One Big Revelation explains everything. In ‘Ulysses’, by contrast, there are thousands of little revelations, repetitions and correlations which shed a little light on this or that mystery from earlier in the text. Not one big reveal but thousands and thousands of small reveals because ‘Joyce is all trivia’ (p.76) so no individual one of them transforms our reading, but taken together all immeasurably deepen the experience.

Songs performed in Sirens The primary songs performed or mentioned in the ‘Sirens’ chapter, in chronological order of their appearance or performance:

  • The Bloom is on the Rye, hummed or thought of by Bloom as he watches the barmaids
  • ‘Love and War’, a duet performed by Ben Dollard (bass) and Father Cowley (tenor) shortly after Bloom enters the dining room
  • ‘Tutto è sciolto’ (from Bellini’s La Sonnambula), whistled by Richie Goulding as he and Bloom sit in the dining room
  • ‘M’appari’ (from Flotow’s Martha): the emotional centre of the episode, sung by Simon Dedalus at the piano
  • ‘The Croppy Boy’: a nationalist ballad performed by Ben Dollard toward the end of the episode as Bloom prepares to leave
  • ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’: although not fully performed in the bar, its melody and lyrics recur throughout the episode in Bloom’s thoughts and are associated with Molly Bloom and Blazes Boylan
  • other musical pieces referred to or hummed include ‘Those Lovely Seaside Girls’ and various motifs from operas like ‘Don Giovanni’ (specifically the minuet played by Father Cowley)

Circe After long trying days, both Stephen and Bloom need purging. According to Aristotle’s classical theory, the form which purges emotions is the drama, the play, so a play is needed to purge his characters. And both men need to confront their ghosts so this shall be a ghost play, wherein Stephen  will confront the accusing ghost of his mother and Bloom will see the ghost of his dead baby, now grown to be an 11-year-old boy. These themes were first mooted when Stephen himself dwelled at length on the nature of theatre in his long disquisition about Hamlet and Shakespeare at the National Library

The nightmare of history Kenner makes one really big point about ‘Circe’. You remember Stephen’s famous declaration to the Unionist headmaster Deasy, which is often quoted out of context, that: ‘History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake’? Well, maybe ‘Circe’ can be seen as a dramatisation of the nightmare of history, with its trials and revolutions and politics and crowning of kings and burning at the stake and haunted terrors. Maybe it is the nightmare of history come to life.

THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: (Raises high behind the celebrant’s petticoat, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is stuck.) My body.

John F. Taylor and the Gaelic revival It was a commonplace of Irish nationalism to equate the small oppressed Irish nation with their its subaltern language and zealous about its religion struggling to be free, with the Israelites in Egypt, small in number, with their own minority language, struggling to be free. This comparison did all kinds of things, giving the struggle for Irish independence the authority of the Bible, guaranteeing that each generation’s independence leader would be dubbed the ‘Irish Moses’, and so on. In the area of language it supported calls for the revival of Gaelic to accompany campaigns for independence.

On 24 October 1901 the lawyer, orator and man of letters John F. Taylor delivered a speech to the Law Students Debating Society pointing out that if Moses had given in to reason, learned Egyptian and aspired to a high place in the Egyptian administration, we’d have never had the ten commandments, Judaism or Christianity. Well, it is this speech which Professor MacHugh recreates in the office of the Freeman’s Journal in ‘Aeolus’.

Gaelic and Hebrew In questions 98 and 99 of ‘Ithaca’ this topic is treated to debunking irony when Bloom and Stephen try to demonstrate their ancestral languages (Hebrew and Gaelic) to each other and it turns out they can both only manage a few lines of songs, and then scrawl down a handful of characters, of their supposed ancestral tongues. Comedy of mutual ignorance.

Ithacan program Kenner usefully pulls together the thoughts scattered in Ithaca’s question and answer format to clarify that Bloom has parental fantasies about Stephen. Bloom fantasises that he will:

  • become a permanent lodger at Eccles Road
  • pay rent
  • take singing lessons from Molly in return for which he’ll tutor her in Italian
  • distract her from Boylan
  • pass evenings of civilised conversation with him, Bloom
  • become a successful and profitable tenor in Bloom’s travelling troupe of singers
  • in time fall in love with and marry Bloom’s daughter, Milly
  • and produce a little light literature on the side

It’s quite the package, then, for a drunk, depressed young man completely adrift in life, the offer for him to become a son-in-law for Bloom and a replacement for Bloom’s dead son, Rudy. But when you list all the elements like that, you can also see it’s a trap, closing off all of Stephen’s ambitions. When it’s put like this you can see why Stephen politely walks away.

Is Bloom Jewish?

For:

  • he has a Jewish name
  • almost everyone treats him as Jewish i.e. with antisemitic slurs
  • in ‘Cyclops’ he becomes angry and says persecution of ‘his people’ is going on right here, right now
  • and the chapter climaxes with him yelling at the Citizen that ‘Christ was a Jew like me’
  • he owns some of the paraphernalia of Jewish ceremonies inherited from his father and grandfather
  • in ‘Eumaeus’ he delivers a defence of the Jews to Stephen

Against:

  • he is uncircumcised (Nausicaa)
  • nowhere is a bar mitzvah mentioned
  • the novel opens with him buying and eating as pork i.e. no-kosher kidney
  • his mother wasn’t Jewish but Irish and so was his grandmother (Ithaca)
  • he has received not one but two Christian baptisms (as a Protestant and a Catholic)
  • crucially he rolls back from his shouted taunt at the Citizen, in Eumaeus telling Stephen: ‘I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family like me though in reality I’m not.’
  • and in ‘Ithaca’ question 68:
    • What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen? is answered thus:
    • He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not.

So in a religious (christenings) and biological (mother and grandmother) and dietary and ceremonial way, Bloom is not a Jew. And yet in a cultural and self-identifying kind of way Bloom clearly still identifies with ‘his people’, his ‘race’, feels their persecution (and experiences it for himself), stands up for them whenever he can. So yes and no.

Molly’s lovers Question 275 in ‘Ithaca’ asks ‘What preceding series?’ and the answer proceeds to list 25 men. For 40 years or more these were taken at face value as a list of Molly’s lovers. Only in the 1970s was the list reinterpreted and came to be seen as anyone who had given Bloom any cause at all to be jealous, and since jealousy can be completely irrational it explains why the list includes a priest (her confessor), her doctor, Simon Dedalus (a drinker not a swiver), and others of the same ilk. And so the list is nowadays reinterpreted as anyone who got close to sexy Molly and triggered jealousy in young Bloom, and so Molly’s reputation has been completely rehabilitated. Scholars have returned Blazes Boylan to his rightful place as the only man Molly has been unfaithful with which also, of course, makes far more sense of why it’s such a big deal for Bloom (p.143).

Bloom’s books ‘Ithaca’ contains a number of catalogues or lists. Kenner notes that the list of (23) books on Bloom’s shelf (in answer to question 292) shows that he does not own a copy of The Odyssey.

Archaeology In a characteristic stretch, Kenner associates the list of memorabilia Bloom finds in his drawers with archaeology. Archaeology reached a golden age in the late nineteenth century; it was in the 1870s that Schliemann excavated Troy in Turkey, capturing the public imagination. Kenner points out that the detailed inventory ‘Ithaca’ makes of the contents of Bloom’s house, in one way treats it as an archaeological site.

Sherlock A little more obvious is the fact that the list of Bloom’s books contains one by Conan Doyle (The Stark-Munro Letters) which makes us think of Sherlock Holmes, and the rather more obvious idea that ‘Ulysses’ is, as well as everything else, a book which is packed with clues which we are meant to find and decipher, starting with the way the parts and chapters of the book are deliberately left unnamed. Whether this world of clues in the end reveals anything beyond the astonishing ingenuity of its own creation – well, that’s a different type of question.

The acme of naturalism Kenner ends with some high-level meditations. In one way ‘Ulysses’ took the late-nineteenth century passion for naturalism (think Émile Zola) to a logical conclusion in a novel where very little happens but we are overloaded with thousands upon thousands of details. The line of thinking anticipated by Ezra Pound.

Eternal recurrence Joyce gets his characters to mull over whether life is predestined and fated, a question of eternal recurrence. Odysseus returns, maybe everything returns.

Picasso, Einstein, Joyce They’re often grouped together because they all removed the distance between the observer and the observed, and so demolished he old-fashioned notion of ‘reality’.

Art: Picasso’s works are rarely and barely ‘about’ the subject (still lives, women in his studio, bullfighters) in the old way that the artist painted a separate reality: the cubist works in particular declare that the subject of the work of art is the work of art itself; the interesting thing is the style and the treatment. (Which explains what, in my opinion, is Picasso’s boring poverty of subject matter, the same half dozen subjects again and again – because the interest is in the style and treatment.)

Physics: In Newtonian physics the observer walked through a fixed, mechanical universe and the two (observer and universe) were completely separate. In Einstein’s view, the observer, their position and speed, create the world. The classical separation between observer and observed is eliminated.

Joyce: in the traditional novel the author writes about something, they are separate from the world and depicting it. Joyce takes late-nineteenth century realism and pushes it to the max and beyond, in a text which became notorious for his pedantic attention to detail, for verifying every aspect of the Dublin of June 1904. But in doing so, he created a text which doesn’t depict the world so much as become a world.

And following from that thought is the idea that at just the moment that the novel reached a peak of naturalism, in Joyce’s idiosyncratic hands, it became an utterly verbal construct. The reader may think they’re reading about the street layout or businesses of Dublin but that world of details’ deeper purpose is to create an encyclopedic system of self-referencing verbal nodes – a vast system of references and clues which no reader can hope to encompass and decipher in just one reading, which demands multiple readings, at each of which the reader notices new details and makes new connections. Each reader writes their own version of ‘Ulysses’.

Somehow it manages to be a vast concordance of objective facts and a Rorschach test of subjective responses, at the same time.

Key books about Ulysses

In a useful appendix, Kenner lists and summarises the main scholarly books written about ‘Ulysses’ in the decades between its publication (1922) and this one (1980).

1920: Joyce sent a schema of ‘Ulysses’ i.e. the Homeric title and parallels for each chapter, along with what happens in each, they style and other structural aspects, to Carlo Linati to help him prepare a lecture. In 1921 Joyce sent a comparable schema to Valery Larbaud for a book he was writing. The key thing is that the two schemas differed in many details.

1930: James Joyce’s Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert: helped by Joyce himself, this was a semi-official guide to the book. It revealed an intensely detailed schema Joyce claimed to have worked to, which showed not only the hour-by-hour events of the day, but revealed that they all take place under a specific Symbol, Colour, Bodily Organ, Art and so on, plus the Homeric parallels. So for a while it set everyone looking for systems and structures.

1931: Axel’s Castle by Edmund Wilson set ‘Ulysses’ in the wider context of late nineteenth century European symbolism and modernism. Wilson was puzzled by the aspects which wouldn’t yield to ‘a naturalistic-psychological interpretation’.

1934: James Joyce and the making of Ulysses by Frank Budgen, an ex-sailor and painter, a non-literary type which is why Joyce liked him. Budgen took a more down-to-earth approach, making Bloom an ordinary everyman, the centre of the narrative. It contains accounts of many conversations Joyce had with Budgen about his book as he wrote it in Zurich during the years 1918 to 1920.

1937: Word index to James Joyce’s Ulysses by Miles L. Hanley: meticulously lists and locates every word in James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’, acting as a foundational reference for understanding its complex vocabulary and linguistic patterns.

1939: James Joyce: The Definitive Biography by Herbert Gorman: a modest account, heavily edited by Joyce himself who wanted to present himself as a visionary martyr to art.

1941: James Joyce by Harry Levin: Levin was able to take account of the recent publication of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, which made ‘Ulysses’ no longer the climax of Joyce’s oeuvre but a way station on the road to something even bigger and weirder.

1947: Fabulous Voyager by Richard M. Kain: used both the Word Index and Thom’s Directory to showcase Ulysses’ amazing amount of local fact and detail, and link these with the book’s larger themes.

1958: Joyce among the Jesuits by Kevin Sullivan: analyzing James Joyce’s early life, education and writings, focusing on the profound impact of his Jesuit schooling (at Clongowes Wood and Belvedere College) on his works, particularly ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, exploring themes of faith, rebellion, and the Catholic tradition he later rejected.

1959: James Joyce by Richard Ellmann: transformed Joyce studies with its scale and detail (it contains 50% more words than ‘Ulysses’). In the context of this immense biography, the works shifted from being standalone masterpieces to being episodes in Joyce’s heroic life.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by Hugh Kenner was published by George Allen and Unwin in 1980.

Joyce reviews

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Posted by Simon on March 4, 2026

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Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun

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

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

Part 3. Nostos or Return

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. 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.

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.

