All posts tagged Modernism

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: Wandering Rocks

—Curse your bloody blatant soul, Mr Dedalus cried,
(Stephen Dedalus’s father Simon is given many vivid curses throughout the book, this one is addressed to the man ringing his handbell outside Dillons auction house while Simon’s having an argument with his small daughter, Dilly)

Here’s a quick reminder of the chapter numbers and names in James Joyce’s epic modernist novel, ‘Ulysses’. Pretty much all discussion of the book needs to reference them. But note: none of the Greek chapter titles are indicated in the actual text of ‘Ulysses’; they were given by Joyce to early commentators who published them in books and articles about the novel and they 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

Homeric parallel

Most of the other chapters in ‘Ulysses’ have a central figure and a central narrative but ‘Wandering rocks’ is an exception to this rule.

Chapter ten marks the mid-point of this 18-chapter novel and so is a sort of interlude or resting point. Joyce had the bright idea of basing it on the wandering rocks episode in Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey. In the poem the Planctae (Greek for ‘wanderers’) were a group of rocks which constantly moved about, stirring up the sea and smashing any ship which tried to navigate between them, leaving only floating timber and flames. They are sometimes confused with the Symplegades or clashing rocks.

As Odysseus prepares to depart from the witch Circe, she warns him that the wandering rocks have only once been successfully navigated, by Jason and his argonauts. The rocks are one of only two routes onwards to Ithaca, the other route going by Scylla and Charybdis. Jason chooses to sail through the rocks, Odysseus avoids them and goes the Scylla and Charybdis route.

Joyce’s adaptation

Joyce’s adaptation of the episode is very characteristic in that he takes what he needs and simply abandons whatever doesn’t fit. Thus he uses the idea of wandering as the basis of 18 short vignettes, each about a different Dublin character, as they potter about central Dublin bumping into each other, seeing each other, thinking about each other, including three of the main protagonists, Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan (section 5), Stephen Dedalus (section 6) and Leopold Bloom (section 10). So ‘wandering’ yes, but as to the danger part of the Greek legend Joyce just ignores it. There’s no clashing involved, there’s no danger anywhere. Bloom/Odysseus is never threatened. No-one is getting crushed.

Instead the chapter is like the novel in miniature. It even contains 18 episodes to match the novel’s 18 chapters (plus a coda, 19 sections in all).

The narrative’s clever interlocking of characters and incidents is widely admired. This is increased by the way each vignette contains references or entire paragraphs referring to incidents taking place in other vignettes, in other parts of the city, at the same moment. Critics call these sudden eruptions of another stories into each vignette, often in the form of one unexplained sentence, ‘interpolations’.

Many readers and critics have thought of this as a cinematic technique which builds up to give a sort of panoramic overview of an entire city at the time it is set, the hour from just before 3pm till a little after 4pm.

I have a major reservation about this, and ‘Ulysses’ as a whole, which I’ll explain at the end of this review.

Church and state

The chapter, like many before it, takes as a key foundation the binary of church and state. Thus it opens with a friendly priest walking through the streets of Dublin and bumping into various acquaintances, before popping up in the background of subsequent vignettes; while in the second half we catch steadily more glimpses of the progress of the Viceroy of Dublin riding in his carriage to open a bazaar, glimpses which lead up to its full presentation in the 18th and final vignette.

So the narrative is topped and tailed by a representative each of Church and of State, types which lay down a kind of conceptual frame of the chapter, which is then fleshed out by the appearances of the 20 or 30 other characters.

Mocked

And they are both mocked, gently but steadily. With Father Conmee Joyce does it with the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth squeaky cleanness of Conmee’s conversation:

Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that. And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to be sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed.

With the Viceroy, the mockery is implicit in the generally indifferent reaction to his passing-by of the various Dubliners. The job is largely done without resorting to large-scale parody (unlike the chapters which follow).

Material rebukes

The final response to the Viceroy in the chapter is the Italian music teacher Almidano Artifoni going into his house and, in effect, turning the bum of his trousers to the august carriage as it trots by.

Father Conmee receives a more obvious rebuke to his values and worldview when he is suddenly confronted by a couple stumbling out of some bushes, flushed because they’ve just had sex. Sex, in comedies, especially farces – or more precisely all the fussing and fretting surrounding it – is the great puncturer of pompousness and pretension.

Heart

If you visualise Dublin as a heart, as the first headline in ‘Aeolus’ suggests:

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

Then the 30 or so characters we meet in this chapter can be thought of as blood corpuscles circulating round it and bumping into each other.

Binaries

Both our protagonists are looking at books, according to their intellectual levels: Bloom is buying a popular romance, Sweets of Sin, for Molly; Stephen is looking through Abbot Peter Salanka’s book of charms and spells, specifically ones designed to attract a woman’s love. Love and sex.

Bloom’s anxiety

You can’t understand this chapter or ‘Ulysses’ as a whole, unless you realise that for the whole long day which it describes its central character, Leopold Bloom, is traumatised by the fact that he knows that his voluptuous wife, Molly, is preparing herself to have sex with the flash man-about-town and concert promoter Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan. Somehow (it’s really not made clear) he knows Blazes’ visit to his house is timed for 4pm, so for all the chapters leading up to then, he is in agony of anticipation, at around that time he is crushed by humiliation, and for the hours afterward, he is haunted by the fact the deed has been done.

We see Boylan at his flashy flirtatious best, in section 5. We see Bloom feeling sorry for himself in section 10.

Summary

Section 1: Father Conmee heads north

We first met Father John Conmee as the symapathetic rector of Clongowes Wood College who young Stephen appealed to after he was unjustly pandybatted by sadistic Father Dolan. Here we find him strolling through Dublin, mild and kind. He thinks about Martin Cunningham’s letter requesting help in securing a school place for the late Paddy Dignam’s son, ‘oblige him if possible’; he see a one-legged sailor begging, he stops and talks to the wife of Mr David Sheehy MP who is away in Westminster; thinks of fellow Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan’s cockney accent; he bumps into three schoolboys from Belvedere school and asks one to post a letter in the letterbox across the road; he sees the flamboyantly dressed dancing master Denis Maginni; he is bowed to by stately Mrs M’Guinness whose posh appearance belies the fact that she runs a pawn shop (mentioned again in section 4).

He passes a closed-up free church and laments the ignorance of protestants; a bunch of Christian brother schoolboys raise their caps to him; he walks past a grocer’s and a tobacconist’s, noting the newsboard about a disaster in New York (a real life disaster: the General Slocum steamship fire, 15 June 1904, the day before the events of the novel, in which over 1,000 people, mostly women and children, died); past Daniel Bergin’s publichouse, past H. J. O’Neill’s funeral establishment where Corny Kelleher totted figures in the daybook (Corny who will play an important role at the end of ‘Circe’ 10 hours later).

He salutes a policeman then passes a butcher’s shop. In the canal he sees a turfbarge and the bargee resting and smoking. He catches an outward bound tram because he doesn’t like walking through the dingy neighbourhood of Mud Island. He regards the other passengers. An older woman who forgets to get off at her stop reminds him of the poor of his parish, worn down by cares, always worrying.

A poster of a blackface minstrel triggers thoughts about Christian missions to Africa. He thinks of the millions of men and women who die without ever hearing the Word of God, and mildly and superficially thinks it a ‘waste’; he thinks about a book on the subject by the Belgian Jesuit Auguste Castelein SJ, ‘The Number of the Elect’.

He alights at Malahide Road whose name triggers thoughts of aristocratic families and glorious old days when priests like himself held real power. He’s written a book about it, Old Times in the Barony. He thinks about Mary Rochfort, daughter of lord Molesworth, first countess of Belvedere, who was accused of adultery with her husband’s brother (adultery is a central theme of the novel, as of so many novels: compare Stephen’s joke about Admiral Nelson being the one-handled adulterer, or the fate of Charles Stewart Parnell, on one level the political tragedy of a nation, on another yet another of the book’s examples of adultery).

Which leads into reminiscences about his time as rector of Clongowes Wood College, reading his holy books and looking up at the calm clouds, listening to the boys playing. He realises he has forgotten to read one of the holy offices at the correct time, and so he pulls out his breviary and is reading the psalm of the day as he walks when, out of bushes beside the road, emerge a young man and woman, flushed after a roll in the hay. Later in the novel they are revealed to be Stephen’s friend Vincent Lynch and a girl called Kitty. Father Conmee blesses them then returns to his reading about sin. It’s important to note the sentence:

The young woman abruptly bent and with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.

Note this phrase, which will recur later, in section 8.

Section 2: Corny Kelleher in the funeral directors’

Father Conmee ‘passed H. J. O’Neill’s funeral establishment where Corny Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of hay’. Now we join Corny Kelleher a few minutes later as he examines a new coffin, before strolling over to the streetdoor and looking out (just as Father Conmee is getting into the tram).

A policeman ambles up and they pass a cryptic exchange. This tends to confirm gossip in earlier chapters that Corny has an ‘in’ with the police i.e. is some kind of informant to the force which are unpopular enforcers of British colonial rule.

Short though it is, this vignette contains an ‘interpolation’, the intrusion of a sentence which seems to come from another section, thus:

Corny Kelleher sped a silent jet of hayjuice arching from his mouth while a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a coin.

Only in the next section will we discover that the white arm belongs to Molly Bloom throwing a penny to a passing beggar.

Section 3: The one-legged sailor begs

A handicapped veteran of the British Navy (seen and blessed by Father Conmee in section 1) stumps the streets, grunting snippets of a patriotic song. He grunts towards Larry O’Rourke, in shirtsleeves in his doorway, swings past Katey and Boody Dedalus, a stout lady drops a coin in his cap, two barefoot urchins chewing ‘long liquorice laces’ stare at his stump, ‘a plump bare generous arm’ throws a coin from a window in Eccles Street onto the pavement and an urchin picks it up and puts it in the beggar’s cap.

The text doesn’t specifically tell us it’s number 7 Eccles Street, so it’s left to us to work out that it’s Molly Bloom’s arm. We are told that in a window is a card advertising ‘Unfurnished Apartments’ for rent in their home, as the Blooms try to make money now their daughter Milly has left home.

Section 4: The Dedalus sisters are destitute

Stephen’s sisters, Katey and Boody Dedalus return home from school, entering the kitchen where sister Maggy who is cleaning shirts in a pot of boiling. They are really destitute and have just tried to pawn Stephen’s books at M’Guinness’s shop (the same stately Mrs M’Guinness that bowed to Father Conmee in the opening section).

They only have anything to eat (pea soup) thanks to the charity of Sister Mary Patrick. When Maggy tells them another sistr, Dilly, has gone to meet their father, Boody blasphemously says ‘our father who art not in heaven’ and Maggy chastises her.

The section ends with another interpolation as we cut away to a shot of the handed-out sheet of paper given to Bloom in ‘Lestrygonians’ which he crumpled up and threw in the river, continuing its passage under Loopline bridge.

Probably the crumpling and wrecking of the sheet of paper is a diminished, mock heroic parody of the action of the crushing rocks.

Section 5: Blazes Boylan flirts with a shopgirl

Considering that Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan’s having sex with Bloom’s wife, Molly, is the central event in the novel, it’s striking that we see and hear so little of him throughout. Surprisingly, this brief vignette is our longest moment in his presence.

He is shopping in Thornton’s fruit and flower shop on Grafton Street, where he buys a bottle and a jar to be placed in a basket, topped with fruit (plump pears and peaches), to be sent in advance to Molly. He smells other ripe fruit and veg while outside the window the five sandwichboard men advertising HELYS that Bloom first saw in ‘Lestrygonians’ file past.

The shopgirl asks for the address the basket is to be sent to then tots up the bill while Boylan looks ‘into the cut of her blouse’ and thinks ‘a young pullet’.

As with most of the sections, there is a brief ‘interpolation’, an out-of-context sentence describing ‘A darkbacked figure under Merchants’ arch scanned books on the hawker’s cart.’ You’d never know without the commentators to help you that this is Bloom scanning second-hand books to find some romance novel for Molly to read.

Inserting a sentence about Bloom searching for second-hand fictional descriptions of seduction, while his rival, Boylan, is going about the practical mechanics of real-life seduction, is full of ironies.

The section ends with Boylan asking if he can make a phone call (see section 7).

Section 6: Stephen and Artifoni the music teacher

Stephen encounters his Italian voice instructor, Almidano Artifoni. While two tramcars full of tourists trundle past, Artifoni tells Stephen his voice would be a good source of income for him. True to his character as The Refuser, Stephen demurs. Another tram unloads soldiers who are members of a Highland regimental band who are heading through the gates of Trinity College. The pair shake hands but then Artifoni realises the conversation has caused him to miss his tram which he forlornly trots after.

Section 7: Miss Dunne

Miss Dunne is Blazes Boylan’s secretary. We find her sitting in her office where (like Molly) she has been reading a library copy of Wilkie Collins’s classic, ‘The Woman in White’ while the boss is away. It’s a bit too mysterious for her and she thinks she’ll swap it for something easier by Mary Cecil Haye.

She inserts a piece of paper into the typewriter and types out the date. This is the only direct reference to the famous date of the novel, 16 June 1904.

The five Hely’s sandwichboard men spelling HELY’S, seen by Boylan from the fruit shop, pass by, turn round and return again.

She stares at a poster of Marie Kendall. This was a real-life English music hall singer and comedian and the poster was for a real-life performance at Dan Lowry’s music hall in Dublin on June 16, 1904.

Miss Dunne thinks about her evening plans, a man who has caught her attention, and a skirt she wishes she could buy, thinking how attractive it made her friend Susy Nagle to ‘Shannon and all the boatclub swells’.

Boylan calls (the phone call we saw him asking the shopgirl if he could make in section 5). We hear her end of the conversation as she instructs her to book travel for two to Belfast and Liverpool (for Molly and himself during the upcoming concert tour), and he gives her permission to leave work at 6:15.

Then she tells Boylan that Lenehan has been looking for him and will be at the Ormond Hotel Bar at 4. (We will see Boylan meet Lenehan there, among other notable characters convene, in the next episode, ‘Sirens’).

Section 8: Ned Lambert, Reverend Love and J. J. O’Molloy

I was hopelessly at sea with this section until I read the commentaries. It takes place in the last remaining room of a 10th century abbey which now serves as a seed and grain warehouse where Ned Lambert works. (We met Lambert earlier at Dignam’s funeral in ‘Hades’ and reading out the overblown patriotic speech by Dan Dawson in the newspaper offices in ‘Aeolus’).

Ned is showing the building to a vicar named Hugh C. Love who is writing a book about the Fitzgeralds. St. Mary’s Abbey is relevant to Love’s research because it was here that Lord Thomas Fitzgerald (nicknamed ‘Silken Thomas’) proclaimed himself a rebel in 1534.

What makes it confusing is that Ned is in the middle of showing Love this when his pal, the lawyer J. J. O’Molloy, enters the dark room, lighting a match to find his way. Ned suggests to the reverend a couple of places where he can get good angles for a photograph.

It’s further complicated because the scene contains not one but two one-sentence interpolations. Suddenly:

From a long face a beard and gaze hung on a chessboard.

We don’t know it yet but this is John Howard Parnell, brother to the late politician Charles Stuart Parnell, who we will meet playing chess in section 16.

The reverend thanks Ned and departs, and New and J. J. exit the warehouse into the bustling forecourt:

With J. J. O’Molloy he came forth slowly into Mary’s abbey where draymen were loading floats with sacks of carob and palmnut meal, O’Connor, Wexford.

Then, with just as little warning, the second interposition:

The young woman with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.

If you recall, this phrase applies to the young woman emerging from the bushes after a roll in the hay with Vincent Lynch, as the come face to face with Father Conmee. The implication being that that is happening at this exact moment in another part of Dublin.

Back to Ned who realises he forgot to tell the clergyman a good joke:

—I forgot to tell him that one about the earl of Kildare after he set fire to Cashel cathedral. You know that one? I’m bloody sorry I did it, says he, but I declare to God I thought the archbishop was inside.

Ned confidently slaps a passing horse on the haunches then turns to J. J. who has come to scrounge money off him, but makes him wait a second while he loudly sneezes.

—Well, Jack. What is it? What’s the trouble? Wait awhile. Hold hard.
With gaping mouth and head far back he stood still and, after an instant, sneezed loudly.
—Chow! he said. Blast you!
—The dust from those sacks, J. J. O’Molloy said politely.

But Ned says it’s that he caught a cold last night and it didn’t help hanging round at Paddy Dignam’s funeral this morning, holding up his hankie ready to sneeze again.

Once all this is explained to you, it’s easy, really easy. But it’s devilish hard to make sense of if you try to read and puzzle it out by yourself.

Section 9: Tom Rochford’s Invention, then Lenehan and M’Coy

Tom Rochford is explaining his invention for indicating which act is currently on stage in a vaudeville act to his mates, Nosey Flynn, Lenehan and M’Coy. Lenehan is impressed a promises to pitch it to Blazes Boylan who we know, from section 7 is meeting in the Ormond Hotel at 4pm, because Boylan is, it’s sometimes easy to forget, a successful music concert producer.

M’Coy and Lenehan leave together, passing Dan Lowry’s music hall displaying a poster for Marie Kendall the singer, the same poster we saw Miss Dunne staring at.

As they walk on Lenehan tells the story of how Rochford rescued a man stuck in a drainage hole. M’Coy waits outside Lynam’s while Lenehan nips in to get the final odds on Sceptre, the horse he backed in the Ascot Gold Cup. While waiting in the street, M’Coy nudges a banana peel into the gutter lest someone slip on it.

This simple narrative is then interrupted by not one, or two but three distinct ‘interpolations’. First a sentence showing the cavalcade of the Viceroy commencing its journey across the city.

Lenehan emerges and announces his horse was evens. They walk on through Merchants arch and spy ‘a darkbacked figure scanning books on the hawker’s cart’ which they both identify as Bloom. M’Coy describes a fine book Bloom bought for 2 bob whose fancy plates alone were worth more than that. Then, suddenly, the second interpolation:

Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam came out of Mangan’s, late Fehrenbach’s, carrying a pound and a half of porksteaks.

This refers to the eldest of recently deceased paddy Dignam’s five children. Lenehan launches in on a long story about something that happened at the annual dinner at Glencree reformatory but he’s barely got going before there’s another interpolation:

A card Unfurnished Apartments reappeared on the windowsash of number 7 Eccles street.

This is Bloom’s house and, since he’s out and about, it must be Molly who replaces the card in the window, the card we’d seen in place when she threw a coin to the beggar in section 3.

Lenehan continues with his story about how everyone got hammered at this reformatory dinner and came home in the early hours in a horse-drawn taxi cab. Bloom and Chris Callinan were on one seat and on the seat opposite Lenehan sitting next to Molly. She’s had a skinful and at every jolt of the cab he was pressed up against her ample bosom.

Every jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell’s delights! She has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.
He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning:
—I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time. Know what I mean?
His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.
—The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She’s a gamey mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At last she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. And what star is that, Poldy? says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. That one, is it? says Chris Callinan, sure that’s only what you might call a pinprick. By God, he wasn’t far wide of the mark.
Lenehan stopped and leaned on the riverwall, panting with soft laughter.

Lenehan can’t know it but much, much later Molly will give her side of this event in the long monologue which makes up chapter 18 in which she describes Lenehan as a creep.

To some extent, whether you really like ‘Ulysses’ or not depends on whether you find this kind of blatant crudity and vulgarity funny or not. I do, and I do. But it’s more subtle than that because M’Coy, a married man himself, recoils a bit at the tale and Lenehan notices it. He backtracks and in an attempt to save face changes tack to praise Bloom.

—He’s a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He’s not one of your common or garden… you know… There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom.

Is that not how human interactions often are? Complex, error-strewn, embarrassing, miscalculating, self-correcting?

Section 10: Mr. Bloom

Having caught two glimpses of him through the eyes of other characters, we finally come to Leopold Bloom browsing a second-hand book stall. In chapter 4 Molly asked him to get her a new book to read. He looks at some saucy ones but the one which triggers his thoughts is Aristotle’s Masterpiece with its anatomical images of foetuses curled up in the womb:

Plates: infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere. Mrs Purefoy.

The last name referring to Mina Purefoy who Josie Breen told him is in maternity hospital having a prolonged and difficult delivery of her baby (more of that in chapter 14, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, which is set in the same maternity hospital and during which Mina finally has her baby.) This also has its ‘interpolations’. In among Bloom’s book browsing, suddenly the sentence:

On O’Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c.

which is clearly written in the affected style in which Mr Maginni regards himself.

Back to Bloom at the bookstall, assessing whether books are suitable for Molly’s erotic tastes. He opens ‘Sweets of Sin’ and reads a few extracts at random, which describe a married woman dolling herself up for her exotic lover, Raoul. Sounds like the right kind of thing. And repeats the theme of adultery which, as we know, is central to ‘Ulysses’.

Bloom starts to get a little worked up, in a heady mix of the text’s soft porn cliches mixed with his own earthier knowledge of the stinks and mess of sex, all of which is interrupted by another interpolation:

An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of chancery, king’s bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in the lord chancellor’s court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident and Guarantee Corporation.

It would be overdoing it to say that everything is connected to everything else, but this is clearly Joyce giving the impression of an overview of the city, a gesture towards all the things taking place at the same time in different locations.

Back in the shop the phlegmy old owner hawks and gobs on the floor, then wipes it with his boot. This is Joyce rubbing into his reader’s middle-class faces the unforgiving materiality of human existence. This is what it is.

It ends on a mildly comic note as the bookseller approves Bloom’s choice:

The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.
—Sweets of Sin, he said, tapping on it. That’s a good one.

We need to take note of this title, Sweets of Sin, as it will recur again and again through the rest of the book, as a mocking title for Boylan’s tupping of Molly, but all other instances of adultery as well.

Section 11: Dilly and Simon Dedalus

The lacquey outside Dillon’s auction rooms shakes his handbell.

The lacquey lifted his handbell and shook it:
—Barang!

Not the first and not the last time Joyce transcribes the sound of an inanimate object. Also, this had appeared as an unexplained interpolation back in section 4.

Young Dilly Dedalus, one of Stephen’s 9 or so younger siblings, is waiting outside the auction rooms for her dad to arrive. Bloom saw here there back at the start of ‘Lestrygonians’. Simon has been drinking with the newspapermen in The Oval, just up O’Connell Street and around the corner from Dillon’s. Ashamed of keeping her waiting, like many a parent he goes on the offensive telling her off for her bad posture. When he imitates bad posture, Dilly is embarrassed and tells him everyone is looking.

He gives her a shilling but, hardened, she demands more and he sheepishly hands over a few pennies, telling her to buy a milk or a bun. The family really is destitute as Simon asks his daughter what she wants him to do, go along Connor Street scouring the gutter for stray coins.

Ignored by everyone the Viceregal procession passes by.

There are the following interpolations:

Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint. J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College library.

This is based on a report of a real-life half-mile bicycle handicap race that took place in Dublin on this day and at this time, as reported in the Evening Telegraph for 16 June 1904. The next one is:

Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along James’s street.

This is explained or followed up in the very next section.

Section 12: Tom Kernan

We met Tom Kernan in the funeral scene in chapter 6. In fact we met him way back in Dubliners, in the short story Grace where his friends were trying to cure his alcoholism.

Here we see him emerging from a business meeting, running over the conversation he’s just had in a pub with the publican Mr Crimmins about the shocking tragedy at New York, the explosion of the Slocombe steamship with over 1,000 killed.

Kernan stops to admire himself in the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser, thinking his secondhand coat was well worth half a sovereign. He admires his grizzled moustache, he looks like an officer back from India. He notes the impressed looks he’s drawn from a few important people.

In the kind of stylistic innovation which so many people copied, Kernan is dazzled by the reflection of sunlight off a passing car:

Is that Ned Lambert’s brother over the way, Sam? What? Yes. He’s as like it as damn it. No. The windscreen of that motorcar in the sun there. Just a flash like that. Damn like him.

He passes the site where the Irish nationalist Robert Emmet (1778–1803) was executed by the British after failing to overthrow British rule in the failed 1803 Dublin rising, which triggers pondering whether or not Emmet was buried at Glasnevin.

He see a carriage without a horse tied up outside the Dublin Distillers Company’s stores at the same moment, the text tells us, as poor mad Denis Breen with his legal books, tired of waiting at the offices of lawyer John Henry Menton’s office, is leading his wife over O’Connell bridge, heading towards another lawyer’s office in his obsessive quest to get justice for being sent the anonymous postcard reading U.P. up.

We are given unusually intimate access to Kernan’s stream of consciousness which is a mashup of nationalist heroes and poems and risings and gambling and so on, very reminiscent of the half-educated ramblings of Bloom.

Interpolations:

  • Simon Dedalus greets Father Cowley
  • next stage of the downriver journey of the crumpled-up flyer Bloom threw into the Liffey in ‘Lestrygonians’ which is, as I suggested, a mocking reference to the clashing rocks
  • the Dennis Breen scene

Kernan is pro-Britain as we learn when the Viceregal Cavalcade jingles past the end of the road and he is just a fraction too late to see it, damn!

Section 13: Stephen and Dilly Dedalus

Stephen’s section is, predictably, the most impenetrable one, opening with seven paragraphs so cryptic and oblique as to be impenetrable without commentary and annotation.

This tells us that they are the thoughts of an over-educated man peering through a series of shops windows at various wares. The prose emerges into something like lucidity when he stops at a second-hand book cart (four for sixpence) wondering whether he’ll find his schoolbooks which his family have pawned to buy food. They really are abjectly poor.

Stephen pauses over ‘Charms and invocations of the most blessed abbot Peter Salanka’. Unexpectedly he is spoken to by one of his sisters, Dilly, suddenly appearing by his side. He remembers her face as she crouched over the fire they’d made from useless boots. She shows him a French primer she’s just bought (with one of the pennies their dad gave her back in section 11) and he recognises his own urge to learn in her, but without the advantages of a private education which he enjoyed.

Stephen sees her utter poverty, of life and hope and is fraught with misery. But, as usual, he rejects and fights off any feeling, any temptation to become involved. His inner cry of Misery! Misery! is, on one level, for me, the truest thing in the entire book.

There’s an interpolation. In the middle of Stephen’s thoughts, suddenly a sentence describing:

Father Conmee, having read his little hours, walked through the hamlet of Donnycarney, murmuring vespers.

Section 14: Simon Dedalus, Father Bob Cowley and Ben Dollard

We saw Simon Dedalus greet Father Cowley as in interpolation in section 12. Father Cowley says he’s barricaded into his house by two men because he owes money to the shark Reuben J. Dodd (seen and cursed by the men in the funeral carriage back in chapter 6, ‘Hades’) who has set two men outside Cowley’s house to collect the debt.

Cowley has asked a friend, Ben Dollard, to ask ‘long John’ Fanning, a subsheriff, to intervene. Just then Simon spots the very same Ben crossing a bridge towards them.

—There he is, by God, he said, arse and pockets.

Ben Dollard ambles over to them scratching his bum, they all hello each other, while Simon is critical of Ben’s outfit, while Ben defends it. By now the reader is getting used to the one-sentence interpolations. In the middle of these three’s conversation, the text cuts away for a moment to the madman Bloom pointed out to Josie Breen in chapter 8:

Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, murmuring, glassyeyed, strode past the Kildare street club.

He will reappear in section 17. Meanwhile, Cowley asks after Ben’s famous bass voice and Ben emits a low note for them to admire. There’s another interpolation (another character walking somewhere else):

The reverend Hugh C. Love walked from the old chapterhouse of saint Mary’s abbey past James and Charles Kennedy’s, rectifiers, attended by Geraldines tall and personable, towards the Tholsel beyond the ford of hurdles.

Ben announces he’s been to see the lawyer John Henry Menton about helping Father Cowley. Cowley explains that he owes rent to his landlord (who happens to be the Reverend Love we have just seen in the interpolation) and Ben says this changes things, because Love’s claim takes priority over Dodd’s. Or as Ben colourfully puts it:

—You can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put that writ where Jacko put the nuts.

Section 15: Martin Cunningham, Mr Power and John Wyse Nolan

Cunningham, Power and Nolan are walking. Cunningham has been working to make financial and other arrangements on behalf of the Dignam family. He tells the others he’s asked Father Conmee for help placing one of the Dignam boys in school, and we know from section 1 that Conmee intends to help.

John Wyse Nolan, looking at the ledger, notes that Bloom has put his name down for 5 shillings and Cunningham says he’s actually paid up.

—I’ll say there is much kindness in the jew, he [John Wyse Nolan] quoted, elegantly.

They see Jimmy Henry, the assistant town clerk, who Cunningham promptly buttonholes to join the cause. They arrive at the office of ‘long John’ Fanning, Dublin’s sub-sheriff. Henry’s corns are hurting and he passes Fanning and up the stairs. Fanning didn’t know Dignam, so Nolan describes him as ‘a decent little soul’ as they walk up the stairs.

They’re half way up the stairs when they hear harnesses and hooves and turn to see. Nolan goes downstairs back to the door and watches the Viceregal procession pass by, shouting up to the others to tell them what it is.

Interpolations of other scenes:

  • Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head, appeared above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel.
  • On the steps of the City hall Councillor Nannetti, descending, hailed Alderman Cowley and Councillor Abraham Lyon ascending.
  • Outside la Maison Claire Blazes Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney’s brother-in-law [Bob Doran], humpy, tight, making for the liberties.

Section 16: Buck Mulligan and Haines

At the end of the preceding chapter, chapter 9 ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, Buck Mulligan left the National Library with Stephen. Now he has met up with the Englishman Haines, who we met in chapters 1 and 2, for a snack at the Dublin Bread Company (D.B.C.).

As they enter the restaurant, Mulligan points out John Howard Parnell, Dublin’s city marshall, playing chess at another table. We saw the chess-playing Parnell as an interpolation back in section 8.

Buck and Haines each order a melange (a drink like a cappuccino), scones and cakes and Mulligan jokes they call it the DBC because it makes damn bad cakes.

Mulligan tells Haines he missed Stephen’s presentation about Shakespeare, to which Haines quips:

—I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.

Mulligan laughs that when he gets drunk, Stephen becomes unsteady on his feet.

—You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance. Wandering Ængus I call him.

Mulligan analyses Stephen’s mind, saying the Jesuits planted a permanent fear of hell in him, which will prevent him ever capturing the pure Attic note, the note of Swinburne et al.

Haines replies to all this with prissy Englishness, quick with references to authorities, in this case saying Stephen’s idee fixe reminds him of the theories of professor Pokorny of Vienna (is this a reference to Freud?).

The cakes arrive, Mulligan slices and butters his and laughs that Stephen claims he’ll write something in ten years! (In fact ten years after 1904 is 1914 and that’s the year Joyce published ‘Dubliners’ and began work on this novel, ‘Ulysses’.) Haines is unexpectedly sympathetic and says he wouldn’t be surprised if Stephen does write something.

Interpolations:

  • we see the one one-legged sailor at his latest location, singing his shanty and begging
  • our last sighting of the religious leaflet Bloom scrunched up and threw in the Liffey, as it arrives at Dublin Bay and passes the Rosevean, the three-masted ship Stephen saw over his shoulder back in chapter 3

Section 17: Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell

We briefly glimpse the Italian music master on his way, but this short section follows the lunatic Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell as he walks along Merrion Square, gets as far as Mr Lewis Werner’s cheerful windows, turns and comes back the way he came.

As he passes a dentist’s surgery belonging to a Mr Bloom (no relation to our Bloom) his flying coattails bang the stick of the blind man we saw Bloom help across the road in chapter 8 ‘Lestrygonians’ but he walks heedlessly on. The blind young man curses Farrell.

—God’s curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You’re blinder nor I am, you bitch’s bastard!

Section 18: Patrick Dignam

Deceased Paddy Dignam’s son, also Patrick – ironically but also tenderly referred to as Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam – has escaped the stifling atmosphere of the house of the dead, full of sniffling old women eating cake, sipping sherry and endlessly jawing, to come out and buy a pound and a half of porksteaks. En route home he sees sights and sounds, including a poster advertising a boxing match, but then realises it took place on 22 May so he’s missed it. He’s a fan of boxing and ponders which current fighter is best.

In two mirrors in the shop window of Madame Doyle the milliner, he catches sight of himself dressed in mourning, and smartens himself up (as Tom Kernan did in the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser in section 12).

Master Patrick spots the poster advertising Marie Kendall, as Miss Dunne did in section 7, and M’Coy and Lenehan in section 9.

(Note the persistent presence of posters, advertising hoardings, newspaper hoardings and so on in the modern city, plus the memorable moment when sunlight off a car windscreen dazzling Tom Kernan – it is this sense of the city as a sensorium of random, fragmentary sights and sounds which would influence so many other authors of the 1920s and ’30s, including John dos Passos and Alfred Döblin.)

He sees a toff with a red flower in his mouth. He doesn’t know it but this is Blazes Boylan who we saw put the stem of the flower between his teeth in section 5. Boylan is apparently listening to a street drunk telling him something and, characteristically, grinning.

He sees some schoolboys with satchels and notes that he’s off school till the following Monday (it being Thursday) and that Uncle Barney is meant to get news about his father’s death into the papers so everyone knows why he’s absent.

