—Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.
Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.
—By Jesus, says he, I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.

The division of James Joyce’s epic novel ‘Ulysses’ into three parts – of 3, 12 and 3 chapters each – is clear for everyone to read in its table of contents. Here is that table of contents. (Note: none of the Greek title names are actually indicated in the text; they were given by Joyce to early commentators who published them in books and articles about the novel, and have been used by critics and commentators, including me, ever since):

Part 1. Telemachiad

1. Telemachus
2. Nestor
3. Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

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

Part 3. Ithaca

16. Eumaeus
17. Ithaca
18. Penelope

But the book can also be informally split into two halves, breaking after ‘Sirens’ thus:

Part 1. Initial style

1. Telemachus
2. Nestor
3. Proteus
4. Calypso
5. Lotus Eaters
6. Hades
7. Aeolus
8. Lestrygonians
9. Scylla and Charybdis
10. Wandering Rocks
11. Sirens

Part 2. One-off chapters

12. Cyclops
13. Nausicaa
14. Oxen of the Sun
15. Circe
16. Eumaeus
17. Ithaca
18. Penelope

This is because the first ten or so chapters are all done in a roughly similar stream-of-consciousness style. Joyce himself in a letter referred to them as being in ‘the initial style’. From ‘Sirens’ onwards, however, each individual chapter has not only a style but a format of its own. They are all longer and, in their different ways, more contrived and artificial than the initial ten. So I’m going to give individual explanations of these final seven chapters starting with chapter 12, ‘Cyclops’.

Chapter 12. Cyclops

‘To hell with the bloody brutal Sassenachs and their patois.’ (the Citizen)

1. First-person narrative

Unlike the first 11 chapters, this one is not narrated by a (sort of) third person narrator, but switches to a highly flavoured first-person narrative given by an unnamed Dublin lowlife and drinker, a self-described ‘collector of bad and doubtful debts’. He’s currently working a job on behalf of a Jewish tea merchant (Herzog) who is owed money by a man called Geraghty.

This narrator describes dropping into Barney Kiernan’s pub along with Joe Hynes, where they encounter a person referred to throughout only as The Citizen, who is an aggressive and intimidatingly fierce Irish Nationalist figure. Unwisely, Leopold Bloom later drops into the pub (looking for Martin Cunningham) and he is subjected to needling and then outright abuse, with some other characters coming to his partial support.

(Incidentally, the unnamed Citizen is generally believed to be a satirical version of Michael Cusack, a founder member of the Gaelic Athletic Association.)

2. Mock epic

The second element which makes this chapter stand out as unique is that there is a second narrator or figure who intersperses the first-person narrative with really long passages of mockery. On almost every page the first-person narrative of events is interrupted by a long passage parodying a range of ‘official’ types of content or tone. To begin with these passages parody the high-flown romantic tone of the Celtic Revival, mocking the heroic figures of Irish legend and the sentimental-heroic style they were written about by authors of the Celtic Revival in the generation before Joyce.

Here’s what I mean. First here’s the tone of the colloquial and half-drunk narrator:

I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D.M.P. at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter only Joe Hynes.

By contrast, here’s just part of the long first passage in the sentimental mock nationalist style:

In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept, warriors and princes of high renown. A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gurnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the pollock, the mixed coarse fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated.

As you can see, this starts out as slushy sentimentalism but quickly becomes, as Monty Python would put it, ‘silly’. In the tradition of learnèd wit which stretches from Rabelais through Don Quixote to Tristram Shandy, one way of mocking the heroic style (and book learning generally) was by concocting absurdly long lists. The Cyclops chapter is bulked out with plenty of these:

Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs, drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale, York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious, and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes.

There is much more where this came from. If you have the leisure time to really savour these interruptions, they are often very funny. Here’s a description of Terry the barman at Barney Kiernan’s pub bringing the boys another round.

Terence O’Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal cup full of the foamy ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of deathless Leda. For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat.

So: by describing the setting and the Citizen in the flowery, exaggerated style of Celtic legends or medieval epics, Joyce mocks the tendency of the culture of his day to romanticize Irish identity and history.