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Posted by Simon on February 6, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/06/ulysses-james-joyce-oxen-of-the-sun/

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916)

Joyce is the most intimately autobiographical of writers.
(Hugh Kenner)

By thinking of things, you could understand them.
(Stephen Dedalus as a boy)

Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learnt them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about them.
(Stephen’s boyish fascination with words)

Ad majorem Dei gloriam!
(Motto of the Jesuit order who run the schools where young Stephen is educated)

‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, published in 1916, was the second book and first novel by Irish writer James Joyce, following Dubliners, published in 1914. It is a Bildungsroman, a German term for a novel which describes the growth of a personality or mind, in this case, as the title indicates, it is pretty much a self portrait of the development of Joyce’s mind, although cast in the shape of his fictional alter ego, Stephen Dedalus.

The meaning of his name

Like everything in Joyce, Stephen Dedalus’s name is highly symbolic or meaningful. Stephen was the first Christian martyr, suggesting that the character is the inventor of a new aesthetic, mocked and martyred for a new vision of art. While his surname obviously alludes to Daedalus, the skilled artificer of Greek mythology who built the labyrinth to contain the monstrous Minotaur begging the question, Are the complex texts Stephen creates also designed to hide and contain some monstrous secret? The character is well aware of the connection.

Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy… Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore [Dedalus], a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

One-stop synopsis

So the narrative traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, divided into 5 chapters or phases. In a nutshell, Stephen grows up in a Catholic family which is initially wealthy enough to send him to a private Jesuit school but which then slowly sinks in the world. His education by systematic and intellectual Jesuits decisively forms Stephen’s mind, which becomes highly intellectual and systematic in its turn.

There are various boyhood and schoolboy adventures (the injustice of being ‘pandybatted’ (hit on the palm of his hand by a pandybat) when he had done nothing wrong; an extended passage around a theatrical performance at his secondary school) before Stephen hits puberty in chapter 3 and, as far as I can tell, becomes addicted to masturbation and sleeping with Dublin prostitutes.

This generates feelings of self-loathing which climax when his class at school goes on a four-day Catholic retreat. Here Stephen and his schoolmates are subjected to a series of sermons about hell and damnation which are brilliantly written, unrelenting in their Jesuitical logic, and terrify young Stephen so much that he overcomes his fears and goes to confession for the first time in eight months, and compulsively lists his sexual sins. To my amazement the text tells us that Stephen is, at this stage, still only 16 years old.

After this psychological purgation Stephen feels wonderfully liberated and cleansed and the shortish chapter 4 shows him undertaking a life of devout religious fervour, continually praying, counting off his rosary, observing all the Catholic feast days, and so on. His devoutness brings him to the attention of his teachers and he is called in by the Dean of his school who asks him to reflect on whether he has a vocation to become a priest, prompting the boy Stephen to reflect, not for the first time, on what this life would be like as Father Stephen Dedalus S.J. (i.e. of the Society of Jesus). Only towards the end of the chapter are there signs that he is starting to doubt his own sincerity, starting to doubt how effective his incessant religious practice really is.

The final chapter, chapter 5, is the longest and is set in real time rather than a scene-skipping retrospective. It shows Stephen as a student at Dublin university, placing him among a cohort of students of his own generation. Without much explanation he has shaken off the fervent religious faith and practice we were told about in the previous chapter and is now a cynical, worldly student.

At least that’s how he comes over to his peers, who are also playing at being cynical worldly students. In reality Stephen has retained a lot of his youthful idealism but it has been redirected away from conventional religion towards a religion of Art. (This, of course, very much reflects the fin-de-siecle movement right across Europe towards Art for Art’s Sake and Aestheticism which was – exactly as with Stephen – an attempt to create a secular religion of Art to replace the traditional Christian faith which had been so undermined by all aspects of nineteenth century life, from industrialisation to Darwin’s theory of evolution see Symbolism by Michael Gibson.)

Entirely in keeping with all this, we learn from a conversation he has with the Dean of Studies, that Stephen is working on a long essay on a theory of aesthetics. In chapter 5 he attends a university lecture then walks around Dublin, accompanied by a student friend who (conveniently enough) asks him about his essay, prompting Stephen/Joyce to a long and systematic explanation of his aesthetic theory.

Among other things he speculates that there is an evolution in art forms from the lyric – which is entirely about the artist, a magnification of the artist’s own feelings – to the dramatic, at the other end of the spectrum – in which the artist completely effaces themself in order to present the subject as objectively as possible. However, the artist can never completely eliminate themselves and so, even though they nowhere refer to themselves, their personality remains present in their choice of subject matter and style. This is the context of Stephen’ famous statement:

The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible aesthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Throughout the text, Joyce had dropped in umpteen phrases indicating Stephen’s alienation from his surroundings, from his family, from his friends, from the same old repetitive political issues (Irish nationalism) all of whom he regards with a kind of mocking detachment – and, finally, from the Catholic religion which he at one point embraced with all the enthusiasm he was capable of, before finding his faith slipping away from him. This lifelong sense of being an outsider looking on at everyone else is what underpins the book’s other famous declaration, in the last few pages, where Stephen tells us that he needs to escape the ‘nets’ which trap him.

— 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.

Which he amplifies and explains further:

—Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.

And so the book ends with Stephen determined to fly all the nets which threaten to imprison him and leave Ireland for good. As Joyce himself, of course, did.

Autobiographical timeline

First readers of any of Joyce’s works, especially those featuring Stephen Dedalus, sometimes ask how autobiographical the work is. The answer is, very autobiographical. Here are the relevant dates from Joyce’s own life – you can see how closely they match the career of Stephen Dedalus:

  • 1882 Joyce is born in Rathgar, Dublin on 2 February
  • 1888 Joyce begins school at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare
  • 1891 Has to leave Clongowes when his father could no longer pay the fees; studied at home and briefly attended the Christian Brothers O’Connell School on North Richmond Street, Dublin
  • 1893 Starts attending Belvedere College, a fee-paying day school for boys run by Jesuits; attends for 5 years
  • 1898 Begins college at University College, Dublin, to study English, French and Italian

Publication history

‘A Portrait’ began life in 1904 as ‘Stephen Hero’ — a projected 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After writing 25 chapters, in 1907 Joyce abandoned ‘Stephen Hero’ and set about reworking its themes and protagonist into the condensed five-chapter novel we have now. He abandoned the first novel’s strict realism and switched to making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows the reader to directly share Stephen’s developing consciousness, to feel, see and hear things from Stephen’s point of view.

The American modernist poet Ezra Pound arranged for the novel to be serialised in the English literary magazine The Egoist in 1914 and 1915, and published as a book in 1916 by B.W. Huebsch of New York. The publication of ‘A Portrait’ just two years after the short story collection ‘Dubliners’ (1914) earned Joyce a place at the forefront of literary modernism, a position which was, of course, to be clinched by the scandal and notoriety surrounding the publication of Ulysses, which began to be published in serial form in the literary magazine The Little Review in 1918, finally published in book form in 1922. 1914, 1916, 1918, a concentrated burst of publication which helped cement his reputation.

Here are sometimes abbreviated notes on the individual chapters.

Chapter 1 (48 pages)

Father’s nursery rhyme. Home life with Dante (Mrs Riordan) the nationalist. At school at Clongowes Wood College. Being bullied. Football. The sound of the word suck.

Suck was a queer word. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name because Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect’s false sleeves behind his back and the prefect used to let on to be angry. But the sound was ugly. Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder.

Thoughts about God and the universe. Holidays and prayers. The story of the ghost. The mystery of kissing:

What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?

After being pushed into a mucky ditch by another boy, Wells, Stephen gets a cold. In the infirmary. Friendship with Athy.

He told Stephen that his name was Athy and that his father kept a lot of racehorses that were spiffing jumpers and that his father would give a good tip to Brother Michael any time he wanted it because Brother Michael was very decent and always told him the news out of the paper they got every day up in the castle.

Later, in Chapter 3, Stephen looks back at life at Clongowes which he summarises as: ‘the wide playgrounds, swarming with boys, the square ditch, the little cemetery off the main avenue of limes where he had dreamed of being buried, the firelight on the wall of the infirmary where he lay sick, the sorrowful face of Brother Michael.’

Home for Christmas dinner, which is scene to a flaring row between Mr Dedalus, his friend Mr Casey and inflexible Dante about whether Parnell was hounded to his grave by lackey priests, or deserved punishment for being a fornicator. Story of the famous spit. Mr D says the Irish are ‘A priestridden Godforsaken race!’ When Casey says Ireland must be free of religion (‘No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God!’) devout Dante storms out while Mr Casey burst into tears for his lost leader.

Back at school, gossip about why some fellows (Simon Moonan and Tusker) got a flogging (is it for some kind of homosexual escapade referred to as ‘smugging’?). Because Stephen’s glasses are broken (someone bumped into him and they fell and broke on a cinder path) Father Arnell gives him permission not to write, but when the sadistic Prefect of Studies, Father Dolan, visits his class, he ignores this excuse, accuses Stephen of slacking, calls him to the front of the class and hits him on the hands with a pandybat, inflicting intense pain. Stephen’s sense of injustice is so strong he overcomes his own fear to go down the special corridor to the rector’s room and report it. The rector assures him it must be a mistake and shakes hands. Back among the fellows, Stephen is cheered as a hero.

Chapter 2 (40 pages)

Opens with the Dedalus family enjoying an extended summer holiday in Blackrock, a seaside suburb of Dublin. Stephen accompanies old Uncle Charles on shopping trips. At the park, he is ‘trained’ as a runner by unhealthy looking Mike Flynn, mate of his dad’s, a fad which doesn’t last. On Sundays Stephen goes with his father and grand-uncle on huge walks. He is reading ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ and sees himself as the book’s hero Edmond Dantès seeking for his equivalent of the heroine, Mercedes.

Friendship with Aubrey Mills and they set up a gang but at the end of the summer the gang breaks up. He senses change at home, where his father’s fortunes are failing which is why he isn’t sent back to the fee-paying Clongowes school. The beginnings of the adolescent sense of frustration and aloneness:

The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet.

A fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue… his restless heart… The noise of children at play… made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others…

Removal vans turn up and move the household stuff from Blackrock to a new house in Dublin. Stephen doesn’t like the city, finds it overwhelming. More alienation:

  • his mood of embittered silence… He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses… He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret…

The text breaks down into short vignettes which demonstrate how ‘His silent watchful manner had grown upon him’. In the last of which a young woman is near him on the tram steps. Haunted by her, he goes home and tries to write a poem i.e. burgeoning sensuality and sensitivity.

His father arranges for him to go to a Jesuit day school, Belvedere. Long passage describing the first night of a school play at Belvedere, where Stephen is ragged by his frenemy, Heron. He’s now in the sixth form and filled ‘with unrest and bitter thoughts’. He goes onstage, performs and is so pumped with adrenaline when he comes offstage that he runs right past his waiting parents and wanders the streets till he’s calmed down and can go back.

Stephen accompanies his father on the latter’s nostalgic journey back to Cork. This is mainly to sell some of his remaining property at an auction, a financial necessity reflecting the family’s declining fortunes, but Mr D uses it to recapture his long-vanished youth. Stephen is appalled at his father’s sentimental drinking sessions with his old buddies. He is now permanently filled with self-disgust.

A leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind… Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust.

Stephen wins money for an exhibition (to college?) and a prize, and blows it all on luxuries for his family.

He feels completely alienated from his father, mother and brother (Maurice). He keeps talking about secret riots and orgies (‘dark orgiastic riot’) and living in sin (‘the wasting fires of lust’) so it began to dawn on me maybe all this refers to masturbation. He wanders the streets in a fever of lust. All this leads up to a visit to a prostitute. Lust leads to all other sins:

From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others, covetousness in using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk.

Chapter 3 (39 pages)

A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul.

Stephen has become a regular frequenter of Dublin’s red light district, sauntering and taking prostitutes as his fancy takes him.

He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment.

At Belvedere he now holds the position of prefect of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, responsible for supervising the young boys at Mass, which sits bitterly ironically alongside his night-time debauchery but ‘ The falsehood of his position did not pain him.’

A little way into Chapter 3 his class are sent on a religious retreat which is marked by the series of sermons given by Father Arnall (who appears to be on secondment from Clongowes – after all, they’re both Jesuit establishments). The sermons’ subject is the four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven and hell, and it triggers ‘a crisis of guilt and piety’ in Stephen, prompting a period of profound introspection and desire for repentance but which reads more, to me, like a panic attack:

The next day brought death and judgement, stirring his soul slowly from its listless despair. The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul. He suffered its agony. He felt the deathchill touch the extremities and creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs, the speech thickening and wandering and failing, the heart throbbing faintly and more faintly, all but vanquished, the breath, the poor breath, the poor helpless human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling in the throat. No help! No help!

The sermons describe in exquisitely logical detail: the original sin of Lucifer and his fellow angels who fell from heaven at God’s command; the torments of hell in terrifying detail, beginning with the physical horrors: the pestilential air of hell; the stench of rotting bodies; the nature of the fires of hell which rage intensely and eternally; how the blood and the brains of the sinner boil with no hope of relief; the torment deriving from the squalid company endured by every soul in hell, devils as well as other sinners.

This first sermon leaves Stephen paralysed with fear and convinced that he, personally, is going to hell. After chapel he listens to the trivial talk of the other students who are not as affected by the sermon as he is. There is an academic class, then it’s back to the chapel for another sermon in which Father Arnall continues his tour of hell, switching from physical to spiritual torments, chief among which is the pain of separation from God.