Suddenly his mind flicks to concrete and disconcerting details of seeing his dead dad laid out: how his face had gone grey instead of its usual red; a fly walking over his face up to his eye; the scrunching sound at they screwed the screws of the coffin; the bumping sound it made being carried downstairs, and his Uncle Barney instructing the men how to manage it in the tight space.

The last night pa was boosed he was standing on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney’s for to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was Mr Dignam, my father. I hope he’s in purgatory now because he went to confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night.

Pathos.

Section 19: The Viceregal cavalcade

As this chapter began with an extended description of a representative of the Catholic Church (Father Conmee) it ends with an extended description of the chief representative of the British state in Ireland, William Humble, Earl of Dudley, as he rides with his wife in one carriage, followed by dignitaries in several more, out from the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park and across the city on his way to inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer’s hospital.

According to the commentators, Father Conmee’s movement is from south to north, while the Viceregal Cavalcade processes from Phoenix Park in the west across to the east side of Dublin, so that the two miniature odysseys form a cross over the geography of the city. In Joyce everything falls into patterns and schemas.

In a massive paragraph Joyce records the reactions to the cavalcade as it passes by of every one of the characters we’ve met so far in this chapter, plus some new ones: Tom Kernan; Dudley White (a real-life barrister); Richie Goulding Stephen’s uncle and down-at-heel lawyer; Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce, the barmaids we’ll meet in the next chapter; Simon Dedalus doffing his hat, which His Excellency returns; the reverend Hugh C. Love similarly doffs his hat but unnoticed; Lenehan and M’Coy watch the procession unmoved; Gerty MacDowell is irritated because her view of what the Viceroy’s wife is wearing is blocked by parked vans; John Wyse Nolan smiles coldly; Tom Rochford notices Lady Dudley looking at him and quickly takes his hands out of his pockets; Marie Kendall stares down at the procession from her much-mentioned poster; Buck Mulligan gaily, and Haines gravely watch the procession from the window of the DBC, the customers crowding to the window casting a shadow on John Howard Parnell’s chessboard; Dilly Dedalus looks up from her second-hand French primer to watch the wheels spin by; John Henry Menton watches from the door of his business; Mrs Breen pulls her husband back from stepping in front of the horses, he hastily salutes the carriages and the Viceroy’s aide-de-camp replies; the five sandwichboard men spelling HELYS stop to watch; Mr Denis J Maginni walks on, unaffected.

With typical confidence Blazes Boylan doesn’t unhat but admires the pretty women in their carriages. From their carriage the Viceroy and wife hear the band of Highland soldiers playing on College Green (the ones we saw getting off a tram in section 6).

Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell stares over the top of the procession; Hornblower, a Unionist, doffs his cap; Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam sees other people taking their hats off and so doffs his own dirty black cap. The cavalcade passes the blind stripling and the mysterious man in the brown mackintosh who keeps cropping up. Then on past Mr Eugene Stratton, two ladies and two small schoolboys.

Mockery The grandiosity of the Viceroy is mocked in at least two ways. First, the entire thing is done in a parody of a Court Circular or official report, complete with the full qualifications of everyone involved. Second, the list includes satirical figures and gestures, the best of which is:

From its sluice in Wood quay wall under Tom Devan’s office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue of liquid sewage.

And after this long list of people reacting to the parade, the whole thing builds up to an image of rude indifference:

On Northumberland and Lansdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni’s sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.

How beautifully and amusingly this complicated set-piece of interlocking parts and references comes to a comic closure.

Caveat: when is a panoramic view not a panoramic view?

In all the commentary I’ve read, among all the fine words about Aristotle, Hume and Vico, I haven’t come across anyone pointing out how rough Joyce’s characters are. The novel is overwhelmingly about the lowlife of Dublin and impresses on you a sometimes crushing sense of a world of failures and cadgers, blowhards, parasites and drinkers.

The most impressive chapters in ‘Ulysses’ are 1) the encounter in Barney Kiernan’s pub with the drunk citizen and his little court of drunk sycophants; 2) ‘Circe’ which is set in a brothel among prostitutes and ends in a drunken fight with a squaddie; 3) 40-pages spent inside the head of Molly Bloom who middle-class professors claim to love but I wonder if they’d really invite the semi-literate, slovenly, sex-mad wife of a failing advertising canvasser to their nice dinner parties.

Even when we meet characters which ought to be solidly middle-class like the editor of the Evening Telegraph, he turns out to be crude and tipsy. The authors A.E. and John Eglinton in the National Library ought to raise the tone, but for some reason they don’t, instead the arrival of Buck Mulligan with his play about masturbation significantly lowers it. Any of the supposedly middle class characters are swamped by the world of cadgers, racing tipsters, loan sharks, debtors, pawners and beggars which is where Joyce’s imagination really lies.

Stephen may be a great intellectual but he comes from a family which has gone right down the tubes, is reduced to pawning its curtains and books, and relies on out-and-out charity to have anything to even eat. It’s all surprisingly close to the sense of threadbare impoverishment which Samuel Beckett picked up and made his own in the 1940s and 50s, it’s overwhelmingly bereft and immiserated.

Where are the middle classes? Where are the fine dinner parties and posh young ladies going to private school, the balls, the visits to the theatre, the recitals? Where are the well-paid, well-dressed officers in the army and in the administration? (making a fleeting appearance only to be mocked, in the finale of this chapter.)

It’s characteristic that (in the National Library chapter, and later) Stephen is embittered at not being invited to George Moore’s literary soirèe and so Joyce doesn’t show it. That would require a whole chapter of fine talk along the lines of George Eliot or Henry James. In its place we get the unbelievably rough and crude ‘Circe’ chapter.

Dublin was and is a port city but where are the business meetings and professional dealings of importers and exporters and customs officers and so on? Scenes set in the big companies that own the ships and the ships’ captains, educated capable men? Instead of them we get the scene in the cabman’s shelter in ‘Eumaeus’, among the roughest of the rough, notable for the threatening bluster of the tattooed sailor, the drunken argument about Parnell everyone gets into, and that the place is run by a convicted terrorist.

Bearing all this in mind, I don’t see how the book as a whole, let alone this chapter, can be said to give a ‘panoramic view’ of the city. It gives a cleverly interlocking and cross-referencing portrait of Joyce’s level of Dublin society, of the lower middle class, working class, hard drinking, scrounging and begging classes, yes. But an overview of all the people in the city, including the genuinely middle, upper and aristocratic classes? Emphatically not.

Credit

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

Related links

Joyce reviews

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Posted by Simon on February 18, 2026

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Ulysses by James Joyce: Penelope

of course hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do
(Molly Bloom thinking her husband, Leopold, should count his blessings)

he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part
(Molly angry at Bloom’s weird habit of kissing her bottom)

Im always like that in the spring Id like a new fellow every year
(Molly’s friskiness)

what else were we given all those desires for Id like to know I cant help it if Im young still can I
(Molly defends her natural urges)

compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf
(Molly compares a woman’s lovely boobs with a man’s ugly bits)

wherever you be let your wind go free
(Molly celebrates the joys of farting)

I bet he never saw a better pair of thighs than that look how white they are
(Molly’s body positivity)

God send him sense and me more money
(dismissing a boring old bishop she once heard deliver a moralising sermon, and sounding very like her irreverent namesake, Moll Flanders)

Lord the cracked things come into my head sometimes

‘Penelope’ is the 18th and final chapter of James Joyce’s novel, ‘Ulysses’. Here’s a reminder of the complete chapter numbers and names. (Note that the names given here are not printed in the published book, they were assigned in guidance and schemas which Joyce sent to supporters and have been used by commentators ever since; but you won’t find them in any published or online edition):

Part 1. Telemachiad

  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

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. Penelope

Place in the sequence

As you can see, ‘Penelope’ is not only the final chapter but the third chapter of the third part of the novel, which is generally called ‘Nostos’, Greek for ‘The Return’, Joyce’s own name for it.

The preceding two chapters tell how (in ‘Circe’) middle-aged advertising salesman Leopold Bloom helped over-educated, drunk and depressed young Stephen Dedalus get away from Dublin’s red light district where he’d been involved in a fight with a soldier. In ‘Eumaeus’ Bloom helps Stephen to an all-night café down by the docks where he tries to restore him with a cup of (disgusting) coffee and a hot roll. In ‘Ithaca’ the pair leave the café and walk to Bloom’s home at 7 Eccles Street.

Here Bloom lets them in, makes Stephen a nice cup of cocoa and they talk about many things. Bloom offers to make up a bed on the sofa for Stephen and suggests all kinds of plans – that he could move in as a lodger and give his wife, Molly, Italian lessons, and maybe even join her as a professional singer in the music troupe Bloom fantasises about setting up and managing. But Stephen turns these offers down and, after the pair have gone for a pee in Bloom’s back garden, Bloom opens the garden gate and Bloom stumbles off into the night never to be heard of again.

Bloom re-enters his house, locks up, gets undressed interspersed with rummaging about in his drawers, looking at mementoes of his absent daughter and dead father, thinking about all kinds of subjects, not least extended fantasies about moving to a delightful cottage in the country. Then he finally gets into bed and thinks about the Central Event in the book which is that while he’s been out walking the streets of Dublin, his bosomy wife, Molly, stayed at home and was visited by the flash man-about-town and concert promoter Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan, who had sex with her.

All day long Bloom has been aware of their tryst, set for 4pm, so that he’s spent the book in a kind of PTSD hyper-self-aware state (which partly explains the super stream-of-consciousness style of the novel). But during the course of his ponderings, Bloom gets over it. He registers his own mixed emotions of jealousy and anger but circles, in the end, round to equanimity and, finally, tenderness. And in this sleep forgiving mood, he kisses Molly on her bare bottom.

Unfortunately, this has the effect of waking her up from her sleep. Now half awake, Molly quizzes her husband about where he’s been and he proceeds to tell her a pack of lies, saying he spent the evening at the theatre then went on to a restaurant for supper where a fellow diner, Stephen, injured himself performing a gymnastic feat and so he brought him home, here, to Eccles Street, to patch him up, and that’s why he’s come to bed late. And having recited this pack of lies which omits everything important which happened during the day and replaces it with a set of fabrications, Bloom falls asleep and hands the novel’s narrative over to his wife. And it’s here that the final chapter, ‘Penelope’, consisting of Molly Bloom’s long monologue, begins.

First a few more facts, then we’ll look in detail at Molly’s chapter.

Time

Each of the chapters of ‘Ulysses’ covers about an hour in the course of one long day, starting at 8am on Thursday 16 June 1904 and going through to the early hours of the following morning, Friday 17 June. (As Stephen remarks, ‘Every Friday buries a Thursday’.)

‘Ithaca’ takes place from about 2 to 3 am on the morning of Friday 17 June 1904. As Bloom lets Stephen out the back door of his garden, the bells of St George’s ring and the commentators tell me this marks 2.30 am. So assuming it takes Bloom about half an hour to lock up, get undressed, potter about and finally get into bed, ‘Penelope’ kicks off maybe around 3am in the morning.

Homeric parallel

Each of the chapters in ‘Ulysses’ is based on an episode from The Odyssey, the famous epic poem composed some 750 years BC by the ancient Greek poet Homer, which describes the ten-year-long voyage back from the Trojan War of the Greek hero Odysseus and his crew, and which features encounters with mythical creatures and legendary figures such as the giant Cyclops or the witch Circe.

In The Odyssey, Penelope is the wife of Odysseus who has waited 20 long years for her husband’s return, which we, the readers, know has been comprised of the ten years of the war itself, and then the ten years of Odysseus’s wanderings round the Mediterranean. During the last few years she has been fending off the horde of ‘suitors’ who have descended like locusts on her palace and are eating her out of house and home while they vie for her hand in remarriage, and so ownership of Odysseus’s kingdom of Ithaca.

Now the key point is that Penelope is every bit as cunning as her husband Odysseus, who is himself described as being the most cunning and many-minded of the Greek heroes. And so in her husband’s absence, Penelope has devised a series of strategies to put off the suitors. The most famous of these is that she tells them she must weave a burial shroud for Odysseus’s elderly father, Laertes, and cannot listen to their suits until she’s finished. For three long years she dutifully weaves the shroud during the day but then carefully unpicks it during the night, so that the task is never finished. Clever, eh?

Molly, her modern reincarnation in the novel, shares many of Penelope’s traits. 1) For a start she represents the final aspect of Bloom’s coming home, his nostos or return. Sure he arrived at his actual house in the previous chapter, but in a sense it’s only climbing into bed and kissing her that marks the completion of his odyssey and his final arrival Home.

2) As to the suitors, Odysseus arrives back at his palace but still has to dispel the suitors and take possession, but there no hordes of suitors in the ‘Ulysses’ version. There was one (Blazes Boylan) but he’s long gone. Instead Bloom arrives home at his house but needs, in some subtle psychological sense, to retake ownership by a) touching all his precious possessions and b) working through in his mind his responses to Molly’s infidelity to him – both processes which are itemised in ‘Ithaca’.

3) Where Molly most resembles Penelope is in her own cleverness, in being every bit as smart as her husband. Because the real point of this chapter is that at long last we get to hear her side of the story and it is significantly, and at all points, different from her husband’s.

Because the ‘Penelope’ chapter consists of a long, long interior monologue by Molly in which she passes in a chaotic review over all the key moments in her life, before and after her marriage to Bloom, mentioning and describing her parents, her girlhood in Gibraltar, incidents from her career, the umpteen times she’s been propositioned or molested or flirted with – but above all, hundreds of comments about Bloom’s character and habits which show him in a completely different light from the entire preceding narrative.

It does a number of things, this final chapter. It rounds off the whole novel by bringing Bloom’s odyssey to a conclusion. But it also gives the woman’s version of a world up to now dominated by men and men’s opinions. More specifically, it gives a completely different portrait of Bloom than we’ve hitherto had, portrayed in detail by someone who knows him intimately (really intimately) and whose version is often at drastic odds with what we’ve learned so far.

First a brief reminder of the key facts of Molly’s biography, then I’ll go through the monologue in detail.

Molly key facts

  • current name Marion ‘Molly’ Bloom
  • born Marion Tweedy, daughter of Major Brian Tweedy, of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers
  • Molly was born and raised in Gibraltar because that’s where Major Tweedy’s regiment was stationed
  • age 33
  • earns money as a soprano singer and is fairly well known around Dublin
  • been married for 15 years to Leopold Bloom
  • two children: a daughter, Milly, who just turned 15 yesterday, and a son, Rudy, who died in infancy, aged 11 days, a decade ago, since when the couple haven’t had sex

Stream-of-consciousness

The latter 5 or 6 chapters of ‘Ulysses’ differ from the first ten or so in each being dominated by one big formatting idea. Thus ‘Nausicaa’ is written in the style of a lady’s romantic novel and ‘Circe is in the form of a play. Molly’s chapter is another case in point: it is the book’s purest example of the invention (often attributed to Joyce) of the stream-of-consciousness. It’s 24,000 words long, filling 40 to 50 pages of the book versions and yet it contains of just 8 unpunctuated sections i.e the words flow seamlessly together with no punctuation at all for thousands and thousands of words. The final section alone contains 3,680 words and no punctuation.

Why the initial style is hard

Surprisingly, though, it isn’t as hard to make sense of as the densest of the ‘initial style’. Brainy young Stephen Dedalus’s thoughts in ‘Proteus’ 1) contain loads of learned references, including 2) quotes from theology and literature, 3) often in foreign languages and 4) the references are often cut off halfway through, clipped and abbreviated, sometimes down to just one word, and all chopped up by continuous full stops into tight little fragments.

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

It’s the combination of these four elements which makes the ‘initial style’, and Stephen’s stream-of-consciousness in particular, often so impenetrable.

Why Molly’s style is much easier

By contrast, all these challenging elements are missing in Molly’s thoughts. There are no fancy-ancy quotes or foreign languages or tight truncations; instead, a soothing flow of words:

theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot he noticed at once even before he was introduced when I was in the D B C with Poldy laughing and trying to listen I was waggling my foot we both ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter I saw him looking with his two old maids of sisters when I stood up

In one of the book’s many commentaries I came across the highly revealing fact that Joyce originally wrote the chapter out as traditional prose and then went back and took all the punctuation out. Once you know that, you can kind of feel your way towards the missing stops. Maybe ‘full stop’ is being slightly too dogmatic, but you can feel the ghost of the missing punctuation. In other words, the prose isn’t really endlessly flowing, it’s actually made up – once you get a feel for it – from relatively traditional units. So the excerpt above could be loosely punctuated thus:

they’re all so different – Boylan talking about the shape of my foot – he noticed at once, even before he was introduced – when I was in the D B C with Poldy laughing and trying to listen, I was waggling my foot – we both ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter – I saw him looking with his two old maids of sisters when I stood up

Not that difficult after all, is it? In fact, surprisingly easy. Obviously there are plenty of passages which aren’t quite as easy to silently punctuate into traditional prose as this one, but a lot are, and once you get used to reading it while looking for these sentence-like units, you develop the knack for recognising them and so extracting the sense, relatively quickly.

While reading ‘Ulysses’ I came across the RTE radio dramatisation of the novel which was made for the centenary of Joyce’s birth in 1982. You can listen to each individual chapter as a separate track on Spotify.

Listening to this radio production of ‘Penelope’, what you almost immediately realise is the obvious fact that, if you’re going to read this text (or indeed anything) out loud, you regularly have to stop for breath. And any sensible reader will tend to stop for breath at the natural breaks of sense, at the end of cadences or phrases. So listening to someone read out Molly Bloom’s soliloquy really brings out the ghostly punctuation which, as I’ve suggested, in practice still exists in the text. Reading it out loud tends to naturally reintroduce the invisible punctuation.

In addition, this (marvellous) reading also brings out the changes of tone and expression which are continually occurring throughout the text, as appropriate for different phrases, and this, too, helps to chop up what at first seemed like page after page of solid text, into what are in reality much more manageable, understandable phrases.

The ‘Eternal Feminine’

As to the reason for this endless flow – in the schematic charts and diagrams which Joyce made about the book, he said ‘Penelope’ took the sign ∞ representing infinity, supposedly because she represents the Eternal Feminine.

Personally, I shy away from this kind of talk because discussing the ‘nature of woman’, ‘female psychology’ and so on was problematic and controversial at the time, and has only become more mired in four generations of feminist theory, not to mention the worldwide swamp of social media.

If you do a quick Google search and read any articles or commentary about Molly and her monologue you will quickly discover how the entire subject is infested by experts who cite the received ideas of our age, that Molly is a ‘strong independent women’ who ‘expresses her own sexuality’ in ‘defiance of the patriarchy’ and countless other clichés. You can find thousands of feminist interpretations at the click of a button.

What I noticed in the two commentaries I’ve tended to have open beside me, is that because they both go on at length about feminism, sexism, the patriarchy and so on, they completely ignore many other aspects and details which are just as important.

Therefore in my summary I will try to stick closely to what the words actually say and not wander off into sweeping generalisations about The Female Mind, Female Sexuality, the Patriarchy and all the other high-level issues which so many commentators instantly jump to. Their approach takes us away from the words on the page, which are not only funny and surprising but are deliberately designed to 1) recap information about quite a few characters we’ve met previously in the book and 2) prompt us to rethink everything we thought we knew about her husband, Leopold.

Yes yes

In that spirit, looking at the actual words on the page, there’s an obvious aspect of the concept of the infinite, which is that this big chapter starts with the word ‘yes’ and ends with the word ‘yes’. This is an obvious manoeuvre by Joyce to bring out the Eternity theme.

Pondering this I conceived a Kafkaesque nightmare of a hypothetical reader who finds themselves somehow condemned to read the chapter forever, because as soon as they read the final ‘yes’ they are transported back to the first ‘yes’ and so spend the rest of their lives stuck inside an endless loop of Molliness.

Section lengths

Precise definitions of the section lengths vary slightly on whether you’re referring to the 1922, 1961 or Gabler (1984) edition. I used an online word counter to count the words in each section of the Planet Gutenberg online edition.

Section 1: 3,746 words (opens with ‘Yes because he never did…’)

Section 2: 4,404 words (opens with ‘theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot…’ and makes up what is supposedly the longest sentence in literature)

Section 3: 921 words (opens with ‘yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he made me thirsty…’)

Section 4: 2,208 words (opens with ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling…’)

Section 5: 2,378 words (opens with ‘Mulveys was the first when I was in bed that morning…’)

Section 6: 3,619 words (opens with ‘that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free…’)

Section 7: 3,230 words (opens with ‘who knows is there anything the matter with my insides…’)

Section 8: 3,680 words (opens with ‘no thats no way for him has he no manners nor no refinement nor no nothing in his nature…’)

Summary

As explained, I am going to avoid wading into the many high-level feminist debates raised by the soliloquy (there’s no shortage of people doing that) and instead try to focus on the exact words and what they tell us.

Section 1 (3,746 words)

Molly is surprised that Bloom has asked her to make him breakfast in bed tomorrow morning. This request doesn’t occur in ‘Ithaca’ so is a puzzle.

Quickly she moves on to a sharp assessment of one of the many other people who appear in the monologue, Mrs Riordan who we met as Dante, nanny to young Stephen Dedalus in ‘Portrait’. In a surprising coincidence we discover she lived as an old lady in the same hotel as Molly and Bloom and the latter used to take her for excursions in her bathchair. I find this one of the most striking things in the entire monologue.

But Molly is cross because Dante never left them any money in her will when she died. Also, she was very moralistic, down on bathsuits etc so Molly is glad she’s not like that.

She likes Bloom for his kindness that way, mind you he’s useless when he’s ill, and so are men generally, ‘weak and puling’, compared to women who have to hide it all. Remembering Bloom being in hospital after he sprained his ankle at a party, she does the first of many shrewish comments about other women using their wiles to get close to Poldy, in this case Miss Stack buying him flowers to get into his bedroom, the implication she had a fancy for him or they even had sex (?).

She suspects he must have had an orgasm during the day because he asked for breakfast i.e. it gives him an appetite. But she’s equally sure it’s not an affair, it’s not ‘love’, so speculates it might be with one of the prostitutes from nighttown, which leads her on to think about all the little bitches Bloom’s picked up on the sly, ‘if they only knew him as well as I do’. She knows that’s why she kissed his bottom, it’s a tell-tale sign and remembers the smell of other women on his clothes.

Just recently she came into a room where he was writing which he hurriedly covered up with blotting paper, poor fool (we know it was probably a letter to his penpal lover Martha Clifford though Molly doesn’t know her name).

She hated it when he had a pash for their scullerymaid, Mary Driscoll, the pair of them flirting under her nose (we know about Mary because she appeared among the many accusers in Bloom’s dream trial in ‘Circe’) and was outraged when Bloom suggested Mary eat Christmas dinner with them, and driven to distraction by her queening round the place (singing in the WC) until she confronted Bloom with an ultimatum, her or me, he chose her and so she gave Mary her week’s notice.

She remembers the last time Bloom came on her bottom, on an evening when they’d gone for a walk with Blazes Boylan and the latter had squeezed her hand. She imagines seducing some young boy, then remembers Bloom’s insistent questioning of who is she thinking about.

She seems to go on and think that now she’s had sex with Boylan, the first time is over, now it will become more routine. She wonders why you can’t just get people to kiss and hug you, she loves kissing.

I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you

Then thinks about having to go to confession, the silly euphemisms the priest uses, then that she was a bit attracted to the priest with his bullneck.

Id like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the smell of incense off him like the pope

Thinking back to her afternoon sex with Boylan, she wonders if he was satisfied with her, she didn’t like him slapping her on the bottom:

I laughed Im not a horse or an ass

A flower he was wearing reminds her of a funny tasting drink she associates with an American she knew, can’t figure out if he slept with her. She associates it with a thunderstorm which put the fear of God into her, thinks about the end of the world, what could you do except go to church and pray, which reminds her that Poldy isn’t religious, refuses to go to church, says there is no soul, just grey matter inside us. Which circles back to memories of sex with Boylan that afternoon:

he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst… no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up…

With a little recrimination to God:

whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us or like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye

But then a surprising debunkment of Boylan:

still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me

Surely the second he refers to Bloom (‘the last time’) since we thought Boylan had only done it once. Interesting to note she’s describing coitus interruptus in the first part. Then a complaint about condoms (?):

nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure

Thoughts of contraception lead to the opposite, of large families like Mina Purefoy‘s whose husband keeps getting her pregnant so she lives in a swarm of children. She wonders about having a child by Boylan but then considers that Poldy has more spunk in him.

Then she remembers coming across him flirting with Josie Powell, the unmarried name of Josie Breen, who Bloom had a thing with, at a dance, which Bloom tried to justify then led to a stand-up row about politics, something about Jesus being a carpenter and the first socialist. But generally how she managed the rivalry with Josie, how she knew Bloom liked her better. But still she ponders how she would win Bloom back is he resumed his passion for Josie, in ‘his plabbery kind of a manner’. How she’d revive him by little touches, getting him to fold down her collar, whereas she’d go and confront Josie directly.

Remembers the night Bloom almost proposed when she was in the kitchen making a potato cake, and how Josie was always embracing her, Molly, in front of Bloom, as if it was Bloom, one among many women who flirted with him. Molly used to tease Josie with how close she was to Bloom, then after they got married she stopped coming round.

She wonders what life is like for her now, with her mad husband, Breen. Last time they met, Josie told her he sometimes gets into bed with his muddy boots on. At least Poldy always wipes his feet on the mat, always blacks his own boots, always takes off his hat when he comes up in the street. Whereas Breen is mad about this postcard he got with U.P. on it.

No she’d rather die than marry another man, mind you Bloom is lucky to have her: ‘hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do’, and thinking of women driven to distraction by their husbands she thinks of Mrs Maybrick who poisoned her husband with white arsenic for love of another man. She was hanged.

Commentary: although there’s a fair amount about Bloom and Boyland, and their penises and spunk, in fact the section can be seen as Molly comparing herself with seven other women, with their different beliefs, moral values, and experiences of love and marriage. Knowing Joyce I imagine with a bit of effort you could work each of them up into symbolising different types or categories.

Section 2 (4,404 words)

its all very well a husband but you cant fool a lover

She blames Bloom for having some new fad every week. She left her suede gloves behind in the toilet at the DBC Dame Street, Poldy suggested offering a reward. Boyle likes her feet, likes her crossing them, he liked watching her take off her stockings. But this segues into Bloom one time asked her to walk in the horses’ dung in the street, ‘of course hes not natural like the rest of the world’.

She remembers him saying she’d beat Katty Lanner (a real-life dancer). The tenor Bartell DArcy who kissed her in church, he liked her low notes. She thinks she’ll tell Bloom about it one day and show him the place where they ‘did it’ – surely she means had sex.

In particular Bloom ‘hes mad on the subject of drawers’, and stares at young girls on bicycles with their skirts blowing up to show their knickers as they ride. The time at a fair when a woman was standing against the sun and he stared even though he was with her and Milly. The hypocrisy of men who can go and get anything they like from anything in a skirt but insist on interrogating them (women) about where they’ve been and with who etc. ‘drawers drawers the whole blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll to carry about in his waistcoat pocket’ (which of course links up with the subject of the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter where Bloom gets his rocks off watching Gerty show him her drawers).

The time they were in the rain and he begged her to lift her skirt a little and she touched his trousers ‘the way I used to Gardner’.

Bloom was always canny not like ‘that other fool Henny Doyle he was always breaking or tearing something in the charades’. Bloom sent her 8 poppies. But he could never embrace well ‘like Gardner‘. She hopes Boylan will come round again, on Monday, same time, 4pm.

She hates people calling at random times like the time Professor Goodwin found her flushed from cooking stew. We learn that Boylan sent ahead a gift of port and peaches (which we saw him buying in Thornton’s fruit and flower shop in ‘Wandering Rocks’.

She’s scheduled to go to Belfast with Boylan the following week; lucky Bloom is to go to Ennis to commemorate his father’s death, would be tricky being in rooms next to each other; if Bloom had sex with her, Boylan would know.

She remembers the time Bloom carried bowls of soup from the dining car along a moving train spilling them everywhere, and the steward locked them in their compartment in revenge. She hopes Boylan books first class tickets. Trains remind her of the nice workman who got her and Bloom their own compartment in the train for their outing to Howth.

She remembers patriotic concerts she did in support of the Boer War where she sang the Rudyard Kipling poem The Absent-Minded Beggar. This song is mentioned numerous times in Bloom’s thoughts earlier in the book. Funnily enough I devoted a blog post to it when I had my Kipling phase. She wore a brooch for Lord Roberts and had a map of the war. Which leads her to reminisce about ‘Gardner lieut Stanley G 8th Bn 2nd East Lancs Rgt’ who fought in the war and apparently died there of enteric fever.

he was a lovely fellow in khaki and just the right height over me Im sure he was brave too he said I was lovely the evening we kissed goodbye at the canal lock my Irish beauty

She likes the army, after all she’s an army brat, her father was a major, so:

I love to see a regiment pass in review the first time I saw the Spanish cavalry at La Roque it was lovely… the Black Watch with their kilts in time at the march past the 10th hussars the prince of Wales own or the lancers O the lancers theyre grand or the Dublins that won Tugela

Interchangeable men I’ll note here where I’ve noticed it, that Joyce deliberately blends all the men in her life together under the one pronoun ‘he’. In consecutive phrases ‘he’ can refer to Bloom or Boylan or his or her father or various others. The implication (apart from Molly being dreamily half-awake) is that all men are the same. At a deeper level, maybe the implication is that all people are the same, that our identities are only skin deep, like name labels stuck on our chests at a conference which soon peel off.

She notes how Boylan’s father made money selling horses to the army and hopes he’ll buy her a nice present when they go to Belfast ‘well he could buy me a nice present up in Belfast after what I gave him’ i.e. sex. She’d love to go shopping with him. She’ll have to take her wedding ring off or risk being reported to the police (married woman with unmarried man) although:

O let them all go and smother themselves for the fat lot I care

She remembers that Boylan is heavy, hairy too, would be more convenient to have sex doggy position:

always having to lie down for them better for him put it into me from behind the way Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband made her like the dogs do

She remembers Boylan was beautifully dressed but for the first ten minutes in a foul temper because he’d just lost £20 on the Gold Cup horse race which reverberates through the novel. He got the tip from Lenehan and that reminds Molly of sitting in a coach next to Lenehan coming back from the Glencree dinner (in ‘Wandering Rocks’ Lenehan remembers this journey, pressed up against Molly so he could feel the outline of her fine breasts: ‘His hands moulded ample curves of air’, which gave him an erection). Unsurprisingly she thinks Lenehan is a creep. At that social do she was aware of the Lord Mayor staring at her with his dirty eyes. Molly’s fate is to be eyed up and chatted up wherever she goes.

She wishes she had cutlery as fine as the ones at that dinner and reflects she could have stolen a few by slipping them into her muff. Shopping: she wants two new chemises and a kidfitting corselet as advertised in The Gentlewoman. Which makes her reflect she’s getting a bit tubby, needs to lay off the stout at lunchtime. Mind you, the poor quality of the booze they get from Larry O’Rourke.

She’s got one pair of garters Bloom bought her, and he got her some lovely face cream which made skin ‘like new’, she asked him to buy a new bottle (which we saw him do right at the start of his part of the narrative). She only has 3 sets of clothes and one at the cleaners.

She feels sorry for herself wearing such shabby outfits and remembers she’ll be 33 this September i.e. 32 now. Mind you take Mrs Galbraith, older than her and a fine looking woman though on the turn. She remembers watching Kitty O’Shea brush her hair in the house opposite in Grantham Street. (This peripheral contact with Kitty parallels Bloom’s brief encounter with Charles Stewart Parnell, recovering his hat after it was knocked off in a riot.)

In another parallel her thoughts drift to Lily Langtry, the Jersey Lily, widely known to be having an affair with the Prince of Wales. So these two women mirror Molly in having extra-marital affairs: one with the leader of the nationalist Irish, one with the future King of England.

In a real digression she remembers Bloom buying a volume of Rabelais for her, and her not getting on with its absurdity and obscenity. (We know from ‘Ithaca’ that Bloom thinks he can educate Molly by leaving good books around.)

Back to the Prince of Wales, she knows he visited Gibraltar the year she was born, planted some tree. Back to Bloom and she wishes he’d change job ‘and go into an office or something where hed get regular pay or a bank where they could put him up on a throne to count the money all the day’, instead he mooches round the house under her feet all the time.

Molly remembers going to Mr Cuffe to plead for Bloom’s job back after he was fired; Cuffe stared at her breasts (as more or less all the men seem to) and politely refused. What she remembers more is the shabby dress she had to make the visit in.

Bloom thinks he knows about women’s clothes but hasn’t got a clue and she remembers some terrible hats he thought she looked great in. Just like he’s rubbish at cooking, ‘mathering everything he can scour off the shelves into it’.

Section 3 (921 words)

Molly ponders her breasts, thinking maybe Boylan made them firmer by sucking them, which leads onto the breasts on the grand statues of naked women you see everywhere, the woman often hiding one breast behind her hand. Mind you not as silly as men’s bits:

compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf

And she remembers various men who have exposed themselves to her:

  • that disgusting Cameron highlander behind the meat market
  • that other wretch with the red head behind the tree where the statue of the fish used to be when I was passing pretending he was pissing standing out for me to see it with his babyclothes up to one side
  • theyre always trying to show it to you every time nearly I passed outside the mens greenhouse near the Harcourt street station

She remembers popping into a men’s toilet in the freezing winter of 1893 coming back from a party and teasingly thinks ‘pity a couple of the Camerons werent there to see me squatting in the mens place’.