He also deploys the strategy of the mock heroic genre (which itself goes back to ancient times) i.e. to portray bathetic, lowlife, contemporary figures in the style of the grand epics associated with Homer for comic and satiric purposes. Which is of course, in a sense, the fundamental approach of the entire novel.

Thus Joyce’s absurdly inflated style elevates the drunken, narrow-minded Citizen into a mythical, giant-like figure to create a humorous, mock heroic parallel. And the Homeric comparison with the one-eyed Cyclops is a scathing satire on Joyce’s conception of violent Irish nationalism for being as ‘one-eyed’ (i.e. narrow-minded, bigoted and violent) as the giant Cyclops is in the Odyssey.

3. Many parodies

But it’s not just Celtic legends that Joyce satirises. There are 32 of these long, overwritten insertions in this chapter and some of them go on to mock what Joyce saw as other forms of pretentiousness, including bad literary style, sports jargon, absurdly formal language, a séance (in which the spirit of dead Paddy Dignam speaks!), pompous academic writing, and the Bible (‘for I will on nowise suffer it even so saith the Lord.’) At one point it drops into a parody of Hansard, treating the crew of drunks in the pub as if they were MPs in the House of Commons:

Mr Cowe Conacre (Multifarnham. Nat.): Arising out of the question of my honourable friend, the member for Shillelagh, may I ask the right honourable gentleman whether the government has issued orders that these animals shall be slaughtered though no medical evidence is forthcoming as to their pathological condition?
Mr Allfours (Tamoshant. Con.): Honourable members are already in possession of the evidence produced before a committee of the whole house. I feel I cannot usefully add anything to that. The answer to the honourable member’s question is in the affirmative.

In other words, nothing is safe, nothing goes unmocked, nothing is sacred.

What actually happens

The overall shape of the narrative is clear but it’s pretty hard to make out the detail of what happens without some kind of guide or crib. The key events are that the narrator and a pal, Joe Hynes, drop into Barney Kiernan’s pub and are greeted by the Citizen; they order drinks and are soon joined by Alf Bergan and Bob Doran (very drunk). Leopold Bloom enters, is offered a drink but wisely opts to take merely a cigar proffered by Joe Hynes, not wanting to be obliged to buy a round later.

Alf Bergan has got hold of a bundle of job applications sent to the Dublin High Sheriff from men volunteering to be the official hangman, which he gives to Joe and Joe reads out to everyone’s disgust. This points to the grim reality of capital punishment under British rule but also, in stark contrast to the nationalistic talk in the bar, indicates there are plenty of Irishmen ready to hang their fellow countrymen for pay. They discuss the urban legend that being hanged gives male hangees an erection. Or, in mock scientiese:

The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, according to the best approved tradition of medical science, be calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres of the genital apparatus…

Bloom insists on taking a scientific view of the matter and this riles the half-drunk Citizen, who aggressively yells an Irish toast for their next drinks. Bloom explains he was only looking for Martin Cunningham about aspects of Paddy Dignam’s will. It is about 5pm. All the fandango about the elaborate parodies can’t hide the fact that we are down among real lowlife, violent shiftless drunks:

Gob, Jack made him toe the line. Told him if he didn’t patch up the pot, Jesus, he’d kick the shite out of him.

Talk turns to the foot-and-mouth disease which is being discussed at the cattle markets and by some local politicians including Nannetti who we met in the newspaper offices. Once again, Bloom, stone cold sober, launches in on a scientific explanation of the issues which really riles the drunk Citizen and the narrator who calls him ‘Mister Knowall’.

A remark about a ban on playing Irish games in the park leads into a discussion of Irish sports. The narrator is really cross with Bloom continually interrupting these drunk rambles to give lucid sensible analyses. When Alf mentions that Blazes Boylan is rumoured to have made £100 betting on a boxing match, Bloom hurriedly tries to continue the existing topic. He wants to avoid any mention of Blazes, his nemesis, the man who is probably screwing his wife as they speak.