Stephen is terrified all over again. When he goes to his room he hallucinates a devil waiting in it to attack him. When he closes his eyes he has an image of being stuck in a muddy swamp with devil creatures, forever. He runs to the window, throws it open and gasps for air.

Walking through the city that evening he asks an old woman the way to the nearest church, restlessly waits his turn, and then makes a big confession to the priest. We learn that it is 8 long months since his last confession, and that he is a mere boy of 16. The priest offers forgiveness and Stephen walks home feeling light and purged and full of grace.

Chapter 4 (24 pages)

Following on from his confession and feeling of having been born again, Stephen becomes a religious fanatic, living every day and every hour according to optimum best practice, praying all the time, saying his rosary etc. This reaches a climax when he is called in by the director of Belvedere College and asked to ponder whether he thinks he has a vocation for the priesthood which, in fact, is something he has often wondered…

Only slowly, towards the end of the chapter, do doubts set in – and the whole chapter is capped by a walk on the beach where he sees a young woman with her skirt hitched up standing in a stream, and his whole being is shaken, not with lust exactly, but a rarefied sense of her transcendent beauty. I take this moment as symbolising the waning of his religious vocation, and its replacement by a romantic aestheticism.

Chapter 5 (71 pages)

— I have a book at home, said Stephen…

Chapter 5 is the longest one and describes Stephen the university undergraduate. He wakes up, his mother washes his neck, his father yells down the stairs asking whether he’s gone to the campus yet, so Stephen hurries off, reflecting on the urban scene, is briefly accosted by a beggarwoman selling lavender. I’ve given headings to the episodes which follow:

Stephen’s sense of English as an alien tongue

At the university buildings he comes across the Dean of Studies, who is English, and has a famous exchange in which he reflects on how natural the English language sounds on his lips and yet how Stephen can’t help feeling it alien. This all starts because the Dean is filling a lamp with oil and Stephen tells him the device he’s using to do so is called a tundish, a word the Dean has never heard before.

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:
—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

Why consider English foreign but Latin as somehow Irish?

This all very is stirring but I nowadays I perceive it as facile: we all speak a foreign tongue; or, to put it another way, which of us invented the language we speak? None of us. Stephen’s thought is incomplete and doesn’t go far enough. All of us speak words invented by others. If you want to be super-sensitive, we are all oppressed by the un-usness, the non-us origins of the language we are compelled to speak. So what difference does it make whether he speaks words invented by long-dead Gaelic ancestors or long-dead Anglo-Saxons (and Vikings and Normans)? All of us speak words created by long-dead peoples. What alternative is there? Making up our own language?

Inconsistency between Stephen’s attitude to language and to religion

There is also a glaring inconsistency between Stephen’s nationalist approach to language and but subservient approach to religion. He resents speaking ‘another race’s language’ but has no problem at all believing another race’s religion.

Did Stephen invent Christianity? Obviously not. Christianity occurred against the background of Judaism, the sophisticated religion first developed by Jews speaking Hebrew at least two and a half thousand years ago in Palestine; it was created and spread among Jews who spoke Aramaic at the dawn of the Roman Empire; its leading theologians were initially eastern Greeks writing in Greek (the four Gospels are all written in Greek); only centuries later was it co-opted by Romans speaking Latin and then imposed across their empire, under duress – in fact after 380 AD under pain of death – by the brutal Roman Empire.

Which bit of this derived from the Celtic inhabitants of Ireland? Absolutely none of it.

Stephen goes to a school run by Jesuits, a religious order founded by a Spaniard, based in Rome, tasked with wiping out heresy and independent thought all across Europe and then around the brutally exploitative Catholic empires of Spain and Portugal. Stephen prides himself on his independence, on casting off all shackles, but for a while in chapter 4 he contemplates joining this repressive foreign order.

If he feels that English from a few hundred miles away is a foreign imposition on Gaelic-speaking Celts, then why accept 1) a religion created 2,500 miles away (Palestine) which is 2) expressed in a language created 1,100 miles away (Rome)? Why rebel against English linguistic imperialism and whole-heartedly accept Roman religious and linguistic imperialism?

Anti-Britishness

Because Britain was the current imperial oppressor of Ireland when Joyce wrote, and anti-British, pro-independence Irish nationalism was the dominant political issue of his time and the time he describes in his works (the pre-war Edwardian era). This passage describing his alienation from the English language only makes sense against the atmosphere of Irish nationalism i.e. the desire to overthrow everything English as part of a wider Irish national liberation, which pervaded the culture he was raised in and describes.

If he really wanted to escape the detested coloniser’s language a simple solution was ready to hand: why not write in Gaelic, the native speech of what he calls ‘his race’? Like Patrick Pearse, Liam O’Flaherty, and Seán Ó Riordáin? That would have been a simple and decisive statement of independence.

But he didn’t. We know that Joyce studied Gaelic for a while, and knew enough from his general upbringing in Dublin to sprinkle a handful of phrases into his texts. And he wrote in his stories and novels a number of fine-sounding anti-English passages like this. But they’re not borne out by his actual choices. Stephen says ‘I have not made or accepted its words’ but he has, hasn’t he? What language is he writing, thinking, arguing in? Which author does Stephen deliver a long analysis of in ‘Ulysses’? Shakespeare. Not exactly Ireland’s national writer, is he?

I think Joyce is making the character Stephen pose as a linguistic Irish nationalist. In the same way as Stephen will outgrow his high-flown romantic rhetoric by the time of ‘Ulysses’, in the same way as he will have moved drastically on from the aesthetic theory he expounds to Lynch (see below), I think in the same way Stephen will reject this linguistic nationalism. Although part of his sensitive soul will always rebel against it, English it will be.

Davin asks Stephen to ‘Join us…’

Back to the narrative, Stephen attends a lecture in physics, in which various student mates horse around and make clever remarks and continue to do so after the lecture ends and they mill around in the corridors. He encounters fellow students in a semi-schematic way, each one standing for a cause or issue, thus allowing Joyce to state his position on them: the nationalist one, the hearty one, the cynic, the joker and so on.

A case in point is Davin the nationalist who tells Stephen it’s his duty to join the Irish nationalist cause. This dialogue gives rise to a series of much-quoted declarations in which Stephen vehemently rejects Davin’s Irish nationalism.

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.

What does this mean for the anti-English passage about the tundish? I think it means Stephen felt himself between a rock and a hard place. With his immense sensitivity to language he resiles against the feel of English words in his mouth. And yet he in no way wants to be hamstrung and confined by the crude rhetoric of Irish nationalism which we see him angrily rejecting here, and brutally lampooning in the Cyclops episode of ‘Ulysses’. The only way out of feeling trapped by all these fences, is to get out, to flee the country which places him in this (and other) impossible quandaries.

This is why the Irish have such an ambivalent attitude towards Joyce. He provided them fine-sounding nationalist quotes such as the one quoted above. But scratch the surface, actually read Dubliners, let alone ‘Ulysses’ and you come to think that he maybe despised his own fellow countrymen as much as he resented British cultural rule.

Stephen expounds his aesthetic theory to Lynch

Tiring of his argument with Davin, Stephen takes his mate Lynch for a walk in which Stephen lays out the main points of his essay on aesthetics. He makes some lofty definitions:

—Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.

He tells Lynch that literature is ‘the highest and most spiritual art’ – which will come as a surprise to all composers and musicians.

He claims to have achieved what Aristotle failed to do, which is to provide clear definitions of pity and fear, thus underpinning the ancient Greek’s analysis of tragedy as a genre. The central idea is that the highest aesthetic experience is static – any artistic artefact which creates kinetic feelings (for example, desire or repulsion) is impure. The highest art is static and, as he goes on to explain, utterly detached.

Stephen posits four types of literature

He suggests that it comes in four forms or genres which exist on a spectrum defined by the writer’s relationship with their material: At one end, 1) the lyrical represents a direct expression of the writer’s feelings; 2) the epical arises when the writer thinks of himself in relation to an epical event; 3) the narrative is when ‘the personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea’; and 4) the dramatic is reached when ‘the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life’. At this point, Stephen speaks a passage which became famous and much quoted:

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Brief reaction to Stephen’s aesthetic

This and what follows is fine and clever and has been quoted and debated over for a century. But it is, in a sense, irrelevant. From Dada and surrealism onwards, art has increasingly been whatever artists say it is and an artist is someone who is accepted as such by the self-policing community of artists, critics and curators.

Of course there’s been extremely clever debate about aesthetics for as long as human beings have been writing, some two and a half thousand years, and certain ideas – or maybe a better word is ‘obsessions’ or maybe ‘dead ends’ – recur again and again. But the mere fact that there has been so much energetic debate proves the simple point that there is not now, and never has been, any broad agreement about art and aesthetics. Any definition of art you settle on will leave out huge swathes of what people think of as ‘art’, while artists themselves have come up with all kinds of definitions of art which generally supported whichever kind of art they happened to make.

The study of aesthetics is a bottomless pit, an endless ocean, which it’s fun to swim and play in. But anyone who expects to discover some kind of ‘truth’ or settled definition, doesn’t understand the nature of the game they’re playing.

Joyce’s theory doesn’t even apply to his own book

So I read Stephen’s aesthetic theory with interest, noted his invoking of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s definition of the work of art as requiring three qualities – integritas, consonantia and claritas – but yet another intellectual fussing about Aristotle’s two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old definitions of pity and tragedy, or worrying about the formal attributes of ancient Greek literary genres, or redefining Thomistic terminology, couldn’t be further from our modern reality.

None of Stephen’s elaborate theory really applies to this book itself. ‘A Portrait’ is not an ‘aesthetic object’, not a picture or a statue you can pick up and move around, but a text which contains hundreds of passages and moments, most of which are far from static and far from isolated in the sense which the Thomas term integritas implies but are, on the contrary, part of a continuous narrative or flow of text, each element leading on to the next, each new element adjusting and changing your understanding of the previous ones, a process which continues after you’ve finished reading the book and dip into the secondary literature around it, or go on to read another book by the same author or from the same period or about the same subject.

The actual lived experience of reading this, as any, book is the precise opposite of an isolated moment of aesthetic stasis but is instead a collection of Joyce-flavoured passages within the endless flux of texts which themselves form part of the broader, never-ending flux of our lives.

The role of comedy in debunking Stephen’s high-falutin theories

So Stephen’s long disquisition reaches its climax with the claim that the godlike detachment of the writer mirrors the non-kinetic, godlike stasis triggered by the ideal work of art. But throughout the lecture, Joyce has been well aware of how pompous and pretentious this all risks sounding – and this is why he has Stephen 1) not write it out in one continuous essay 2), nor think it to himself, but 3) enunciate it all in dialogue with Lynch, and the main reason for this is so that Lynch can keep interjecting jokes.

Lynch fails to understand bits, takes the mickey out of Stephen’s phrasing, makes mock tributes, tells Stephen he’s forgotten key definitions so Stephen has to repeat them, and so on and so on. In other words, Joyce puts a lot of effort into dramatising the presentation of his theory; and, in my opinion, this is partly what makes it so memorable.

This strategy of Joyce’s tends to be overlooked or forgotten by critics who extract from the extended dialogue the bits they need to quote to summarise the theory but, in my opinion, it’s the way it is part of an extended and often comic dialogue which makes it so memorable.

Thus, as Stephen reaches the climactic part of the theory, it starts to rain and Lynch jokes:

—What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this country.

(Incidentally, a few days later, I was reading Hugh Kenner’s book about ‘Ulysses’, in which he quotes Ezra Pound saying that Joyce complained to him, ‘If only someone would say the book was so damn funny.’ So I’m agreeing with Joyce’s opinion of his own works. Woven among the Jesuitical theology and the Thomist aesthetics, there are lots of sly Irish gags.)

Stephen’s invisible girlfriend

The outbreak of rain ends Stephen’s long disquisition, as he and Lynch hurry to take shelter under an arcade of the university, and it is here that Stephen sees his girlfriend (again). Now the notes tell me that the beloved young woman who haunts this final chapter is called Emma Clery but her name is very well hidden: a control + f search of the entire online text reveals just three mentions of ‘Emma’ and none at all of ‘Clery’, so I’m puzzled how commentators have extracted her name so confidently.

Reflecting on her near invisibility, I wondered whether she isn’t named because her role is to be The Woman With No Name; more precisely, her function is to be a semi-abstract peg for Stephen’s resentment and jealousy, notably when he sees her (in two earlier scenes I haven’t mentioned yet) joking with a priest and/or flirting with Cranly. I’m not sure we even get to hear her speak, certainly Stephen doesn’t have a dialogue with her as he does with his male friends. So she’s the Nearly Invisible and Totally Silent Woman.

Maybe there’s another, more bucket reason. It was arduous enough for Joyce just to nail down Stephen’s aesthetic theory and relationships with fellow male students. As it is, this final chapter which contains all this intellectual content is longer than the preceding four and already contains several abrupt cuts of scene. Maybe if Joyce had embarked on describing a full-blown love affair for Stephen, it would have doubled or tripled the size of the chapter and ended up distracting attention away from his political and artistic statements. Seen in this practical way, maybe Emma’s elusiveness and the role assigned her simply reflect the lack of space for her in Joyce’s overall design.