Of men’s penises she thinks: ‘I tried to draw a picture of it before I tore it up like a sausage or something I wonder theyre not afraid going about of getting a kick or a bang’.

She remembers Bloom encouraging her to let herself be photographed nude when he lost his job to earn some money, which reminds her of the painting of a naked nymph they have above their bed, or the erotic photos he keeps hidden in his drawer (catalogued in ‘Eumaeus’).

She remembers him trying to explain the word metempsychosis which had cropped up in a book right at the start of Bloom’s narrative: ‘he never can explain a thing simply the way a body can understand’ and then he went and burned the bloody pan frying his kidney this morning. Sounds like any wife complaining about any husband.

Then she switches men and complains about Boylan biting her nipple till she screamed: ‘arent they fearful trying to hurt you’. She remembers having swollen breasts full of milk when Milly was born and Bloom (typically) saying she could rent herself out as a wetnurse. She remembers ‘ that delicate looking student that stopped in no 28 with the Citrons Penrose’ nearly catching her washing naked through the window.

As to her full breasts she a) got Dr Brady to write her a prescription and b) got Bloom to suck the milk out of them, they were so hard and painful: ‘he said it was sweeter and thicker than cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea well hes beyond everything.’

Just one more of his outrageous suggestions, she thinks she should write them all in a book titled ‘the works of Master Poldy’. He used to suckle her for an hour at a time, the big baby: ‘hey want everything in their mouth all the pleasure those men get out of a woman’.

Then a very explicit memory of the multiple orgasms Boylan gave her:

O Lord I must stretch myself I wished he was here or somebody to let myself go with and come again like that I feel all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he made me spend the 2nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all

Though she had to restrain herself because you never know with some men, some men want you to remain coy and well behaved even while having sex. And she looks forward to more of the same with Boylan come Monday: ‘O Lord I cant wait till Monday’.

Section 4 (2,208 words)

Molly’s fourth sentence begins with her hearing a train whistle ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling’, the latest of Joyce’s hundred or so attempts to transcribe non-human sounds (the cat, the door, bells, gongs, clocks, the sea and many more).

Molly thinks of the men who work in trains, away from their wives at night. ‘Im glad I burned the half of those old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that lying about hes getting very careless’ – are these saucy magazines?

It was hot earlier, the rain shower was refreshing, she thought it was going to get as hot as Gibraltar. She remembers her father’s friend Mrs Hester Stanhope (a real-life historical figure) who sent her a nice frock from the B Marche Paris and her husband: they called each other Doggerina and Wogger, and she remembers a letter she wrote him.

She would give anything to be back in Gibraltar where life was free and easy. Take Edwardian clothes: ‘these clothes we have to wear whoever invented them expecting you to walk up Killiney hill then for example at that picnic all staysed up you cant do a blessed thing in them in a crowd run or jump out of the way’.

She hated bullfights, the horses all getting ripped open. She was good friends with Hester, who showed her how to put her hair up, she slept in her bed the night of the storm and they had a pillow fight in the morning.

She remembers blushing the first time ‘he’ looked at her, when she was with her father and Captain Grove: ‘he was attractive to a girl in spite of his being a little bald intelligent looking disappointed and gay at the same time’. ‘She’ gave Molly The Moonstone to read. Reminds her she doesn’t like books with Molly in the title like that Molly Flanders.

She’s hot and uncomfortable, the blanket is too heavy and her nightdress has ridden up so she moves around to get comfortable. She remembers the mosquito nets in Gibraltar, how long ago it seems. She remembers in detail the day the Stanhopes left, the dress Mrs S was wearing, then how terribly dull life was after they both left.

Ships remind her of guns booming whenever a dignitary arrived at Gibraltar like General Ulysses Grant (Ulysses – a small connection). She remembers old Sprague the consul dressed in mourning for his son (echoing Bloom) and then Captain Groves and her dad having endless yarns over whiskey in the evenings about imperial battles.

Boredom and trying to get a reaction reminds her of how she’d dress up and put her gloves on in the window for the benefit of the young doctor in the house opposite, in Holles Street, but he never got the idea. Men are stupid.

there was a nice fellow even in the opposite house that medical in Holles street the nurse was after when I put on my gloves and hat at the window to show I was going out not a notion what I meant arent they thick never understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster for them… where does their great intelligence come in Id like to know grey matter they have it all in their tail if you ask me

She thinks of recent letters and cards, including one from Milly, and a letter from a Mrs Dwenn in Canada who wrote out of the blue wanting to know the recipe for pisto madrileno (apparently the Spanish version of ratatouille). And one from Floey Dillon who wrote to say she was married to a very rich architect. And: ‘poor Nancy Blake died a month ago of acute neumonia well I didnt know her so well as all that she was Floeys friend more than mine poor Nancy.’

She thanks God Boylan has fucked her:

O thanks be to the great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me

But she hopes he’ll write her a letter, she’d love a real love letter, ‘I told him he could write what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan.’ It just makes you so happy: ‘true or no it fills up your whole day and life always something to think about every moment and see it all round you like a new world.’

Then she’ll write an answer from bed where he can imagine her. Need only be a few words, in fact the less the better, lets the imagination work. Not like here friend Atty Dillon who wrote long elaborate letters copied from The Ladies Letterwriter to the fellow that was something in the Four Courts. He ended up jilting her. ‘A few simple words’ is best.

This section ends with a sudden spurt of bitterness at the fate of women to be pursued and worshipped when young, and then dumped and ignored once they get old.

as for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit.

Note that it ends with a full stop, one of only two in the entire chapter.

Section 5 (2,378 words)

Section 5 opens with a similar passage to section 1 (intentionally?) in that it is a harsh character assassination of an older woman. In section 1 it’s Mrs Riordan (the Dante of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’). Here it is the elderly Spanish housekeeper of the Tweedy family in Gibraltar, Mrs Rubio. Molly condemns her as a:

disobliging old thing… with her switch of false hair on her and vain about her appearance ugly as she was near 80 or a 100 her face a mass of wrinkles

and also, as with Mrs Riordan, feels threatened by / despises the old woman’s religious zeal:

with all her religion domineering because she never could get over the Atlantic fleet coming in half the ships of the world and the Union Jack flying with all her carabineros because 4 drunken English sailors took all the rock from them and because I didnt run into mass often enough in Santa Maria to please her with her shawl up on her except when there was a marriage on with all her miracles of the saints and her black blessed virgin with the silver dress

So Molly dislikes her on account of 1) her age (she seems ancient to Molly, who is only 15); 2) her religious zeal (which clearly Molly has no time for); and 3) also a Spanish nationalist reason. Apparently the Spanish Mrs Rubio is still angry that the British seized a part of Spain with just ‘4 drunken sailors’. (Incidentally the number 4 seems to have no historical provenance: the actual capture of Gibraltar was, as you might expect, a bigger bloodier affair.)

So one morning this ‘disobliging old thing’ brings her a letter from Lieutenant Mulvey who is clearly a ‘beau’ of the 15-year-old Marion. This Mulvey followed her in the street one day, but instead of scaring Molly this just excited her and made her want to ‘pick him up’. Then he wrote her a letter making an appointment to see her, which thrilled her to bits, she kept it on her and was so excited that she wanted to move the hands on the clock forward to make the appointment come quicker.

Now who does this remind you of? Of Blazes Boylan of course, whose letter Molly received at the start of this long day, setting his arrival for 4pm. Direct parallel. History repeats.

Cut to Molly being out with this Mulvey who kissed her ‘under the Moorish wall’ and ‘he crushed all the flowers on my bosom’. She considered him her sweetheart. Given the graphic sexual details everywhere else, I was intrigued by the phrase:

I put my knee up to him a few times to learn the way

What way? Well, For the flirtatious lolz she told him she was engaged ‘to the son of a Spanish nobleman named Don Miguel de la Flora and he believed me’.

Eventually he was posted away, in May (she remembers because she always feels like a new man in the spring: ‘Im always like that in the spring Id like a new fellow every year’). She knew precisely how far to flirt:

I had that white blouse on open in the front to encourage him as much as I could without too openly they were just beginning to be plump

They were at some place up on some mountain among entrances to ancient galleries of St Michael’s caves, a beautiful sunny day and far from anywhere, and:

he caressed them outside they love doing that its the roundness there I was leaning over him with my white ricestraw hat… my blouse open for his last day

Obviously he wanted to go further:

he wanted to touch mine with his for a moment but I wouldnt let him he was awfully put out first for fear you never know consumption or leave me with a child embarazada that old servant Ines told me that one drop even if it got into you at all

And remembers how she’s experimented with how it would feel to have a penis inside her by using a banana.

after I tried with the Banana but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me somewhere because they once took something down out of a woman that was up there for years

You can see why sex-averse Virginia Woolf loathed this book, can’t you? I’d forgotten it was stuffed (so to speak) with so much sexual crudeness or candour (depending on taste). As to men, well:

theyre all mad to get in there where they come out of youd think they could never go far enough up

Back to Mulvey, she would have full sex but instead masturbated him to climax:

how did we finish it off yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to be excited but I opened my legs I wouldnt let him touch me inside my petticoat because I had a skirt opening up the side I tormented the life out of him first tickling him I loved rousing that dog in the hotel rrrsssstt awokwokawok his eyes shut and a bird flying below us he was shy all the same I liked him like that moaning I made him blush a little when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it

Yep, sounds like a penis alright. Amusingly, she can’t clearly remember Mulvey’s name, though this is consistent with her using the pronoun ‘he’ to refer interchangeably to many men (mainly Bloom and Boylan).

Molly darling he called me what was his name Jack Joe Harry Mulvey was it yes I think a lieutenant he was rather fair he had a laughing kind of a voice

Lucky Jack Mulvey promised he’d come back for her and she promised she’d let him **** her, even if she was married. Twenty years ago it must be and he’s probably promoted and married and little does his wife know about his little sexual adventure with Molly Tweedy.

Far from anywhere she blew up the paper bag they’d brought biscuits in, then burst it with a bang which made all the pigeons take off. She wanted to fire his gun but he didn’t have one. HMS Calypso she thinks he was assigned to, because it was printed on his cap (note another sly Odysseus reference slipped in).

Cut to memories of some pompous old Bishop who delivered a sermon about the New Woman riding bicycle and wearing bloomers, which triggers her to think how funny she’s ended up with the surname Bloom. Her rival for Leopold, Josie Breen, used to joke that she was looking ‘blooming’ whenever they met, still better than names with bottom in them like Ramsbottom.

She doesn’t really remember her mother (who is a very shadowy figure in the whole book). Her name was Lunita Laredo and she was a Gibraltarian of Spanish/Jewish descent. A vivid memory of running down Williss Road and her boobs jiggling:

they were shaking and dancing about in my blouse like Millys little ones now when she runs up the stairs I loved looking down at them

She remembers the wonderful view from the Rock over the Straits to Africa. She was so infatuated with Mulvey, she kept the hankie the masturbated him into under her pillow for weeks, for the smell of it.

Mulvey appears to have given her a ring as a keepsake, ‘that clumsy Claddagh ring for luck’ that she then gave to another lover, Gardner, the soldier who went off to the Boer War where he died of enteric fever.

She has the impression of a moustache and for a moment thinks it was Mulvey’s but then realises she’s getting him mixed up with Gardner.

Another train whistles, reminding Molly of Love’s Old Sweet Song and her upcoming performance, which triggers a repeat of her scorn for the other singers:

Kathleen Kearney and her lot of squealers Miss This Miss That Miss Theother lot of sparrowfarts skitting around talking about politics they know as much about as my backside

As the daughter of a soldier who’s lived abroad, Molly views herself as much more worldly than the daughters of bootmakers and publicans, ‘I knew more about men and life when I was 15 than theyll all know at 50’.

She reflects on her looks. Her father left her her English accent (raised among soldiers in garrison) but she has her mother’s eyes and figure. Let them get a husband and a lovely daughter and get a fine man like Boylan falling over her and swiving her 4 or 5 times. She thinks about the correct posture, neck and facial position to project her singing voice best, and considers which songs to sing: Love’s Sweet Song and Wind from the South but not My Lady’s Bower, ‘too long for an encore’.

She thinks she could have been a prima donna if she hadn’t married Bloom. She’ll dress to impress.

Ill change that lace on my black dress to show off my bubs and Ill yes by God Ill get that big fan mended make them burst with envy

And then she realises she needs to pass wind and shifts position in the bed, carefully so as not to wake Bloom. (Remember the reference a few lines earlier to the song Wind from the South? A Joyce joke). So she softly passes wind, in another joke doing so in synch with the whistle from another passing train.

Section 6 (3,619 words)

Molly starts by being happy at having passed wind and wondering if it was the pork chop she ate earlier which gave her wind, she doesn’t trust that butcher.

She remembers being a girl in Gibraltar, the freezing cold nights, which leaps to being much older and stripping and creaming herself for the pleasure of the medical student living opposite (mentioned above).

Which links into her hoping Poldy isn’t going to fall in with the medical students, squandering money and getting drunk, what do they find to talk about?

We get more specifics on Bloom’s request for breakfast, which wasn’t reported in ‘Ithaca’. According to Molly, he ordered: ‘eggs and tea and Findon haddy and hot buttered toast’ which leads onto how she enjoys hearing him clunking up the stairs with the rattling cutlery. Then onto the cat, licking itself but she doesn’t like its claws. (It strikes me as odd that the cat doesn’t have a name. Surely Joyce missed a trick, he could have given it an ironically Odyssey-connected name.)

Hunger: she thinks she’ll buy a nice piece of plaice, no cod, and some jam which flows into the thought of buying more and organising a picnic, which flows into memories of various outings, better at the seaside but not in a boat after he swore blind he could row and then got into so much trouble they nearly drowned, and the water flooding into the rowing boat ruined her shoes and the wind ruined her hat.

But the sea brings memories of Gibraltar, the smell of the sardines and the bream in Catalan bay all silver in the fishermen’s baskets.

She remembers all the grandiose plans Bloom made, saying he’d change their place into a musical academy, or a hotel, full of plans and schemes which all come to nothing.

he ought to get a leather medal with a putty rim for all the plans he invents then leaving us here all day

She gets scared being alone in the house at night and remembers a vagrant who got 20 years for murdering an old woman, she’d castrate men like that. She remembers the night she swore she heard burglars and she made Poldy go downstairs with a candle frightened out of his wits, making as much racket as he could to scare them off, of course there was no-one.

Then she’s unhappy the way Bloom sent their daughter, Milly, away to Mullingar to get a job at a photographer’s, she thinks because he sensed Molly and Boylan’s impending affair. She should have been sent to Skerry’s Academy to study for the civil service.

She remembers Milly becoming a handful ‘with her roughness and carelessness’, breaking a statuette, refusing to peel the potatos, and Bloom taken to explaining things out of the paper to her and Milly pretending to play along. Cunning, like her dad. She’s started flirting with the boys and reminds Molly of herself at that age. She’d started to go beyond bounds for example to the skating rink and she smelled tobacco on her clothes.

all the people passing they all look at her like me when I was her age

And being prissy at the theatre, insisting Molly not touch her, which makes her remember men who’ve ogled and rubbed up against her at theatres. Milly didn’t even want Molly to kiss her at the station when she was leaving well – in the same tone as she said Bloom will never find anyone else like her, Molly thinks good luck to her daughter to find someone else who’ll dance attendance on her when she’s ill, like her old Ma.

I think Molly says she didn’t have a climax till she was 22:

of course she cant feel anything deep yet I never came properly till I was what 22 or so it went into the wrong place (?)

Milly’s boyfriends including Conny Connolly and Martin Harvey. She thinks such devotion means a man’s a bit cracked in the head which reminds her of Poldy’s father, must have been cracked to commit suicide.

She thinks it’s Bloom’s fault for not getting a servant and instead having the two women in the family slaving away for him, apart from the useless cleaner they had, Mrs Fleming, sneezing and farting everywhere and you had to follow her round fixing her work, and the time she left a smelly old dishcloth behind the dresser.

All the friends Bloom brings back at all hours including Simon Dedalus, and his son who won all the prizes, what was he doing bringing him home, and why did he have to drop down into the area to get into the house, amazing he didn’t rip his grand funeral trousers, shame her old drawers weren’t hanging up for them both to see!

And we learn that Mrs Fleming, useless as she was, is now leaving them to look after her husband who’s got to have an operation.

Thoughts of the body circle round to Molly realising her period’s about to start, not surprising considering ‘all the poking and rooting and ploughing he [Boylan] had up in me’. Damn! That means she’ll be bleeding when Boylan next visits in just three days time (it’s Friday and he’s scheduled to come around on Monday). Menstruation she sees as a curse, out of action five days every three weeks, ‘simply sickening’.

She remembers the most embarrassing occasion when it came on when they were at the theatre, had been given a box by one Michael Gunn to see Mrs Kendal and her husband at the Gaiety, when it came on her and her struggle to concentrate with her husband yakking on next to her.

O patience above its pouring out of me like the sea

She’s very self-conscious about having sex in the bed with all the springs jingling so seems to say that when Boylan came round she put the quilt on the floor and a pillow under her bottom.

She thinks she’ll shave her pubic hair to look like a young girl again, that’ll surprise Boylan next time!

And during these thoughts she’s eased out of bed and is squatting over the chamberpot bleeding into it, hoping she won’t break it, thinking about rinsing it out and perfuming it in the morning, very self conscious about it making such a noise, and so the section ends.

Section 7 (3,230 words)

Molly continues menstruating on her chamber pot. She remembers encounters with a gynaecologist, Dr Collins, who she’d gone to see, worried about some discharges, during which she gets long medical words wrong like ‘omissions’ and is amused by the posh word he used for her bits, ‘vagina’: comedy at the expense of her illiteracy.

Which segues into the letters Bloom wrote her, quoting Keats and other poetry. She was so excited by him and the letters she masturbated 4 or 5 times a day. She was impressed by his high political talk about home rule and the Land League. She’s thinking all this while she’s still on the pot:

I better not make an alnight sitting on this affair they ought to make chambers a natural size so that a woman could sit on it properly

I think she says the Leopold kneels to masturbate, ‘I suppose there isnt in all creation another man with the habits he has’; and then bemoans his habit for years of sleeping upside down in the bed, with his head at her feet and his feet by her head. The posture reminds her of him taking her to see an Indian god all yellow in a pinafore on his side, presumably a Buddha.

She reaches for a napkin which she ties round her parts, then slips back into bed, noting how deeply Bloom is sleeping, and repeating her hunch it’s because he had an orgasm today, and wondering who with, and waspishly pointing out he can only get it if he pays for it these days.

She laments the many moves of house they’ve had to make due to Bloom’s inability to keep a job or progress, including Raymond Terrace, Ontario Terrace, Lombard Street, Holles Street and then the City Arms hotel with the toilet out in the hall and you could always tell who’d used it before you by the stink. Things are always just starting to shape up when he puts his big foot in it, getting dismissed again and again, from Thoms and Helys and Mr Cuffes and Drimmies.

St George’s bells chime, saying its 2am (?) can that be right?

She describes Bloom’s poor attempts at cunnilingus:

when I wouldnt let him lick me in Holles street one night… he does it all wrong too thinking only of his own pleasure his tongue is too flat or I dont know what he forgets that wethen I dont Ill make him do it again

She wonders if the woman Bloom was with today was Josie, then decides he doesn’t have the guts to risk it with a married woman, despite her Josie Breen’s) mad husband. She thinks Poldy having sex was ‘the fruits of Mr Paddy Dignam yes they were all in great style at the grand funeral’ i.e. all those men all got hammered and went on somewhere and Bloom paid for a prostitute (she thinks; we know that’s not at all correct).

They think they’re so grand, those silly men in their little funeral parade and she rattles off a list of the male mourners at Dignam’s funeral who we met in chapter 6, but Molly says they’ve never seen a military parade like she knew back in Gibraltar, now that was impressive.

She feels sorry for poor Paddy’s wife and orphans which leads into memories of a dinner and formal singing, thoughts of Ben Dollard the base baritone, 5 shillings admittance to the concert, and then praises Simon Dedalus’s voice, untrained but effective (and we remember Simon singing at the Ormond Hotel in ‘Sirens’), she remembers he was married to May Goulding but a widower now.

She remembers seeing Stephen as a boy of 11, 11 years ago, when she was in mourning for poor Rudy, ‘he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his lord Fauntleroy suit and curly hair like a prince on the stage’ (‘prince’ of course reminds us of Stephen’s recent obsession with Shakespeare, Hamlet and the lecture at the National Library).

Suddenly she realises Stephen was predicted in the tarot cards she played with this morning and goes back through the cards in detail. She guesses at Stephen’s age and hopes he’s not a lank-haired poet, briefly imagining seducing him. Bloom claimed he’s a professor, Molly knows he’s surely too young, and hopes he’s not a professor like old Professor Goodwin whose specialist subject is whiskey.

Which segues into poetry, she likes poetry, and random quotes from favourite poems. It would be a nice change to have an intelligent person to talk to (Stephen) and not have to listen to Bloom’s endless talk about Billy Prescott’s ad and Keyes’s ad and Tom the Devil’s ad.

Instead she remembers seeing lithe young men at Margate bathingplace lazing on the rocks or diving into the sea, if only all men were that fit and handsome. Then some more rudeness:

I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock there so simple I wouldnt mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was looking as if it was asking you to suck it so clean and white he looks with his boyish face I would too in 1/2 a minute even if some of it went down what its only like gruel or the dew theres no danger

If she’s never met the adult Stephen this must be a sort of sleepy fantasy Stephen of her imagination she’s imagining sucking off and swallowing. Quite staggeringly pornographic, isn’t it?

She resolves to throw the tarot cards again in the morning to see if they’re fated to be together and anyway she’ll read and study some poetry so as not to appear ignorant if they meet, while she’ll teach him about sex until he half faints, and then:

then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly too with our 2 photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous

I’d forgotten that Molly has this quite graphic fantasy about Stephen. Remembering it sheds a whole new light on his character extending right back through ‘Portrait of the Artist’. What would happen if in the next few weeks Molly does meet Stephen, is taken by his strange intelligence and youth, while he sees sex sex sex in the older, voluptuous woman, and they ended up falling in love and eloping? Has anyone ever written a sequel to ‘Ulysses’ in which that happened?

Section 8 (3,680 words)

But then, what’s she going to do about Boylan? Thinking about Boylan makes her cross again at him slapping her on the bottom, such a peasant ‘he doesnt know poetry from a cabbage’. She criticises the way he just stripped off his shoes and trousers, might as well be an animal, he might as well have been an old lion. Well, maybe he was so excited because her boobs were so round and tempting. To be honest, they excite her sometimes, in fact she’d like to be a man:

I wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so soft when you touch it

Men are lucky:

they can pick and choose what they please a married woman or a fast widow or a girl for their different tastes

Whereas women are restricted and limited. Jealousy. Why can’t people remain friends while sleeping around? She’s glad she’s still young and excitable but frustrated that Bloom never touches her, never embraces her any more. Only kisses her on the bottom, where she has least expression, like kissing an inanimate object, one time he kissed the front door, she thinks Bloom is mad, ‘what a madman nobody understands his cracked ideas but me’.

A woman needs loving and cherishing:

a woman wants to be embraced 20 times a day almost to make her look young no matter by who so long as to be in love or loved by somebody

Sometimes she gets so sexually frustrated she fantasises about going down to the docks and picking up a sailor or maybe one of the dangerous looking gypsies from their camp in Rathfarnham, some stranger to ‘ride me up against the wall without a word or a murderer anybody’.

Men, eh? She remembers some fine KC giving her and Bloom a fish supper after winning a bet on a boxing match but later that night catching him coming out of a dingy alley (Hardwicke lane) followed by a common prostitute, then going back to his wife.

She is irritated with Bloom being such a big lump and tries to budge him over in the bed, and irritated at him expected to be waited on with breakfast in bed. A little feminist polemic:

itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them

Speaking of needing mothers she wonders what Stephen’s doing away from his books and home and study, keeping bad company now his mother’s died.

Which morphs into thinking about her son Rudy, going over the decision to bury him in ‘that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another’. She and Bloom have never been the same since.

Back to Stephen, she wonders why he wouldn’t stay the night (how does she know this, it feels like Joyce’s awareness bleeding into hers). Remember Hugh Kenner’s point that Molly never says something but she soon contradicts it? Well, barely a few phrases after her little feminist praise of women, the exact opposite:

I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy

She thinks Stephen could have slept on the sofa in the other room, mind you she’d have heard her filling the chamber pot, ‘arrah what harm’.

Dedalus, odd name. Makes her think of names of people on Gibraltar, she’s particularly tickled by a woman named Opisso, she’d die rather than have such a name.

small blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I dont feel a day older than then

For the third time she laments that Stephen didn’t stay, she’d like to give him Spanish lessons then he’d see she’s not so ignorant after all: quite the persistent thinking about clean-cocked young Stevie.

And it goes on: she thinks Stephen was tired, and needed a rest, and she’d have happily brought him breakfast in on the sofa. She’s really taken with having Stephen as a lodger:

supposing he stayed with us why not theres the room upstairs empty and Millys bed in the back room he could do his writing and studies at the table in there for all the scribbling he does at it and if he wants to read in bed in the morning like me as hes making the breakfast for 1 he can make it for 2… Id love to have a long talk with an intelligent welleducated person

Which segues into needing to buy a new bed, and shopping triggers thoughts of going to the market early to get fresh fruit and vegetables, she’d love a fresh juicy young pear. And then another pornographic passage I can’t make out whether it starts about Stephen but it definitely becomes about Bloom, arousing him then making him feel guilty about Boylan:

Ill start dressing myself to go out presto non son piu forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it out in front of me serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress

So she’ll let Bloom know that his wife has been well fucked and the mark must be of Boylan’s spunk, but what does ‘make him do it out in front of me’? Force Bloom to masturbate in front of her to shame him, to make it clear that if he masturbates and refuses to fuck her then she will be unfaithful, ‘its all his own fault if I am an adulteress’?

Supercrudely she says if he wants to kiss her bottom, he can kiss her hole, and she’ll get a £1 or 30 shillings out of him to go shopping with. She’ll buy some fine new drawers and let him masturbate onto her from behind:

Ill let him do it off on me behind provided he doesnt smear all my good drawers… Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head… Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head then Ill suggest about yes… then Ill wipe him off me just like a business his omission’

She realise it’s getting late, they’ll be up in China, the nuns will be getting up soon, she should try and get some sleep. She’ll get up early go and buy some flowers to brighten the place up in case Bloom brings Stephen home again, I’m surprised how much longing for Stephen features in this last section.

She’ll clean the piano and they’ll have music, she’ll buy some cakes and has a passage thinking about her favourite types. Flowers,

I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violet

She dismisses Bloom’s highfalutin atheism, nature disproves it, and they all end up calling for the priest as they lie dying. Thoughts of God and nature line us up for the final passage in which she reminisces about the day she and Bloom spent outdoors on Howth hill.

the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life

What she remembers is genuinely liking him, but also her canny manipulation of him.

that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky

And Joyce gives her a magnificent passage recapping all her memories of her girlhood in Gibraltar, all the sights and sounds and words of the hot place, the castle and the multicultural society of Greeks and Turks and Jews and Arabs, and it ends with the famous magnificent climax:

and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Molly’s feminism?

If you summarise Molly’s soliloquy, it’s easy to speak in clichés about her being a strong independent woman or expressing her sexuality, as if that’s a fine and impressive thing like a speech or a declaration. But if you read it closely (and if you’ve read my summary) you’ll realise she’s far from being a role model for feminists, she’s far too bitchy and critical of other women for that, critical of old women and scornful of her rival female singers.

And ‘expressing her sexuality’ sounds fine in the abstract but when you read the detail of her thoughts (I’m tempted but won’t repeat the fruitier passages), again, it’s not necessarily such a fine and noble thing; it feels much muckier, messier, real and compromised than that, as actual sex tends to be.

Is Molly a male projection?

All the commentaries go on about Molly being a modern woman freely expressing her own sexuality and, having gone through it in this much detail, you can see how Molly is, indeed, staggeringly rude but totally honest and accepting of sex, the sex act, her own desires and fantasies, yes.

However, I could never forget that this whole thing is written by a man. I.e. is it just a man’s fantasy of how sexually frank and candid he’d like a woman to be? Is it purely a male fantasy to imagine a woman who goes to sleep fantasising about sucking a young man’s cock or having it done to her doggy fashion? Is Molly’s much vaunted sexuality in fact male projection?

In a sense, the most relevant criticism of Molly is what the woman Joyce based her on, his own partner, Nora Barnacle, thought of her, and Nora was famously unimpressed by Molly. (As, when I summarised some of the passages to her, was my wife.)

This is vanishingly tiny anecdotal evidence but it crystallises my feeling that Molly is a construct made of words, not always convincing, and the relentless dominance of sex fantasies… well, rather than capturing a woman’s thoughts, it just felt too relentlessly male to me.

Men, eh?

That said, I was struck by the number of thoughts Joyce gives his creation which diss or rubbish male sexuality:

  • theyre so savage for it
  • they want to do everything too quick take all the pleasure out of it
  • can you ever be up to men the way it takes them
  • only for the name of a king theyre all made the one way
  • arent they fearful trying to hurt you
  • arent they thick never understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster for them
  • they always want to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin for them all thats troubling them theyre such fools
  • I suppose he thinks I dont know deceitful men all their 20 pockets arent enough for their lies

All these sentences mocking men’s obsession with sex were written by a man. The steady stream of criticisms of the male sex, maybe that’s plausible in a woman’s passing thoughts? Or does it reveal a kind of self-obsession with masculinity on Joyce’s part? Is there something masochistic in Joyce the man writing quite so many passages slagging off men as sex-obsessed? Was it a form of self-critical therapy? Or was he simply bringing together lots of the criticisms you hear women say or women write about men, bundling them, along with much else besides, into Molly’s big boisterous character?

I’m not sure there’s any way of arriving at a conclusive answer, which is why I’ll note the questions but leave it at that.

Weaving contradictions

Hugh Kenner makes the point that Molly is a creature of contradictions, she doesn’t make a statement without somewhere else stating the opposite. Boylan is superb, Boylan is coarse. Bloom is inadequate, Bloom has more spunk in him than Boylan. The prospect of Stephen excites, then again he probably has long lank student hair. She’s proud to be a woman, she hates being a woman. She’ll bring Poldy breakfast in bed, she’ll throw it at him.

Kenner smartly compares this pattern of Molly stating then denying, with Homer’s Penelope weaving her shroud by day and unweaving it by night. Typically Kenner in being cute, insightful and amusing. I’ve written a blog post summarising Kenner’s book on ‘Ulysses’, coming soon.

Credit

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

Related links

Joyce reviews

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Posted by Simon on February 16, 2026

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Ulysses by James Joyce: Ithaca

What qualifying considerations allayed his perturbations?

‘Ithaca’ is the 17th of the 18 chapters in James Joyce’s epic modernist novel, ‘Ulysses’. Here’s a reminder of the complete chapter numbers and names. (Note that the chapter names are not given in the published book, they were assigned in guidance and schemas Joyce sent to supporters and commentators and have been used by everyone, including me, ever since; but you won’t find them in any published or online editions, which only have chapter numbers.)

Part 1. Telemachiad

  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

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. Penelope

Place in the sequence

‘Ithaca’ is the second chapter of the third part of the novel. The first 14 chapters slowly build up to the long, mad fantasia of chapter 15, ‘Circe’, set in a brothel in Dublin’s red light district which is depicted as a version of hell, populated by the hideously poor and deformed, and that’s before the long sequence of bizarre hallucinations even begins.

The long phantasmagoria of ‘Circe’ ends with over-educated, drunk and depressed Stephen Dedalus getting knocked down by an angry English soldier and the next chapter, ‘Eumaeus’, describes the older figure of Leopold Bloom, a friend of Stephen’s father, helping him up and helping him along to an all-night café down by the docks where he tries to restore him with a cup of (disgusting) coffee and an apology for a roll.

Here they are buttonholed by a dodgy old sailor (D.B. Murphy) who tells a series of tall tales about his sailing career, which somehow triggers a long discussion about the Lost Leader of Irish nationalism, Charles Stewart Parnell, with much stream-of-consciousness free-associating by Bloom, who cautions Stephen about his dissolute life, reflects on his wife cuckolding him, and has his own views about the Parnell scandal.

Bloom eventually tells Stephen it’s time to leave, pays the café bill, and invites the young man back to his place, for a cup of cocoa and the offer of a bed for the night made-up on the sofa.

This chapter, ‘Ithaca’, describes the pair’s walk from the all-night café down on the Dublin waterfront to Bloom’s house at 7 Eccles Street, the route they take, their conversation, what they do (make a nice cup of cocoa) and (at great length) say when they get there.