Incidentally the boxing match, between Myler Keogh (‘Dublin’s pet lamb’ and an Irish champion) and Percy Bennett (‘the Portobello bruiser’ a sergeant-major representing British forces) is fictional and clearly another representation of the central them of the antagonism between Ireland and Britain. At the same time it is described in an extended parody of sports journalism. Nothing is sacred.

They are joined in the pub by J. J. O’Molloy and Ned Lambert who have passed the madman Denis Breen and his worried wife Mrs Breen. Breen madly wants to bring a libel case which prompts discussion of recent lawsuits, one of which is then described in flowery Medieval English. Someone involved in it was Jewish which sets the Citizen to lamenting that we ever let ‘them’, the Jews, into the country.

Next to enter the crowded pub are John Wyse Nolan and Lenehan ‘with him with a face on him as long as a late breakfast’ because they lost money betting on the Gold Cup horserace, but this is a digression from the Citizen who delivers an extended vision of Ireland restored to her rightful place on the high seas and fine industries and thriving population – ‘All wind and piss like a tanyard cat’ according to the jaded narrator.

The Citizen gets distracted into a rant about the appalling conditions in the Royal Navy which triggers a blasphemous interpolation.

They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth, and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.

Bloom is foolishly sober and pedantic:

—Perfectly true, says Bloom. But my point was…

The episode is overtly presented as a clash between bigoted nationalism and a Jew, a case of antisemitism – which it explicitly is – but as always with Joyce, it’s other things too.

1) It’s a clash between sobriety and drunkenness. Bloom is not teetotal but he chooses to drink nothing while the ten or so Dubliners around him proceed to get very drunk, angry, arguing, fighting drunk.

2) It’s a class thing. Bloom is lower middle-class and we know about his calm intellectual curiosity about things, whereas most of the others are portrayed as real lowlifes, parasites, leaches, drunken gamblers (O’Molloy the lawyer isn’t nor, in fact, is the Citizen himself). Bloom is not just a nice Jewish boy who’s stumbled into a den of bigots; he’s a nice middle-class man generally, who’s stumbled into a den of drunken roughs.

Then the Citizen asks Bloom direct what his nation is and, when Bloom replies ‘Ireland’, the Citizen hawks and spits in disgust. Suddenly Bloom loses his temper and briefly speaks about the repression of his people, here and now. It’s worth quoting in full:

—And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant.
Gob, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar.
—Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle.
—Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.
—I’m talking about injustice, says Bloom.
—Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.
That’s an almanac picture for you. Mark for a softnosed bullet. Old lardyface standing up to the business end of a gun. Gob, he’d adorn a sweepingbrush, so he would, if he only had a nurse’s apron on him. And then he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as limp as a wet rag.
—But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
—What? says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now…

Of course the irony is that Bloom is preaching the gospel of love promoted by Jesus Christ to supposed Christians but this so infuriates the Citizen that he swears he’ll murder him, he’ll crucify him, for all the world sounding like the Jewish and Roman authorities who conspired to execute Christ.

After he’s stalked out, Lenehan mistakenly spreads the rumour that Bloom had a hot tip on the Gold Cup race, Throwaway, and has gone to collect his winnings. And this triggers venomous gossip about Bloom undermining the nationalist cause, and his father being a swindler.

At this point, at the end of the episode, nice Martin Cunningham arrives and his arrival is described in cod medieval style, maybe parodying Walter Scott.

Our travellers reached the rustic hostelry and alighted from their palfreys.
—Ho, varlet! cried he, who by his mien seemed the leader of the party. Saucy knave! To us!
So saying he knocked loudly with his swordhilt upon the open lattice.
Mine host came forth at the summons, girding him with his tabard.

Disappointingly, Martin joins in the general slagging off of Bloom and pads out the accusation that his father helped the British authorities in Dublin castle draw up repressive legislation and practices. At which point Bloom unexpectedly and unwisely appears back in the pub, in search of Cunningham to do good for Dignam’s widow. But nobody believes this story; his name is thoroughly blackened now, and the narrator thinks:

There’s a jew for you! All for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat.