Whatever the precise reason, Emma’s role as a fleeting presence who never speaks but nonetheless haunts Stephen’s consciousness certainly fits with the rest of his character. It is entirely characteristic of the alienated outsider we have seen him to be in so many previous situations, that Stephen makes no effort to go and talk to her even when she’s only ten yards away, but prefers to watch, and bubble over with resentment and jealousy, from a distance.

Stephen composes a poem (by Shelley)

I mentioned abrupt cuts. One occurs in the middle of the chapter. After the long walk with Lynch and the exhaustive exposition of aesthetic theory ends with the pair taking shelter in the arcades and spotting his lady love at a distance, does the scene develop in any natural way i.e. Stephen goes after her, talks to her, or goes on to hang with his pals maybe go for a drink?

No, none of those. There is a line space and suddenly the narrative cuts to the next morning and Stephen waking up in his bedroom from a lovely dream and reaching out for pen and paper to write down a poem which has come to him. The next few pages are presumably Joyce’s attempt to describe the state of mind in which lines of poetry come to you, you shape and perfect them, and they trigger more until the poem feels ‘finished’ i.e. you have no more to say. I’ve had this experience many times as, I imagine, have hundreds of millions of other people, maybe most of my readers… It’s a common enough sensation among bookish people.

Here’s the first verse of Stephen’s poem:

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

What’s really striking is the fantastically old-fashioned Shelleyan style of the poem. In fact it may be deliberately echoing the famous Shelley fragment which Stephen quotes in chapter 2:

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless…?

Although the line length is different, the wistful sentiment is very similar. In fact, having read and reread it I’ve realised it’s as much late-Victorian, fin-de-siecle as Shelleyan. ‘Lure of the fallen seraphim’ is deliberately langorous and sensual, with hints of naughty Wildean transgressions (in strict Christian theology there is nothing alluring about the fallen angels; they are devils pure and simple; only in the naughty Nineties did lots of poets and artists flirt with blasphemy, black magic, Salome etc etc). Maybe it would be more accurate to attribute it to Swinburne, the naughty boy of Victorian poetry, rather than Shelley the romantic angel.

Anyway, the writing of the poem takes place across several pages of the novel. Maybe it’s meant to be a practical demonstration of the creation of a literary work which fits the aesthetic theory he outlined at such length to Lynch the day before; maybe Stephen is putting his money (metre) where his mouth is.

The pages describing the composition are also meshed with Stephen’s feelings about his beloved (the elusive Emma he saw the day before) who he is cross with for flirting (he thinks) with one of the priests. In angry jealousy Stephen says he doesn’t care if she throws away her beauty (and lovely body) on ‘the unworthy’. In other words, even here at the end of the novel he is displaying standard Goth, alienated teenager feelings.

Stephen wants to be free as a bird

Cut to later on this second day and Stephen standing outside the National Library and looking up at birds wheeling in the sky. Are they swallows which migrate from the south? This introduces the theme of flight and exile.

He comes across some mates inside the library, they chat and then, mindful of being told off for talking, leave, engaging in banter in the corridors: these buddies are Cranly, Temple, Dixon, O’Keeffe, Goggins. Older and less impressed by Stephen’s purist theories, I am (as I explained above) more entertained by the humour of these student scenes.

The stout student who stood below them on the steps farted briefly. Dixon turned towards him, saying in a soft voice:
—Did an angel speak?

Amid all this banter, Stephen again sees HER walking away from the library and is mixed up in a confusion of memories, something to do with her body and her smell but also a teenage attempt to save himself by damning and scorning her.

Well then, let her go and be damned to her! She could love some clean athlete who washed himself every morning to the waist and had black hair on his chest. Let her.

Reading this you realise that, for all his precocious reinterpreting of Aristotle and Aquinas, Stephen is emotionally still a child.

Stephen’s last walk with Cranly

Stephen goes for the last of the walks which characterise this chapter, this time with his best friend Cranly. Their conversation turns to the fact that Stephen has argued with his mother: she wants him to take mass at Easter and he refuses to. In a half-joking way, Cranly presents a series of arguments for why Stephen should, from theological reasons (is he not afraid of damnation?) to humane (his mother has had a hard life; if he disbelieves in religion, why not go through this performance in order to make her happy?). The dialogue is crafted to build up to Stephen’s angry declaration that he will not submit or as he puts it, a bit more pompously, he will not serve.

—Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.

This is often quoted as a version of Joyce’s own manifesto. Less noticed is the way it is undercut by Cranly making jokes, much as Stephen’s earlier disquisition about aesthetics was undercut by Lynch’s joshing. Less impressed by Joyce’s rhetoric than I was as a young man, what I notice this time round is how all the high-minded statements appear in dialectic tension with comic responses. Stephen rarely makes any serious declaration without having some school or student buddy around to deflate him.

Stephen’s diary

In the last four pages the text disintegrates (again). Right at the start, ‘A Portrait’ opened with the disjointed perceptions of a very small child. Now, right at the end, the continuous narrative falls back into disintegrated fragments, in this case into four pages of brief diary entries, starting 20 March and ending on 27 April, so covering 38 days in total. They end with a phrase Joyce must have realised sounds ridiculously immature and overblown:

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

This kind of thing is widely quoted as expressing Joyce’s attitude. But in my opinion, like the overblown romanticism of other final passages, it instead indicates Stephen’s emotional and intellectual immaturity. I.e. it is a limited, imperfect and slightly ludicrous character who says this, not the canny author (aged 34 when the novel was published).

Cast

Sometimes creating a cast list sheds different light on the text, highlights characters as motifs, suggests alternative routes through the story. Also, it’s just handy to remember key attributes of leading figures.

Family

  • Stephen Dedalus – the main protagonist, who we follow from small boyhood, through junior school, secondary school and on to university, as he experiences all the stages of growing up from being bullied at school to adolescence where he goes through phases of sexual debauchery, then of religious enthusiasm, before his final dedication to a religion of art; named Stephen because Stephen was the first Christian martyr, and Dedalus after the ingenious inventor from Greek mythology
  • Simon Dedalus – Stephen’s father, a former medical student whose fortunes decline throughout the book, forcing the family to move from a large house in the suburb of Blackrock into a smaller house within Dublin itself; he’s a good man but, like many sons, Stephen is embarrassed by his sentimentalism and increasing drunkenness
  • Dante (Mrs. Riordan) – governess to the two Dedalus children, Stephen and Maurice, a devout and fiery Catholic who has a bitter argument with Simon and his friend about the fate of the Irish nationalist leader Parnell. In ‘Ulysses’, chapter 17, detail is given: ‘Mrs Riordan (Dante), a widow of independent means, had resided in the house of Stephen’s parents from 1 September 1888 to 29 December 1891 and had also resided during the years 1892, 1893 and 1894 in the City Arms Hotel owned by Elizabeth O’Dowd of 54 Prussia street where, during parts of the years 1893 and 1894, she had been a constant informant of [Leopold] Bloom who resided also in the same hotel.’
  • Uncle Charles – Stephen’s great uncle who lives with the family. Young Stephen enjoys taking long walks with his uncle and listening to Charles and Simon discuss the history of both Ireland and the Dedalus family
  • Mike Flynn – a friend of his father’s who tries to train Stephen as an athlete with little success
  • Aubrey Mills – friend his own age Stephen forms a gang with for adventures one summer
  • Mary Dedalus – Stephen’s mother, a shadowy figure who rarely appears or talks: who tries to keep the peace at the big Christmas day argument, a lot later chides Stephen for being late to lectures; her most notable appearance is when, at the start of chapter 5, she washes his neck and face from a bowl of hot water
  • Cranly – Stephen’s best friend at university who he confides in

At Clongowes Wood College (as a boy)

  • Nasty Roche –
  • Saurin
  • Cantwell
  • Jack Lawton
  • Wells – taunts the boy Stephen for kissing his mother before he goes to bed, and one day he pushes Stephen into a dirty cesspool, causing Stephen to catch a bad fever and be sent to the infirmary
  • Rody Kickham
  • Simon Moonan
  • Tusker
  • Corrigan
  • McGlade
  • Fleming – who gets pandybatted
  • Paddy Rath and Jimmy Magee
  • Cecil Thunder

Staff

  • Father Conmee – rector i.e. headmaster of the school
  • Father Arnall – Latin teacher who stands by and lets Stephen get pandybatted; he later reappears on the religious retreat from Belvedere and delivers the series of sermons which terrify Stephen
  • Father Dolan – bully who unfairly pandybats Stephen
  • Brother Michael – the kindly brother who tends to Stephen and Athy in the Clongowes infirmary after Wells pushes Stephen into the cesspool

At Belvedere (as a teenager)

  • Vincent Heron – Stephen’s antagonist, always ready to rap his calves with his cane
  • Boland – Heron sidekick
  • Wallis – Heron sidekick
  • Nash – Heron sidekick
  • Doyle – producing the school play which Stephen appears in
  • Mr Tate – English master, erroneously thinks he detects Stephen committing a heresy in an essay

At the beach he sees some of his schoolfriends stripped to their trunks:

  • Shuley without his deep unbuttoned collar
  • Ennis without his scarlet belt with the snaky clasp
  • Connolly without his Norfolk coat with the flapless sidepockets

At university

  • Davin – the peasant student who tells the story of a peasant woman, Irish nationalist, asks Stephen why he doesn’t learn Gaelic and become ‘one of us’; his insistence that Stephen devote himself to the cause of Irish independence prompts one of Stephen’s famous outbursts: ‘—Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.’
  • Cranly – Stephen’s best friend at the university, a kind of secular confessor
  • MacCann – politically committed student who tries to recruit Stephen to the causes of world peace etc: ‘MacCann began to speak with fluent energy of the Tsar’s rescript, of Stead, of general disarmament, arbitration in cases of international disputes, of the signs of the times, of the new humanity and the new gospel of life which would make it the business of the community to secure as cheaply as possible the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number.’
  • Temple – with his dark gypsy eyes, literal-minded and limited he admires and tries to copy the cleverer students, leading Cranly to mock him: ‘You flaming floundering fool! I’ll take my dying bible there isn’t a bigger bloody ape, do you know, than you in the whole flaming bloody world!’
  • Lynch – a coarse and dryly sarcastic student who is even poorer than Stephen; big and muscular with a ‘whinny like an elephant’; but it is Lynch that Stephen explains his theory of aesthetics to as they walk round Dublin
  • Moynihan – witty student, prone to whispering comic remarks to Stephen
  • Donovan – member of the university field club
  • Glynn – a student who gives private tuition, Cranly calls him ‘a bloody ape’

Theology

Clearly the central chapter containing the hellfire sermons is awash with precise and detailed theology. I am not qualified and not particularly interested in enumerating and analysing it.

He found an arid pleasure in following up to the end the rigid lines of the doctrines of the church and penetrating into obscure silences…

The sermons are constructed with impressive logic and have an awesome rhetorical and emotional effect… And yet I was more entertained by a passage where Stephen dwells on the absurdities which theological speculation can lead you into:

If a man had stolen a pound in his youth and had used that pound to amass a huge fortune how much was he obliged to give back, the pound he had stolen only or the pound together with the compound interest accruing upon it or all his huge fortune? If a layman in giving baptism pour the water before saying the words is the child baptised? Is baptism with a mineral water valid? How comes it that while the first beatitude promises the kingdom of heaven to the poor of heart, the second beatitude promises also to the meek that they shall possess the land? Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and as man?

This has more the feel of Rabelais or scholastic satirists of the minutiae of Catholic philosophising.

Style

Initially I was impressed by the sensual lyricism of many passages, dawn or dusk in the city, the soft beauty of women etc. But as in ‘Dubliners’, I was also aware that Joyce’s prose is not as relaxed as it first appears; after a while you realise it is more studied and detached than it seems, more calculating.

When I read ‘A Portrait’ as a boy I was duly terrified by the series of retreat sermons; now, 40 years later, I am still impressed by the power of the rhetoric but what I notice is Joyce’s careful structuring of his material: the overall structure of subject matter, its crisp division into focused paragraphs, and, within individual sentences 1) an insistence on the logic of the content or 2) an intense attention to the detail of description, both of which take precedence over everyday word order and rhythm.

They are just the most obvious way in which Joyce’s careful and elaborate phrasing can make many of his sentences feel clotted and effortful, a little stilted, a little formal, pedantic, continually drawing attention to their own grammatical correctitude. Officiously accurate. Nitpickingly precise. Even at his most lyrical, there’s always a kind of metallic finish to Joyce’s prose.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird.

I know this particular passage is meant to be sensual and overblown romantic. I know it also indicates the way Stephen’s taste is still adolescent and immature. But I also feel the tremendous control and intentionality of it.

Detachment battles passion

The text bombards us with messages about Stephen’s cold, aloof, detachment:

His silent watchful manner had grown upon him and he took little part in the games…

He, apart from them and in silence..

‘You’re a terrible man, Stevie, said Davin, taking the short pipe from his mouth, always alone.’