Time

Each of the chapters of ‘Ulysses’ covers about an hour in the course of one long day, starting at 8am on Thursday 16 June 1904 and going through to the early hours of the following morning, Friday 17 June. (As Stephen remarks, ‘Every Friday buries a Thursday’.) ‘Ithaca’ takes place from about 2 to 3 am on the morning of Friday 17 June 1904. As Bloom lets Stephen out the back door of his garden, the bells of St George’s ring, the commentators tell me at 2.30 am.

Homeric parallel

Each of the chapters in ‘Ulysses’ is based on an episode from the Odyssey of Homer, the famous epic poem composed some 750 years BC, which describes the ten-year-long voyage back from the Trojan War of the Greek hero Odysseus and his crew and which featured encounters with mythical creatures and legendary figures such as the giant Cyclops or the witch Circe.

This chapter, coming near the end of the story is loosely based on the incidents surrounding Odysseus’s final arrival home. In Homer Odysseus discovers that his palace has been taken over by scores of ‘suitors’, living off the fat of his kingdom while they vie for the hand of his wife, Penelope, all insisting that the long-absent Odysseus must be dead by now.

Well, the novel’s unlikely Odysseus figure, Leopold Bloom, certainly arrives home, at the shabby house which is the ironic modern equivalent of the Greek hero’s palace. And his wife, Molly, the ironic modern reincarnation of Penelope is there, fast asleep, upstairs in the marital bed. But where are the hordes of suitors which Odysseus had to fight and defeat in the poem? Nowhere to be seen. So the chapter is only in a very high-level way a re-enactment of the Odyssey passage.

The cleverest commentary I’ve read points out that, in Homer’s poem, Odysseus arrives at his palace in disguise, pretending to be one more suitor, and has to take part in the ritual challenge the suitors have created, which is to fire an arrow through the hafts of twelve axes set up in a row. None of the suitors has managed to achieve this feat as it would have required a very steady hand indeed, requiring tremendous accuracy – and so the clever commentary I read suggests that Joyce chose to ignore the fact of the suitors and the challenge as such, but borrowed the theme of extreme accuracy as his concept for the entire chapter. Hence:

Conceit of precision

The later chapters of ‘Ulysses’ are characterised by large-scale conceits or concepts which dominate their form and style. ‘Nausicaa’ is written in the style of a romantic novelist. ‘Oxen of the Sun’ consists of a series of pastiches of English prose given in historical order. ‘Circe’ is entirely in the form of a surreal play. ‘Eumaeus’ is written in the deliberately bad, clichéd but at the same time pretentious style derived from popular magazines or local newspapers.

Following the trend, this chapter, ‘Ithaca’, is dominated by one of the more drastic and intrusive conceits: the entire chapter is cast in the form of (short) questions and (long) answers. It is a catechism.

What is a catechism? A catechism is ‘a summary of religious doctrine and teachings, traditionally structured in a question-and-answer format designed for instruction, memorization, and conversion’. Catechisms are commonly used by the Catholic Church, especially in schools, and Joyce was educated at Jesuit schools where he would have used catechisms on a daily basis.

But there’s another angle to the idea. The turn of the century when ‘Ulysses’ is set saw the creation and mass marketing of a number of popular encyclopedias and guides, and many of these were in effect secular catechisms, consisting of numerous short questions which prompted long encyclopedia-style answers. According to the scholars, Joyce was particularly indebted to Richmal Mangnall’s ‘Historical and Miscellaneous Questions’, which was immensely popular in the Victorian era and which is also mentioned in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’ Here’s an article about Mangnall:

And you can read her Historical Questions read online. The closest modern parallel is the sets of ‘frequently asked questions’ which we nowadays find in loads of contexts, from gadget instruction manuals to medical guidance.

So how does this all apply to the ‘Ithaca’ chapter? One example will make it clear:

What act did Bloom make on their arrival at their destination?

At the housesteps of the 4th of the equidifferent uneven numbers, number 7 Eccles street, he inserted his hand mechanically into the back pocket of his trousers to obtain his latchkey.

See? The text describes the events in the form of a rhetorical question, and a detailed and pedantic answer.

Now, we know that Joyce was extremely pedantic, a logician and a precisian. He was pedantic about words, spoken and thought, but right from the earliest Dubliners stories he was also extremely precise about the movements and actions of all the characters, often deforming the normal word order of his sentences in order to emphasise particular gestures. And very obviously he loads Stephen, in particular, with vast amounts of specialist knowledge, of theology, history, languages and much more.

So alighting on this catechistic format to structure an entire chapter allowed Joyce to combine his interest in precise description of movement and gesture, with encyclopedic (and often scientific) information. Take the moment when Bloom discovers he’s lost his front door keys and so lowers his body over the ‘area’, the sunken space in front of his house, then lets himself drop the few feet to the flagstones. As the text puts it:

Did he fall?

By his body’s known weight of eleven stone and four pounds in avoirdupois measure, as certified by the graduated machine for periodical selfweighing in the premises of Francis Froedman, pharmaceutical chemist of 19 Frederick street, north, on the last feast of the Ascension, to wit, the twelfth day of May of the bissextile year one thousand nine hundred and four of the christian era (jewish era five thousand six hundred and sixtyfour, mohammadan era one thousand three hundred and twentytwo), golden number 5, epact 13, solar cycle 9, dominical letters C B, Roman indiction 2, Julian period 6617, MCMIV.

So yes, he did fall, but with a great weight of pedantic, pedagogic impediments adding to the description.

This can be comic. The grotesquely exaggerated, pedantic precision of the answers and indeed the whole concept, is, if you have a certain bookish sense of humour, very funny. I liked it in the same way I liked the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ chapter, I liked the wittiness of the conceit and the sustained inventiveness of the execution, smiling all through and laughing out loud in several places. For example when they have a pee in the garden.

At Stephen’s suggestion, at Bloom’s instigation both, first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom’s, then Stephen’s, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.

Just as importantly, it’s also extremely easy to understand what is going on because even the smallest gesture is explained in such pedantic detail. For this reason – for their high concepts, their comedy and the ease of understanding what’s going on and why – these later chapters are by far my favourites, much more than the first ten or so chapters whose fragmented stream of consciousness and oblique, truncated dialogue I often found frustratingly incomprehensible.

Cast

  • Leopold Bloom
  • Stephen Dedalus

Questions about questions

How many questions are there in the ‘Ithaca’ chapter? 309.

Falling in with Joyce’s obsession for pattern and structure, the 309 questions can perhaps be divided into four parts or sections:

Part 1: Bloom and Stephen (questions 1 to 171)

Bloom and Stephen get into his house, drink cocoa and chat, Bloom offers him a bed for the night, Stephen refuses, they go for a joint pee in the garden, then Bloom lets Stephen out through it and off he walks.

Part 2: Bloom alone (questions 172 to 269)

Ponders, tidies up, goes upstairs, reviews a variety of belongings (letters from Milly, life insurance), fantasises about owning a country cottage or emigrating, takes clothes off.

Part 3: Bloom gets into bed (questions 270 to 290)

Bloom gets slowly and carefully into bed next to Molly and ponders his own complicated responses to knowledge of her infidelity with Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan. The outcome is a feeling of tenderness and he kisses her buttocks.

Part 4: Molly wakes up and asks him about his day (questions 291 to 309)

Molly asks him where he’s been and he lies: he doesn’t mention the fracas with the Citizen, his encounter with Gerty MacDowell, and certainly not his visit to the brothel. Instead he makes up a story about going to a performance the play ‘Leah’ at the Gaiety Theatre, then on to supper at Wynn’s (Murphy’s) Hotel, where after the meal ‘professor and author’ Stephen Dedalus put on a little gymnastic display but hurt himself so Bloom heroically stepped in to help him. In other words, a pack of lies. This is because they haven’t had sex for over ten years.

Incidentally, Molly’s questioning or inquisition obviously forms a series of questions within a series of questions, a catechism within a catechism, the kind of ingenuity Joyce loved and lovers of Joyce come to appreciate, too.

Ithaca questions

Is there any point trying to summarise the chapter? Or would it be easier and also more indicative just to list the questions?

Part 1: Bloom and Stephen

1. What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?

2. Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?

3. Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions to experience?

4. Were their views on some points divergent?

5. Was there one point on which their views were equal and negative?

6. Had Bloom discussed similar subjects during nocturnal perambulations in the past?

7. What reflection concerning the irregular sequence of dates 1884, 1885, 1886, 1888, 1892, 1893, 1904 did Bloom make before their arrival at their destination?

8. As in what ways?

9. What act did Bloom make on their arrival at their destination?

10. Was it there?

11. Why was he doubly irritated?

12. What were then the alternatives before the, premeditatedly (respectively) and inadvertently, keyless couple?

13. Bloom’s decision?

14. Did he fall?

15. Did he rise uninjured by concussion?

16. What discrete succession of images did Stephen meanwhile perceive?

17. Did the man reappear elsewhere?

18. Did Stephen obey his sign?

19. What did Bloom do?

20. Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think?

21. What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from the fire towards the opposite wall?

22. What did Bloom see on the range?

23. What did Bloom do at the range?

24. Did it flow?

25. What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

26. Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he return to the stillflowing tap?

27. What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer?

28. What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach and thenar or sole of foot?

30. What additional didactic counsels did he similarly repress?

31. Which seemed to the host to be the predominant qualities of his guest?

32. What concomitant phenomenon took place in the vessel of liquid by the agency of fire?

33. What announced the accomplishment of this rise in temperature?

34. For what personal purpose could Bloom have applied the water so boiled?

35. What advantages attended shaving by night?

36. Why did absence of light disturb him less than presence of noise?

37. What quality did it (his hand) possess but with what counteracting influence?

38. What lay under exposure on the lower, middle and upper shelves of the kitchen dresser, opened by Bloom?

39. What attracted his attention lying on the apron of the dresser?

40. What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow?

41. Where had previous intimations of the result, effected or projected, been received by him?

42. What qualifying considerations allayed his perturbations?

43. His mood?

44. What satisfied him?

45. How did Bloom prepare a collation for a gentile?

46. What supererogatory marks of special hospitality did the host show his guest?

47. Was the guest conscious of and did he acknowledge these marks of hospitality?

48. Were there marks of hospitality which he contemplated but suppressed, reserving them for another and for himself on future occasions to complete the act begun?

49. Who drank more quickly?

50. What cerebration accompanied his frequentative act?

51. Had he found their solution?

52. What lines concluded his first piece of original verse written by him, potential poet, at the age of 11 in 1877 on the occasion of the offering of three prizes of 10/-, 5/- and 2/6 respectively for competition by the Shamrock, a weekly newspaper?

53. Did he find four separating forces between his temporary guest and him?

54. What anagrams had he made on his name in youth?

55. What acrostic upon the abbreviation of his first name had he (kinetic poet) sent to Miss Marion (Molly) Tweedy on the 14 February 1888?

56. What had prevented him from completing a topical song (music by R. G. Johnston) on the events of the past, or fixtures for the actual, years, entitled If Brian Boru could but come back and see old Dublin now, commissioned by Michael Gunn, lessee of the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King street, and to be introduced into the sixth scene, the valley of diamonds, of the second edition (30 January 1893) of the grand annual Christmas pantomime Sinbad the Sailor (produced by R. Shelton 26 December 1892, written by Greenleaf Whittier, scenery by George A. Jackson and Cecil Hicks, costumes by Mrs and Miss Whelan under the personal supervision of Mrs Michael Gunn, ballets by Jessie Noir, harlequinade by Thomas Otto) and sung by Nelly Bouverist, principal girl?

57. What relation existed between their ages?

58. What events might nullify these calculations?

59. How many previous encounters proved their preexisting acquaintance?

60. Did Bloom accept the invitation to dinner given then by the son and afterwards seconded by the father?

61. Did their conversation on the subject of these reminiscences reveal a third connecting link between them?

62. Had he performed any special corporal work of mercy for her?

63. Why could he then support that his vigil with the greater equanimity?

64. What distinct different memories had each of her now eight years deceased?

65. Were there no means still remaining to him to achieve the rejuvenation which these reminiscences divulged to a younger companion rendered the more desirable?

66. Had any special agility been his in earlier youth?

67. Did either openly allude to their racial difference?

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?

69. What, the enclosures of reticence removed, were their respective parentages?

70. Had Bloom and Stephen been baptised, and where and by whom, cleric or layman?

71. Did they find their educational careers similar?

72. Why did Bloom refrain from stating that he had frequented the university of life?

73. What two temperaments did they individually represent?

74. What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards applied, rather than towards pure, science?

75. Were these inventions principally intended for an improved scheme of kindergarten?

76. What also stimulated him in his cogitations?

77. Such as?

78. Such as not?

79. Such as never?

80. Which example did he adduce to induce Stephen to deduce that originality, though producing its own reward, does not invariably conduce to success?

81. What suggested scene was then constructed by Stephen?

82. What?

83. What suggested scene was then reconstructed by Bloom?

84. Did he attribute this homonymity to information or coincidence or intuition?

85. Did he depict the scene verbally for his guest to see?

86. Did he see only a second coincidence in the second scene narrated to him, described by the narrator as A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The Parable of the Plums?

87. Which domestic problem as much as, if not more than, any other frequently engaged his mind?

88. What had been his hypothetical singular solutions?

89. What instances of deficient mental development in his wife inclined him in favour of the lastmentioned (ninth) solution?

90. What compensated in the false balance of her intelligence for these and such deficiencies of judgment regarding persons, places and things?

91. How had he attempted to remedy this state of comparative ignorance?

92. With what success had he attempted direct instruction?

93. What system had proved more effective?

94. Example?

95. Accepting the analogy implied in his guest’s parable which examples of postexilic eminence did he adduce?

96. What statement was made, under correction, by Bloom concerning a fourth seeker of pure truth, by name Aristotle, mentioned, with permission, by Stephen?

97. Were other anapocryphal illustrious sons of the law and children of a selected or rejected race mentioned?

98. What fragments of verse from the ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish languages were cited with modulations of voice and translation of texts by guest to host and by host to guest?

99. How was a glyphic comparison of the phonic symbols of both languages made in substantiation of the oral comparison?

100. Was the knowledge possessed by both of each of these languages, the extinct and the revived, theoretical or practical?

101. What points of contact existed between these languages and between the peoples who spoke them?

102. What anthem did Bloom chant partially in anticipation of that multiple, ethnically irreducible consummation?

103. Why was the chant arrested at the conclusion of this first distich?

104. How did the chanter compensate for this deficiency?

105. In what common study did their mutual reflections merge?

106. Did the guest comply with his host’s request?

107. What was Stephen’s auditive sensation?

108. What was Bloom’s visual sensation?

109. What were Stephen’s and Bloom’s quasisimultaneous volitional quasisensations of concealed identities?

110. What future careers had been possible for Bloom in the past and with what exemplars?

111. Did the host encourage his guest to chant in a modulated voice a strange legend on an allied theme?

[Recite the first (major) part of this chanted legend.]

112. How did the son of Rudolph receive this first part?

[Recite the second part (minor) of the legend.]

113. How did the father of Millicent receive this second part?

[Condense Stephen’s commentary.]

114. Why was the host (victim predestined) sad?

115. Why was the host (reluctant, unresisting) still?

116. Why was the host (secret infidel) silent?

117. From which (if any) of these mental or physical disorders was he not totally immune?

118. Had this latter or any cognate phenomenon declared itself in any member of his family?

119. What other infantile memories had he of her?

120. What endemic characteristics were present?

121. What memories had he of her adolescence?

122. Did that first division, portending a second division, afflict him?

123. What second departure was contemporaneously perceived by him similarly, if differently?

124. Why similarly, why differently?

125. In other respects were their differences similar?

126. As?

127. In what way had he utilised gifts (1) an owl, (2) a clock, given as matrimonial auguries, to interest and to instruct her?

128. In what manners did she reciprocate?

129. What proposal did Bloom, diambulist, father of Milly, somnambulist, make to Stephen, noctambulist?

130. What various advantages would or might have resulted from a prolongation of such an extemporisation?

131. Why might these several provisional contingencies between a guest and a hostess not necessarily preclude or be precluded by a permanent eventuality of reconciliatory union between a schoolfellow and a jew’s daughter?

132. To what inconsequent polysyllabic question of his host did the guest return a monosyllabic negative answer?

133. What inchoate corollary statement was consequently suppressed by the host?

134. Was the proposal of asylum accepted?

135. What exchange of money took place between host and guest?

136. What counterproposals were alternately advanced, accepted, modified, declined, restated in other terms, reaccepted, ratified, reconfirmed?

137. What rendered problematic for Bloom the realisation of these mutually selfexcluding propositions?

138. Was the clown Bloom’s son?

139. Had Bloom’s coin returned?

140. Why would a recurrent frustration the more depress him?

141. He believed then that human life was infinitely perfectible, eliminating these conditions?

142. Why did he desist from speculation?

143. Did Stephen participate in his dejection?

144. Was this affirmation apprehended by Bloom?

145. What comforted his misapprehension?

146. In what order of precedence, with what attendant ceremony was the exodus from the house of bondage to the wilderness of inhabitation effected?

147. With what intonation secreto of what commemorative psalm?

148. What did each do at the door of egress?

149. For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?

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

151. With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

152. Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

153. Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?

154. Did he find the problems of the inhabitability of the planets and their satellites by a race, given in species, and of the possible social and moral redemption of said race by a redeemer, easier of solution?

155. And the problem of possible redemption?

156. Which various features of the constellations were in turn considered?

157. His (Bloom’s) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing for possible error?

158. Was he more convinced of the esthetic value of the spectacle?

159. Did he then accept as an article of belief the theory of astrological influences upon sublunary disasters?

160. What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

162. What visible luminous sign attracted Bloom’s, who attracted Stephen’s, gaze?

163. How did he elucidate the mystery of an invisible attractive person, his wife Marion (Molly) Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp?

164. Both then were silent?

165. Were they indefinitely inactive?

166. Similarly?

167. What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the invisible audible collateral organ of the other?

168. What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed?

169. How did the centripetal remainer afford egress to the centrifugal departer?

170. How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?

171. What sound accompanied the union of their tangent, the disunion of their (respectively) centrifugal and centripetal hands?

Part 2: Stephen walks away, Bloom alone

172. What echoes of that sound were by both and each heard?

173. Where were the several members of the company which with Bloom that day at the bidding of that peal had travelled from Sandymount in the south to Glasnevin in the north?

174. Alone, what did Bloom hear?

175. Alone, what did Bloom feel?

176. Of what did bellchime and handtouch and footstep and lonechill remind him?

177. What prospect of what phenomena inclined him to remain?

178. Had he ever been a spectator of those phenomena?

179. He remembered the initial paraphenomena?

180. Did he remain?

181. What suddenly arrested his ingress?

[Describe the alterations effected in the disposition of the articles of furniture.]

[Describe them.]

182. What significances attached to these two chairs?

183. What occupied the position originally occupied by the sideboard?

184. With what sensations did Bloom contemplate in rotation these objects?

185. His next proceeding?

186. What followed this operation?

187. What homothetic objects, other than the candlestick, stood on the mantelpiece?

188. What interchanges of looks took place between these three objects and Bloom?

189. What composite asymmetrical image in the mirror then attracted his attention?

190. Why solitary (ipsorelative)?

191. Why mutable (aliorelative)?

192. What final visual impression was communicated to him by the mirror?

[Catalogue these books.]

193. What reflections occupied his mind during the process of reversion of the inverted volumes?

194. Which volume was the largest in bulk?

195. What among other data did the second volume of the work in question contain?

196. Why, firstly and secondly, did he not consult the work in question?

197. What caused him consolation in his sitting posture?

198. What caused him irritation in his sitting posture?

199. How was the irritation allayed?

200. What involuntary actions followed?

[Compile the budget for 16 June 1904.]

201. Did the process of divestiture continue?

202. Why with satisfaction?

203. In what ultimate ambition had all concurrent and consecutive ambitions now coalesced?

204. What additional attractions might the grounds contain?

205. As?

206. What improvements might be subsequently introduced?

207. What facilities of transit were desirable?

208. What might be the name of this erigible or erected residence?

209. Could Bloom of 7 Eccles street foresee Bloom of Flowerville?

210. What syllabus of intellectual pursuits was simultaneously possible?

211. What lighter recreations?

212. Might he become a gentleman farmer of field produce and live stock?

213. What would be his civic functions and social status among the county families and landed gentry?

214. What course of action did he outline for himself in such capacity?

[Prove that he had loved rectitude from his earliest youth.]

215. How much and how did he propose to pay for this country residence?

216. What rapid but insecure means to opulence might facilitate immediate purchase?

217. Was vast wealth acquirable through industrial channels?

218. Were there schemes of wider scope?

219. Positing what protasis would the contraction for such several schemes become a natural and necessary apodosis?

220. What eventuality would render him independent of such wealth?

221. For what reason did he meditate on schemes so difficult of realisation?

222. His justifications?

223. What did he fear?

224. What were habitually his final meditations?

225. What did the first drawer unlocked contain?

[Quote the textual terms in which the prospectus claimed advantages for this thaumaturgic remedy.]

226. Were there testimonials?

227. How did absentminded beggar’s concluding testimonial conclude?

228. What object did Bloom add to this collection of objects?

229. What pleasant reflection accompanied this action?

230. What possibility suggested itself?

231. What did the 2nd drawer contain?

[Quote the textual terms of this notice.]

232. What other objects relative to Rudolph Bloom (born Virag) were in the 2nd drawer?

233. What fractions of phrases did the lecture of those five whole words evoke?

234. What reminiscences of a human subject suffering from progressive melancholia did these objects evoke in Bloom?

235. Why did Bloom experience a sentiment of remorse?

236. As?

237. How did these beliefs and practices now appear to him?

238. What first reminiscence had he of Rudolph Bloom (deceased)?

239. Had time equally but differently obliterated the memory of these migrations in narrator and listener?

240. What idiosyncracies of the narrator were concomitant products of amnesia?

241. What two phenomena of senescence were more frequent?

242. What object offered partial consolation for these reminiscences?

[Reduce Bloom by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune, from which these supports protected him, and by elimination of all positive values to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity.]

243. With which attendant indignities?

244. By what could such a situation be precluded?

245. Which preferably?

246. What considerations rendered departure not entirely undesirable?

247. What considerations rendered departure not irrational?

248. What considerations rendered departure desirable?

249. In Ireland?

250. Abroad?

251. Under what guidance, following what signs?

252. What public advertisement would divulge the occultation of the departed?

253. What universal binomial denominations would be his as entity and nonentity?

254. What tributes his?

255. Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?

256. What would render such return irrational?

257. What play of forces, inducing inertia, rendered departure undesirable?

258. What advantages were possessed by an occupied, as distinct from an unoccupied bed?

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

260. What selfimposed enigma did Bloom about to rise in order to go so as to conclude lest he should not conclude involuntarily apprehend?

261. What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not comprehend?

262. Who was M’Intosh?

263. What selfevident enigma pondered with desultory constancy during 30 years did Bloom now, having effected natural obscurity by the extinction of artificial light, silently suddenly comprehend?

264. Where was Moses when the candle went out?

265. What imperfections in a perfect day did Bloom, walking, charged with collected articles of recently disvested male wearing apparel, silently, successively, enumerate?

266. What impression of an absent face did Bloom, arrested, silently recall?

267. What recurrent impressions of the same were possible by hypothesis?

268. What miscellaneous effects of female personal wearing apparel were perceived by him?

269. What impersonal objects were perceived?

Part 3: Bloom gets into bed

270. Bloom’s acts?

271. How?

272. What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?

273. If he had smiled why would he have smiled?

275. What preceding series?

276. What were his reflections concerning the last member of this series and late occupant of the bed?

277. Why for the observer impressionability in addition to vigour, corporal proportion and commercial ability?

278. With what antagonistic sentiments were his subsequent reflections affected?

279. Envy?

280. Jealousy?

281. Abnegation?

282. Equanimity? [this is a particularly funny one where Bloom justifies to himself reasons why Blazes Boylan tupping his wife is not as bad as a whole list of natural disasters and wicked crimes.]

283. Why more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity?

284. What retribution, if any?

285. By what reflections did he, a conscious reactor against the void of incertitude, justify to himself his sentiments? [Many, but the key one is ‘the futility of triumph or protest or vindication.’]

286. In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge?

287. The visible signs of antesatisfaction?

288. Then?

289. The visible signs of postsatisfaction?

290. What followed this silent action?

Part 4: Molly half wakes and asks Bloom about his day

291. With what modifications did the narrator [i.e. Bloom] reply to this interrogation [by Molly]?

292. Was the narration otherwise unaltered by modifications?

293. Which event or person emerged as the salient point of his narration?

294. What limitations of activity and inhibitions of conjugal rights were perceived by listener and narrator concerning themselves during the course of this intermittent and increasingly more laconic narration? [it is ten years since Bloom and Molly last had penetrative sex]

295. How?

296. What moved visibly above the listener’s and the narrator’s invisible thoughts?

297. In what directions did listener and narrator lie?

298. In what state of rest or motion?

299. In what posture?

300. Womb? Weary?

301. With?

302. When?

303. Where?

Famously, the answer to the final question is just a big black full stop.

A discrepancy

All the commentaries say there are 309 questions but, as you can see, I went through carefully numbering them and came up with only 303. Either the commentators are all wrong or I am. As I read I noticed there are a small number of places where the text doesn’t have a question and answer, it has a command to describe something which the text then obeys, for example ‘Describe the alterations effected in the disposition of the articles of furniture.’ When I counted 6 of these and added them to the 303 questions, that totalled 309 ‘prompts’. But in the end there are 10 of them and that doesn’t quite work either. So at the time of writing, I’m puzzled.

Another synopsis with notable learnings

Part 1

Bloom and Stephen walk the 0.8 of a mile from the cabman’s shelter to 7 Eccles Street, chatting about miscellaneous subjects. Bloom has left his front door keys in the pocket of his other trousers so is forced to climb over the low railing, lower himself into the area, force the latch of the window, enter the house, emerge 4 minutes later from the front door, and let Stephen in.

(Forgetting his keys leads Bloom to be jokily described ‘as a competent keyless citizen’ but as the commentators point out, Stephen is also keyless, having been deprived of the key to Mulligan’s Martello tower, so they are both in fact keyless. They are a keyless couple.)

He lights the hob and makes Stephen a nice cup of (Epps’s soluble) cocoa. They talk about – and Bloom thinks about – a wide range of subjects and these, in the chapter’s pedantic style, involve paragraphs of information about a very wide range of subjects including:

  • the date of Ireland’s conversion to Christianity
  • Bloom’s height and weight (5 foot 11, 11 stone 4 pounds)
  • the precise capacity of the reservoirs and pipes which supplied Dublin with water
  • the importance and beauty of water in all its forms
  • Stephen is a hydrophobe i.e. he hates water: astonishingly, he hasn’t had a bath since the previous October
  • the contents of Bloom’s shelves
  • poems and a song Bloom wrote when young
  • the two occasions they’d previously met (when Stephen was a boy)
  • the coincidence that Bloom lived in the same hotel and used to take for walks in her bathchair old Mrs Riordan, the same zealous Catholic who has the fearsome argument over the Dedalus family Christmas table in ‘Portrait’
  • they write down for comparison letters from Gaelic and Hebrew
  • prolonged memories of his daughter Millicent (Milly) as a girl
  • Bloom returns Stephen’s money which he took for safekeeping in the brothel, one pound seven shillings
  • Bloom invites Stephen to stay and sleep on the sofa but Stephen declines

They both go out into the backgarden for a pee, under what is memorably described as ‘The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit’, which in turn prompts a series of extravagant speculations about the universe, life on other planets etc. Then Bloom unlocks the gate in the garden wall and Stephen departs.

Part 2

Alone, Bloom:

  • undresses
  • notices in the mirror the spines of his books, which the text lists (23 of them)
  • thinks about his dream country cottage
  • and becoming a landowner and JP, as which he will administer justice firmly but fairly to a long list of hypothetical malefactors
  • reviews quite a few money-making schemes he’s dreamed up but never implemented e.g. reclamation of human faeces, construction of optimum tram lines
  • reviews his documents, letters from his daughter, life insurance, letters from his dead dad
  • fantasises about moving out of Dublin, to scenic parts of Ireland or exotic abroad
  • he imagines a reward being issued for him after he goes missing

Part 3

In bed with Molly he ponders his complicated reactions to knowing that Boylan has slept with her. The overall outcome is tenderness and he kisses her on the buttocks, which half wakes her.

Part 4

They haven’t had sex in over ten years. Which explains why he prefers to sleep upside down i.e. with his head on a pillow by her feet, his feet at the head of the bed by her head.

Is Bloom a Jew?

No. Mentioned in ‘Eumaeus’, confirmed here.

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?
He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not.

Notable facts

Out of the blue, Bloom refers to the late Mrs Emily Sinico, accidentally killed at Sydney Parade railway station, 14 October 1903. This must be the same Mrs Sinico who features in the Dubliners story ‘A Painful Case’.

Followed by the revelation that Stephen’s mother, Mrs Mary Dedalus (born Goulding) was buried almost a year ago, on 26 June 1903. That’s a long time for Stephen to wear mourning.

My favourite fact about Bloom remains that he has to walk on the right-hand side of anyone he’s walking with.

Naughty

Bloom is incorrigibly sexual. a) In his drawer he keeps two erotic postcards (carefully described). b) Reflecting that he has flattering encounters with several women today (Mrs Josephine Breen, Miss Callan, Gerty) he fantasises about a high class encounter:

The possibility of exercising virile power of fascination in the not immediate future after an expensive repast in a private apartment in the company of an elegant courtesan, of corporal beauty, moderately mercenary, variously instructed, a lady by origin.

c) When he thinks about moving out of Dublin, one way of navigating would be by the moon, but this gets sidetracked into another horny fantasy, of:

a bispherical moon, revealed in imperfect varying phases of lunation through the posterior interstice of the imperfectly occluded skirt of a carnose negligent perambulating female

Where ‘carnose’ means ‘fleshy, pulpy, or succulent’. Naughty Poldy!

Beautifuls

What are the most beautiful of the 309 answers? My favourites are the ones about water, moon/women and dawn.

25. What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

160. What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

175. Alone, what did Bloom feel?

The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn.

Who, having stayed up all night partying, has not known that spectral feeling?

A real discrepancy

The next chapter, ‘Penelope’, starts with Molly surprised that Bloom has asked her to make him breakfast in bed the next morning. This is puzzling because in the final paragraphs right up to Bloom falling asleep, he is recorded as making no such request. Is this a hint that the catechism is not complete? You’ve heard of the unreliable narrator, a fairly frequent device in modern novels, movies, TV dramas. Are we dealing here with an unreliable catechist?

Credit

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

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Posted by Simon on February 13, 2026

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Ulysses by James Joyce: introduction

‘You have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way.’
(Buck Mulligan arguing with Stephen Dedalus)

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
(Stephen’s credo)

‘Your own name is strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.’
(John Eglinton responding to Stephen’s lecture about Shakespeare)

Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man…
(Stephen’s self-mocking self description in the same scene)

I’ll tickle his catastrophe, believe you me.
(Simon Dedalus threatening to write a letter to Buck Mulligan’s mother exposing him, and demonstrating his vivid and generally comic turn of phrase)

—I beg your parsnips, says Alf.
(In the Cyclops chapter)

James Joyce is a world class literary giant on the basis of his 1922 novel ‘Ulysses’. It’s monster long – around 700 pages in most editions – and has a fearsome reputation for being a ‘difficult’. In many senses it is difficult, often very difficult, but I’m going to have a go at explaining it as simply as I can.

Joyce’s previous and much more conventional novel, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, (published in 1916) told the life story of a transparently fictional version of Joyce himself, named Stephen Dedalus, from toddlerdom to university. When described like that it sounds very straightforward; what complicates it is Joyce’s phenomenal intellectual powers and his increasingly experimental way with prose.

As in his set of short stories, Dubliners (published in 1912), on the surface all is realism, with realistic characters pottering round Dublin, getting into realistic scrapes and having realistic conversations. However, what was clear to perceptive readers of Dubliners from the get-go was that these stories are extremely carefully organised: at a meta level they are arranged so that the collection as a whole describes different stages of life – from boyhood japes in the early stories, to young manhood, maturity, through to the final story, titled The Dead. And within each story, there is also careful structuring and symbolism: for example, the short story ‘Grace’ opens with a middle-aged man passed out pissed in the toilets of a popular bar. He’s helped home by some mates and put to bed while his pals work with his wife to persuade him to go on a religious retreat to try and help him give up the booze. So far so mundane, until someone points out that the three locations of the story – downstairs toilet, bedroom and church – can be seen as the three locations of the afterlife: hell, purgatory and paradise. And once you know this, you are able to spot further little clues which have been sprinkled about the story, symbols or Latin phrases which subtly reference and gesture towards this concealed structure.

Well, magnify this method a thousandfold and you have ‘Ulysses’. I’ll consider it in three ways: first, the literal story; then the structure which underpins (or has been imposed) on it; thirdly, (some of) the linguistic innovations introduced in ‘Ulysses’, innovations which start slowly but spread to become completely rampant. It’s these innovations in prose style and structure which are the real stumbling blocks of the novel, often making it hard to read on the sentence, paragraph and page levels, presenting countless challenges to comprehension, and from relatively early on. But first, a look at the structure:

Structure

‘Ulysses’ is divided into 18 chapters, which are themselves gathered into three parts: part 1 contains 3 chapters; part 2 12 chapters; part 3 has 3 chapters.