He and Martin exit, getting up into a cab but the Citizen finally staggers to his feet and makes his way to the pub door and yells after Bloom: ‘—Three cheers for Israel!’ drawing the attention of passersby. Bloom, incensed yells back:

—Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.

The Citizen is so incensed by this that he stumbles back into the pub, looking for the knackered old biscuit barrel his dog had licked clean of its last crumbs, as a weapon. He grabs it, returns to the door and throws it at the horse-driven cab (terrifying the horse) as his furious mangy hound Garryowen runs after the carriage and passersby laugh at these yelling drunks.

The throwing of the biscuit tin is a mock heroic reference to the end of the Cyclops story in the Odyssey, where Odysseus, having tricked the Cyclops, escaped from the cave where he had been imprisoned, made it to his ship and sailing away, is incautious enough to yell taunts at back at his captor. At which the giant Cyclops picks up an enormous boulder and hurls it at the ship, only narrowly missing. Heroic version: giant rock. Modern mock heroic equivalent: biscuit tin.

The Arranger

Canadian critic Hugh Kenner says that the critic David Hayman was the first to identify and name Ulysses’ main technical innovation, which was the irruption into the text of a voice which belongs to none of the characters nor to any narrator, but just intrudes, as we’ve seen happens in ‘Cyclops’.

Its first significant appearance in the text takes the form of the 63 newspaper captions which punctuate the ‘Aeolus’ chapter. Who is ‘saying’ these headlines? Nobody. And as the chapters follow you realise that, yes, we are still 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. Kenner devotes a whole chapter to describing its effects and I note the name is still being used by modern commentators. And this chapter 12, the ‘Cyclops’ chapter, is the first one where we really see The Arranger fully in action. Who speaks the 32 comic parodies and exaggerations which punctuate the text? Not the lowlife narrator of the episode, not the narrator of the initial sections, who is by and large close to the idea of a traditional third-person narrator. No, someone else.

At one level, obviously it’s James Joyce who wrote the whole thing. But I really like Hayman’s idea that, within the experience of reading the text, it’s someone else, something else, a powerful supra-authorial entity, a science fiction invader from some other realm of discourse, concocting these solid blocks of text. This makes them not only funny, but spooky, adding to the luminous sense of ‘Ulysses’ coming, in some sense, from another world.

General xenophobic insults

The Citizen isn’t just rude about the Jews.

• The French! says the citizen. Set of dancing masters! Do you know what it is? They were never worth a roasted fart to Ireland.
• the Prooshians and the Hanoverians, says Joe, haven’t we had enough of those sausageeating bastards on the throne from George the elector down to the German lad and the flatulent old bitch that’s dead?
• [Of Nannetti the Italian]
  Hairy Iopas, says the citizen, that exploded volcano, the darling of all countries and the idol of his own.
• [Of the English king]
  We have Edward the peacemaker now.
  —Tell that to a fool, says the citizen. There’s a bloody sight more pox than pax about that boyo. Edward Guelph-Wettin…
  And what do you think, says Joe, of the holy boys, the priests and bishops of Ireland doing up his room in Maynooth in His Satanic Majesty’s racing colours and sticking up pictures of all the horses his jockeys rode…
  —They ought to have stuck up all the women he rode himself, says little Alf.

Comic phrases and vivid speech

The face on him all pockmarks would hold a shower of rain.

—Here you are, says Alf, chucking out the rhino. [handing over money]

—I beg your parsnips, says Alf.

Mister Knowall. Teach your grandmother how to milk ducks.

Gob, he’d have a soft hand under a hen.

—Me? says Alf. Don’t cast your nasturtiums on my character.

—What’s up with you, says I to Lenehan. You look like a fellow that had lost a bob and found a tanner.

—Who made those allegations? says Alf.
—I, says Joe. I’m the alligator.

—Expecting every moment will be his next, says Lenehan.

Credit

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

Related links

• Ulysses, complete text on Planet Gutenberg
• Genius annotated Ulysses: includes Joyce’s schema at bottom of page
• Ulysses guide: section 12
• Sparks notes: section 12

Related reviews

• James Joyce reviews