And yet at the same time we know from the hundreds of passages of free indirect speech, that Stephen’s mind is a seething swamp of angers and resentments, of lusts and self-hatred or, as Cranly puts it: ‘You’re an excitable bloody man, do you know.’

I’ve already argued that the aesthetic of stasis and detachment which Stephen so famously expounds is wildly inappropriate for a form like the novel, and especially Joyce’s own novels, which unravel in all directions and are thus the precise opposite of detached and static objets d’art.

But there’s another way of thinking about Stephen’s theory, namely it could be interpreted in psychological terms as a man permanently driven by wild passions trying to establish control of himself. That it’s not just an aesthetic aim but a psychological goal. That what he’s really talking about is a kind of therapy. He wishes his mind was more calm and cold and detached and static, and not the seething swamp of lusts and resentments which the novel very vividly describes it as being.

Super-romanticism

One subset of Stephen’s stormy, troubled personality is his penchant for exceedingly lush hyper-romantic visions and sensations. On and on he goes about logic and detachment and yet the novel abounds in passages which demonstrate the precisely opposite qualities:

He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.

Is this parody or does he actually believe in writing like this? Many a natural description throughout the book is in this tenor:

Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of skyline, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

‘Cleft’? No wonder young Stephen tells Heron his favourite poet is Lord Byron. When, half-way through chapter 5, he awakes from an enchanted sleep with a poem echoing in his mind and hurries to write it down, it is a clear pastiche of Shelley or his mid-Victorian avatar Swinburne.

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

And here is young Stephen is sounding even more like Shelley in prophetic mode, imagining himself as:

a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.

Joyce may have been taken up by Pound as a saint of modernism but reading the many, many passages like this can’t help but convince that his core values are arch-Romantic. And the characteristic aspect of romanticism is self-indulgence, indulgence of The Self, a grandiose rejoicing in the importance of our own emotions:

He spoke the verses aloud from the first lines till the music and rhythm suffused his mind, turning it to quiet indulgence…

A few pages later he watches birds flying which triggers a snatch of poetry and responds:

A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal, and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret, quietly and swiftly.

I can see it’s beautifully, sensitively written. But I am also aware behind everything he published of Joyce’s steely focus.

Aesthetic

The last third or so of the book deal with Stephen’s development of an aesthetic. This has provided grist for tens of thousands of books, articles and papers. What struck me as key to his entire attitude is Joyce and Stephen’s poor sight as described in this passage.

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:
—A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

Having poor sight, Joyce is less distracted by the richness of the actual visual world and leans more towards its description in words. Indeed, as we have seen, the text repeatedly describes Stephen’s fascination with the sound of certain words (kiss, tundish, mulier) right from the start.

The focus of all his writings on the quality of words and language have proved a goldmine to academics, accompanying as they do the entire twentieth century ‘linguistic turn’, the turn towards endless theories of language, its structure, its fugitive nature, the way it creates and encodes reality and much more. Joyce is like the patron saint of this movement whose handful of revolutionary texts provide an endless reservoir of reinterpretations.

Poverty

Anyway, rereading Joyce as a middle-aged man who’s struggled to raise a family, I am less impressed by the flashy manifesto commitments of an over-intellectual youth and this time round noticed other, less prominent aspects of the novel. I’ve mentioned the sly ubiquity of the humour, easy to miss if you’re dazzled by the nationalist posing, the theology and aesthetics. Another is Stephen’s sheer poverty.

In the course of the book, the Dedalus family really goes down in the world. At the start of chapter 5 they are living in a poor dirty house. As he prepares to leave for his morning lecture, Stephen looks with pity at his younger brothers and sisters who will never enjoy the privileged education he had. They use jam jars instead of teacups. When he wants to write his poem down Stephen has to do it on a torn-open fag packet. When he walks in the street, he stumbles because the broken soul of his shoe snags in a grating. At the university physics lecture he has to ask a colleague for a sheet of paper to make notes on because he has no paper of his own. Breakfast is watery tea and crusts of fried bread. Supper is a bowl of rice, like a poor Chinese peasant. None of this is dwelt on but is what struck me this time round.

And the other members of his swarming impoverished family? His father and great-uncle Charles loom large in the early chapters but there’s no mention of Charles (presumed dead) at the start of the climactic chapter 5, where his father only makes an off-stage appearance, a voice yelling down the stairs to see whether he’s left for university yet, and his mother actually appears but only briefly, to wash his neck and tell him off for being late.

But it’s his kid brothers and sisters which get me. Before he leaves their slum for the university, Stephen looks at them with pity, knowing they’ll never have the advantages he’s had. At one point he tells Cranly in an offhand manner that his mother bore nine or ten children and that some died (!). We never learn how many there are, although a couple of names are casually mentioned (Katey, Maggie, Boody). What did they think of him, Mr Linguistic Nationalism, Mr Romantic Poet? What did they make of their too-clever, self-obsessed, lucky older brother, the one who fled to the continent and abandoned the family to its poverty?

I wonder if anyone’s ever written a short story or novel about Stephen Dedalus’s siblings in which the great Martyr to Art appears as the self-centred narcissist that he so clearly is?

Comparison with Katherine Mansfield

I read all of Joyce while still at school and then reread ‘Ulysses’ when I had to study it at university. I was swept up by the depth of Joyce’s intellectual worldview and readily agreed with the idea that he had a Shakespearian grasp of language. But now, 40 years later, I’m not so convinced. The persistent romanticism, the frequent passages of olde worlde, Shelleyan lyricism, now come across to me as very dated and as dating the entire text. While its main appeal, from the hellfire sermon onwards, is in the rigour and thoroughness of Stephen’s intellectual positions, 1) first Catholic, 2) then aesthetic.

I have, I think, two objections: One is that I now have no sympathy at all with any of his intellectual positions; I can 1) appreciate the thoroughness of the sermon and the intellectual structure of his Catholic belief, and 2) I sort of sympathise with the aesthetic position he reaches, but I just disagree with both.

My worldview is based on 1) biology, biochemistry and Darwinian evolution (Stephen explicitly dismisses Darwin at one point, which I simply regard as a profound intellectual mistake), and 2) my aesthetic position is an acceptance of the wild chaos of aesthetic theories produced by the twentieth century, not to mention the new ones being created by the digital age. The world, and the world of art, are so chaotic there is no point restricting yourself to one theory or type of response. The opposite; you should be open to as many ways as possible of receiving and responding to works of art. Stephen’s scholarly reintepretations of Aristotle and Aquinas strike me as impressive achievements which are completely irrelevant to anyone except scholars and students having to write about them.

The second objection is that the whole things seems too calculated; it too obviously has designs on me and on all its readers. ‘A Portrait’ is packed with not just subtle symbolism, but the structuring of incidents and the narrative as a whole according to clever references and precedents, are designed to encourage attentive readers to spot them, unravel them, and construct multiple frameworks of interpretation.

In this it was a spectacular success: there was already a cohort of fans busily decoding the text’s meanings even before ‘Ulysses’ was published, based on the instalments published in the Little Review. The advent of the finished book signalled the start of the Joyce industry which has grown hand-in-hand with the growth of Literary studies as an academic discipline. A century later, there are more essays, papers, articles and books written about Joyce than any one person could read, along with more seminars, lectures and conferences than any one person could possibly attend.

When I was a student I contributed my grain of sand to this mountain (I was particularly proud of an essay which compared the use of the ‘epiphany’ in the works of Joyce and Kafka) but now it turns me off.

And so to my own surprise, of the works I’ve read over the past few months, I’m surprised to find myself preferring Katherine Mansfield’s short stories to Joyce. I can see and understand Joyce’s mastery as a writer, his astonishing control of structure and symbolism, his fluency. But whether due to age and fatigue, or to having had a family of my own and been through various tribulations, I find life stranger and more uncanny than ever; and so I find the systematisation in Joyce – the creation of multiple systems of symbolism, resonance and meaningful structuring – I find his control to be metallic and repelling.

Whereas the 33 Mansfield short stories I read before Christmas are a) less controlled and systematic and so more accurately reflect the chaotic unplanned nature of life; and b) within each story the meanings are beautifully fugitive, fleeting; at every moment in a Mansfield story strange things happen, people’s lives are disrupted, events and emotions they can’t control derail their intentions, upsetting their entire understanding of their lives, and even what it means to be alive. This, it seems to me, is more what life is like, even the etiolated intellectual life Joyce is ostensibly recording.

There is no strangeness in Joyce; everything is controlled, every detail is subordinated to a very canny plan, and this is all very well in its own terms – nobody ever constructed a bigger, more multi-levelled matrix of meanings and symbols and associations than ‘Ulysses’. And yet one short story by Katherine Mansfield says more to me about the strangeness, the uncontrolledness and the uncanniness of human existence, than all of Joyce.

Credit

‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ by James Joyce was published in 1916 by B.W. Huebsch.

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Posted by Simon on January 28, 2026

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Dubliners by James Joyce (1914)

Dublin is such a small city: everyone knows everyone else’s business.
(The Boarding House)

Dubliners, that book of traps…
(Literary critics Hugh Kenner)

‘Dubliners’ is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, written between 1904 and 1907, and published as one volume, after various problems and delays, in 1914. The earlier ones are mostly pretty short and so have been described as vignettes, a vignette being ‘a brief evocative description, account or episode.’ The later ones are longer and more complex.

On the face of it the Dubliners stories present naturalistic depictions of Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early twentieth century, although some readers, and subsequently a small army of academic scholars, have detected all manner of subtle symbolism and clever structuring in all of them.

  1. The Sisters (9 pages)
  2. An Encounter (9 pages)
  3. Araby (7 pages)
  4. Eveline (6 pages)
  5. After the Race (7 pages)
  6. Two Gallants (11 pages)
  7. The Boarding House (8 pages)
  8. A Little Cloud (14 pages)
  9. Counterparts (12 pages)
  10. Clay (8 pages)
  11. A Painful Case (10 pages)
  12. Ivy Day in the Committee Room (17 pages)
  13. A Mother (13 pages)
  14. Grace (22 pages)
  15. The Dead (41 pages)

1. The Sisters

A young boy is taken to see the lying-in of his dead priest.

A young boy who lives with his philistine uncle and aunt, reacts to the death of an old priest, the reverend James Flynn, who taught him much. From the start he is very alert to words, he lives through words which are as real as people:

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

The title comes from the fact that the narrator is taken by his aunt to visit the two spinster sisters who looked after the dead man, Eliza and Nanny, to be shown the corpse in his coffin, then have a glass of sherry and a gossip.

2. An Encounter

Two schoolboys run into a flasher.

Another story about boyhood but told in a much more stilted and pompous style:

A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one.

Three boys bunk off school to go swanning round Dublin.

We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce—the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing-vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay.

Except one of them, tubby Joe Dillon, doesn’t show up. So the narrator and Mahony roam round town till they come to rest in a field. Here they approached by a furtive old pervert, ‘a queer old josser!’ He asks about their girlfriends, talking about girls in a strange obsessive way. He excuses himself and goes off to a corner of the field and, it is strongly implied, masturbates.

After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim: “I say! Look what he’s doing!”

Then he comes back to the boys and, when Mahony goes off chasing a cat, launches into a monologue about how such boys should be whipped, repeating the word and idea obsessively.

It’s an encounter with a ‘flasher’, a case of indecent exposure, for sure, and creepy. But the man is also a type of mental blockage and paralysis, unable to get beyond his maundering obsessively repetitive phrases about girls and whipping. Perversion as paralysis.

3. Araby

An adolescent boy tries to impress an older girl he has a crush on but fails.

Everything around Joyce becomes charged with meanings and symbolism. So the apparently simple opening sentence is both realistic and symbolic:

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free.

One way to start with Joyce is not the awe-ful weight of the intellectual frameworks and symbolism, but more simply responding to his lyricism.

When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.

The narrator is a pubescent boy who is romantically obsessed with the sister of his schoolfriend Mangan, who lives in the house opposite. He takes her image in his heart everywhere, amid the hurly-burly of the Dublin streets and shops, giving rise to the famous sentence:

I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.

A bazaar comes to town. In an unclear passage, the narrator thinks Mangan’s sister says she wishes she could go but her convent are going on a retreat, so he promises to go and bring her back a present. All weeks he shirks schoolwork, burning to perform his quest for beautiful Mangan’s sister.

When Saturday comes he waits for his uncle (who’s gone out) to get home and give him a little pocket money to go to the bazaar but uncle, a bit drunk, doesn’t get home till past nine, and has to be reminded to give the boy some money.

He hastens to the train station to catch a train out to the bazaar and doesn’t make it till nearly ten, as it’s closing up, desolate and empty. He walks among different stalls, is asked whether he wants to buy anything by a bored shop assistant, reluctantly says no, and walks back through the now-empty bazaar, burning with humiliation.

Another story about frustration and paralysis and unfreedom.

4. Eveline

Young Evelyn is invited by her boyfriend to elope abroad and escape her closeted life, but at the last minute bottles out.