What happens

Part 1: Chapters 1 to 3

At 8am on Thursday 4 June 1904 young Stephen Dedalus wakes up in the Martello Tower on Dublin Bay where he’s been dossing with a friend, medical student Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan. He’s cross because he was kept awake by the noisy nightmares of a third guest, the Englishman Haines. He’s also in a bad mood because Mulligan teases him because his (Stephen’s) mother recently died, and Stephen refused, on principle, to kneel by the bedside of his dying mother, something which now haunts him with guilt. This trio of young bucks go for a quick dip in the sea (well, fastidious Stephen doesn’t take part) then (in chapter 2) Stephen goes on to the school where he teaches part time, takes a history lesson, gets paid by the pedantic headmaster. In chapter 3 we are alone with Stephen and his thoughts as he walks along the beach.

Part 2: Chapter 4 to chapter 15

Cut back to 8am in the household of Leopold Bloom in central Dublin. Bloom is a middle-aged seller of newspaper advertising, a job which involves tramping the streets of Dublin touting for business. He’s married to Molly. He makes her breakfast in bed, fries breakfast for himself and then sets off on his day’s work. His day includes:

  • a trip to the Post Office
  • attending the funeral of a friend
  • visiting the office of a newspaper to place an ad
  • popping into Davy Byrne’s pub for a sandwich lunch
  • going to the National Library to look up an ad in an old newspaper, where his path doesn’t quite cross Stephen who is in the office of the Head Librarian, delivering another one of his literary theories, this time about the true meaning of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to representatives of Dublin’s literary elite
  • Bloom has dinner at the Ormond Hotel while listening to other characters playing the piano and singing
  • Bloom moves on Barney Kiernan’s pub where he meets a character referred to only as The Citizen who is a pugnacious Irish nationalist who ends up trying to attack him
  • Bloom wanders out to Sandymount Strand on the seashore, and watches a young woman, Gerty MacDowell, who’s with some friends; aware of him watching her, Gerty deliberately flashes her legs in a sexy way and arouses Bloom so much that, watching from a safe distance as night falls on the beach, he masturbates to a climax: although it’s a little difficult to make out through Joyce’s highly-mannered prose what’s happening, it was this chapter which got ‘Ulysses’ banned in America and Britain
  • Bloom visits a maternity hospital where a family friend named Mina Purefoy is giving birth, and finally meets Stephen, who has been drinking with his medical student friends and is awaiting the arrival of his frenemy Buck Mulligan
  • when the maternity hospital drinking party breaks up, Stephen and his friend Lynch walk into Nighttown, Dublin’s red-light district, where Bloom follows them into Bella Cohen’s brothel; everyone is quite drunk by now and the scene is extremely long and filled with grotesque hallucinations, climaxing with Stephen being kicked out onto the street where he manages to get into an argument with a British soldier who knocks him to the ground where Bloom comes to his rescue

Part 3: Chapters 16 to 18

  • To sober him up, Bloom takes Stephen to a nearby cabman’s shelter by Butt Bridge where they encounter a drunken sailor
  • Bloom takes Stephen back to his place, makes him a cup of cocoa and they have a post-drunk conversation about the educational and cultural differences between them; they both go outside to pee in the garden; Stephen refuses Bloom’s offer of a bed for the night and staggers off into the night while Bloom goes to bed next to his sleeping wife
  • Chapter 18 is famous because it consists solely of Molly Bloom’s thoughts as she lies in bed next to her passed-out husband: the 40 or so pages contain only eight paragraphs with no punctuation in a tour-de-force of the relatively unknown technique of stream-of-consciousness: she remembers her various boyfriends and reminisces about courting and having sex with them, before the novel ends with a description of her having an orgasm, marked by the words yes yes yes which conclude this vast epic novel

There is One Big Fact I haven’t found space to explain yet and this is that, right from the start of his day, Bloom has known that a rival of his, the music impresario and flashy man-about-town, Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan, is going to call by his house, at 4pm that afternoon, supposedly to discuss details of the concert tour he’s arranged for Molly, but in reality to have sex with her. Bloom knows she is taking Boylan as her lover and yet feels powerless to stop it. And so he spends his entire day in a state of anxiety and suspense, continually looking at the clock at every venue he visits, in anticipation of zero hour; and then, after 4pm, reluctant to return to his house afterwards 1) lest he encounters the couple still at it of Boylan just leaving and 2) because he won’t know what to say to his wife.

So it’s a long book, and there’s a lot of words to read but I hope this summary shows that, on a basic narrative level, the story is relatively straightforward. All the events are highly realistic and plausible, if not actively boring and mundane, and once you’re told that this is the sequence of events the book describes, you can approach it with a lot less trepidation. What daunts people is the buried symbolism and above all the difficult prose style. Next: the Greek myth connection, or: why is it called Ulysses?

Ulysses and the Odyssey

Like every educated person, Joyce had read the two great epic poems of the ancient Greek author Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Iliad is a tragic account of the key episode at the heart of the ten-year-long Trojan War when the Greek hero Achilles, furious at the Greek leader Agamemnon, retires to his tent and refuses to fight. This has tragic consequences because when the Trojans counter-attack and make it as far as the Greek tents, Achilles lets his friend and soul-mate Patroclus put on his armour and rally the troops; Patroclus does this until he comes face to face with the Trojan hero Hector who slaughters him like a beast and the rest of the poem describes Achilles’ immense fury and bottomless grief.

But if the Iliad is tragic, the Odyssey has a very different feel. After the ten-year Trojan War ended, the Greek hero famous for his wily cunning, Odysseus, the man who came up with the idea of the Trojan Horse which led to the final defeat of the besieged city, it takes him ten further years to get home to his wife Penelope and his young son Telemachus (i.e. Odysseus is away from his kingdom of Ithaca for 20 years).

The poem actually opens near the end, with his last adventure, washing up on the shore of Princess Nausicaa, being discovered, bathed and dressed, then invited to a feast in her palace and it is here that he tells all the other guests his amazing adventures – being enslaved by Circe the magician, being held prisoner by the one-eyed Cyclops, sailing past the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis, having to be tied to the mast in order not to give way to the seductive song of the Sirens, and many more.

Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, the Odyssey tells us how, throughout these ten long years, Odysseus’s faithful wife Penelope remained at home in their palace, putting off the many suitors who wanted to marry her and so inherit Odysseus’s kingdom. And it tells us how towards the end of this long period his son, Telemachus, come of age during his father’s absence, sets out on a quest of his own to find his father.

So with that understood, back to Joyce. Apparently Joyce had begun a story which he intended to be another short realistic yarn to join a revised edition of his short story collection ‘Dubliners’, about a Jewish advertising salesman with an unfaithful wife who wanders the streets in a peculiar frame of mind as he knows his wife is preparing to meet her lover, in his marital bed.

One thing led to another as Joyce wondered what if this advertising salesman met the young avatar he had created of himself in ‘A Portrait’, Stephen Dedalus? What would they discuss, what would they make of each other? And at some point he had the Eureka moment when it occurred to him that maybe this fellow Bloom’s wanderings around Dublin could be mapped onto Odysseus’s ancient adventures, maybe those ancient stories could give it a structure and, more than that, a kind of deep literary resonance, of the kind he was used to concealing in his Dubliners stories (like ‘Grace’, as described above),

When I tried to read ‘Ulysses’ at school I found it a great struggle because 1) I had no idea what was going on and 2) as the text progresses, the prose becomes difficult to read (see next section). You really need to know that the three central characters are modern avatars of Homer’s three characters: Bloom is wily old Odysseus; Stephen plays the role of his son, Telemachus; and Molly is the faithful Penelope waiting at home for her man. Except that they’re not a perfect match, are they? Stephen isn’t actually Bloom’s son and when, at the end, Bloom suggests a closer friendship Stephen mumbles something and wanders off into the night. No reconciliation there. And Molly, she is hardly the model of a faithful wife, in fact the whole point is that she is the exact opposite. And Bloom is hardly a macho Greek warrior, very much the reverse, he is a shy and diffident Jew in a Catholic country, liable to be discriminated against and picked on. So the novel’s central characters are in no way like-for-like matches of the Homeric epic, they are something more like ironic reincarnations, satirical avatars, reflecting the comic bathos of modern life.

But if I didn’t understand the roles played by these characters, the biggest single stumbling block to grasping the mythic resonances of the novel was the way the 18 chapters in Joyce’s text have no titles. Just giving them titles, and a sentence of explanation, would have transformed my experience.

As soon as I came across a book which explained that each of the chapters reflects or is based on a specific episode from the Odyssey, and clearly indicated which one was which, my whole reading experience was transformed. Augmented by the knowledge that the 18 chapters are further grouped into three parts which themselves are based on the main thematic elements of the Odyssey story, as follows:

  1. the first three chapters, describing Stephen waking in the tower, going to school and wandering into Dublin, are titled the Telemachia or wanderings of Telemachus
  2. the 12 central chapters can be thought of as the Odyssey proper, describing the many adventures of Bloom during the day
  3. the final three chapters, when Bloom takes Stephen home, can be grouped as the Nostos, Greek for return so the ‘Return’ part of the story, reflecting the final chapters of Homer’s poem which describe the homecoming of the long-absent hero

Why Ulysses and not Odysseus?

The ancient Romans not only co-opted many of the Greek gods, subsuming them into the existing Latin pantheon, they did the same with many of the mortal heroes of ancient Greece. When the Romans translated the Greek legends from Greek into Latin, they sometimes found it easier to change the names as well, to make them easier to pronounce. The early Latin translators of Homer probably adapted the Greek Ὀδυσσεύς into the Sicilian Οὐλίξης, and then the Etruscan Uluxe, before arriving at the shorter, more Roman-friendly Ulysses.

So that’s why you see two names being used for the same person: Odysseus is his original Greek name as used by Homer; Ulysses is the name used by Roman authors, such as Virgil, when describing the Tale of Troy.

So why did Joyce use the Latin name? Apparently, when he was a boy of 12, Joyce’s thoughts on the subject were crystallised when he first read the story in Charles Lamb’s book ‘The Story of Ulysses’ (1808), and that version of the name stuck. Having been brought up in a heavily Catholic school, Latin was all around him, in the Mass and liturgy and so on, and so he took to the Latinate forms (unlike late Victorian English Protestant private schools of the time, where there would have been as much emphasis on ancient Greek and so the Greek names are preferred by English writers).

Plot structure version 2

So here’s the chapter structure again, but this time indicating the episode from the Odyssey which each one is based on and explaining the parallels with the Homeric episode, such as they are:

Part 1: The Telemachia (the wanderings of Telemachus / Stephen)

Chapter 1: Telemachus

8am. Introducing Stephen Dedalus, bunking in the Martello Tower being rented by Buck Mulligan. Breakfast. Stephen should be mourning his recently dead mother and so borrows an all-black suit from Mulligan. In other words, he is dressed in mourning for the whole of the novel.

Chapter 2: Nestor (wise king of Pylos, advisor to the heroes)

Stephen’s encounter with school headmaster Garrett Deasy, who asks him to take a letter to the newspaper about foot-and-mouth disease. (Which gives rise to Stephen’s mortified expectation that Mulligan will mock him as ‘the bullockbefriending bard’, which becomes one of many recurring phrases, not to mention later cattle-related jokes such as someone being a bull in a china shop etc.)

[Myth parallel: Remember I mentioned that Bloom, Stephen and Molly are not direct avatars of their heroic predecessors but more like satirical, ironic modern versions. Well, as you can see here, the pompous Unionist headmaster Deasy is far indeed from being an avatar of wise old king Nestor of Greek mythology. Quite obviously he is a comic parody and yet there are commonalities: Nestor trained young horses, Deasy’s career is training teenage boys.]

Chapter 3: Proteus (the shape-shifting sea god from Greek myth)

Stephen wanders down to the seashore at Sandymount Strand and his mind wanders, free-associating ideas and memories from school and university, shreds of knowledge, quotes in various languages, perceptions and the rhythmic sound of the waves all melding in his mind to make this one of the most daunting of all the chapters to read, certainly in the first half.

[Myth parallel: You can see how the concept of the shape-shifting god maps nicely onto the endless shape-shifting of the protagonist’s mind.]

Part 2: the Odyssey (the wanderings of Ulysses / Leopold Bloom)

Chapter 4: Calypso

Cut back to 8am and Leopold Bloom, waking up, having breakfast, reading his mail, taking a letter from Blazes Boylan to his wife Molly in bed.

[Myth parallel: Calypso was a nymph from Greek mythology, famous for holding the hero Odysseus captive on her island, Ogygia, for seven years. Note that here, at the start of Bloom’s novel, Molly is Calypso. In the final chapter the same Molly stands in for the completely different figure of Penelope. Which shows you how Joyce’s parallels are exact in some respects but can be very loose if needs be.]

Chapter 5: Lotus Eaters

Bloom has an hour to kill before he has to attend Paddy Dignam’s funeral at 11am so he does a handful of chores in a lazy sensual mood: he goes to the Post Office, posts a letter, wanders into a Catholic church (incense and gold), buys a bar of lemon soap at a chemist and fantasises about paying a visit to Dublin’s Turkish baths.

[Myth parallel: The Lotus Eaters were a mythical people from Homer’s Odyssey, living on an island where they ate the narcotic lotus flower which caused blissful forgetfulness, a desire to stay, and loss of ambition. This is one of the more oblique of the Homeric parallels.]

Chapter 6: Hades or hell

Along with three friends, including Stephen’s father Simon Dedalus, Bloom attends the funeral of Paddy Dignam, taking the long journey by funeral carriage across Dublin to the burial in Glasnevin cemetery. This triggers in Bloom thoughts of his own son, Rudy, who died young, and of his father who committed suicide with poison.

[Myth parallel: This is one of the more obvious and direct allusions, matching Odysseus’s trip to the Greek underworld and a modern funeral.]

Chapter 7: Aeolus, the god of wind

This chapter is notable for the way the text is broken up by no fewer than 63 captions in the style of newspaper headlines, ironically summarising the content of each section.

At the office of the Dublin newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, Bloom walks past the huge printing machines to the editor’s office where he attempts to place an ad for a client. Stephen arrives at the same office bringing (as promised) Deasy’s letter about foot-and-mouth disease. Bloom notices Stephen and that his boots are dirty but they do not actually meet. Instead the chapter mostly consists of long wordy conversations between half a dozen editors, hacks and scroungers, about each other, Dublin gossip, and racing tips.

[Myth parallel: In Greek mythology Aeolus was the keeper of the winds, ruling from the island of Aeolia where he held the violent winds captive in a bag. Control of the winds of information and opinion is an ironic or satirical way of thinking about a newspaper, and gassy windiness also describes the banter of the 7 or 8 characters gathered in the office.]

Chapter 8: Lestrygonians (a race of giant, cannibalistic ogres in Greek mythology)

Bloom wanders the streets feeling hungry, bumps into an old flame, Josie Breen, notices the (real life) author A.E. walking past him with a lady acolyte. He enters Burton’s restaurant but is overwhelmed by the smell and sight of so many people eating, so leaves and pops into Davy Byrne’s pub for a light lunch of a cheese sandwich and a glass of Burgundy wine. When he leaves, 4 or 5 other characters discuss his character.

Out on the street, he helps a blind man (who we later learn is a piano tuner) to cross the road and ponders at length all the implications of being blind – then walks on to the National Library. Thinking about food has led him to consider the human body as a machine, food in-poo out, which leads to the eccentric speculation whether traditional Greek statues were depicted with anuses. As he enters the National Library he has a quick squint up at the big statues flanking the entrance, to check.

[Myth parallel: obsession with food links the classical reference and the modern chapter.]

Chapter 9: Scylla and Charybdis

Cut to Stephen in the head librarian’s office at the National Library delivering another one of his literary theories, this time about the true meaning of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, appropriately enough because he is dressed in mourning (though for a dead mother not a dead father, as is the case with the Danish prince). Stephen and Bloom’s paths nearly cross as the latter pops in to look up an ad in an old newspaper but, again, they don’t actually meet.

[Myth parallel: In the Odyssey Odysseus’ ship has to sail the narrow channel between the twin monsters Scylla and Charybdis. I’ve read a clever interpretation pointing out that the two monsters can be mapped on to the two types of aesthetic theory dramatised in this chapter: Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare insists that the Bard’s great plays arose from the tribulations of his own sometimes squalid personal life but he’s presenting it to the older generation of Dublin critics who believe art should be about beautiful timeless spiritual ideals – so it’s these two opposing theories which represent the two legendary monsters, and which Joyce the author had to navigate between. Clever. There might also be a canny little micro-parallel because, as Bloom enters the Library, he walks between Stephen and his friend Mulligan exiting, who also represent two ends of a spectrum, Mulligan all glib flashy smartness, Stephen, deep but gloomy introspection.]

Chapter 10: Wandering Rocks

Nineteen short vignettes describe the movements of the central figures and about 30 secondary characters through the streets of Dublin. The episode begins by following kind-hearted Father Conmee, a Jesuit priest, walking north and stopping for a kind word for various parishioners, and ends with an account of the cavalcade of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, William Ward, Earl of Dudley, processing through the streets on his way to inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer’s hospital, and with the response of the 19 or so characters described in the preceding vignettes to his carriage as it passes.

[Myth parallel: Wandering rocks and wandering Dubliners.]

Chapter 11: Sirens

Bloom has dinner at the Ormond Hotel whose bar is dominated by the ministrations of two barmaids, dark-haired Miss Kennedy and brunette Miss Douce, while other characters gossip and then play the piano and sing some airs in the hotel’s dining room. Bloom gets a pen and paper to write a furtive reply to his lover Martha’s letter to him.

[Myth parallel: In Greek mythology the sirens were enchanting beings, half-woman, half-bird, who lured sailors to shipwreck and death with their irresistible songs; so the sirens are represented by the two barmaids, who don’t themselves sing but the scene is full of characters playing and singing, not least Stephen’s father, Simon.]

Chapter 12: Cyclops

Up till now the chapters have been cast in what you could call basic stream of consciousness, albeit often difficult to follow. The remaining six chapters of the novel are all longer and each one has its own individual format. Chapter 12 breaks the convention of the novel up to now by being narrated by an unnamed Dubliner who has a completely different ‘voice’ or style from either Stephen or Bloom.

This narrator works as a debt collector and goes to Barney Kiernan’s pub where he meets a character referred to only as ‘The Citizen’ who is a vehement Irish nationalist. When Bloom arrives at the pub, he is subjected to an antisemitic rant by the Citizen and various other characters come to his defence.

[Myth parallel: The Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey was Polyphemus, a giant, one-eyed son of the sea god Poseidon who captured Odysseus and his men in his cave. This monster eats several of the sailors before Odysseus manages to get him drunk then blind him with a sharpened stake, and escaping. So the Citizen is the Cyclops and the one-eyed reference is a satirical take on the bigoted monomania of Irish nationalism.]

Chapter 13: Nausicaa

Bloom wanders out to Sandymount Strand where he watches a young woman, Gerty MacDowell, who flashes her legs to excite him. The first half is written as a parody of a romance magazine, the second half more realistically from Bloom’s point of view.

[In Homer’s Odyssey, Nausicaa was daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete of Phaeacia, famous for discovering and helping the shipwrecked Odysseus, giving him clothes, food, and guidance to her father’s palace. So the reincarnation of the elegant princess as a flirty young woman is obviously full of ironies and a vivid example of the general idea of how ‘fallen’ or degraded the modern world is.]

Chapter 14: Oxen of the Sun

Bloom visits the maternity hospital where Mina Purefoy is giving birth, and finally meets Stephen, who has been drinking with his medical student friends. At the end the drinking party breaks up, Mulligan catching the train back to his tower while Stephen drunkenly blunders off to the red light district accompanied by his pal, medical student Vincent Lynch. Worried about him, a much more sober Bloom follows.

[In the Odyssey Odysseus and his men come to the island of the sun god Helios, and are warned not to touch his holy cattle. When Odysseus goes off to pray for guidance his hungry men slaughter, roast and eat some of the cattle. Odysseus returns and tells them to flee but their ships are pursued by the sun god’s anger and most of his men are wrecked and drowned. The parallel is loose here, as this chapter is famous for mimicking the growth of the foetus in its mother’s womb by parodying the evolution of English from the original Anglo-Saxon onwards.]

Chapter 15: Circe

Bloom follows Stephen and his pal Lynch into a brothel where they both experience a series of grotesque Rabelaisian hallucinations. After smashing the chandelier with his walking stick, Stephen is kicked out onto the street where he gets into a fight with a British soldier and is knocked down, leaving Bloom to pick him up and sort him out.

[In the Odyssey, Circe was a powerful sorceress who used her magic to turn Odysseus’s men into swine and keep them imprisoned for years. Obviously there are no years here, just one night, and there is no crew, just Stephen, Lynch and Bloom. But the monstrous brothelkeeper Bella Cohen is a fittingly grotesque parody of the beautiful magical Circe of Homer.]

Part 3: Nostos (the Return)

Chapter 16: Eumaeus

[Myth parallel: in the Odyssey, Eumaeus is the loyal swineherd of Odysseus, a man of noble birth kidnapped as a child who had become a trusted friend of the master and is the first point of contact for the disguised hero upon his return to Ithaca.]

In the novel, having saved Stephen from arrest after his altercation with the soldier, Bloom takes Stephen to the cabman’s shelter near Butt Bridge where they encounter a drunken sailor: so the drunken sailor is the parallel to Eumaeus.

Chapter 17: Ithaca

[Myth parallel: In the Odyssey, Ithaca is Odysseus’s kingdom to which he returns.]

In the novel Ithaca it is Bloom’s house, to which he brings Stephen for a cup of cocoa.

Chapter 18: Penelope

[Myth parallel: In the Odyssey, Penelope is Odysseus’s loyal wife who waits for 20 long years for her husband to return, spurning the advances of numerous eligible suitors to replace the husband they all claim is dead.]

In the novel, Penelope is reincarnated as Molly Bloom, and the novel ends by abandoning the men and the male perspective altogether and ending with the huge seamless stream-of-consciousness flow of Molly’s falling-asleep thoughts.

Technical innovations

So far I’ve talked about the ‘structure’ of the novel but I have barely mentioned the technical or style innovations which make it such a demanding read on the page, made it so notorious in its time, and for a generation afterwards made it feel as if Joyce had not just revolutionised the novel with his elaborate system of symbols and references, but had revolutionised English prose as well.

Two or three of these quirks or innovations had already appeared in ‘A Portrait’ but in ‘Ulysses’ they are cranked up to the max, along with new novelties.

1. Formal, studied prose

Not an innovation as such, just the foundation on which everything else sits: but Joyce’s prose, even at its least experimental, is surprisingly formal and stiff and mannered. He consistently writes sentences not as you’d expect them to flow but with a deliberate stiffness. He consistently puts words into a counter-intuitive order. After a while I realised he always puts the adverb where you don’t expect it, counter to its usual position in everyday English. As in: ‘He waited by the counter, inhaling slowly the keen reek of drugs…’ where putting ‘slowly’ after ‘inhaling’ makes you linger on it longer, process it more, gives it more weight. Or:

The carriage turned again its stiff wheels and their trunks swayed gently. Martin Cunningham twirled more quickly the peak of his beard.

You’d expect ‘again’ to come after ‘stiff wheels’; you’d expect ‘more quickly’ to come after ‘beard’ and so on. He does this even in his plainest sentences and it gives them a studied, calculated movement. You argue he does so in order to describe things, especially people’s actions, with a finicky super-precision. Here’s the start of chapter 6:

Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself. Mr Power stepped in after him, curving his height with care.

Also, he enjoyed avoiding the common word and using the slightly more official or officious word or phrase. After helping him with his sums, Stephen watches Sargent hurriedly change and run out onto the sports field.

He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy field where sharp voices were in strife. They were sorted in teams and Mr Deasy came away stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet. When he had reached the schoolhouse voices again contending called to him.

‘Where sharp voices were in strife‘ is not the easiest most colloquial way to describe a bunch of boys shouting on a football pitch. It is studied and formal. Ditto the third sentence which contains the odd phrase ‘voices again contending’. You or I might write ‘the sound of the boys arguing again’ but Joyce prefers this much more stiff and formal arrangement: ‘voices again contending’. And note ‘again’ in the unusual position, you or I would say ‘voices arguing again’, but putting it before the verb, this time, has the effect of making every word feel more studied and carefully presented, as at an exhibition of sentences.

So we must bear in mind that even when he’s trying to write relatively ‘straight’, before he got up to any formal tricks, Joyce’s prose style was already oddly stiff, spavined and constricted: highly self-conscious and ornately arranged. This lends even the most supposedly straightforward passages a certain stiff, presentational feel, before we get to any of his party tricks.

2. No speech marks

Joyce had a foible about/well thought-out intellectual objections (delete where applicable) to speech marks / quotation marks / inverted commas. In all the texts Joyce had final say over he replaced the conventional introduction of speech by double apostrophes with an em dash, with no indication where a piece of dialogue ended. Just this one change is surprisingly confusing. It has the cumulative effect of meaning you’re never quite sure where a piece of speech ends and the narrative, or a character’s thoughts, begin.

—Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his hand. These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is for shillings. Sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.

3. No hyphens

Just as he disliked speech marks, so Joyce early on decided to dispense with hyphens and just to run two hyphenated words together. ‘A Portrait’ is full of examples like illfated, selfrestraint, rosesoft and hundreds more. And so it is here, as indicated by the novel’s famous 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.

Innocent though this foible first appears, like dispensing with speech marks it is the first stirrings of the disintegration of language the book is going to deploy on a massive scale. For just as dispensing with speech marks makes it increasingly hard to know where direct speech ends and free indirect speech (i.e. the character’s own thoughts) begins; so dispensing with hyphens where they ought to go marks the start of start of not knowing where one word ends and another begins; in practice, it marks the start of Joyce’s running words together in original and increasingly inventive ways.

It starts with dropping hyphens in a phrase like:

He passed an arm through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriagewindow at the lowered blinds of the avenue.'(chapter 6).

But then it moves on to sticking together words which should never be joined to create new words:

… an old woman peeping. Nose whiteflattened against the pane

You can see in this example how he realises he’s stumbled across a new piece of grammar, the portmanteau noun, and as the novel progresses, the technique of jamming 2, 3 or more words together becomes more outrageous. So as Stephen walks by the sea in chapter 3, he fancifully imagines everyone in the world linked back to their mothers via a ghostly umbilical cord:

The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh…

And then drops the first of his made-up, portmanteau words, imagining the early Christian heretic Arius:

Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality.

After all, if you can glue two words directly together, why not three or four or five words? This is a taste of things to come…

3. Learnèd allusions

We could be here all week describing this one but the basic idea is simple. Joyce was hyper well-read and developed the habit in ‘A Portrait’ of dropping allusions to his learning into the narrative bits of text. Quite regularly the supposed narrative in fact contains no narrative at all, just a tissue of allusions, as if giving you direct access to the flux of (super-literate) thoughts in the main protagonist, Stephen’s, head. So you have potentially three elements: 1) old-fashioned third-person narration; 2) speech without speech marks; 3) the protagonist’s thoughts reflected in indirect speech.

Example 1

The opening of chapter 2 demonstrates all three elements: both the abolition of speech marks, a brief appearance from a conventional narrator, then an abrupt jump into Stephen’s hyper-educated mind.

(1: no-speech-marks speech)
—You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?
—Tarentum, sir.
—Very good. Well?
—There was a battle, sir.
—Very good. Where?
(2: third-person narrative)
The boy’s blank face asked the blank window.
(3: straight into Stephen’s thoughts)
Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?

There has been no narrative lead-in or introduction, no text explaining that we are in a school classroom and Stephen is taking a lesson. Only from the dialogue can we deduce this is what is happening and that it is a lesson about ancient history. ‘The boy’s blank face asked the blank window’ is a neat way of describing the poor schoolboy’s blank ignorance of Stephen’s question, but look what happens next.

We are thrown straight into Stephen’s ‘stream of consciousness’. I admit I had to stop and puzzle this out and have only got parts of it. The two sentences using ‘fabled’ I think reflect Stephen thinking that the battle referred to has gone down in history and yet, he reflects, was probably not as ‘memory’ tells fables about it.

What battle? He will go on to quote the Roman General Pyrrhus who won a battle in 279 BC where the Romans losses were so bad he is supposed to have said: ‘Another victory like that and we are done for.’ This is where we get our phrase ‘A Pyrrhic victory’ from. Stephen is (I think) reflecting that this phrase expressed not so much the general’s despair as his ‘impatience’.

I know the poet William Blake wrote in praise of excess: in his ‘Proverbs of Hell’ he wrote that ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ Maybe Stephen is conflating the disastrous outcome of the Roman battle, its excessiveness, with the ‘wisdom’ contained in the general’s phrase which led to it becoming a proverb.

As to the next bit, ‘I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame’ I don’t think this is particularly tied to Pyrrhus or this history lesson, although I know it is a phrase which will be repeated throughout the novel at various moments. So it is more like an early appearance of an idée fixe of Stephen’s and, if we consider ‘Ulysses’ as a work of art, it is like a motif which is being introduced early on so that it can be repeated with variations later on.

There’s probably more going on here than I’ve indicated and I might have got some of this wrong, but you see how it works: just elements – bits of dialogue which are not at all clearly demarcated, minimal amount of narrative explanation, then chunks of Stephen’s internal monologue which is ferociously learned and allusive – are already combining to make it a tricky read.

Don’t panic

As a bookish person, who’s read a lot of the same books as Joyce, I get some of his references and/or I’ve taken the trouble to look (some of) them up – but there is one key principle to bear in mind here, which is: Don’t be afraid.

Tens of thousands of academics have spent their entire lives elucidating ‘Ulysses’ and nobody has got all the allusions buried in it. It doesn’t matter. If you like puzzles, you can stop at each paragraph and look up the allusions. Or you can read the novel with a page-by-page guide (online or hard copy) open beside it to explain them. (If you have the patience, that’s probably the way to get the most out of reading ‘Ulysses’.)

As Canadian academic Hugh Kenner puts it, the book’s innumerable correspondences and patterns ‘adds fun to our endless exploration of this book’ – if, that is, endless exploration of a vast tissue of learnèd references and internal echoes is your idea of fun.

But if you’re not that kind of person, don’t worry. Read at the book, forge on through it, and let its unusual methods creep up on you. At various points you’ll recognise the same quotes or allusions cropping up and begin to get a feel for them, how they recur and give structure to the text, like motifs returning in a long piece of music. As in the ‘Cantos’ of Ezra Pound you don’t even have to understand what they mean (quotes from foreign languages, for example) for their repetition to start to have a haunting and evocative effect.

Also: it is as well to be clear that Stephen is not a god, he is not the prophet of some challenging religion: he’s just a character in a book, and his character is that of a cleverclogs, a callow young man too clever by half. He’s read all the books in the world but has little or no life experience, and it shows. Therefore, to some extent his thoughts are probably intended to be offputtingly clever-clever.

Example 2

Here’s another example of the method. Stephen stays after class to help a poor schoolboy, Sargent, with his sums. But as he does so, his overworking, over-educated intellect reflects that the symbols used in algebra are Arab in origin, in fact the word ‘algebra’ is itself Arabic, and this prompts him to think of the two great medieval philosophers – Ibn Rushd (1126 to 1198) Latinized as Averroes, and Moses ben Maimon (died 1204), commonly known as Maimonides. This is at least part of what is going on in this passage:

Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands, traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

The dance of symbols across the page is described as a ‘morrice’ which is an antique adjective for Moorish or Arab, but has echoes of Morris dancing, a connotation reinforced by the word mummery, which is an olde English word for acting. Both of them clearly refer to the algebraic symbols Stephen is trying to teach the boy Sargent about and which he fancifully envisions dancing hand in hand with each other, bowing to their partners and so on.

The second half of the paragraph is, as far as I can see, a poetic evocation of the effect of the medieval scholars’ writings, which was itself so complicated and full of learned allusions that Stephen envisions it as mirrors. Maybe the two wise men’s learning is referred to as a darkness because 1) they were both dark-skinned non-European men and 2) maybe Western Europe is the brightness and lightness in which their complex, dark-skinned wisdom made little impression. I’m not sure. Something like that…

Anyway, this kind of thing happens thousands and thousands of times throughout the book. It makes up most of the long the novel’s texture, so it helps if you yourself are bookish and like spotting allusions. But, as I keep emphasising, it’s not absolutely necessary to get every allusion to enjoy the book, in fact it’s probably impossible. It’s perfectly valid to read the whole thing without ‘getting’ any of the allusions because there is plenty of other stuff going on – the structure of the plot itself (as outlined above) but also tens of thousands of places where the prose is so unexpected and inventive that you can enjoy it on the surface, for it mysteriousness and multitudinous rhythms, as much as for this riddling Sudoku element.

The internet / AI changes everything

As I wrote the preceding paragraphs it began to dawn on me that nowadays, of course, the whole experience of reading, especially reading difficult or demanding books, has been transformed by the internet and not just the old internet but the shiny new world of artificial intelligence.

