We stopped after reading "...
in articulo mortis per diminutionem capitis." Penguin (394.17), Gabler (12.478)
On these pages, Joyce intercepts ordinary conversations with snippets of Homeric language (See, for example:
And lo, as they quaffed their cup of joy, ... Penguin 385. 18 ff;
The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered medical evidence.... Penguin 394. 4 ff)) and flights of fancy such as the wonderfully funny verbal excursion on the practice of seance (Penguin 389.1 ff). He balances Alf Bergan's and Joe Hynes's jokes with Bloom's serious discourses a
bout phenomenon and science and this phenomenon and the other phenomenon. In short, as Fritz Senn says, Joyce's technique here is gigantic; everything is elaborated, exaggerated.
In Barney Kiernan's pub, Joe Hynes and our anonymous narrator are being served by Terry. Hynes pays for the pints with a sovereign, that he says was given to him by Bloom, referred to here as the
prudent member. (Bloom was a Freemason, and the Masonic order forbids, among other things, imprudent conversation.) The citizen is busy reading the birth, marriage and death notices in the Freeman's Journal
(the old woman of Prince's street). His dog,
old Garryowen, bears its teeth, growling now and then, and gets kicked in its ribs as a reward. Bob Doran (a character we know from the story,
The Boarding House, in Dubliners) is sitting in a corner in a stupor,
snoring drunk, blind to the world.
This group of pub-goers is joined soon by little Alf Bergan,
a godlike messenger who comes
swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth. Alf is doubling up with laughter, remembering how Mr. Breen was upset because of the card - where it was written u.p.: up - he had received that morning. (It is obvious that Alf Bergan was the author of that card.) That he is a bluffer becomes clear to all those assembled there, when he says that he had just seen Willy Murray with Paddy Dignam in Capel Street. (Willy Murray was the name of one of uncles of Joyce; Gifford 12.213.) Joe tells Alf that he saw perhaps
his (Dignam's)
ghost. It is this word,
ghost, that provides Joyce the golden opportunity of making a parody of the beliefs of the
Theosophical Society, of which prominent Dubliners such as Yeats were members. He embellishes his description of how a seance could look like by using a lot of modified Sanskrit words such as
pralaya, (the original Sanskrit word has no elongated 'a's and means deluge that ends the world)
, jivic (jiva - with an elongated 'i' - in Sanskrit means breath, life)
, atmic (the Sanskrit word atma - in which the first 'a' is elongated - means soul). He even uses the symbol utilized in the Roman script to indicate the elongated 'a' of Sanskrit in parodying language, creating words such as tālāfānā, ālāvātār, etc! Read this paragraph (page 389 of the Penguin edition) loudly to enjoy what Joyce has created here!
As Alf Bergan is sharing with his comrades some letters from his office, Bloom who has been walking up and down outside the pub, enters. The growling dog is silenced by the citizen. Otherwise, none pays any attention to Bloom's entrance, with Joe starting to read one of the letters produced by Bergan. It was an application for the job of a hangman. When finally Joe asks Bloom, '
What will you have?', Bloom dithers a long time saying
he wouldn't and he couldn't etc, settling at the end for a cigar. (This is yet another example of how Bloom is an outsider among the Dubliners.)
The topic moves back to capital punishment, to hanging. Bloom starts talking of
the whys and the wherefore and all the codology of the business, its deterrent effect and so forth and so on. Meanwhile the citizen's dog is smelling him all the time leading to the narrator's comment, '
I'm told those jewies does have a sort of a queer odor coming off them for dogs...'. The word '
deterrent' triggers off Alf Bergan's comment, '
There's one thing it hasn't a deterrent effect on... The poor bugger's tool that's being hanged...'. Whereas Joe tries to make a commonplace comment, saying, '
Ruling passion strong in death', Bloom starts explaining what happens scientifically. Again our Bloom stands out as an outsider.