Eveline Hill is about to elope with a young fellow. She takes a last look round the family home, at the rooms she’s dusted once a week, at the estate of new houses which used to be fields where she played with her childhood friends, all grown up and moved away now. Reflecting on the weekly struggle to pool her own earnings at the department store where she is routinely demeaned, with whatever she can extract from her drunken bully of a father. She promised her dying mother to keep the home together as long as she could but the time has come. She’s been walking out with a young sailor named Frank, tall and handsome who’s back in Ireland on holiday from the merchant ships. Her father found out about the affair and tried to ban it. But now she’s written goodbye letters to him and to her surviving brother, Harry. When she remembers her mother’s final descent into madness, she is overcome with panic:

She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.

The short text cuts to her standing with Frank amid the swirling quay by the huge ship set to sail across the sea to Buenos Aires and when it comes to it, she has a panic attack, clutches the railing, and cannot move.

5. After the Race

Swept up into a glamorous international set, a rich young man gambles away the money entrusted to him by his father.

Crowds are gathered to watch an international car race through the roads around Dublin, a place characterised by ‘poverty and inaction’. The story focuses on the four young men crewing one of the motor cars.

  1. Charles Ségouin, the owner of the car
  2. André Rivière, his cousin, a young electrician of Canadian birth – both about to start a motor establishment in Paris with Rivière
  3. Villona – a huge Hungarian devoted to his food
  4. Jimmy Doyle – a neatly groomed young man, with a soft, light brown moustache and rather innocent-looking grey eyes

After the race, the four young men go on a prolonged binge. It starts with dinner at Doyle’s house where they are indulged by Doyle senior, a wealthy businessman who made his money the hard way. It is emphasised that Doyle senior has been grooming his son to take over the family business, sent him to posh private (Catholic) school in England, then to Cambridge where an indulgent father picked up the tab for young Jimmy’s moderate debauchery. Doyle senior has encouraged Jimmy’s friendship with Ségouin and this has crystallised into an agreement that the Doyles will invest in Ségouin’s new car company in France.

They had already bumped into an English chum, Routh who they bring to dinner. Afterwards, out on the town, they bump into another pal in the street, a rich American named Farley and drunkenly row out to his yacht anchored in the bay. Here there is heavy duty drunken gambling and, the implication is, Doyle gambles away all the money which was meant to be his family’s investment in Ségouin’s business.

The unsung hero of the piece is the Hungarian Villona who is on the face of it a greedyguts only interested in food but turns out to be knowledgeable about English madrigals, of all subjects, and is wise enough to sit out the card game and play the piano. Wisdom.

6. Two Gallants

A parasite waits for a cocky ladykiller to inveigle money out of his latest squeeze.

Lenehan is a leech, a ravaged-looking hanger-on, a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of stories, limericks and riddles who inveigles himself into partying groups. One evening he’s walking along with Corley, a swaggering police inspector’s son, who’s telling him all about a tart he picked up and has been seeing regularly; that they catch a tram out to the fields to have sex (he’s vaguely worried about her getting pregnant) but as important as the sex is the free fags and cigars she brings to every rendezvous. Lenehan listens and applauds and is all oily servility.

They walk through Dublin towards Corley’s rendezvous with the woman, Corley all the way regaling Lenehan with stories of past conquests. They come to the place where the girl is waiting and Lenehan gets a good look at here, minutely described. She looks like a tarty pig. Corley and she stroll off leaving Lenehan to kill time, because for some reason he is anxious to meet up with Corley afterwards, he is counting on Corley to pull off some kind of scam.

He pops into a cheap eatery, has a plate of hot peas, a ginger beer and laments his lot. He’ll be 31 next birthday and has no job or career and is fed up of leeching off people. Incidentally, all the stories reveal or display Joyce’s detailed knowledge of Dublin’s street layout.

He paid twopence halfpenny to the slatternly girl and went out of the shop to begin his wandering again. He went into Capel Street and walked along towards the City Hall. Then he turned into Dame Street. At the corner of George’s Street he met two friends of his and stopped to converse with them… He left his friends at a quarter to ten and went up George’s Street. He turned to the left at the City Markets and walked on into Grafton Street.

The aim of the story is to build up to a comic anticlimax. All the way through the narrative, every detail of his behaviour and thoughts rams it into our minds that Lenehan is desperately anxious that Corley ‘brings it off’, succeeds, achieves his goal, gets a result. Lenehan marches up and down the corner where he’d agreed to meet his palm long before he’s due there, it starts to rain and he begins to think it’s ‘no go’ bit then he sees the couple approaching. He ducks out of sight, watches the girl go down into the area (the low area in front of Georgian terraced houses), then sees her come out of the main door and skip down the steps and confer with Corley before disappearing back inside.

The bathetic anticlimax is that all this cloak-and-dagger behaviour has all been simply to extract some money from the poor girl. This, the story tells us, is the pitiful amount of time and nervous energy a leech and parasite expends on earning even a fraction of money.

‘Can’t you tell us?’ he said. ‘Did you try her?’ Corley halted at the first lamp and stared grimly before him. Then with a grave gesture he extended a hand towards the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm.

Squalid and pathetic. Lenehan goes on to appear in several chapters of ‘Ulysses’.

7. The Boarding House

A young man is intimidating into marrying the landlady’s daughter, who he’s unwisely had sex with.

At last, when she judged it to be the right moment, Mrs Mooney intervened. She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat:

The situation is simple: a youngish (35) boarder in a boarding house (Mr Doran) has got into a relationship with the pretty daughter and servant in a boarding house (Polly Mooney) and had sex with her i.e. ‘taken her virginity’. Her mother and landlady of the house, the big solid no-nonsense Mrs Mooney, has got wind of the affair, obtained a full confession from her daughter. This vignette first of all gives a lot of backstory about Mrs Mooney (how she had to flee her drunken husband, and what became of him), how she set up the boarding house and how it became a popular venue for young artistic and musical types – before moving on to describe the tense mood of both young Polly and Mr Doran as they wait for Mrs D to call the young man in for an interview in which she will demand that he ‘does the decent thing’ and marries Polly i.e. half an hour which will change both their lives forever.

8. A Little Cloud

A flashy man who’s made his name abroad returns to Dublin and upstages his quiet sensitive friend who stayed at home.

Eight years ago Ignatius Gallaher left Dublin to start a career in the Press in London. Now he’s back in Dublin for a flying visit and has invited one of his old friends, shy timid Thomas Malone Chandler, to meet up with him at the loud garish Corless’s bar. Chandler fancies himself as a passionate poet but he is in reality ‘a delicate and abstinent person’, a chaste and methodical clerk, who long ago earned the nickname ‘Little Chandler’, timid and hesitant.

Predictably, the London man is large and hearty, wearing a vivid orange tie, and proceeds to regale timid Chandler with racy tales of life not only in London, but Paris and Berlin. When Chandler suggests he’ll settle down sooner or later, once he finds the right girl, Gallaher boomingly laughs off the idea.

Cut back to Little Chandler at home, at the end of the evening. He has irritated his prim wife, Annie, by forgetting to bring home some coffee. She’s loaded him with the sleeping baby and gone out. He looks at a photo of his wife and notes her pretty features, pretty but cold and prim. Compare with the lurid erotic fantasies conjured up by brassy Gallagher’s brave talk of rich Jewesses with dark oriental eyes, full of passion and voluptuous longing!

Dandling the baby he opens a book of Byron’s poetry and is transported. Why can’t he write poetry like that? The baby awakes, starts crying, refuses to be quieted and suddenly he feels trapped.

It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life.

So he shouts ‘STOP’ at the baby which, after a moment of amazement, starts screaming even louder. And that’s when his wife walks back in, horrified and demanding to know what he’s done to the baby. Yes, he is trapped forever.

The story contains a line that may have been heartfelt for Joyce, who himself felt stifled by Dublin’s parochial and nationalist culture:

There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.

Which is, of course, precisely what Joyce did, moving to Trieste in the 1900s, Zurich during the Great War and then onto Paris (1920 to 1940).

9. Counterparts

Angry frustrated man, humiliated at work and hard up, gets angry drunk and returns to take it out on his poor young son.

Farrington works as a clerk and copyist in the offices of Crosbie & Alleyne and hates it. He is:

tall and of great bulk. He had a hanging face, dark wine-coloured, with fair eyebrows and moustache: his eyes bulged forward slightly and the whites of them were dirty.

Farrington is a slacker and a drinker. Despite being warned he must finish off a long copying job before 5.30, he nips out to a nearby snug for a quick pint of porter. He is a little tipsy, stressed and discombobulated when the owner calls him out in front of the entire staff for not including two letters in an important tranche of documents he gave him. But he turns the moment into a crisis by choosing to answer back to the boss. The exchange is, in modern terms, hard to understand.

‘Tell me,’ [Mr Alleyne] added, glancing first for approval to the lady beside him, ‘do you take me for a fool? Do you think me an utter fool?’
The man glanced from the lady’s face to the little egg-shaped head and back again; and, almost before he was aware of it, his tongue had found a felicitous moment: ‘I don’t think, sir,’ he said, ‘that that’s a fair question to put to me.’
There was a pause in the very breathing of the clerks. Everyone was astounded.

Not the snappiest reparteee I’ve ever heard, but 5.30 comes and Farrington 1) pawns his watch and chain for six shillings, then 2) makes a beeline for his favourite pub, Davy Byrne’s, where he keeps a succession of arriving friends in awe with recounting of this devastating wit. His mates are: Nosey Flynn, O’Halloran and Paddy Leonard, and Higgins from the office who retells the story with great drama.

They pub crawl on to another bar called the Scotch House where they are introduced to Weathers, an acrobat in the Tivoli, and Farrington buys another round. When the Scotch House closes, they go round to Mulligan’s, to a parlour room at the back. Here Farrington spots a couple of dolled-up ladies and a man who come in and sit at a nearby table; he spends some time ogling one of the women and is irritated when they leave and she fails to turn round and give him an encouraging glance. He’s also irritated that he’s spent all his money on drinks for the others, who he now thinks of as spongers, instead of saving some to impress a lady.

The conversation turns to physique and Weathers shows off his strong arms. The others call on Farrington, the biggest there, to defend Irish national honour and so they stage an arm-wrestling contest. Weathers wins twice, which makes Farrington even angrier.

Drunk and angry, Farrington gets a cheap tram back to his house. It is a squalid household. His wife, Ada, is a little sharp-faced woman who bullies her husband when he is sober and is bullied by him when he is drunk. They have five children.

One of the small boys come down and tells him his mother’s gone to chapel. Farrington, boiling over with rage, takes it out on the harmless child, blaming him for letting the fire in the kitchen go out, taking his walking stick and mercilessly beating the poor child on his thighs.

I needed Wikipedia to explain to me that the story is titled ‘Counterparts’ for two reasons:

  1. For Joyce’s the term ‘counterparts’ could be expected to suggest (hand-written) duplicate copies of legal documents.
  2. At the story’s end, Farrington is seen as the ‘counterpart’ of Mr. Alleyne because just as his superior at his workplace humiliates him, so he, Farrington, abuses his child at home.

10. Clay

The timid life of a mousey spinster.

‘Maria is a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin.’ She is a small, middle-aged spinster, very popular at the laundry where she works, Dublin by Lamplight.

It’s Halloween which Irish Catholics celebrated with a party and traditional games. The story follows her helping with evening tea at the laundry, distributing slices of ‘barmbrack’ to all the ladies, then being toasted and cheered, she is so popular.

As soon as that tea is tidied away, she sets off by tram for the house of a man called Joe Donnelly who she nursed when he was a boy, along with his brother Alphy.

She goes to several shops on the way spending a lot of time worrying about which cake to buy to take with her eventually choosing a big slice of plumcake. On the tram to Joe’s she is made room for and shown great courtesy by a stout gentleman wearing a brown hard hat, with a square red face and a greyish moustache, a ‘colonel-looking gentleman’. The implication is he’s a bit tipsy and flirtatious.

She is welcomed with fanfare and affection at Joe’s house by him and his wife and children and plunges straight into tea and games. but when she goes to look for the plumcake can’t find it, asks the children if they’ve hidden or eaten it, and only finally realises the colonel looking gentleman must have stolen it off her.

Joe is keen to brush over this and so gets on with the main Halloween game which is being blindfolded and led to a table on which are a variety of objects. these include a Bible and a ring, and what you select predicts your future. Blindfolded, Maria puts her hands in something soft and squidgy, leading to silence and then a hurried taking of it away. Only later did I realise this is the clay of the story, clay brought in from the garden by the children and put into one of the saucers, clay which, in the symbolism of the game, stands for Death. Which is why there’s an embarrassed silence, then it’s quickly taken away and Maria told to have another go.

She moved her hand about here and there in the air and descended on one of the saucers. She felt a soft wet substance with her fingers and was surprised that nobody spoke or took off her bandage. There was a pause for a few seconds; and then a great deal of scuffling and whispering. Somebody said something about the garden, and at last Mrs Donnelly said something very cross to one of the next-door girls and told her to throw it out at once: that was no play. Maria understood that it was wrong that time and so she had to do it over again: and this time she got the prayer-book.

The prayer-book symbolising a life of spiritual vocation (service at a convent, suggests Joe’s wife). After more games for the children and wine for the adults, Maria is asked to sing. Mrs Donnelly plays the piano while Maria sings ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’ from the opera The Bohemian Girl by Michael Balfe.