Nowadays if you’re puzzled by anything in ‘Ulysses’, from the overall structure to the tiniest word, you can ask an LLM like Chat GPT and chances are it will explain everything. For example, I was not understanding the scattered references to Bloom’s father in chapter 6 (Hades) and so I simply asked Chat GPT: ‘In James Joyce’s Ulysses, did Leopold Bloom’s father commit suicide?’ and Chat came right back with ‘Yes’ along with details such as the method (poison) and location (the Queen’s Hotel).

So there’s now the facility to look up everything – from the granular level of individual words, foreign quotes, odd phrases, through to the macro level of my Bloom query – on an AI (Chat, CoPilot, Gemini) and have answers delivered on a plate.

Whether this is an appropriate way to read the book, whether it short circuits the time and effort Joyce intended his readers to invest in it, whether it undermines the experience of slowly constructing your own version from the fragments you notice or understand, and replaces it with a fully explained, Sam Altman-friendly version, is open to debate. But there’s no denying AI’s help in immediately solving thousands of niggling details or impenetrable obscurities, for example: who is Hynes? What does ‘De mortuis nil nisi prius’ mean? Can I find a recording of ‘Those lovely seaside girls? (Yes – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4IpDMyox2Y).

After a while I began to rely on it more heavily because the broken-up prose and elliptical style of so many of the conversations often mean it’s very hard to figure out what’s going on, and even what people are saying to each other.

But academic books will remain useful…

Where books, even quite old guides to ‘Ulysses’, score over the internet, is that they will offer useful and interesting opinions and insights. Chat will 1) only answer the question you asked; it might answer it fully and give you more detail than you expected, but at the end of the day the answer is limited by how you phrase your initial question or ‘prompt’. And 2) it will only give you other people’s opinions, neatly summarised and tied up in a bow.

By contrast a book-length guide will tend to introduce you to ideas and interpretations you’d never thought of before. They let you share, and follow the logic behind, distinct and maybe idiosyncratic interpretations, by expert scholars. LLMs tend to repeat and confirm the biases or expectations you bring with you whereas (good) books open the mind to all kinds of new possibilities.

So AI has already revolutionised the process of reading difficult works of literature like ‘Ulysses’ (and many more). But good books of criticism or analysis or just good quality guides, will for the foreseeable future still have the advantage of opening your mind to new ideas. Which, back in the olden days, was often considered an element point of studying literature…

Credit

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

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Posted by Simon on January 30, 2026

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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

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/01/28/portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-james-joyce/

Jacob Epstein @ Tate Britain

‘My language is form, in all its variety and astonishing wealth, and that is my native language.’
(Jacob Epstein)

In the main hall of Tate Britain, officially known as the Duveen Gallery, they’ve dusted off 20 or so pieces by British sculptor and modernist pioneer Jacob Epstein to form a lovely display. Some of the large carved stone sculptures fit perfectly into the hall which is constructed of stone columns and panels, which complement Epstein’s bigger stone carvings.

There are (maybe) three aspects to Epstein’s work:

1. Heroic modernism

In the heroic age of modernism, the pioneering 1910s, Epstein’s radically angular vision climaxed in The Rock Drill from 1913, a science fiction vision of the machine age, or the angular and stylised sculpture for the tomb of Oscar Wilde in Paris (1913).

During this period he was a key figure in the ‘direct carving’ movement in Britain. This approach emphasised a ‘truth to materials’, in which sculptors worked directly with the stone, using its natural qualities rather than making wax or clay models first. He was influenced by the techniques and imagery used in ancient Egyptian, West African and Oceanic carvings, which he collected.

2. Stone carvings

Later, in the ’20s and ’30s, he made a series of monumental stone carvings with religious overtones, pagan gods or characters from the Bible, whose monumental blocky scale and composition influenced a younger generation of British sculptors.

3. Bronze busts

Throughout his career he made bronze portrait busts in a completely different style. By contrast with the large angular, slab-like carvings, the busts are more or less life-size, and fiddly, made of knobs and whorls and excrescences where you can almost feel the fingers and thumbs shaping the root material. Nonetheless they’re often good likenesses, and provided Epstein with a regular income from members of elite families and leading figures in the arts who paid for these commissions. The display includes busts of Albert Einstein, the Labour politician Nye Bevin, writer Somerset Maugham, actor Iris Beerbohm Tree and so on.

Gallery

The following text in italics is direct from the curators – why reinvent the wheel?

Rock Drill (1913)

Epstein began this sculpture in a period when artists in the Vorticist and Futurist movements were exploring the dynamic artistic potential of mechanisation. The original sculpture, first exhibited alongside works by Vorticist artists at the London Group exhibition of 1915, was a plaster figure mounted on top of a commercial rock drill.

He later described it as ‘a machine-like robot, visored, menacing, and carrying within itself its progeny… the armed sinister figure of today and tomorrow.’ After the machines of the First World War killed millions of people, Epstein removed the drill, cut the figure down at the waist and chopped off the left hand and right arm and cast it in bronze. This newly truncated figure now looks more vulnerable, a victim rather than a perpetrator of violence.

Torso in Metal from The Rock Drill (1913 to 1914) by Jacob Epstein. Tate © The Estate of Jacob Epstein (photo by the author)

This may be my favourite work of art of all time. It has the geometric angularity of early modernism, highly infused with a Vorticist, machine-age aesthetic, probably my favourite art movement. But more than that, its hard angularity anticipates the unforgiving cruelty and atrocity of the world to come, the world unleashed by the Great War, the great century of catastrophe. And its alien appearance makes it the godfather to almost all the really serious, minatory science fiction of the last century. It is spookily, tragically prophetic. And yet it gives off hard waves of psychic energy. It symbolises the science and technology which have simultaneously liberated us and threaten to annihilate us.

Here’s a photo of what it originally looked like, Epstein’s original conception atop an actual pneumatic drill, which transport it to a whole new level of alien apparition. 1913 when John Singer Sargent was still painting pictures of rich American ladies in their boudoirs!

Doves

A pair of doves, a traditional symbol of love. The two birds are mating, reflecting Epstein’s interest in exploring sexuality and procreation. He simplifies the forms into bold geometric shapes, influenced by the experimental work of sculptor Constantin Brancusi, whom he had met in Paris in 1912 when he was working on Oscar Wilde’s tomb. Epstein made three sculptures on this theme. This version, the third, is the most abstract of the three.

Doves by Jacob Epstein (1914-15) Tate © The Estate of Jacob Epstein (photo by the author)

Jacob and the Angel (1940-1)

Epstein depicts a passage from the Biblical Book of Genesis in alabaster.

In the Bible story Jacob wrestles through the night with an unknown attacker, who eventually overpowers him. In the morning, he realises he has been fighting God and his own conscience. Epstein shows Jacob exhausted, being held up by an angel. The interaction of the figures is ambiguous, both an intimate embrace and the aftermath of a struggle.

Epstein carved several monumental works on biblical subjects in alabaster in the 1930s and 1940s. They all caused controversy because of their use of simplified figural forms and sexual explicitness to depict religious subject matter. In each, Epstein allowed the shape of the stone block to define the figure. He wrote that his intention was to explore ‘the discipline of the simplification of forms, unity of design, and co-ordination of masses.’

Jacob and the Angel by Jacob Epstein (1940 to 1941) Tate © The Estate of Jacob Epstein (photo by the author)

Einstein

The physicist Albert Einstein fled Germany for Britain in July 1933. He was staying at a refugee camp in North Norfolk when Epstein made this portrait. Epstein wrote about his week of sittings with Einstein, which he enjoyed: ‘His glance contained a mixture of the humane, the humorous, and the profound. This was a combination that delighted me. He resembled the ageing Rembrandt.’

Epstein had to work quickly on the bust, which was not fully finished when the sittings ended, because in October Einstein left for the US to take up a post at Princeton University.

Einstein by Epstein (1933) at Tate © The Estate of Jacob Epstein (photo by the author)

Conclusion

If you’re going to see the fabulous Lee Miller exhibition which is just off the central atrium, factor in 15 or 20 extra minutes to take in this display. Most of the bronze busts did nothing for me, whereas the half dozen or so Modernist works are bracing and inspiring, the alabaster Jacob hugely impressive, and I spent 4 or 5 minutes just absorbing the energy, inspiration and horror of the amazing Rock Drill.

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by Simon on October 18, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 18, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/18/jacob-epstein-tate-britain/

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 1. Reading and Writing (1)

You may well complain of the vagueness of my language.
(Woolf acknowledging that she doesn’t always have clear ideas or express them very clearly, in ‘Character in Fiction’, page 48)

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’, edited by David Bradshaw, brings together 30 of Woolf’s non-fiction prose pieces and groups them under four headings:

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. Looking On

I’ve published introductory notes on the themes and style of the essays. This blog post summarises the first four essays of the ten in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section (many but not all of which are available online).

  1. The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905)
  2. Modern Fiction (1919)
  3. The Modern Essay (1922) [review of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920]
  4. How It Strikes a Contemporary (1923)
  5. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923)
  6. Character in Fiction (1924) [a talk]
  7. ‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926) [Thomas de Quincy]
  8. How Should One Read A Book? (1926)
  9. Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927)
  10. Craftmanship (1937) [BBC radio talk]

1. The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905: 3 pages)

Summary: good essays are always personal and autobiographical.

Woolf was just 23 and exploring her talents in this early essay. She affects a world-weary omniscience of the literary scene and laments the overproduction of writing of all types:

Tracts, pamphlets, advertisements, gratuitous copies of magazines, and the literary productions of friends come by post, by van, by messenger—come at all hours of the day and fall in the night, so that the morning breakfast table is fairly snowed up with them.

Like many conservative-minded people she laments all the newfangled tricks and innovations of ‘modern’ writers (this was written before the genuine wave of modernist innovations, so reads like the standard conservative lament about everything going to the dogs; and is also deeply ironic seeing as she was to go on to become one of the most notable pioneers of modernist techniques in English fiction).

She claims that one of the most prominent innovations of the age (end of the Victorian era, start of the Edwardian decade) has been the advent of the personal essay which gives the opinions of the author, in which every sentence starts with ‘I’:

Its popularity with us is so immense and so peculiar that we are justified in looking upon it as something of our own—typical, characteristic, a sign of the times which will strike the eye of our great-great-grandchildren

Rather ludicrously she attributes this tidal wave of personal essays to the simple fact that so many people have been taught to write, presumably as a result of the late-Victorian education acts which expanded the scope of state schooling. But it’s the personal, egotistical element of essay writing which interests her:

The essay, then, owes its popularity to the fact that its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities, so that under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full. You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays.

Then she arrives at a point, of sorts. When contemporaries write reviews about books (which we can all read for ourselves) or pictures (which we can all see for ourselves) what real value do they add? It’s only when critics write of what is really, distinctively theirs alone, ‘of that single book to which they alone have the key and of that solitary picture whose face is shrouded to all but one gaze’, that their essays have value. Too many essayists, like autobiographers, feel obliged to produce fine writing and orthodox views. For young Virginia Stephen, on the contrary, it is the personal element which is most valuable in criticism.

This call for the personal in criticism can be seen as a kind of manifesto for the deeply personal impressions and observations she would make a career out of.

2. Modern Fiction (1919: 7 pages)

Summary: Woolf rubbishes the novels of the popular writers of her day, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, for being obsessed with realistic detail and neglecting the spiritual aspect of human nature. Hence her calling them ‘materialists’. She goes on to define the kind of novel she desires, concerned with the internal psychology of its characters and registering the blizzard of sensory input and thoughts we all experience.

It is important to state that a good deal of Woolf’s essays consist of gaseous verbiage. She is prolix and verbose. She writes as if she’s being paid by the word, not the idea. Entire pages consist of filler. Particularly irksome is her adoption of the lofty, snobbish ‘we’ in her articles.

It is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account.

The ‘we’ refers to ‘people like us’, privileged, educated, upper-middle-class who have the right stuff, an advanced sensibility and sophisticated tastes. Another reason for using it is that, very simply, it protects the writer from coming out into the open and admitting it’s just their own personal opinion. It makes it sound like she’s speaking on behalf of a group, a class. Safety in numbers.

It need scarcely be said that we make no claim…

This orotund phraseology is the tone of a conservative snob, the tone of an old buffer in clubland. The fact that it emanates from the consciously feminist Woolf makes it all the more ironic. If she’d been a man, she would have been unbearably snobbish and reactionary.

This is a notorious essay because it’s the first in a series in which Woolf criticises three of the most successful novelists of her time, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. Why? Because they lacked the refined and sensitive spirituality of a superior soul such as Woolf. They describe real people in an all-too-rackety and realistic way. Woolf struggles to find a word to describe what she dislikes and the best she can come up with is materialism.

These three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us.

Woolf was an atheist. Her novels rarely bother with traditional Christian belief or, if they do, do so only to mock it, as in the figure of the Reverend Streatfield in Between The Acts. As always, to get the full measure of her real opinions, you shouldn’t consult the novels but read her searing criticism of the Church of England as a perpetrator of misogynist patriarchy in Three Guineas.

But here, in this essay, in order to diss Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy, she is happy to invoke traditional religious metaphors, contrasting the heavy, materialist, clay of their writings with her ideal of writing which is, of course, pure, airy and spiritual.

Of Bennett she says that his books are solidly built and well crafted and present hosts of characters but ‘it remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for?’ Bennett depicts nothing but comfortable lives, first class railways carriages and fine hotels at Brighton i.e. all the externals of life. Similarly, Wells overstuffs his novels with issues and ideas:

In the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realise, or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings. Yet what more damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and of his Heaven than that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his Joans and his Peters? Does not the inferiority of their natures tarnish whatever institutions and ideals may be provided for them by the generosity of their creator?

‘The inferiority of their natures’ – there you have, in black and white, the clearest possible expression of Woolf’s snobbery.

All three novelists, in Woolf’s opinion, describe in immense detail the material facts of life and completely neglect the higher, spiritual aspects, the aspects, in other words, which Woolf intended to devote her novels to. They:

write of unimportant things… they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.

‘The true and enduring’ being exemplified by the Classics of English Literature which Virginia found in her father’s well-stocked library and which he taught her to revere as the true repositories of Poetry and Truth – Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare – you know the list.

So, in Woolf’s view, All Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy’s novels fail to capture ‘life’ – but the obvious question is, Whose definition of ‘life’? Hers, of course, The higher, spiritual life, not the low, clay life of ‘inferior natures’.

For us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide.

‘Vestments’, by the way, are ‘liturgical garments and articles associated primarily with the Christian religion’. See what I mean by how, in order to insist on the important of the spiritual in art, she has to temporarily resort to explicitly Christian metaphors, despite her contempt for the Church of England?

As so often in her polemical essays, it becomes more interesting when it opens up to describe Woolf’s own practice. She very vividly describes what she feels as the oppressiveness of having to create characters, think up a plot, come up with some comedy and generally conform to the existing pattern of The Novel. Does the novel always have to be like this? she asks.

It’s at this point, if it wasn’t obvious before, that you realise that Woolf is deploying her criticism of Wells et al in order to better define what she is aiming to do with the form.

Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

This is an interesting description of Woolf’s own dilemma as a novelist: she had written two traditional, conventional, heavy realistic novels but knew she wanted to break free and works out in the essay what that would mean and feel like:

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions–trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.

And then a ringing statement of intent:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?

This is a very eloquent defence of the new aesthetic she was to embody in Jacob’s Room and even more so in Mrs Dalloway. It is a manifesto. You can see why these passages are routinely quoted in introductions and essays to her works.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

Surprisingly, she goes on to praise James Joyce, whose ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ had been published just three years earlier, in 1916. Why? Because he, like she, and unlike the clayey materialists she deprecates, is spiritual.

In contrast with those whom we have called materialists, Mr Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see.

Although she immediately goes on to qualify her praise, claiming that Joyce’s work ultimately fails:

because of the comparative poverty of the writer’s mind, we might say simply and have done with it. But it is possible to press a little further and wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind… centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond?

This is her response to the early chapters of Ulysses which were circulated among potential publishers from 1918 onwards. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that her aversion to the later book is due to its inclusion of sex, always a queasy subject for Woolf.

Does the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon indecency, contribute to the effect of something angular and isolated?

As far as I understand it, Woolf deprecated sex in fiction not so much because of the sex itself, per se, but because sex is vulgar. A properly brought-up person, a well-bred writer, simply doesn’t talk about such matters. It is a paradox that Woolf cheerfully criticised other writers for being narrow and shut in and yet, on the subject which went on to dominate the fiction of the century, sex, it is she who is fastidious, aloof and taciturn.

Back to her manifesto, Woolf says the modern novelist must overthrow, ignore and reject all the constraints of the traditional novel – the concerns for realism and realistic detail and realistic settings and realistic plots, which she so dislikes in Wells-Arnold-Galsworthy – and strike out for new points of interest.

She thinks the new, the modern style will concern itself with a new psychology. She cites a short story by Chekhov, ‘Gusev’, for its obliqueness. She tells us that it is, at first reading, a little hard to work out what this story is ‘about’, whether it’s comic or tragic or really has an ending. It is this type of inconclusive obliquity which she thinks presages The Modern.

The last paragraph of this important essay briefly tells us that any serious conversation about modern fiction has to defer to the Russians. Why? Because of their superior spirituality.

If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own materialism the least considerable of their novelists has by right of birth a natural reverence for the human spirit.

Woolf is that very characteristic modern type, the spiritual and superior woman who, however, rejects all established religions (as male and sexist). They became a very common type in the 1920s, heavily satirised in their stories by D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, but nonetheless real for that.

As to Russia’s superior spirituality, regular readers of my blog will know that I despise this point of view. The classic Russian authors (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy) defined the superior spirituality of the great Russian soul by comparing it with the decadence and superficiality of the West, of the corrupt France and materialist Britain. My view is, look where Russia’s supposed superior spirituality got it in the following hundred years and look where Russia’s superior spirituality has landed it today? Woolf was just one of many sensitive souls who identified with the superior spirituality of the Russian soul.

In every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with a feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our famous novels to tinsel and trickery.

Well, Stalin wiped out any tinsel and trickery in his Russia. The great Russians wrote about the nobility of suffering and their children and grandchildren got the revolution, the civil war, the gulag archipelago and the Great Patriotic War. After a decade of drunken chaos under Yeltsin we are now back to traditional Russian values with Vladimir Putin, who has made speeches asserting the superior civilisation of Mother Russia and the hopeless decadence of Western democracies. Russia’s superiority over all other civilisations is an essential part of Russian culture and here we have Woolf espousing it.

Woolf backs up a little and concedes there is some merit to the English tradition:

English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities of the intellect, and in the splendour of the body.

For me it is telling that she doesn’t really draw the obvious conclusion from this thought, which is that maybe the characteristic tone of the greatest English literature is comedy. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens are comedians, to which Bennett and certainly Wells, in their smaller ways, are the heirs. But Woolf has little or no sense of humour and so doesn’t see it. Given a choice between Dickensian humour and the solemn pieties of Romantic poetry, she chooses Keats, Rossetti and Tennyson every time.

She ends with more manifesto:

Nothing – no ‘method’, no experiment, even of the wildest – is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. ‘The proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.

This essay is an impressive and resounding rallying cry for the type of novel she was to write over the next decade even if, like so many manifestos, it has to be unduly critical of her contemporaries in order to clear the space for her new approach.

3. The Modern Essay (1922: 10 pages)

The best essays are highly personal and express personality.

This was a review of a hefty five-volume collection of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920 which was published in 1922. It explains why this review refers freely to a variety of the essayists included in the set. It contains the paragraph on what makes a good essay which Bradshaw quotes in his introduction and I quoted above, the paragraph about the main purpose of an essay being to entertain and give pleasure.

The principle which controls [the essay] is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. (Modern Essays)

The review rambles through the famous names in these volumes but the striking thing about Woolf is that, despite the vast amount she wrote about fiction and literature, she’s not a particularly useful critic, either in theory or practice. What I mean is, she very, very rarely analyses a passage by someone to tell you whether and why it succeeds or fails. And she has few general critical ideas apart from the ones which help her gather her thoughts for her own endeavours.

For example, she thinks Walter Pater’s essay is best because ‘he has somehow contrived to get his material fused‘. Not very useful. She thinks Max Beerbohm’s essay is a success because in it ‘he is himself’.

He has brought personality into literature… We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes.

Not dazzlingly insightful, is it? And his style? ‘The triumph is the triumph of style.’ These are close to platitudes and she hits a kind of low when she tells us that the important thing in writing an essay is ‘to know how to write.’ Yes. Sounds likely.

This is pretty thin pickings, isn’t it? Barely exists as criticism. You can see why, despite fans like Bradshaw bigging her up, few if any of Woolf’s critical ideas are widely used or cited for the simple reason that she hardly has any critical ideas, apart from the ones where she is working out her own approach – but those passages are cited everywhere.

4. How It Strikes A Contemporary (1923: 9 pages)

The present age lacks one commanding critical figure, a symbol of the way that, since the war, literature has become fragmented and difficult.

The ‘it’ in the title isn’t the modern world or politics, it refers to contemporary literary criticism i.e. it’s a commentary on contemporary literary criticism circa 1923.

Why are there such radical disagreements about new books? Because there is no one critic who dominates the age. Like all conservatives, Woolf looks back to supposed Golden Ages when there was one towering critical figure who dominated their era – to the ages of John Dryden (the 1680s and ’90s), Dr Johnson (1760s to ’80s), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1810s to ‘1830) or Matthew Arnold (1860s, ’70s, ’80s). The fact that these are nostalgic conservative tropes is given away by her own phraseology:

Once upon a time, we must believe, there was a rule, a discipline, which controlled the great republic of readers in a way which is now unknown…

‘Once upon a time…’ reveals that this is a fairy tale version of history, removing all its complexity and conflict.

Anyway, in Woolf’s opinion the real problem is simply the scale of output. No one critic could read everything that is produced nowadays and so the situation she laments, with thousands of reviewers scribbling away but no one central Man of Letters setting a standard.

It is revealing who she picks but then dismisses as possible contenders for this title of Master of the Age: Thomas Hardy has retired from novel writing; Conrad is an exotic outsider. No, like all cultural conservatives, Woolf thinks the present day (1923) was one of special collapse, decline, decay. It is an age of fragments, ‘it is a barren and exhausted age’ etc.

Interestingly, she gets it wrong about W.B. Yeats, thinking he will only be remembered for a few poems. Similarly and notoriously, she thinks that James Joyce’s Ulysses was a disaster and failure. In both of these opinions, she was, of course, dead wrong.

There are several passage of incoherent impressionism before she emerges with a tangible point: the present age is defined by The War. The First World War changed everything.

Nor has any generation more need than ours to cherish its contemporaries. We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale—the war, the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages—has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed… The most casual reader dipping into poetry, into fiction, into biography can hardly fail to be impressed by the courage, the sincerity, in a word, by the widespread originality of our time.

But:

Our exhilaration is strangely curtailed. Book after book leaves us with the same sense of promise unachieved, of intellectual poverty, of brilliance which has been snatched from life but not transmuted into literature. Much of what is best in contemporary work has the appearance of being noted under pressure, taken down in a bleak shorthand which preserves with astonishing brilliance the movements and expressions of the figures as they pass across the screen. But the flash is soon over, and there remains with us a profound dissatisfaction.

We live in a special age, uniquely cut off from the past. Many writers are capturing this new spirit. But there is something unsatisfactory about their work. This is a useful impression and certainly a very useful background to understanding her own practice from ‘Jacob’s Room’ onwards.

But the essay also conveys a sense of Woolf feeling adrift in this new age. As so often with Woolf you feel that this is due, in part, to her own personal intellectual inadequacy. In her essays and her novels, you get the impression that things are always just a bit too much for her to cope with. She needs help. She needs Daddy.

And Daddy, here as everywhere, takes the form of looking back nostalgically to the age of Wordsworth, Scott and Austen. She likes those old authors because they were so sure of themselves. By contrast, her contemporaries:

afflict us because they have ceased to believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that happens to himself. They cannot make a world.

Her conclusion uses a silly metaphor to make a valid point:

It would be wise for the writers of the present to renounce for themselves the hope of creating masterpieces. Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his hands, point to their blots and erasions, and tear them across; but he will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them because other students will find them very useful. It is from notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made.

The great critics of the past spoke with confidence for their entire age. The Great War has made that impossible because it has shattered all traditional values. This explains the daring experiments but also the failures and sense of blockage and frustration among so many of her contemporaries. But she nonetheless cleaves to the hope that out of the current chaos great things will come. And she was, of course, correct. She was in fact living in an age of masterpieces, which included her own works.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.

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The Years by Virginia Woolf (1937)

‘What could be more ordinary?’ she said. ‘A large family, living in a large house…’
(Rose Pargiter, thinking back on her childhood, page 161)

He looked clean, he looked starched and ironed like his robes. But what did he mean by what he was saying? She gave it up. Either one understood or one did not understand, she thought. Her mind wandered.
(Typical behaviour from one of Woolf’s female protagonists [in this case, Delia], detached from male discourse and dreamily drifting into her own world)

Her mind was a perfect blank for a moment. Where am I? she wondered. What am I doing? Where am I going? Her eyes fixed themselves on the dressing-table; vaguely she remembered some other room, and some other time when she was a girl…
(Kitty Malone expressing the dissociation and bewilderment typical of so many Woolf women)

The Years is Woolf’s longest novel. The strange thing is how this big and traditional novel punctuated her run of much shorter, much more experimental works, coming after the run of Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927) and before her last, normal-length work, Between The Acts (1941).

It’s a sad and mournful book, lyrical and nostalgic. I like the suggestion by Nuala Casey (see below) that it’s a sort of ghost story, the ghosts being Woolf’s own family who the Pargiter family are clearly based on.

‘The Years’ and ‘Three Guineas’

‘The Years’ had a long, complicated and painful gestation. It was intimately tied up with the long feminist essays which became Three Guineas. According to Wikipedia:

Although Three Guineas is a work of non-fiction, it was initially conceived as a ‘novel–essay’ which would tie up the loose ends left in her earlier work, A Room of One’s Own (1929). The book was to alternate between fictive narrative chapters and non-fiction essay chapters, demonstrating Woolf’s views on war and women in both types of writing at once. This unfinished manuscript was published in 1977 as The Pargiters. When Woolf realised the idea of a ‘novel–essay’ wasn’t working, she separated the two parts. The non-fiction portion became Three Guineas. The fiction portion became Woolf’s most popular novel during her lifetime, The Years, which charts social change from 1880 to the time of publication through the lives of the Pargiter family. It was so popular, in fact, that pocket-sized editions of the novel were published for soldiers as leisure reading during World War Two.

The soldiers’ version

Regarding its popularity and the publication of a pocket edition for soldiers, as I read through The Years I came to understand why. It is gentle and beautiful, sad and nostalgic. Each of the book’s 11 sections opens with a description of the English countryside or the busy London streets, in winter and in summer, in rain and shine, and these slowly build up into a composite portrait of the country those soldiers were fighting for.

And you can put The Years down and pick it up at any point, on any page, without worrying about forgetting the plot, because there is no plot. The characters waft around London in the same lyrical, detached, dreamlike state for hundreds of pages.

Similarly, although we know Woolf was incensed by the oppression of women by the patriarchy of her day, and although her fury is hinted at at various points in the narrative, ironically it is the very exclusion of women from education, the professions and public life, from activities of most kinds, which permits the novel’s lazy, hazy, dreamy tone.

The person who emerges as the central protagonist, Eleanor Pargiter, is the one who suffers most from patriarchal exclusion, finding herself obliged to stay at home to look after her widowed father, never benefiting from a proper school let alone university education, excluded from all the professions and any kind of paid employment. No wonder she grows up into the detached, dreamy, forgetful woman she’s depicted as – what alternative was there for women of her era and class?

There is also a pleasing irony that the great pamphlet The Years grew out of, Three Guineas, is furiously against war and against the entire patriarchal, masculinist system of hierarchy, competition and militarism which encourages it, and yet the fiction which evolved alongside it was mass published to help and succour… soldiers, becoming, in its particular way, part of the vast machinery of war which Woolf claimed to hate so much.

‘Three Guineas’ feminism

As explained, The Years was originally conceived to be interspersed with factual chapters detailing the oppression of women in England during the period covered (1880 to 1937). Eventually Woolf realised the two books had to be separated out and from her factual material created the great pamphlet, Three Guineas.

Three Guineas is a powerful feminist polemic. Reading it changed my opinions, shifting me to a markedly more feminist point of view of English social history and in particular the literature of this period, the late Victorian and Edwardian era. It is more difficult to read but, in the end, much more powerful than the shorter, more popular A Room of One’s Own.

Three Guineas is a searing indictment of all aspects of the patriarchal system developed during the Victorian era, which Woolf felt still strangled women’s aspirations in the 1930s. One aspect of this is her compelling portrait of the classic Victorian family home as a prison for daughters. Middle-class daughters were deprived of the private education given to their brothers, prevented from going to university, prevented by law from entering any of the professions, prevented from earning money and having any kind of financial or personal independence. Instead they were trapped in the prison of the Victorian family home ‘like slaves in a harem’, subject to the tyrannical whims of an all-powerful paterfamilias and, more often than not, confined to tending family members, especially if they were sick. Millions of women were forced to squander their talents, living lives blighted by endless legal, financial and cultural restrictions. This boredom crops up throughout the opening chapters.

‘I’ve nothing whatever to do,’ [Delia] said briefly. ‘I’ll go.’

This, then, is why the young women of Woolf’s day obsess about marriage and spend so much time fantasising about the young men they meet at this or that party or reception. Because marriage represents the only means of escape from the stifling family home. Deprived by law and tradition from all other channels of expression and achievement, pursuit of the perfect marriage is the only ‘profession’ allowed them.

She [Eleanor] wished Milly did not always bring the conversation back to marriage. And what do they know about marriage? she asked herself. They stay at home too much, she thought; they never see anyone outside their own set. Here they are cooped up, day after day… (p.31)

My reading of Three Guineas heavily influenced my reading of The Years, the weight of Woolf’s angry critique of Victorian oppression of women hanging very heavily over the text of the novel.

The character of the damaged, angry, unpredictable Colonel Pargiter is straight out of the essay, as is the permanent gloom caused by their mother’s long illness, the heavy curtains, the sense of trapment and stasis. Then, after the mother dies, Eleanor finds herself even more trapped in the role of her father’s carer and household manager, while all the time she watches the boys of the family go off to their private schools, then to Oxbridge colleges, and then on to professions in the army, academia or the law. All forbidden to the daughters of the family.

Presumably the dominance of this factual or even political agenda is one reason why the novel is so unlike her experimental ones, so much more conventional, much closer to the big novels about family dynasties which were so popular in the Edwardian era (for example, the series of novels by John Galsworthy making up The Forsyte Saga published 1906 to 1921).

Structure

How do you ‘chart social change? Well, Woolf picked a series of specific years, like snapshots in a family scrapbook. Hence the structure, the chapter titles and title of the novel as a whole.

  1. 1880 (82 pages)
  2. 1891 (37 pages)
  3. 1907 (15 pages)
  4. 1908 (12 pages)
  5. 1910 (29 pages)
  6. 1911 (20 pages)
  7. 1913 (8 pages)
  8. 1914 (52 pages)
  9. 1917 (20 pages)
  10. 1918 (3 pages)
  11. Present Day (123 pages)

Curious to see if the section lengths indicated any sort of pattern, I turned them into a graph. No particular pattern emerges except the obvious fact that the first and last chapters are the longest, with the final chapter as long as all the short ones put together. The book is heavily weighted towards the ‘Present Day’

The Waves and The Years

Each of the 11 sections starts with a paragraph or so describing the time of the year and the weather, giving lyrical natural descriptions before the text zooms in onto the human characters. This tactic of natural setting followed by human interaction is very similar to the structure of The Waves, in which each of the sections is preceded by a description of the passage of the sun through the sky and the effect of the changing light, wind and weather on the sea beneath it – before moving on to focus on the lives of the characters. Not quite identical but a very similar idea.

And it’s not just using an introductory section about the weather that both novels have in common. The idea of following half a dozen or so characters, from childhood through to adulthood by giving snapshots of particular moments or events scattered over a period of 40 or more years, this is exactly the method of The Waves.

The similarity extends to the tactic of giving the children a couple of childhood events or moments, and then having these same events be remembered in each successive section, so that they slowly build up significance and resonance. Thus it was with the childish incident of Jinny kissing Louis in The Waves which gains significance as the various characters remember it throughout their lives. Here it is incidents like defiant little Rose sneaking out of the house to run along to Lamley’s shop or Maggie’s memory of the cheap necklace Eleanor bought for the Colonel to give her (Maggie) on her birthday.

1880. The Pargiter family at Abercorn Terrace wait for their mother to die (82 pages)

It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and of purple flying over the land…

Colonel Abel Pargiter is in his 50s. He served in India where he lost two fingers during the Mutiny of 1857. He lives in a comfortable family home in Abercorn Terrace, off the Bayswater Road, north of Hyde Park.

An online article by Nuala Casey tells me that:

The Pargiter family home in Abercorn Terrace is a replica of 22 Hyde Park Gate where Woolf grew up with her father, the Victorian biographer Leslie Stephen, her mother Julia, a former Pre-Raphaelite model, her siblings Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian and step-siblings Stella, Gerald and George Duckworth.

The colonel’s wife is dying of some slow wasting illness, so he has taken a mistress, Mira, who lives in a dingy house near Westminster Abbey. Mira herself is no longer young, being about 40 and with a daughter at school.

Back at the family home wait the Colonel’s children – Milly, Delia (‘his favourite daughter’), Rose, Eleanor and Martin. They are all terrified of his bad moods. Eleanor, in her early twenties, is already the household manager and accounts keeper. Martin is 12, Rose is 10.

There are several servants. The main housekeeper is named Crosby, silent and efficient. The butler is named Hiscock, rarely talks, always mumbles.

Morris is another son but is old enough (after his private education) (in his early 20s) to have a job, as a junior in a barristers chambers (‘devilling for Sanders Curry’).

Cut to rooms in an Oxford college. Here we meet Edward Pargeter and his two friends, hulking great Gibbs and more effete Ashley. They’re not really friends, they don’t get along. When he’s got rid of them Edward hears laughter from the Lodge of the college and wonders who’s there with young Kitty who, presumably, he has a thing for.

Cut to the Malone household. Father is a don, Dr Malone. The interest is on young Miss Kitty Malone. She’s spent the day showing Mrs Fripp, the wife of American tourists, round Oxford. At the end of the day she undresses to go to bed. She’s a large girl who’s self conscious about her size.

Next morning she gets up and goes to see her tutor, Miss Craddock who’s tutoring her in history. Miss C is very harsh and says a child of ten could have written Kitty’s latest essay. We don’t even find out that the subject of the essay is, before their hour is up and Kitty goes on to visit the Robson family in Prestwich Terrace.

She despises their bad taste, their rooms cluttered with pretentious junk, and they’re all so small, until the son of the house, Jo, comes in from the back garden where he’s been repairing a hen coop. Kitty fancies him; she’d like him to kiss her. Jo thinks she’s a ‘stunner’.

She returns to the Lodge and sits with her mother as the latter reads The Times. Then a note arrives to say that cousin Rose has died. This is obviously Mrs Pargiter. Mrs Malone remembers sitting with Rose out on the moors in Yorkshire when young Abel Pargiter rode up from his barracks to propose to her (Rose).

Cut to the house in London, in Abercorn Terrace. it is dark and full of wreaths. The coffin containing their mother’s body is carried out. Rose’s funeral is seen through the eyes of Delia who loved and hated her. Delia feels excluded by her father and brothers who manage everything.

1891. Eleanor goes to watch brother Morris in the law courts, Colonel Pargiter visits his brother, Sir Digby Pargiter. Death of Parnell (37 pages)

The autumn wind blew over England. It twitched the leaves off the trees, and down they fluttered, spotted red and yellow, or sent them floating, flaunting in wide curves before they settled…

It is October. Kitty has married Lord Lasswade, has a little boy, lives at his grand house in the North of England. Milly has married Edward’s student friend, big Hugh Gibbs. She is pregnant. Edward is an academic at Oxford, in Classics. Morris is a barrister walking through the Inns of Court.

Eleanor, now in her early 30s, still lives at home with her father, still does the household accounts, as well as running round taking part in various committees and managing the family’s other properties, dingy rented houses called Rigby Cottages, dealing with dishonest traders; plus buying a last-minute present for her father to take to Aunt Eugénie for her little girl, Magdalena (Maggie)’s, birthday.

After a morning of chores and lunch with her father, Eleanor hurries off to the Law Courts to watch Morris prosecute a case. On the way she reads a letter from Martin who is 23 and serving in India. She rendezvous with Morris’s small, cat-faced wife in furs, Celia Chinnery.

I read the scene of Morris in court through the prism of Three Guineas. Woolf’s fierce condemnation of the way the patriarchy excluded women from all the professions brings out the outsiderness of Eleanor, excluded from a good education, prevented from attending university, she views proceedings as an outsider. She notes the palliness of all the barristers, their awe of the judge, but without following any of it, her head full of her own impressions and memories. All this makes a lot more sense if you bear in mind Three Guineas explanation of women’s exclusion from every aspect of public life.

Out in the busy Strand she reads a newspaper announcement that Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish independence leader, is dead (6 October 1891). Her sister, Delia, was a supporter of Home Rule so she takes a cab out to the squalid square where Delia lives, but she’s not there.

Cut to Colonel Pargiter visiting Aunt Eugénie in her house in Browne Street. She is married to his younger brother, Sir Digby Pargiter, and her two young daughters, (Sara and Magdalena) are playing in the garden round a bonfire of autumn leaves. Sir Digby arrives, 5 years younger than the Colonel, though the Colonel has more money. After some chat and chaffing the children, the brothers have no more to say to each other, so the Colonel leaves.

En route to their house he’d read a letter to him from his old mistress, Mira, who’s now in her 50s and fat. She had gone off with some other chap who has now, predictably, dumped her and she wants money from him. The Colonel had wanted to tell Eugénie about her, Mira, to unburden himself of his secret life but the moment never occurs, and he leaves, frustrated.

1907. Digby and Eugénie attend a party then come home to their daughter, Sara (15 pages)

It was midsummer; and the nights were hot. The moon, falling on water, made it white, inscrutable, whether deep or shallow…

Each chapter opens with a bird’s eye description of London or the countryside. This one opens with a long description of all the carts of agricultural produce lumbering along roads into London towards Covent Garden (compare and contrast Oscar Wilde’s description of the same thing in Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime and D.H. Lawrence’s description in Aaron’s Rod).

Eugénie and Digby and their older daughter, Magdalena (Maggie) are riding in a coach through Hyde Park towards a party. Back in their house in Browne Street their teenage daughter Sara is too young to attend, so has been left behind. She’s trying to sleep but is kept awake by the waltz music from a nearby party. She opens a present from her cousin Edward, the Oxford Classics scholar, his own translation of Sophocles’ Antigone.

We know from Three Guineas that the Antigone was very, very important to Woolf. Of more than personal importance, it had a polemical, political significance, because Antigone stands for all women everywhere who stand up to dictators and tyrants as Antigone stood up to her tyrannical uncle, Creon. This carried not only an immense significance in the 1930s of the fascist dictators but, in Three Guineas, Woolf makes a direct link between the public tyranny of the dictators and the private tyranny of the Victorian paterfamilias. Even Antigone’s eventual fate was highly symbolic, not just being executed but being buried alive just like the daughters of the upper-middle-class like Woolf and her generation, were buried alive in the dark, curtained mausoleum of the patriarchal home. So this isn’t a casual reference.

Identities and selves

Anyway, the parents return and Maggie visits Sara in her room. Their conversation winds round to the central Woolf theme of identity, not in any profound ore worked-through way, just in a kind of girlish throwaway:

‘Would there be trees if we didn’t see them?’ said Maggie.
What’s ‘I’?…’I’…’ She stopped. She did not know what she meant. She was talking nonsense.
‘Yes,’ said Sara. ‘What’s ‘I’?’ She held her sister tight by the skirt, whether she wanted to prevent her from going, or whether she wanted to argue the question.
‘What’s ‘I’?’ she repeated.

As we know from the last chapter of Orlando, Woolf had evolved to a position where the whole idea of identity was problematical, where she imagines the so-called ‘I’ being made up of scores or even hundreds of ‘selves’. (This theme is picked up in the 1910 chapter, see below.)

Their mother comes into the room and there’s a lovely scene of mother-and-daughters warmth as they chat about the party. The girls (both now in their twenties) persuade their mother to show them how she used to dance, holding her Edwardian skirt out like a partner. Until Sir Digby calls her to come down and lock up, angrily, and when Maggie tiptoes downstairs it’s because there have been burglaries in the street, and Digby told Eugénie to get a new lock fitted and she’s forgotten. The sweet Edwardian mother and the angry Edwardian father.

1908. Martin views the Digby house then visits Eleanor looking after their father (12 pages)

It was March and the wind was blowing. But it was not ‘blowing’. It was scraping, scourging…

It’s March the following year and we learn that Eugénie died a year ago (can that be right? if she was going to parties in October the previous year?) and Digby is dead too. The family house in Browne Street has been put up for sale, and has been sold, as Martin (now in his 40s) discovers when he arrives to view it. The Malone children used to come here all the time. Martin is upset at the loss of this setting of his childhood.

So Martin pops round to the family home. Old Crosby opens the door. The Colonel’s had a stroke and is slow. Eleanor, now in her 50s, is still looking after him. Martin finds a newspaper obituary for Sir Digby among the cuttings that the Colonel nowadays has Eleanor cut for him, which leads to a mild disagreement about whether they preferred him or Eugénie.

(And there’s a joke. Woolf started in the 1930s collecting newspaper cuttings into scrapbooks, many of them to be used in Three Guineas. So it’s a sly joke against herself when Woolf has Eleanor think, about her father: ‘That was a sign that he had grown very old, Eleanor thought—wanting newspaper cuttings kept,’ p.143)

Martin goes to play chess with their father and Eleanor reflects that he, Martin, was right to quit the army.

Martin notes that Eleanor is reading a book by the French historian Ernest Renan. Left by herself Eleanor reflects that she knows so little, is so ignorant of so much. This, of course, is an understated reference to the way she (and so many women her age) were denied any formal education.

There’s a knock at the front door and their sister Rose arrives. She is in her 40s, lives in Northumberland, and is a well-established eccentric, giving to muttering quotes from poems and songs. Eleanor was expecting her to arrive on the 18th but Rose says this is the 18th and both she and Martin laugh at Eleanor for thinking it’s the 11th, for getting her dates mixed up, for being so forgetful and ditzy. (A lot later Woolf tells us ‘She could never do sums in her head at the best of times’ and ‘She never could remember names’.)

This is a trope familiar to Woolf readers, who often goes out of her way to describe the ignorance and lack of education and general ditziness of her central woman protagonists (Mrs Dalloway in the book of the same name, Mrs Ramsay in To The Lighthouse). Woolf describes their practical shortcomings in order to emphasise that it doesn’t matter so long as their heart is in the right place, and because they love life.

All this has much more meaning to me after reading Three Guineas in which Woolf is so angry about the exclusion from all forms of education of women of her class. It made me rethink these women characters as not so much feebly dim but as victims of patriarchal laws and traditions designed to exclude them from education and public life – to be blunt, to keep them ditzy and distracted with trivia.

This adds bite to the way that, as Martin goes to leave, he mentions that he’s dining out that night, again, and Eleanor is jealous that he dines out every night and meets all sorts of people, and here she is trapped at home with a dying old man. Again, reading Three Guineas gives a powerful feminist, political bite to all these simple events and thoughts.

We learn that Rose is very politically engaged and has been making speeches ahead of the 1907 general election. It is nowhere mentioned, but the OUP editors assume she is a suffragette.

1910. Rise visits Sara and Maggy, Kitty goes to the opera, death of Edward VII (29 pages)

In the country it was an ordinary day enough; one of the long reel of days that turned as the years passed from green to orange; from grass to harvest. It was neither hot nor cold, an English spring day…

A lyrical portrait of busy London leads into a description of eccentric Rose catching a bus south of the river to visit her cousins Maggie and Sally at a place called Hyams Place, near Waterloo. After both their parents died and the Browne Street house was sold off, Maggie and Sara had to fend for themselves.

Rose is dismayed by how shabby and poor their house is. When they try to make conversation about the old times she feels like she’s two different people (the Multiple selves theme).

They talked as if they were speaking of people who were real, but not real in the way in which she felt herself to be real. It puzzled her; it made her feel that she was two different people at the same time; that she was living at two different times at the same moment. She was a little girl wearing a pink frock; and here she was in this room, now (p.159)

Rosie persuades Sara to go with her to a meeting. Eleanor is already there taking notes and then Kitty Malone, now Lady Lasswade, arrives, inappropriately dressed in opera wear. We don’t learn what the meeting is about, and since half the people arguing are men I assume it’s not a suffragette meeting. Wikipedia says it’s just ‘one of Eleanor’s philanthropic meetings’.

The meeting breaks up and Kitty, Lady Lasswade offers Eleanor a lift in her magnificent chauffeur-driven car. She drops her where she wants to be dropped then continues on to the Opera. There’s a tasty description of the embarrassment of her and all the other posh types who are wearing evening dress, heels, cloaks and furs in the middle of the day because they are attending a matinee performance, dodging between the Covent Garden workers.

The opera is Siegfried by Wagner and Woolf gives a description. Lady Lasswade/Kitty is in a box with Edward and another young man, very in-the-know. She and they observe that the Royal Box is empty.

Cut back to Sara and Maggie back in their dingy home in the squalid street near Waterloo. There’s a pub just on the corner, children shouting in the street, a geezer yelling for any old iron. A drunk is thrown out of the pub and comes battering on the front door of the neighbouring door. Then along comes a man selling the evening paper and yelling that the king is dead. (King Edward VII was declared dead on 6 May 1010.) So that’s how the characters find out, one set at the Royal Opera, the other in their dingy digs.

1911. Eleanor visits Morris and Celia in Wittering (20 pages)

The sun was rising. Very slowly it came up over the horizon shaking out light. But the sky was so vast, so cloudless, that to fill it with light took time…

August, the holiday season. We learn that every year Eleanor comes to stay at Morris’s house on the south coast, at Wittering. There’s a nice description of the little town in the blistering August sun. We learn that old Colonel Pargiter has died and therefore the London house is locked up.

Morris is the barrister we saw in the courtroom scene where Eleanor soon lost interest in proceedings. Eleanor is greeted by Morris’s wife, Celia, who explains they’re all of a tizzy because other guests have only just left and yesterday they held a bazaar with a little play, a scene from Shakespeare, in support of the local church spire. Characteristically for a Woolf woman, Celia can’t remember which Shakespeare play it was. Because they don’t work – are barred from most work – Woolf’s women are notoriously indifferent about details and precision: everything is a drift and blur.

Eleanor washes herself and changes in the room she’s been given (the blue room). She’s been on a big trip abroad, maybe her first freedom after her father’s death, which included Naples, the Acropolis and, lastly, Spain – Granada and Toledo. Her skin is notably brown (though nobody uses the word ‘tanned’; they say burned; the concept of a suntan must have appeared later in the century. According to the internet the first use of ‘suntan’ as a commercial name for a light-brown skin colour was in 1937. The OED’s earliest evidence for the word ‘suntanning’ is from 1946).

Eleanor is 55. This is the first time the age of any of the Pargiters is mentioned. From it we can deduce that she was already 24 when the novel opened in 1880.

She went on this grand tour with her brother, Edward, the Classics scholar. Another guest is staying for the weekend, a man named Dubbin who they’ve known since they were children. He is now a balding old buffer called Sir William Whatney. He’s been out in India, ruling a province the size of Ireland ‘as they always said’.

Having read Three Guineas I detect the bite behind all this. Whatney and Eleanor’s brothers Edward and Morris have had careers, gone places, had responsibilities, competed over their achievements and status. From this, like all women of her class, Eleanor has been excluded by the entire system of patriarchy which condemned her to live at home with her father managing the household accounts.

She isn’t really jealous, just indifferent, so as Sir William tells another story about India in her booming voice Eleanor, like all the Woolf women, loses interest, drifts away, notices inconsequential details of the room around her, wonders about the passage of time etc.

More bite in the fact that, when Morris and Whatney start talking about politics, Celia takes that as a signal to ‘leave the gentlemen to their politics’, and to take Eleanor and the children out onto the terrace for coffee. Here we learn that 1) Rose is in court, again, for throwing a brick, so presumably she is a suffragette and 2) Maggie has got married to a Frenchman, René.

Morris and Celia have two teenaged children, Peggy and North. The daughter of this house, Peggy, is excited because they see an owl every evening at the same time and her excitement spreads to Eleanor. Celia wants Whatney to come and live somewhere close because he’s so good for Morris.

In the top floor of the house lives old Mrs Chinnery, Celia’s mother, a very ancient 90 years old. Her nurse brings her downstairs in her wheeled chair and Eleanor goes through the rigmarole of politely kissing her and trying to make conversation. As you strongly suspect Woolf did in these situations (because so many of her characters do), Eleanor finds herself going through the motions and acting the part of the dutiful guest.

Eleanor goes to bed and can hear old Whatney huffing and puffing round in the room next door. His life is over (he’s retired) while hers – liberated from caring for her father – is only just beginning. Where should she go? What should she do?

1913. The family home is locked up and Crosby moves to Richmond (8 pages)

It was January. Snow was falling; snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose’s wing from which feathers were falling all over England…

It’s a snowy January and Eleanor is escorting an estate agent, Mr Grice, round the now-empty family house at Abercorn Terrace. All the furniture’s been removed, leaving empty spaces, stains on the walls. The point is it’s Crosby’s last day. She’s served the family for 40 years. Showing the estate agent round, Eleanor for the first time realises how low and dingy the cellar was where she spent those 40 years, and feels ashamed. Crosby cries as Eleanor sees her into the carriage which will take her and her dog, Rover off to a one-room apartment in Richmond.

So off Crosby goes to her new home in Richmond, sharing the house with Mr Bishop and Mrs Burt, But Rover doesn’t like the change, sickens and dies.

Crosby catches the Tube to Ebury Street and walks to the bachelor pad of Martin, I wasn’t sure from the text why. The Wikipedia article tells me it’s because she’s still doing his laundry.

Martin is now about 45 and still a bachelor. He is uneasy around servants, tries to sympathise when Crosby tells him about Rover. As he clumsily says his goodbyes to her, he reflects on the tradition of telling lies in their wretched family. After the Colonel died they discovered a batch of letters to him from Mira i.e. that he had a mistress. We’ve seen how the Victorian family house was a prison for girls, but Martin has just as negative a view.

It was an abominable system, he thought; family life; Abercorn Terrace. No wonder the house would not let. It had one bathroom, and a basement; and there all those different people had lived, boxed up together, telling lies. (p.212)

1914. Martin goes to the City, Hyde Park, then to a party (52 pages)

It was a brilliant spring; the day was radiant. Even the air seemed to have a burr in it as it touched the tree tops…

‘Martin, standing at his window, looked down on the narrow street’ (see my section on Windows, below). He heads off towards the City and bumps into Sara/Sally, now in her 40s, outside St Paul’s. He invites her for lunch at a chop house and is angry when the waiter tries to steal some of the change from the bill. They walk back along Fleet Street and catch a bus to Hyde Park. Here the beautiful sunshine gives him a transcendent moment, which revives the ‘multiple selves’ theme.

The sun dappling the leaves gave everything a curious look of insubstantiality as if it were broken into separate points of light. He too, himself, seemed dispersed. His mind for a moment was a blank. (p.230)

He’s accompanying Sara to meet her sister, Maggie – who’s gotten married (to René, a Frenchman) and recently had a baby – at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. I like reading about London because I myself stroll around these places; only a few months ago I went to an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery then strolled along to the Round Pond then down to Kensington High Street where I popped into the Japan House. So all these London placenames aren’t vague abstractions but places where I myself have walked and strolled at different seasons, following in the footsteps of so many of Woolf’s characters.

Sara and the baby fall asleep and Martin finally gets to tell Maggie that his father had a mistress. It seems so silly and petty now, that he bothered to hide it. But this leads him on to ask Maggie if she thinks her mother, Eugénie, was in love with his father, the Colonel, her brother-in-law.

I know there are many readers for whom love – who in a novel is in love with whom, and who having affairs with whom, who is being unfaithful etc etc – is a subject of inexhaustible interest. For me it is a subject of ineffable boredom. But at the same time, I have to accept that this narrow, dull subject – the love lives of the bourgeoisie – is what this art form, the novel, is more often than not about.

Sara wakes up and breaks the odd intimacy he and Maggie had enjoyed. He leaves the sisters. A few hours later he’s wearing evening dress and riding in a carriage to a party in Grosvenor Square. It is hosted by Kitty, Lady Lasswade. It is dazzling how utterly indifferent Woolf is to dialogue. Martin is assigned a young women, Ann Hillier, to escort for the evening (to dinner) and their conversation is quite dazzling in its dullness and banality. One page of dialogue by Oscar Wilde outshines all the conversations in every novel Woolf ever wrote. She has a very poor sense of the difference between people. All her characters have the same dreamy inconsequentiality.

Kitty takes a train to her castle in the north

To our surprise Kitty is impatient for her guests to leave because, as soon they do (soon after 11pm) she rushes upstairs, gets changed into the clothes her maid has laid out, runs downstairs and into the car which the chauffeur drives fast to the station (Euston? King’s Cross?) and she just makes it onto her train, is shown to her sleeper compartment, undresses, lies in the narrow bed and sleeps.

Kitty wakes the next morning, looks out the train window, arrives in a northern station, alights with her bags, is collected by another chauffeur (in the new car) and is driven to the family castle, where she changes for breakfast.

This is an unusual bit of energy and excitement for a Woolf novel, but also serves to highlight the complete absence of plot. She is, after all, just travelling from her London home to the family castle in the North. The entire novel is the record of its half a dozen posh characters coming and going. This sequence is notable because it’s a rare passage set outside London, so Woolf shows off with a description of a train journey and the colder, harder landscape of the North.

1917. Eleanor goes to dinner with Renny and Maggie, there’s an air raid (20 pages)

A very cold winter’s night, so silent that the air seemed frozen, and, since there was no moon, congealed to the stillness of glass spread over England…

Eleanor goes to dinner with Renny and Maggie who have fled France to live in a shabby house in one of the obscure little streets under the shadow of the Abbey. Here she is introduced to a dark foreigner, Nicholas, talkative and philosophical.

Then Maggie’s sister, Sara arrives. Sara has always been portrayed as on the edge of madness, and she infects this dinner party with a kind of delirium. The characters talk and mention things but it’s hard to make sense of the conversation, it seems more a series of random observations. They argue but it’s hard to know what about.

This inconsequential conversation is interrupted by a German air raid. They all go down to the damp cellar while the sound of bombs gets slowly, closer, is overhead, then passes on.

Back in the living room, the meandering conversation turns to Nicholas and Eleanor talking vaguely about the future, about whether there will be a better world.

When, she wanted to ask him, when will this new world come? When shall we be free? When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave?

But Sara pours cold water on all this by pointing out the way that people always say the same thing: Nicolas always says ‘Oh, my dear friends, let us improve the soul!’, Eleanor agrees with everything, Maggie says nothing just sits and darns a sock, and Renny angrily says ‘What damned rot!’

Sara surprises the reader by saying Nicholas is gay. To be precise, she jokes that he ought to be in prison:

‘Because he loves,’ Sara explained. She paused. ‘—the other sex, the other sex, you see.’

Eleanor feels a moment of repulsion and then realises it doesn’t matter, at all. She likes him. She reacts like so many Woolf characters do, in so many situations, by going to the window and looking soulfully out.

She got up. She went to the window and parted the curtains and looked out. All the houses were still curtained. (p.284)

1918. Crosby and the armistice (3 pages)

A veil of mist covered the November sky; a many folded veil, so fine-meshed that it made one density. It was not raining, but here and there the mist condensed on the surface into dampness and made pavements greasy…

The last four years have aged old Crosby, the Pargiter family servant. She talks to herself, grumbling and complaining about the other occupants of the house near Richmond Green, especially a Belgian refugee from the war who calls himself a count and spits on the side of the bath, which Crosby has to clean up.

She hears guns bombing and a siren wailing. Woolf in her Woolfian way, tells us what Crosby sees, a man up a ladder painting windows, a woman walking by carrying a loaf of bread wrapped in paper. Someone in a shop queue tells her the war is over.

This is a classic example of Woolf’s technique of indirection and disassociation which can be interpreted in several ways.

  1. Modernism: modernism was all about rejecting Victorian pomp and circumstance and addressing a subject in an obvious and relatable way; instead tackling everything obliquely and ironically.
  2. Woolfian dissociation: in all her mature novels, characters tend to be dissociated and detached from events, even ones directly affecting them. How much more detached they are from supposedly big public events. Compare and contrast the oblique way King Edward VII’s death, though Kitty’s visit to the opera.
  3. Woolfian feminism: the complete indifference of a muttering old lady to the Armistice exemplifies my reading of Three Guineas, which is centrally concerned with the question How to avoid war, and drips with mocking sarcasm about men’s obsession with competition, priority, hierarchy and status which she sees as one of the roots of war. Muttering old Crosby doesn’t give a monkeys about your war or peace or politics or diplomacy and maybe she is right to do so.

Present day (123 pages)

It was a summer evening; the sun was setting; the sky was blue still, but tinged with gold, as if a thin veil of gauze hung over it, and here and there in the gold-blue amplitude an island of cloud lay suspended…

As explained, each section opens with a description of the time of year and weather which largely sets the tone for what follows. As you can see this, the longest, section, opens with an image of mellow contentment, high summer gold, a thin veil, an island of cloud etc. So what’s become of our characters? And when is the present day?

Eleanor back from India, North back from Africa

Eleanor has just returned from a trip to India, brown skinned and white haired. She now in her 70s. She’s just had visitors at her little flat, including her nephew North, son of her brother Morris. North is back from years ‘in Africa’. (Characteristically, the narrative doesn’t tell us what he was doing there. We have to deduce from scattered references that he was a farmer and now he’s sold the farm.)

Eleanor shows North her jazzy new shower. He drives off in his nifty little sports car. He’s going for lunch with Sara, his aunt, now in her 50s i.e. 20 years or so older than him. He parks in a dingy street and has the characteristic Woolf experience of forgetting who he is or what he’s doing:

He mounted slowly and stood on the landing, uncertain which door to knock at. He was always finding himself now outside the doors of strange houses. He had a feeling that he was no one and nowhere in particular…

He knocks and enters Sara’s dingy house:

‘And you—’ she said, looking at him. It was as if she were trying to put two different versions of him together; the one on the telephone perhaps and the one on the chair. Or was there some other? This half knowing people, this half being known, this feeling of the eye on the flesh, like a fly crawling—how uncomfortable it was, he thought…

The uncomfortableness of being observed reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novels.

She’s on the phone to a man he met at Eleanor’s, the philosophical foreigner we first met in the previous chapter, ‘that very talkative man, her friend Nicholas Pomjalovsky, whom they called Brown for short.’ He is meant to be a great intellectual but the grandest thing he’s said, so momentous it’s repeated several times, is: ‘if we don’t know ourselves how can we know other people,’ which feels mundane and limp.

Come down in the world

A serving girl serves them undercooked mutton which bleeds. A theme in the last few chapters is how all the Pargiter siblings have come down in the world compared to the grand family home they lived in as children, paralleled by the warm Digby household at Browne. The children of both houses find themselves, in the modern world, living in dingy houses and pokey flats. Only their cousin Kitty Malone has done well for herself, marrying Lord Lasswell.

North and Sara have a dingy dinner, but the thing about their encounter is its staginess: he seems to be egging her on to perform her lines rather than have a conversation. Only from the notes did I learn that they were actually reading from a play.

Eleanor rings. She’s having dinner with her niece Peggy. Thus, by phone, two pairs of this extended family communicate. In their part of the narrative, Peggy thinks how old and forgetful Eleanor’s become but then we know she’s always been vague and easily distracted.

Eleanor loves hot water and electric lights but is not so keen on motor cars – one nearly ran her over the other day – and hates the wireless.

Eleanor sees a newspaper with the face of one of the dictators on it, Hitler or Mussolini, and swears and tears it in half, to the shock of her niece. The pair catch a cab to her sister, Delia’s house, who’s having a party. Which is an opportunity for Woolf to slip in a description of travelling into central London, Oxford Street by night etc.

Cut back to North and Sara reading this play, him egging her on to read her lines. I didn’t realise they were reading a play because Sara’s always been a bit cracked, much given to randomly (mis)quoting poems and plays.

Cut back to Eleanor and Peggy arriving at Delia’s party.

Cut back to North with Sara. Again they are creating a kind of joint fantasy, describing living on a desert island, when they’re interrupted by the arrival of Sara’s sister, Maggie, and her husband Renny. They’re all going to Delia’s party.

Cue Maggie, Miss Margaret Pargiter, being announced at the party and going to sit with deaf old Uncle Patrick, Delia’s husband.

The big party scene

I’ve seen commentary to the effect that this big long party scene is a sort of reprise of the big party which ends Mrs Dalloway, and to some extent of the big warm family meal at the end of part 1 of To The Lighthouse, with the implication of themes and variations across her career. What I take from it is how very little Woolf has to offer in terms of incident or plot. Characters wander round London, meeting up for lunch or dinner or attending parties, and that’s more or less it.

One way of reading her novels is as records of almost asphyxiating dullness. There was so little to do. In the real world people spend a lot of time at work, go and watch sports or take part in them, or amateur theatricals, have hobbies, tinker with their cars, go on cycling or walking holidays. Absolutely none of those worlds are in Woolf at all. Instead the trip to the opera house and Kitty’s train journey to the north are the only scenes with any life or colour in them, the only scenes outside the endless rounds of lunch and dinner, walks through the park, cab journeys here or there, the crushing mundaneness of life. I suppose the scene of the family taking shelter in the cellar during a German bombing raid in 1917 ought to be another example but somehow Woolf manages to downplay the danger, focus on the characters’ trivial conversations and make it sound very run-of-the-mill

So the climax of this long novel is this party at which various Pargiter relatives meet up and chat. It’s as excruciatingly boring as the kind of family do’s I had to go to as a boy. I wanted to run a mile from the feelings of claustrophobia, embarrassment and boredom, only leavened by the occasional nice conversation or moment of connection with a random relative. So why would I want to read 130 pages of characters expressing pretty much the same negative feelings? Although it’s the longest, it’s by far the worst chapter in the book and the only one which felt like a chore to read.

Facts: Rose is now ‘stout’ and deaf. Peggy is a doctor which is mentioned everso casually but, from the Three Guineas perspective, is a massive thing, a very big deal that women of her generation were allowed to study medicine at university, qualify and practice as doctors. Yet it is slipped very casually into the narrative. In fact Peggy is her Uncle Martin’s physician. He’s petrified of getting cancer.

Peggy is bored or impatient and, in the archetypal Woolf gesture, looks out the window (see below) and sees Maggie, North, Renny and Sara arriving. Up they come. Points of view alternate between the perceptions of Eleanor, North and Peggy who all experience more or less of the classic Woolf feeling of alienation and unreality.

North is bored he is as he interacts with all the members of his family. Milly is there with his big fat husband, Hugh Gibbs. North is appalled by how married couples learn to walk and talk like each other.

Eleanor falls asleep, then wakes up feeling rejuvenated, feeling that ‘life has been a perpetual discovery, my life, a miracle.’ She doesn’t want North to go back to Africa. He tells them he made four or five thousand from the sale of his farm.

Someone puts a record on the gramophone, they move the carpet out of the way and the young people dance. Peggy, finding herself marooned by the bookshelves, plucks a book at random. Eleanor calls her over and asks her, as a doctor, what dreams mean. Maggie and Renny appear and Eleanor candidly says that if she’d been younger she would have fallen in love with him.

Eleanor insists she is happy but Peggy, characteristically hard and pessimistic, wonders how anyone can be happy in such a world of poverty, depression, mass unemployment and the threat of war. Then again, she wishes she could just stop thinking all the time. Oh for a life of dreams. The conversation stumbles awkwardly and without wishing to, she finds herself being quite critical of her brother, North, critical of him writing book after book instead of ‘living’.

The moment is eclipsed when Aunt Milly appears, telling them everyone’s going downstairs to eat. Kitty, Lady Lasswade appears in the doorway looking majestic. North takes an instant dislike to her. She is widowed now. Everyone heads downstairs. North and Peggy recall childhood exploits but it’s to paper over the fact they now feel very antagonistic to each other.

Delia makes a big deal about getting spoons for everyone to eat the soup. We see inside her head and how she’s always loved bringing people together at parties like this. This is exactly the thinking of Mrs Dalloway, supervising her party.

North finds himself bunched up with Lady Lasswade and Uncle Patrick (husband of Delia who’s hosting the party). They all wonder why he came back from Africa and for the umpteenth time he explains that he’d had enough. The conversation drifts onto the threadbare topic of whether the present is better than the old days. Old Patrick thinks everything’s gone to the dogs, specially in Ireland where he’s from. Kitty on the other hand, welcomes women’s liberation; she remembers the old days when women weren’t allowed to do anything.

Delia lets North escape her pontificating husband but where to? He’s been out the country, he knows nobody. Woolf gives him the latest of several passages where she gently despises the young men of today (the 1930s) obsessed with talking politics but really just saying ‘I, I, I’.

He bumps into Edward, the thin, dried-out scholar of Sophocles. North feels like he’s being interviewed by the headmaster, when Eleanor, that ‘impulsive, foolish old woman’, calls them over. North admires the way the old brother and sister are at ease with each other, and Edward’s grace and precision.

Nicholas thumps a fork on the table to make a speech, which brings Rose to his side to support him but Martin mocks her and Eleanor intervenes, telling them to stop arguing. it takes a while for this family welter to die down and Nicholas to have another go at a drunken speech but they interrupt him again.

‘How can one speak when one is always interrupted?’ (p.404)

That’s what I always dislike about big family do’s, everyone interrupts everyone else so that nothing is ever finished. But this, arguably, is what the book is all about, all of Woolf’s books, maybe: about interruptions and things never completed, about absences and things that might have been, wistful dreamy memories and perceptions of people and events which always escape our understanding.