The narrative tells us that she by ‘mistake’ sang the first verse twice. Characters in Joyce might make mistakes but Joyce never does. In a story fraught with symbolism this omission, too, is symbolic, because in the second verse of the song the singer imagines being beset with lovely suitors, thoughts and imagery inappropriate to the confirmed spinster status of little old Maria.

In an ironic conclusion, Joe is so moved by her singing that he can’t find a corkscrew and has to ask his wife where it is. Much earlier Maria had said she loved Joe except when he drank, for then he became a different person.

Only she hoped that Joe wouldn’t come in drunk. He was so different when he took any drink.

Very subtly it’s implying that some men can only cope with emotion by drinking, thus channeling emotion into the familiar channels of inebriation. Given the horrible violence drunken frustration triggers in Farrington in the previous story, this casts a small shadow over the narrative (as did the tipsy colonel-type nicking her cake).

Not only is Maria, like so many of the characters, trapped in her condition, but she is hemmed round by these threats and risks, mostly from men.

11. A Painful Case

An emotionally constipated would-be intellectual starts an affair with a married woman but as soon as she becomes really engaged, backs off, with tragic consequences.

A portrait of a middle-aged man painfully isolated life, even from his own life, who begins a platonic affair with a married woman but, when she starts to have feelings for him, hurriedly breaks it off.

Mr Duffy is a middle-aged bank cashier of extraordinarily rigid lifestyle, every aspect of his life meticulous and ordered so as to incur as little social contact as possible. One night at a concert he meets a Mrs Emily Sinico, a middle-aged married woman. They strike up a conversation, arrange to meet again, and again.

These meetings are perfectly chaste and mostly an opportunity for Mr Duffy to sound off about his abstruse intellectual concerns. He feels uneasy about the surreptitious nature of the meetings and so asks to be invited to the family home, where me meets the husband, Mr Sinico, who mistakenly thinks his regular visits are by way of wooing their daughter. And so their friendship continues with Duffy sounding off and impressing her with his many intellectual interests.

Little by little he entangled his thoughts with hers. He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all.

In a scene which shows what a gulf there is between Joyce’s Edwardian times and our own, in the areas of sex and relationships, one night at a meeting, Mrs Sinico displays unusual levels of ‘excitement’ and then impulsively takes Duffy’s hand and presses it to her cheek.

This shocks our man in two ways, that he realises the lady hasn’t been listening to his lectures in the high-falutin’ way he intended but also that she’s getting sticky and he risks being sucked into human contact and emotion. So he arranges one last meeting, they walk round the park for three hours as he painfully extricates himself from the relationship. When she shows signs of getting emotional he jumps on the nearest tram and legs it.

As in a fairy story, four years pass and Mr Duffy has reverted to his utterly inflexible, chilly lifestyle when one evening he sees an item in his evening paper. Joyce quotes at length a fictional newspaper report about Mrs Sinico who was knocked over by a train while crossing the line at a station. The train wasn’t going very fast and obliquely from witnesses at the coroner’s enquiry it emerges that in the last few years she had changed character and taken to drink.

The title of the newspaper article is ‘A Painful Case’ which gives the story its title.

Duffy is at first disgusted by the report, dismissive of Mrs Sinico and thinking it weakness that led to her drinking. He is agitated enough to go out for a walk and drops into the local pub for a drink but as he reflects on their time together more, and then leaves the pub to walk into the park up a hill and looking out over Dublin, he slowly, guiltily, starts to think maybe it was his rejection of her which led to her drinking and, ultimately, her death.

He spots young people lying by the wall of the park, no doubt engaged in amorous activities and suddenly realises how lonely he is. ‘He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast’.

Unrelentingly sad aren’t they, these stories.

12. Ivy Day in the Committee Room

Rambling portrait of ten or so Dublin characters involved in a local election campaign.

The stories get steadily longer. This one is a sort of portmanteau piece, introducing us to quite a number of Dublin characters, men involved in the half-hearted politics of a local election, being:

  • Old Jack – the caretaker, ‘an old man’s face, very bony and hairy. The moist blue eyes blinked at the fire and the moist mouth fell open at times, munching once or twice mechanically when it closed’
  • Mr O’Connor – ‘a grey-haired young man, whose face was disfigured by many blotches and pimples’
  • Mr Richard J. Tierney – the Nationalist candidate
  • Mr Hynes – ‘a tall, slender young man with a light brown moustache’
  • Mr Henchy – ‘a bustling little man with a snuffling nose and very cold ears’
  • Father Keon – pops in, in search of someone, then pops lout again
  • Crofton – ‘a very fat man whose blue serge clothes seemed to be in danger of falling from his sloping figure. He had a big face which resembled a young ox’s face in expression, staring blue eyes and a grizzled moustache’
  • Lyons – ‘much younger and frailer, had a thin, clean-shaven face. He wore a very high double collar and a wide-brimmed bowler hat’

One by one they enter like actors onto a set, coming through the door to the outside where it’s a wet cold October day, and into the hall where there’s a fire, stoked by Old Jack the caretaker. For me, the overall impression of the thing is the slack amateurism of all involved but chances are it’s an accurate description of political canvassing in Dublin circa 1908 because, apparently, Joyce’s own father did just such canvassing. The Wikipedia summary is thus:

In a committee room, Matthew O’Connor, a canvasser for Richard Tierney, a candidate in an upcoming municipal election, discusses child-rearing with Old Jack, who tries to keep a fire going. Joe Hynes, another canvasser, arrives and needles O’Connor on whether he’s been paid for his work yet. He proceeds to defend rival candidate Colgan’s working-class background and maintains that Tierney, although a Nationalist, will likely present a welcome address at the upcoming visit of King Edward VII to which, as the spokesman for the working class, he objects. This sparks a debate about whether they, Dubliners, the Irish, should welcome the King or not.

When Hynes points out that it is Ivy Day (October 6), a date appointed to commemorate the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, a nostalgic silence fills the room. Another canvasser, John Henchy, enters and criticises Tierney for not having paid him yet. When Hynes leaves, Henchy voices a suspicion that the man is a spy for Colgan.

A priest, Father Keogh, makes a brief appearance, asking after a Mr Fanning and, when told Fanning’s at a certain pub, exits, triggering gossip about the priest, some wondering whether he’s even a priest at all.

A ‘boy’, in fact 16, enters to deliver a crate of stout from the nearby pub, the Black Eagle. He’s asked to pop out and fetch a corkscrew for the bottles, upon his return old Jack opens three of them and, reluctantly, one for the delivery boy, who finishes his off and exits with the corkscrew.

Henchy badmouths another canvasser, Crofton, just before Crofton himself enters with Bantam Lyons. Crofton had worked for the Conservative candidate until the party withdrew and gave their support to Tierney. Henchy offers Crofton and Lyons a drink but they realise they have no corkscrew to open the bottles. So Henchy shows them a trick, he places the bottles on the hob of the fire and, once they’ve warmed up enough, the corks pop out by themselves. This struck me as dangerous – what if the bottles crack before the corks pop out – and disgusting – drinking fire-warmed beer? Yuk.

The talk of politics drifts to Charles Stewart Parnell, who has his defenders and detractors in the room. Hynes returns and is encouraged to read his sentimental poem dedicated to Parnell. The poem is in simple ballad form and criticises those who betrayed Parnell, including the Catholic Church, and places Parnell among the ancient heroes of Ireland. All applaud the performance and seem to forget their differences for the moment.

Commentary

Apart from the air of amateurishness and laziness, the other thing that comes over, and which is odd for a story about canvassing for an election, is the lack of politics. Nobody really discusses political policies except objecting to a possible visit to Dublin by King Edward; some object they shouldn’t truckle to a German king (Edward’s father was the German Prince Albert); others say he’s a good fellow coming on a well-intentioned visit to meet and talk to his subjects, so they shouldn’t reject or heckle him before they’ve even met him, it will only confirm negative English stereotypes of the Irish.

In other words, the only thing close to a policy they discuss is their response to the English monarchy, on which they’re largely split. And the only thing that gives them all a temporary unity is sentimental nostalgia for the disgraced nationalist leader, Charles Stewart Parnell.

But tipsy nostalgia is not a political platform. The lack of debate, the lack of readiness or preparation, the lack of discussion of any policies at all, is interesting background to the confusion and disagreement which afflicted all parties when radical political change was triggered by the Easter Uprising 6 or so years later.

13. A Mother

Pushy mother embarrasses her young singer daughter at a public recital.

The mother in question is Mrs Kearney. With characteristic thoroughness, Joyce gives us her backstory, how she was an educated, romantic, accomplished young lady named Miss Devlin, who intimidated man of her acquaintance and so ended up marrying the solid, reliable , who was very accomplished at a young age but found that the young men of her class were intimidated by her, which prompted her to marry the working class Mr Kearney, who was a bootmaker on Ormond Quay, ‘out of spite’.

So she becomes a mum and raises her girls with his educational and cultural standards. When the Irish Revival comes along in the 1890s she gets her girls educated in Gaelic and folklore. Her daughter Kathleen becomes an accomplished enough pianist to be offered gigs as an accompanist at concerts.

And that’s where the narrative proper commences: A Mr Holohan, assistant secretary of the Eire Abu Society, is organising a series of four concerts and approaches Mrs K to ask if Katherine could be the pianist. Mrs K agrees and sets the price at 8 guineas, and this is the core of the story because the concerts turn out to be very badly planned and publicised. Although Mrs K lends a lot of shrewd help to the creation of the posters, the night of the first concert is very poorly attended.

The second one has a larger audience but Mrs Kearney is bothered by both the behaviour of the audience and the casual attitude of the society’s secretary, Mr. Fitzpatrick, ‘a little man, with a white vacant face. She noticed that he wore his soft brown hat carelessly on the side of his head and that his accent was flat.’

The third concert is cancelled and Mrs Kearney now becomes concerned that her daughter will not be paid the full contracted price but is unable to get a straight answer on the matter from Holohan or Fitzpatrick. She brings her husband to the final concert, anticipating a confrontation.

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed…

and confrontation there is. In readiness for this final night, we get a full list of the performers, being:

  • The bass, Mr Duggan, was a slender young man with a scattered black moustache. He was the son of a hall porter in an office in the city and, as a boy, he had sung prolonged bass notes in the resounding hall. From this humble state he had raised himself until he had become a first-rate artiste.
  • Mr Bell, the second tenor, was a fair-haired little man who competed every year for prizes at the Feis Ceoil. On his fourth trial he had been awarded a bronze medal. He was extremely nervous and extremely jealous of other tenors and he covered his nervous jealousy with an ebullient friendliness.
  • Miss Healy, the contralto.
  • Madam Glynn, the soprano, wearing a faded blue dress which was stretched upon a meagre body.

In addition there are some gentlemen from the press:

  • the man from the Freeman – a grey-haired man, with a plausible voice and careful manners. He held an extinguished cigar in his hand and the aroma of cigar smoke floated near him – due to miss the concert in order to attend a lecture by an American priest
  • Mr O’Madden Burke who will write the notice

So you can see that there’s a narrative of sorts, but that arguably the point of the story is the range of characters, the sense of the variety of Dublin society.

Anyway the crisis of the story is that as the theatre fills up and then audience start to get restless, Mrs Kearney absolutely refuses to let her daughter go on until she is paid the contracted 4 guineas. At last, after a lot of feverish whispering and haggling, Haloran manages to return from the mysterious ‘committee’ he’s always talking about, with four pounds (a guinea is a pound and a shilling so he’s four shillings short).

At this point young Kathleen intervenes and insists on going onstage with the performers despite her mother’s wishes, and the first half of the concert is a triumph

The first part closed with a stirring patriotic recitation delivered by a young lady who arranged amateur theatricals. It was deservedly applauded; and, when it was ended, the men went out for the interval, content.

In the climax tempers get out of control and when Holohan tells her the committee will pay the remained the following Tuesday, Mrs Kearney says that’s not good enough and refuses to allow her daughter to go back onstage. At which all the performers, Holohan, Fitzpatrick et al roundly condemn her. Timid Miss Healy agrees to play one or two accompaniments, and when the performers troop back onstage for part two and the first act commences, Mrs Kearney forces her husband and daughter out the side entrance and into a cab in a blazing fury.

14. Grace

Four kind-hearted men try to talk their friend into reforming his alcoholic ways, employing comically ignorant Catholic theology along the way.

The story opens with two men helping to his feet a man who’s passed out drunk in the downstairs toilet of a pub. Carried upstairs, and a policeman called, he’s identified by a pal of his, a Mr Power, who identifies him as Mr Tom Kernan and promises the copper to get him home to his wife, which he does, in a cab. They carry him up to bed then Power is embarrassed before the hapless wife, used to Kernan’s drunkenness and who has nothing to offer him by way of hospitality. As if to make amends for this, Power tells her that he and Kernan’s other buddies will help Kernan turn over a new leaf.

And that’s what they do. Powers organises a plan with two other buddies, M’Coy and Cunningham, to get Kernan along to a Catholic retreat with them. The long central part of the ‘story’ consists of an extended dialogue between these four guys, as the three in on the plan chip in with various suggestions and pledged until Kernan is shamed into agreeing to join them. His wife tries hard to conceal her delight at the prospect of her husband stopping being such a pitiful drunk.