And so it is here, with the other siblings over-riding Nicholas who abandons his attempt, and the others toast Rose for having the courage of her convictions, smashing a window for the suffragettes and going to prison.

The music starts up in the room above and all the young people head upstairs, leaving the ruck of the Pargiter family to carry on remembering, blundering, talking at cross-purposes. According to the notes, one of the working titles for the novel was ‘Here and Now’, and here on the last few pages Eleanor has thoughts which use that phrase and would, in that case, have been the clear statement of its meaning. Here brother Edward says something to her nephew North but the end of his sentence is masked by someone else laughing and she is a little frustrated. Life is always like that.

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves. We’re only just beginning, she thought, to understand, here and there. She hollowed her hands in her lap, just as Rose had hollowed hers round her ears. She held her hands hollowed; she felt that she wanted to enclose the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding. (p.406)

Then something weird happens. It’s very late, in fact the sky is lightening for dawn, when Delia brings two small shy children into the room. She cuts them slices of cake. they are the caretakers’ children. Martin offers them sixpence to sing and if Woolf were fully sentimental, they’d sing some reassuring children’s song to round off this book of creams. But instead they sing in unison incomprehensible words in a tuneless screech. The dysjunction between their sweet innocent appearance and the horrible screech which comes out of their ears appals the middle-class listeners. Martin gives them their sixpences and off they toddle, leaving the Pargiter family, and the reader, perplexed.

Dawn is coming. In Woolf’s characteristic gesture, Delia steps to the window and opens the curtains. The party is over. Nicholas asks Maggie to wake her sister, Sara, and as Sara wakes, she has a monetary vision, of the Pargiter siblings all gathered in the window like a frieze.

‘How strange,’ she murmured, looking round heir, ‘…how strange…’
There were the smeared plates, and the empty wine-glasses; the petals and the bread crumbs. In the mixture of lights they looked prosaic but unreal; cadaverous but brilliant. And there against the window, gathered in a group, were the old brothers and sisters.
‘Look, Maggie,’ she whispered, turning to her sister, ‘Look!’ She pointed at the Pargiters, standing in the window.
The group in the window, the men in their black-and-white evening dress, the women in their crimsons, golds and silvers, wore a statuesque air for a moment, as if they were carved in stone. Their dresses fell in stiff sculptured folds. Then they moved; they changed their attitudes; they began to talk. (p.411)

For the most part Woolf eschews obvious symbolism so this feels like an unusually overt move, it feels fittingly beautiful, consciously beautiful, a very beautiful, understated and realistic climax to this long lovely novel. The siblings offer each other lifts and remember the last time they parties till dawn and so amid friendly chat and memories, the novel sweetly and beautifully ends.

Now it was summer. The sky was a faint blue; the roofs were tinged purple against the blue; the chimneys were a pure brick red. An air of ethereal calm and simplicity lay over everything.

Family members

Pargiter family

Live in Abercorn Terrace.

Colonel Pargiter is married to Rose, Mrs Pargiter, who has a long-term illness then dies.

  • Eleanor, remains single
  • Morris, becomes a barrister, marries Celia Chinnery, has three children:
    • North
    • Peggy
    • Charles (who we never see, is mentioned once as having died in the war)
  • Milly, marries Edward’s university friend Gibbs
  • Delia, marries Patrick, hosts the party in the final chapter
  • Edward, remains single, turns into a silver-haired, dignified Classics don
  • Martin
  • Rose, the activist suffragette who goes to prison for her views and ages into a stout spinster

Digby family

Live in Browne Street.

Sir Digby Pargiter is the Colonel’s younger brother. He is married to the beautiful Eugénie — which makes them Uncle Digby and Aunt Eugénie to the Colonel’s children.

  • Magdalena (Maggie) marries the Frenchman René
  • Sara (Sally) becomes increasingly eccentric

Malone family

They are related because Kitty is a cousin of Edward’s, though I can’t figure out whether on her mother or father’s side. They live at the Lodge of an Oxford college.

  • Kitty Malone – marries the wealthy Lord Lasswade, becoming mistress of both his swanky London house, where she hosts a party, and his castle in the north

Seeing life through a window

My only contribution to Virginia Woolf scholarship would be to point out how regularly her characters stare out of windows, day-dreaming, or observing people in the street, avoiding dialogue and interaction with other people in the room, retreating to their own little worlds. I’ll be publishing a blog post on the subject.

Disassociation

Forever seeing life through windows is one example of the way the entire narrative, long though it is, feels beautifully detached from real life. Women in Woolf are not only – as she furiously points out in Three Guineas – legally and financially debarred from the wide world of the professions, of the British Empire, trade, finance, industry, and from the whole world of work – they are temperamentally or psychologically detached too.

At all the dinners and set-piece conversations (posh dinner at Lady Lasswade’s, dinner at Digby and Celia’s in Wittering, the cheap meal at Maggie and Renny’s) the female protagonist starts off by paying attention to the conversation but soon loses interest, loses track, drifts away, focusing on irrelevant details of the cutlery or the furnishings or what people are wearing, drifting off into a world of their own.

He [Morris the lawyer] looked clean, he looked starched and ironed like his robes. But what did he mean by what he was saying? She [Delia] gave it up. Either one understood or one did not understand, she thought. Her mind wandered…

Or, in the final chapter, Peggy the doctor, a bit more aggressively:

Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wished that there were blinds like those in railway carriages that came down over the light and hooded the mind. The blue blind that one pulls down on a night journey, she thought. Thinking was torment; why not give up thinking, and drift and dream?… I will not think, she repeated; she would force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came… She did not want to move, or to speak. She wanted to rest, to lean, to dream.

‘She wanted to dream.’ A Virginia Woolf novel is like a beautiful, lyrical, dreamy painting of the world with almost everything which makes up the real world – all the work and effort, the organisations, the companies, trade and labour, the practicalities and the hard thinking – taken out, excised, surgically removed – to leave a dream world through which her sensitive heroines waft in their long, trailing Victorian dresses.

The effect is very restful. The equanimity of Woolf’s calm, lyrical style, the lack of modernist tricks and tactics, the absence of any events liable to worry or disturb the reader, the absence of any plot and the deep sense of the whole thing being a beautiful dream, makes this by far the most readable and enjoyable of the six Woolf novels I’ve read.

Credit

‘The Years’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1937. Page references are to the 2004 Oxford Classics paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

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Posted by Simon on April 9, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/09/the-years-virginia-woolf/

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy?

‘Mrs Dalloway’ feels like a significantly better, fuller, more complete and significant novel than ‘Jacob’s Room’. But maybe that’s because it’s much more traditional and easier to read.

I powerfully disliked ‘Jacob’s Room’ because it felt, to me, packed with barely contained unhappiness and occasional hysteria, which I found badly triggering i.e. triggered the same feelings in me. ‘Mrs Dalloway’ contains some of the same technical tricks as Jacob, but feels much, much more contained and controlled and accessible.

Continuities between Jacob and this include:

  • it’s set in London with an obsessive attention to the precise geography of the city and the exact routes taken by the main protagonists
  • a large cast of secondary characters, often passersby or people just on the streets or parks or shops of London who the main characters momentarily notice, who pop up for a brief mention then disappear forever
  • unexpected segues or jumps between scenes which neither begin nor end in a conventional way

But what makes it significantly easier than Jacob, is 1) there are far fewer lead characters, just 4 or 5 and 2) we get to know them in much, much more detail than in Jacob. Jacob went out of its way to omit any explanation of characters’ backgrounds and relationships to each other, leaving the reader in a permanent sense of frustration and bewilderment. Its extreme fragmentation and continual hopping about from one fragmented scene to another was its main artistic aim. By contrast, in ‘Dalloway’ there’s just a handful of characters and everything about their backstories is explained at great length. We get to know and walk around the characters. In this respect it is a far more conventional, ‘ordinary’ and accessible novel than its predecessor.

Main cast

The action of the novel follows one day in the life of its characters, a Wednesday in June 1923. Each of the main characters has some business to carry out and so the novel follows them going about their tasks, lightly jumping from one to another.

1. Mrs Clarissa Dalloway

Wife of Richard Dalloway, a Conservative MP. Just entering her 52nd year. Has a daughter, Elizabeth, 17 and serious. Lives in a lovely town house in Mayfair, complete with maids etc, notably Lucy. Was raised in a country house, Bourton, in Gloucestershire. When her father, old Mr Parry, Justin Parry, died, the house went to her brother, Herbert. A neighbour sees:

A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. (p.2)

Mrs Kilman sees:

her small pink face, her delicate body, her air of freshness and fashion

She thinks of herself as having:

a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing — nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown… (p.7)

When a wave of depression flows over her at not being invited to Lady Brunton’s, she feels ‘herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless’ (p.26). She is essentially talentless: she has no gift for writing or talking, can’t play the piano, doesn’t follow her husband’s political campaigns, is astonishingly ignorant (she doesn’t know what the equator is) (p.107).

She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed…

Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever… (p.66)

She has the frigid anti-passion of her class and gender and especially of her author (I say this having read Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf which shows that theirs was a sexless marriage, probably never consummated, because Virginia became hysterical every time the subject of sex was even raised, let alone moved towards.) ‘Horrible passion! she thought. Degrading passion!’ Her main activity in life is bringing disparate people together at her parties. She really enjoys doing this and enjoys her life.

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. (p.2)

How unbelievable death was! — that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all!

Bravo to Woolf for not making her heroine a writer, poet, painter etc but a fairly ordinary upper-middle-class woman with few if any talents. She is therefore (in an admittedly narrow, upper class way) a sort of everywoman.

Task: Clarissa is organising things for a big party she’s hosting that evening.

2. Richard Dalloway

Clarissa’s husband is a conscientious Conservative MP, not top drawer material, never likely to make the Cabinet.

He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type. He ought to have been a country gentleman—he was wasted on politics. He was at his best out of doors, with horses and dog… (p.65)

He is invited to luncheon with Lady Bruton, along with their old friend, the pompous Hugh Whitbread.

3. Peter Walsh

Clarissa has known since a boy. He’s six months older than her. He was always unconventional, got kicked out of Oxford for being a Socialist. Back in the 1890s when they were young, he proposed to Clarissa who turned him down. Years later he returns from India (where he’s been for 5 years, 1918 to 1923) and turns up unannounced at the Dalloway house. He is back in London to organise a divorce from his wife because he has fallen in love with a major’s wife, Daisy, aged just 24 i.e. less than half his age. Foolish man.

Task: Walsh has an appointment to see the lawyers Messrs. Hooper and Grateley of Lincoln’s Inn about his divorce.

4. Septimus Warren Smith

The outsider, completely outside the network of Clarissa’s friends and family which mostly dominates the text. Septimus is aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat. He is a shell-shocked World War One veteran who talks to himself and threatens suicide to his terrified, long-suffering wife Lucrezia.

Task: at noon Septimus and Lucrezia have an appointment with the Harley Street nerve specialist Sir William Bradshaw.

Lucrezia Warren Smith

Long-suffering wife of Septimus. Looks after him all day and shepherds him to the Harley Street appointment, then back to their rented room.

Secondary characters

Sally Seton

Unconventional woman Clarissa fell in love with and kissed back in the 1890s (p.30). And turns up out of the blue at Clarissa’s party. And is changed utterly. Clarissa compares their youthful hijinks with the plump conventional woman she’s become.

She smoked cigars,… she ran down the passage to fetch her sponge bag, without a stitch of clothing on her, and Ellen Atkins asked, ‘What if the gentlemen had met her?’ But everybody forgave her. She stole a chicken from the larder because she was hungry in the night; she smoked cigars in her bedroom; she left a priceless book in the punt. But everybody adored her (except perhaps Papa). It was her warmth; her vitality — she would paint, she would write. Old women in the village never to this day forgot to ask after ‘your friend in the red cloak who seemed so bright.’ She accused Hugh Whitbread, of all people (and there he was, her old friend Hugh, talking to the Portuguese Ambassador), of kissing her in the smoking-room to punish her for saying that women should have votes. Vulgar men did, she said. And Clarissa remembered having to persuade her not to denounce him at family prayers — which she was capable of doing with her daring, her recklessness, her melodramatic love of being the centre of everything and creating scenes, and it was bound, Clarissa used to think, to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her martyrdom; instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at Manchester. And she had five boys! (p.161)

Aunt Helena

Old Mr Parry’s sister, so Clarissa’s aunt (p.28), now in her 80s and with one glass eye. A great traveller in India in the 1860s and a keen watercolorist of rare orchids (p.158).

Tertiary characters

Scrope Purvis – neighbour in Westminster.

Sir John Buckhurst – venerable judge, caught up in the traffic jam in Brook Street (p.13).

Dr Holmes – physician to Septimus Smith who insists there’s nothing physically wrong with him.

Large, fresh coloured, handsome, flicking his boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside — headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams — nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said.

(Compare and contrast the physician who shows up to pronounce Leonard Bast dead at the end of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End, and the useless doctor who misdiagnoses the daughter with terrible consequences in D.H. Lawrence’s story England, My England. Doctors generally get a bad rap in the fiction of this period.)

Mr Brewer – managing clerk at Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents, Septimus’s boss.

Lady Millicent Bruton – invites Richard Dalloway to lunch, but not Clarissa, upsetting her.

Miss Milly Brush (40) – Lady Bruton’s secretary, ‘knobbed, scraped, angular, and entirely without feminine charm’ (p.90).

Perkins – Lady Bruton’s servant (?) (p.91).

Miss Pym shop assistant at Mulberry’s the florists, hands always red (p.9).

Edgar J. Watkiss, a workman carrying a roll of lead piping round his arm (p.11).

Mrs Sarah Bletchley with her baby in her arms.

Mrs Emily Coates – passerby in Pall Mall.

Mr Bowley – appears in Jacob’s Room.

Maisie Johnson – freshly arrived from Edinburgh, encounters Septimus and Lucrezia in Regents Park.

Mrs. Dempster – worn-out old lady in Regents Park observes Maisie’s interaction with the Smiths.

The unknown young woman who Peter spots in Trafalgar Square, is suddenly infatuated with and follows north till she disappears into a house in Bloomsbury, leaving him feeling deflated.

The elderly nurse with a pram in Regent’s Park, sat knitting on the bench where Peter comes to rest and falls asleep.

Miss Isobel Pole – lectures about Shakespeare, Septimus attended and developed a crush on her, wrote her letters and poems and stalked her.

Mrs Filmer – older woman living in same boarding house as Septimus and Lucrezia.

Agnes the serving girl in the Smiths’ boarding house.

Sir William Bradshaw – Harley Street physician, calm recommender of a sense of proportion (p.87).

Lady William Bradshaw – wife, fusses about her son at Eton and her hobbies, namely:

Large dinner-parties every Thursday night to the profession; an occasional bazaar to be opened; Royalty greeted; too little time, alas, with her husband, whose work grew and grew; a boy doing well at Eton; she would have liked a daughter too; interests she had, however, in plenty; child welfare; the after-care of the epileptic, and photography… (p.80)

Doris Kilman – Kicked out of her school for her German ancestry during the war, Richard came across Miss Kilman and hired her as a history tutor for Elizabeth. Over 40, embarrassingly poor, ‘heavy, ugly, commonplace’, she had a mighty religious conversion 2 years and 3 months ago (109). Now when she comes Clarissa isn’t sure how much of their time is history and how much is religious zeal.

Rev. Edward Whittaker whose sermon converted Miss Kilman.

Mr Fletcher – retired, of the Treasury, ‘neat as a new pin’, worshipper in Westminster Abbey

Mrs Gorham – widow of the famous K.C., worshipper in Westminster Abbey

Mrs Burgess – a good sort and no chatterbox, who Peter confides in about his affair, advises that while he’s away in England, hopefully Daisy will come to her senses.

Old Joseph Breitkopf – a frequent guest at Bourton who liked singing Brahms but didn’t have any voice.

Events

‘Jacob’s Room’ was divided into 14 distinct chapters. ‘Mrs Dalloway’ doesn’t have any chapters or parts. From time to time there’s just a break in the text, which indicates a new scene or time:

10am

Mrs Dalloway is walking across Green Park towards the florists. She bumps into her old friend Hugh Whitbread. She walks along Piccadilly and into the shop window of Hatchards. She crosses into Bond Street and walks up to her florists, Mulberry’s. A car backfires in the street outside. Various passersby stop and notice. The road is blocked and we meet the shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Smith.

Ripple of excitement among passersby about who is inside the car (which has curtains over its windows), the Prime Minister, the Prince of Wales. The narrative takes us down the Mall to the crowd outside Buckingham Palace including, in Woolf’s usual manner, a clutch of casual bystanders who she bothers to name – shawled Moll Pratt with her flowers on the pavement, Mrs Emily Coates, Sarah Bletchley with babe in arms, little Mr Bowley.

All of them then witness something strange which is an airplane flying low over central London and emitting smoke as if writing letters in the air. In classic modernist confusion nobody can agree what the letters spell.

Cut to: Lucrezia sitting next to her depressed husband Septimus Smith in Regents Park. Her feelings of desperate loneliness now her husband is mad.

Maisie Johnson, a young woman freshly arrived from Edinburgh, asks them the way to Regents Park tube and thinks them a very strange couple. Mrs Dempster who has lunch in the park and feeds the squirrels observes their interaction. The plane eventually flies off, giving a few moments thought to a Mr Bentley mowing his lawn in Greenwich. A seedy-looking nondescript man carrying a leather bag hesitates at the entrance to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Woolf’s novels are packed with these inconsequential moments from random strangers’ lives. In fact she theorises it a bit, attributing this affinity with complete strangers to Clarissa:

Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter… (p.135)

Presumably this flitting between snippets of random strangers’ lives was part of the modernism which discombobulated the book’s first readers. All I can say is I took it in my stride and enjoyed this bird’s eye overview of London and random people doing random activities. A hundred years later the technique is thoroughly assimilated.

Clarissa arrives home, discovers her husband has been invited to luncheon with Lady Millicent Bruton, and is jealous. This triggers a wave of memories, her childhood at the family home at Bourton, her wooing by Peter Walsh. But much more she remembers her close friendship with the unconventional Sally Seton which ended with the latter kissing her (p.30).

She is awoken from her revery when the doorbell rings and it’s Peter Walsh, out of the blue. They sit and reminisce. He tells her he’s come back to organise a divorce so he can marry a woman (unfortunately, herself married) Daisy.

Their conversation is just becoming personal, and Clarissa is allowing herself to feel something for this silly loveable man, when the door opens and her daughter, Elizabeth walks in. Walsh had been pacing up and down and now he simply says ‘Goodbye’ and leaves the room, and their densely emotional conversation simply ends.

Reeling, Peter walks along Victoria Street and into Whitehall where he sees a procession of Boy Scouts leaving memorials at the Cenotaph.

11.30am

He is in Trafalgar Square looking at the statues. In a peculiar passage, he sees an attractive woman crossing the road and ends up following her, trailing her, fantasising about starting a completely new life with her, across Piccadilly, up Regents Street, across Oxford Street, up Great Portland Street, and off into a side street where she goes into a house.

The fantasy bursts, and he continues up towards Regents Park, dawdles till he finds a park bench with a nurse sitting on it, knitting, sits down and slowly falls asleep. Starts snoring.

He wakes with a start and painfully remembers the stay at Bourton, in the early 1890s, when he declared his love to Clarissa and she not only rejected him but very visibly fell in love with another guest, simple dashing young Richard Dalloway.

These memories are interrupted when the little girl who’s with the nanny accidentally runs into Lucrezia as she walks miserably with her husband. This takes us into 4 or 5 pages describing Smith’s worsening mental illness, delusions of grandeur (the secrets of the universe), hearing voices, seeing his dead friend Evans in unexpected places.

Peter is now up and walk and walks past the miserable Smiths sitting on their park bench. He is reflecting on the ship journey back to England, being struck that women now openly apply face powder and lipstick, something nobody did in his day.

He remembers how much he dislikes Clarissa’s old friend Hugh Whitbread, an utterly conventional pompous ass who married the Right Honourable Evelyn someone and has a post at Court; how conventional Richard Dalloway is; his disapproval of Shakespeare’s Sonnets for being disreputable etc. How much he still likes Clarissa, her sense of life and comedy, her sense of duty, always running round helping people; how, now into his 50s, he just doesn’t need people any more.

Exiting the Park he hears and sees an ancient crone singing for money. She is a kind of pivot because we also see her through Lucrezia’s eyes and the narrative switches to describing Lucrezia’s story, how she met Septimus. He had fallen in love with the lecturer in Shakespeare, Miss Isabel Pole, working at Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents. He was one of the first to volunteer and served the full four years. He became very close to his officer, Evans, who was killed just before the Armistice. Now he hears Evans talking to him from behind trees and park benches.

The end of the war found Septimus in Milan, billetted with an innkeeper whose two daughters made hats. Lucrezia was the younger. They fell in love and married and came back to London, took rooms in Tottenham Court Road, and Septimus slowly became more (mentally) ill. He talks openly about killing himself and wonders how to do it most effectively.

Twelve noon (p.82)

The sound of Big Ben (which, I realise, tolls through the book on the hour, every hour). Septimus and Lucrezia have an appointment with Sir William Bradshaw, nerve specialist, in Harley Street. Woolf mocks Bradshaw and his pathetically inadequate advice to Septimus to cultivate a proper sense of ‘proportion’. To achieve this, Bradshaw says he’ll arrange for Septimus to be sent to a rest home, a care home (nobody uses the word asylum). Although presented sweetly, this obviously has a coercive element and leads onto a peculiar couple of pages where Woolf claims that, the (pathetically inadequate) concept of ‘proportion’ is accompanied by a ‘sister’ concept, ‘Conversion’. This is obscure but seems to refer to compulsion, to forcing his patients to acquiesce in his diagnoses, with the implication that he will be forced to go to this home (asylum). This sense of being forced against his will, plays a crucial role in the climax of Septimus’s story.

Like all contemporary physicians, Bradshaw knows nothing about the workings of the brain and central nervous system.

One thirty (p.90)

According to a clock in nearby Oxford Street where is walking Hugh Whitbread, 55, respected holder of a position at Court, ‘unbearably pompous’. He, too, has been invited to luncheon with Lady Bruton and arrives on the doorstep of her house in Brook Street at the same moment as Richard Dalloway.

She talks of this and that and mentions that Peter Walsh is back in England. But it turns out she has invited them both there simply because she needs their help writing a letter to The Times about her hobby horse, encouraging the emigration of the ‘surplus population’ to the colonies, specifically Canada. Hugh is a gluttonous creep in many respects but in this, writing formal letters in the style of the Establishment, he is outstanding and does a great job, developing and refining it at Lady Bruton’s instructions. Then lunch is over and the two men depart.

But a wind is blowing up Brook Street and for some indefinable reason they find it difficult to part and end up together going into a jewellers’s shop where Hugh buys a necklace for his wife, Evelyn. Talk of Peter Walsh has reminded him of his wooing of Clarissa and suddenly he wants to buy her a present. Lacking judgement of jewellery, in the blink of an eye he has bought some red and white roses and strides through Green Park towards their house, intending to give them to her and tell her he loves her.

Scholars think the Dalloways live in Great College Street, Westminster, though this is nowhere made explicit.

3pm (p.103)

Big Ben sounds the hour as Dalloway enters his house, surprising Clarissa. He gives her the roses but can’t quite bring himself to tell her he loves her. He quickly leaves to attend a committee, concerned with Armenian survivors of the genocide though Clarissa, characteristically, can’t remember whether it’s Armenians or Albanians.

Miss Kilman emerges from being cloistered with Elizabeth. She was hired as a history tutor for Elizabeth but during the war had a religious conversion. We get the story of her conversion. Now she and Elizabeth emerge to go shopping. There is a momentary standoff between Clarissa and Miss Kilman which Clarissa ends by laughing. They exit.

3.30pm (p.112)

Clarissa watches the old lady opposite laboriously climb her stairs and thinks that, that is life.

Meanwhile, Mrs Kilman is infuriated beyond measure by the way Mrs Dalloway laughed at her, seething with hatred for her dim, philistine privilege. She and Elizabeth go to the Army and Navy Story (to buy a petticoat) and then have tea and a chocolate eclair. Woolf gives us Miss Kilman’s thoughts which are almost as demented as Septimus’s in her seething anger at being ugly and poor and clumsy.

Miss Kilman goes into Westminster Abbey to share her misery with God and some other sniffling worshippers. Elizabeth, 17, loves being out in the busy streets and takes a bus down the Strand, across into Fleet Street and bravely ventures towards St Paul’s Cathedral, all the way thinking a confused, immature 17-year-old girl’s thoughts about what she might do when she grows up.

The passing backwards and forwards of omnibuses is a link to the Smiths, Septimus lying on the sofa in their lodgings while Lucrezia tries to fix a hat at their table, a hat for Mrs Filmers’ married daughter, Mrs Peters. For half an hour he comes out of his madness and actively helps Rezia design the little hat and she is deliriously happy but then Mrs Filmer’s grand-daughter arrives to deliver the paper, and Rezia gives her a sweet then accompanies her back to her flat, leaving Septimus by himself, and he has tremors of relapse.

When she comes back he suggests she gets out all his mad writings, the letters and poems and diagrams and drawings, and burns them all, but she wants to keep them, sorts them and ties them with string.

At this point the indefatigable Dr Holmes arrives downstairs and Rezia runs down to head him off but he insists on blundering up to see his ‘perfectly well’ patient, which triggers a panic attack. Because Septimus associates the doctors with Sr William’s air of polite coercion, of being confined to an asylum.

So as soon as hears Holmes’s voice, Septimus quickly considers various methods of suicide and, as Dr Holmes enters the room, throws himself out the window and down onto the area railings. So that he is impaled on the railings. Yuk.

What happens next is odd because instead of having hysterics, Rezia is given a sweet drink by the doctor and feels relaxed and has happy visions, presumably a powerful tranquilliser. And it isn’t made clear whether Septimus is dead or badly or lightly injured. Mystery.

The ambulance carrying Septimus whizzes past Peter Walsh out walking and he’s struck by how civilised the notion of the traffic pulling aside to let is pass is, after the chaos of the Orient (i.e. India). Peter reacts a bit deliriously, with a hint of the Woolf madness, which is disguised as his temperamental over-susceptibility.

6pm (p.137)

Peter arrives back at his hotel, a sad sterile place, his mind awash with memories of Clarissa on his many visits to Bourton. He is upset when these fantasies are punctured by a one-line note she’s had sent round which simply says ‘Heavenly to see you!’ So conventional, so middle-aged and disappointing. And he reflects on his affair with Daisy, her mad love for him, his jealousy, the whole thing utterly inappropriate and disreputable, as he gets dressed for Clarissa’s party. No wonder she married Richard.

He goes down to the hotel dining room where he is shy and sits at a table by himself. After dinner he gets into conversation with the Morris family, being old Mr Morris, young Charles Morris, Mrs Morris and Miss Elaine Morris.

Evening falls over the city. Peter realises he’ll go to the party simply because he wants a gossip and to hear the latest talk about the future of India. As night falls the streets light up and fill with lively young people. Peter prides himself at not being at the Oriental Club surrounded by harrumphing old bloaters, but sitting on a cane chair outside his hotel near the Tottenham Court Road enjoying the sense of youth and possibility.

He pays a penny for an evening paper, reads the cricket scores, then leaves it on the table and sets off walking through Bloomsbury, heading south and west to Westminster and a lovely description of people stepping out their houses and into cabs, of windows lighting up, the sound of gramophones through windows on this hot June evening, till he arrives at Clarissa’s house and braces himself.

The servants, Lucy bustling about front of house and Mrs Walker, the very harassed cook and old Mrs Barnett, Ellen Barnett, helping the grand ladies off with their cloaks. Mr Wilkins a sort of butler/announcer, hired specially for parties.

Clarissa is terrified that the party is not going well, people are not mingling, are standing around tutting about the draught (Peter desperately wishes he hadn’t come, he knows nobody). But then more guests arrive and it starts to go. Clarissa stands at the main door to the drawing room greeting them all as they’re announced by Wilkins. Lady Bruton has come and Clarissa is genuinely relieved. Then she is amazed that Sally Seton has gatecrashed, happened to be in London, heard about it etc. She is now Lady Rosseter with five strapping sons!

And then the Prime Minister, an amusingly non-descript little man. Peter Walsh, an outsider from India, is appalled at the snobbery of the English, and then amused to see pompous Hugh Whitbread dancing attendance like a toady. And then he is touched with how old but gracious Clarissa looks in her green dress, effortlessly managing her guests. And there’s pages of her dealing with each of these guests, maybe based on real people (?), certainly an interesting variety.

Coincidentally (it’s a small world; well it’s a big world actually, but fiction is a small world) Sir William Bradshaw arrives, with his wife. He’s the pompously expensive nerve doctor who was so fundamentally useless to Septimus, and who Lucrezia was so relieved to escape. Interestingly, Clarissa once went to him with a problem and had the same experience, being impressed by his tone and dignity, but everso relieved to escape back out onto the street. Lady B explains they are late because they were just leaving when someone rang up Sir William to tell him a sad case of his had just killed himself (p.162).

Aha. So Septimus succeeded in killing himself. I was wondering whether I’d have to look it up on the internet to find out what happened (as I had to Google it to find out what happened at the end of ‘Jacob’s Room’).

News of this death affects her badly and Clarissa withdraws into a little side room. She feels it has a special message, is meant as an act of defiance. (Surely in this we can hear Woolf defending madness and suicidal ideations as something more than just illness, but a rebellion, a defiance, suicide as a kind of treasure).

And Clarissa’s response is to find Sr William somehow, obscurely, evil. When she met him professionally she felt the evil of compulsion in him, forcing his patients at their most vulnerable time. It awakens in her a deep terror:

Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.

Because:

Somehow it was her disaster — her disgrace. It was her punishment… She felt somehow very like him — the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. (p.165)

Mad though this sounds, I know exactly what she means. It feels profoundly true.

Meanwhile Sally and Peter sit together and have a long chat about old times. He is 53, she is 55. This I found very moving because I’m about their age and at parties have sat and talked to friends I met at university when we were 20 and full of dreams and now look at each other, grey and middle-aged and worried about our children. That feeling comes over very well indeed.

And Peter confides that he never got over his love for Clarissa, the rest of his life was a throwing-himself-away. Sally sympathises and insists she comes to stay with him in her huge house in Manchester and meet her husband, a vastly wealthy mine owner who started out a working man himself and brought himself up by his shoestraps.

And they both watch young Elizabeth, looking radiant, walk over to her doting father who tells her how beautiful she is. Sally says she’s getting up to go and talk to them. And then the novel ends on a kind of bombshell, which I shall quote in its entirety. Sally leaves him and:

‘I will come,’ said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.

Nothing will happen between them, we know too much about them to sentimentally think that. But it is like colour in the composition of a painting. It ends on a tremendous upbeat of something we have come to realise is much more potent than love or memory, something much deeper.

It really is about as beautiful and moving as a novel can possibly be.

Thoughts

1. ‘Mrs Dalloway’ is not at all the avant-garde, modernist text I’d been led to believe, but a remarkably conventional, normal novel, easy to read and understand.

2. Mrs Dalloway is a posh, upper-class wife of a Conservative MP, a classic lady who lunches, it’s not clear that she’s ever done a day’s work in her life, just orders around her servants and suppliers. As such she has 0% of my sympathy. My sympathies are always with people who work for a living and not the parasitic upper classes which throng so much classic bourgeois fiction. But not having much sympathy for her doesn’t at all prevent me from appreciating the craft and beauty of the novel.

3. As you know I had a severe abreaction to Jacob’s Room, a book which gave me a powerful sense of mental illness barely controlled. It is symptomatic of this book’s greater sense of control and order that the mental illness is still there but has been channelled into just one character, isolated and delimited, as it were. Still that figure is a major player, the opposite pole to Clarissa, Septimus Smith. Into this character Woolf was able to pour all her demons, the voices talking in her head, and the calm and practical planning how to kill yourself.

The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood — by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know. Holmes had won of course; the brute with the red nostrils had won. But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.

A note in the Oxford University Press edition of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ tells me that Woolf suffered mental collapses in 1895, 1904 and 1913 to 1915; that she tried to kill herself in 1895 (aged 13) and again in 1913 (aged 31). In 1922 when she felt another attack coming on, she went to see a Harley Street specialist who was, predictably, useless.

So the novel dramatises her two states – being a posh sensitive woman in London, and being mentally ill unto making practical plans to commit suicide – in its two central characters. It is a bipolar book.

And the two halves are brought together in the climactic party in a very complex, moving, disturbing, but sympathetic way, as Clarissa sorts through her complex response to Lady William’s mention of Septimus’s suicide. It is really a wonderfully complex working of a stricken subject and her horrible experiences into a beautiful work of art.

Credit

‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in May 1925. References are to the 2004 Vintage paperback edition.

Related links

The Virginia Woolf Society holds a DallowayDay event on the Saturday before or after the third Wednesday in June.

Related reviews

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by Simon on March 26, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 26, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/03/26/mrs-dalloway-virginia-woolf/

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