Cut to the third scene, which sees all four chaps in the Jesuit church in Gardiner Street and the arrival of the priest, Father Purdon, in the pulpit to deliver a sermon. Far from the high-falutin’ theology of redemption you might have expected, the priest’s approach is surprisingly mundane and worldly:

He came [Father Purdon said] to speak to businessmen and he would speak to them in a businesslike way. If he might use the metaphor, he said, he was their spiritual accountant; and he wished each and every one of his hearers to open his books, the books of his spiritual life, and see if they tallied accurately with conscience.

Commentary

1. Characters As so often, in one sense the most interesting part of the narrative is the backstory of the central characters. These are stated clearly and bluntly, as in a presentation: I mean they aren’t conveyed with subtle and scattered hints, but all plonked down in one interest bio.

Mr Kernan was a commercial traveller of the old school which believed in the dignity of its calling. He had never been seen in the city without a silk hat of some decency and a pair of gaiters. By grace of these two articles of clothing, he said, a man could always pass muster. He carried on the tradition of his Napoleon, the great Blackwhite, whose memory he evoked at times by legend and mimicry. Modern business methods had spared him only so far as to allow him a little office in Crowe Street on the window blind of which was written the name of his firm with the address—London, E.C. On the mantelpiece of this little office a little leaden battalion of canisters was drawn up and on the table before the window stood four or five china bowls which were usually half full of a black liquid. From these bowls Mr Kernan tasted tea. He took a mouthful, drew it up, saturated his palate with it and then spat it forth into the grate. Then he paused to judge.

Mr Power, a much younger man, was employed in the Royal Irish Constabulary Office in Dublin Castle. The arc of his social rise intersected the arc of his friend’s decline, but Mr Kernan’s decline was mitigated by the fact that certain of those friends who had known him at his highest point of success still esteemed him as a character. Mr Power was one of these friends. His inexplicable debts were a byword in his circle; he was a debonair young man.

Mrs Kernan… was an active, practical woman of middle age. Not long before she had celebrated her silver wedding and renewed her intimacy with her husband by waltzing with him to Mr Power’s accompaniment. In her days of courtship Mr Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure: and she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding was reported and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled with vivid pleasure how she had passed out of the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, leaning on the arm of a jovial well-fed man, who was dressed smartly in a frock-coat and lavender trousers and carried a silk hat gracefully balanced upon his other arm. After three weeks she had found a wife’s life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she had become a mother. The part of mother presented to her no insuperable difficulties and for twenty-five years she had kept house shrewdly for her husband. Her two eldest sons were launched. One was in a draper’s shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast. They were good sons, wrote regularly and sometimes sent home money. The other children were still at school.

See how much time and detail, precision and effect, Joyce spends on each character. They are highly defined and positioned. As many people have pointed out, in ‘Dubliners’ Joyce feels like he’s taken nineteenth century naturalism as far as it can go. Nobody could write more careful detailed descriptions of his characters. Which is why, having reached the end of the line, he burst through the boundaries of the genre into something post-naturalist, experimenting with free indirect speech in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and then bursting the bounds of what a novel even is, in ‘Ulysses’.

2. Catholic dogma A good deal of the long central section consists of the three would-be conspirators struggling with various aspects of the Catholic faith, from the mottos of various popes to the role of the Jesuits, the difference between Catholics and Protestants, and so on.

Why is it called ‘Grace’? Is it a sympathetic view that the grace of spiritual rebirth stems from pretty much as low as one could go, a man falling down dead drunk in an underground toilet? Or is Joyce mocking religion, suggesting that there is no grace, here or anywhere? That fits the spirit of irony and satire which informs the entire collection.

15. The Dead

Beautiful extended description of a traditional Christmas party which ends with a sensitive husband suddenly made aware of the tragic death of his beautiful wife’s first love.

The Dead is routinely described as one of the greatest short stories in the English language. It is noted for its tenderness, and lyrical acceptance of lost love, death and bereavement. The main character is Gabriel Conroy who takes his beautiful wife Gretta to the annual Christmas party thrown by his lovely aunts, Miss Kate and Miss Julia Morkan, ‘in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island’. The narrative describes the preparations, the arrival of the guests, numerous conversations, dancing and singing, the big Christmas dinner at which Gabriel carves the roast goose, and then makes a movingly gracious speech of thanks to the old aunts, and then the slow winding down towards thank yous and farewells.

Cast

As usual, Joyce pays scrupulous attention to each of his characters’ backstories and appearance.

  • Gabriel Conroy – ‘plump’, ‘a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat’ — Gabriel is ‘son of their dead elder sister, Ellen, who had married T. J. Conroy of the Port and Docks’ — he is a college teacher and book reviewer
  • Gretta Conroy – Gabriel’s wife
  • Kate Morkan and Julia Morkan – Gabriel and Mary Jane’s aunts – ‘two small plainly dressed old women. Aunt Julia was an inch or so the taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face. Though she was stout in build and stood erect her slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. Aunt Kate was more vivacious. Her face, healthier than her sister’s, was all puckers and creases, like a shrivelled red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour.’
  • Mary Jane Morkan – niece of Kate and Julia, teaches music, ‘Many of her pupils belonged to the better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line’
  • Lily – the caretaker’s daughter, ‘a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair’
  • Freddy Malins – an alcoholic and friend of the family – ‘a young man of about forty, was of Gabriel’s size and build, with very round shoulders. His face was fleshy and pallid, touched with colour only at the thick hanging lobes of his ears and at the wide wings of his nose. He had coarse features, a blunt nose, a convex and receding brow, tumid and protruded lips. His heavy-lidded eyes and the disorder of his scanty hair made him look sleepy’
  • Mrs Malins – Freddy Malins’ mother, ‘a stout feeble old woman with white hair. Her voice had a catch in it like her son’s and she stuttered slightly’, lives with her married daughter in Glasgow and comes to Dublin on a visit once a year
  • Molly Ivors – a long-time acquaintance of the family – ‘a frank-mannered talkative young lady, with a freckled face and prominent brown eyes. She did not wear a low-cut bodice and the large brooch which was fixed in the front of her collar bore on it an Irish device and motto’
  • Mr Browne – only Protestant guest at the party, ‘A tall wizen-faced man, with a stiff grizzled moustache and swarthy skin’
  • Bartell D’Arcy – a tenor, ‘a dark-complexioned young man with a smart moustache’
  • Other guests: Miss Furlong, Miss Daly and Miss Power, Mr Bergin and Mr Kerrigan

Incidents include:

– Upon arrival Gabriel tries to joke with his aunts’ maid, Lily, which doesn’t work out.

– He goes upstairs to join the rest of the guests, where he worries about the speech he has to give, worrying about too highfalutin’ reference to the poetry of Robert Browning, still, in the 1890s, considered difficult.

– When Freddy Malins arrives drunk, as the aunts had feared, Aunt Kate asks Gabriel to make sure he doesn’t cause trouble.

– As the party gathers pace, Gabriel is twitted by Miss Ivors, an Irish nationalist, because she has figured out that he is the GC who writes book reviews in the Unionist newspaper The Daily Express. She teases him by calling him a ‘West Briton’, repeatedly. Gabriel tries to reply but can’t come up with a convincing argument.

– Miss Ivor tells Gabriel she and some friends are organising a reading week in the West of Ireland. He says he can’t go but when he then tells his wife, she is excited at the thought of revisiting her childhood home of Galway.

– Dinner begins, with Gabriel seated at the head of the table. He boisterously carves and hands round the plates while the guests discuss music and theology. Once the eating is over, Gabriel rises to his feet again and makes his speech, courteously referring to Aunt Kate, Aunt Julia and Mary Jane as the Three Graces. The speech ends with a toast and the guests sing ‘For they are jolly gay fellows’.

– The party winds down and the guests leave one by one. Having got his coat Gabriel goes to the foot of the stairs and from the dark well looks up to see his wife lost in thought at the top of the stairs, listening to a song coming from the living room. She is listening to the famous tenor Bartell D’Arcy singing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’.

– They walk part of the way back to their hotel, then get a cab. Gabriel has rarely seen his wife looking so beautiful and suddenly he is overcome with lust. He can’t wait till they are back in the hotel room alone together. There is what I suppose for the time was fairly graphic description of his desire, specifically the fact that he needs her to want it too:

If she would only turn to him or come to him of her own accord! To take her as she was would be brutal. No, he must see some ardour in her eyes first.

– BUT once they are alone in their hotel room, Gabriel’s lust reaches a peak and then is utterly dashed. Gretta sits on their bed but not in the heat of desire at all; instead she is crying. She tearfully admits that the song she was listening to reminded her of her first true love, reminds her of a young boy, just 17, named Michael Furey who had courted her in her youth in Galway. He, too, used to sing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ for her.

– The boy fell ill as she was leaving for the big city, but insisted on getting out of his sick bed to come to her house and stand under her window in the winter rain just to see her. He returned to bed even sicker and died soon after.

– Gretta is overcome with grief and cries herself to exhaustion and then to sleep leaving Gabriel dismayed that there was something of such importance in his wife’s life that he never knew about. Now alone in the bedroom he reflects that we will all die, Aunt Julia, Aunt Kate, all of them – and finds this strangely comforting. He can almost feel the presence of the dead:

His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

And in the story’s famous last lines the narrative picks up on him looking out the window at the snow falling, to describe how it is falling all across Ireland.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

There should not, by these closing lines, be a dry eye in the house.

When I first read this as a boy, I wished my Christmases were like this, festive and convivial with lots of singing, and I wished I would grow up as soulful and sensitive as Gabriel…

Swayed by their beauty, for years I remembered the story for the haunting beauty of its closing lines. I had completely forgotten that the key passages beforehand give a surprisingly frank expression of Gabriel’s desire, nay lust. He becomes really inflamed with lust and desperately wants to ‘take’ his wife as soon as they get back to the hotel. Everyone remembers the poetic ending. Not so many people comments on the way it is also a story about the inappropriateness of male desire; a description of how male desire flares up but then is crushed, mortified and embarrassed by superior female sensitivity.

Commentary

Human life

The stories offer a loosely chronological overview of the different stages of human life, starting with:

  • boyhood (in The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby)
  • young adulthood (After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House)
  • maturity (Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case, A Mother)
  • old age and mortality (The Dead)
  • with slyly comic digressions into contemporary politics (Ivy Day in the Committee Room) and the arts (A Mother)
  • before the grand meditation on mortality (The Dead)

Sociology

The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

Fiction doesn’t have to be sociological i.e. comment on the social issues of its time (see Kafka or Borges) but realist fiction tends to do so because a realistic depiction tends to take time to fill in details of character or aspects of events, which themselves tend to reflect contemporary practice. The three themes which stick out for me are drunkenness, Irish nationalism and the broader one of paralysis and trapment.

1. Drunkenness is shown in numerous aspects:

  • the youthful exuberant party drunkenness of young Jimmy Doyle who gambles away his inheritance
  • the hardened middle-aged drunkenness of the angry failure Farrington, who takes out an evening of humiliations by beating his poor son
  • the pathetic fall-down-drunk inebriation of Tom Kernan
  • the sad, pitiful drunkenness of Mrs Sinico after Mr Duffy dumps her

In a number of other stories, nobody gets drunk but drink plays a role. Thus:

  • it’s notable how the bottles of beer are a necessary emollient which take the edge off the political frictions in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’
  • Joe’s occasional drunkenness is a threat lurking at the edge of ‘Clay’
  • the scenes in which Little Chandler is compared with big brassy Ignatius Gallaher are set in a noisy bar where Gallaher not only knows his drinks but gets the bartender’s attention in a second whereas Chandler struggles to be seen etc

2. Paralysis Not much need be said because I’ve pointed out in individual stories where their guiding theme or mood is one of entrapment and paralysis. Almost all the characters are trapped in their behaviour patterns; when offered escape like Evelyn, they are too scared to take it. And entrapment becomes a way of life, for timid characters like Little Chandler or Maria; or underpins the alcoholic rage of a bully like Farrington.

Irish nationalism is well represented in the tales, notably in the character of Miss Ivors in ‘The Dead’ but the issues surrounding nationalism are most fully dramatised in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ – but in neither does the debate or argument get much beyond abuse – there doesn’t appear to be any plan or policy for how independence would be achieved, what steps are required, for example lobbying the Liberal government which was in power for most of the Edwardian period, and lobbying them for what, precisely?

In this way, the presentation of Irish nationalism – no doubt a massive issue in Joyce’s day and which flavours and sometimes becomes a dominant issue in all his writings – feels, ultimately, like a sub-set of the paralysis and stagnation which is the book’s central theme.

Lyricism

The volume concludes with the tremendous lyric vision at the end of ‘The Dead’ but this lyrical eloquence appears at key moments throughout all the stories. It is often very beautiful writing, worth savouring in its own right. It’s a large question for debate whether this lyricism can be said to underpin Joyce’s entire worldview, and how it is contained or subsumed in the more complex styles of his later works.

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Posted by Simon on January 26, 2026

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