Tuesday, 24 November 2015, Pages 526 - 534, Oxen of the Sun, Episode 14

We stopped at "... once more to the mercy as well as to the bounty of the Supreme Being." (Penguin 534.2), (Gabler 14.879)

Last week we had read about Buck Mulligan and Alec Bannon joining the bash at the Holles street maternity hospital. Mulligan had just produced a specially printed card proclaiming himself as Fertilizer and Incubator, and had announced his resolve to purchase the freehold of Lambay island to pursue his obligation in these roles.  This week we read that he proposes to set up there a fertilising farm to be named Omphalos (center of the world) and to offer his services to the poorest kitchenwench as well as to the opulent lady of fashion. Here Joyce is taking on the controversial topic of eugenics of which a chair had been established in the early 1900s at the London university (See Gifford, 14.684-85). Mulligan's description of the project entertains his audience, except for Mr. Dixon, who thinks that it is a useless exercise like carrying coal to Newcastle (at that time coal used to be shipped from Newcastle to other parts of England). Mulligan's attention now turns to the stranger among them, asking him - ironically - whether he (the stranger) was in need of any professional assistance that they could give. As the stranger, who in fact is none other than our Bloom, is answering quite seriously that he had come to see about a lady, Mr. Dixon takes his chance to poke fun at Mulligan, pointing to his incipient ventripotence (big-belly) and using bombastic medical terms. Mulligan's reply gives rise to another storm of mirth.

Next it is Alec Bannon's turn. Written in the style of the Irish novelist, Lawrence Sterne (1713-68), this paragraph (starting with 'Here the listener who was none other than the Scotch student,...'), describes how Bannon accepts a cup and starts talking in flowery language about his meeting a girl (Milly) and her beauty, ending with his thanks to God, the author of his days! (A sigh of affection gave eloquence to these words and, having replaced the locket in his bosom, he wiped his eye and sighed again.) What follows is another play of words with double meanings. Does Bannon really feel that he should have taken his cloak along or something else, does the Marchand de capotes he refers to mean a cloak merchant or a merchant of condoms?  (After all this episode is mainly about sterility and fertility.) Lynch comes in with his comments (One umbrella, were it no bigger than a fairy mushroom, is worth ten such stopgaps), with what his girl, Kitty would do/say.  Note that umbrella is a slang for diaphragm!

(Statue of Oliver Goldsmith in front of the Trinity college, Dublin)

With this kind of bantering going on, the style changes again to that of the 18th century Anglo-Irish novelist, Oliver Goldsmith, the author of The Vicar of Wakefield. A bell rings. Nurse Callan enters and speaks in low tone to Mr. Dixon. The room, which was quiet when the nurse was there, breaks out again in ribaldry, once she leaves. Costello, one of the assembled, very drunk, starts commenting about nurses and doctors. He is joined by Lynch and Mulligan (the young blood in the primrose vest), who again imitates in a female voice, how a nurse would react to a doctor's advances. (Bless me, I'm all of a wobbly wobbly....) Dixon rebukes them, and leaves the room to go and attend to Mrs. Purefoy, who has just given birth.

Attention and style change again: Attention to the musings of Bloom, style to that of another Anglo-Irish essayist, political theorist, Edmund Burke. Bloom reflects about the raucous behaviour of the young men around him. He had borne some impudent mocks he has been subjected to since his arrival as being the result of their age. Even then he cannot excuse Costello's remarks about the nurse. (To those who create themselves wits at the cost of feminine delicacy... to them he would concede neither to bear the name nor to merit the tradition of a proper breeding...) Whatever that be, he is glad to hear from Nurse Callan that the ordeal of Mrs Purefoy, whose status he had to come to enquire about, is finally over.

Tuesday, 17 November 2015, Pages 518 - 526, Oxen of the Sun, Episode 14

We stopped reading at "... our ascendancy party." (Penguin 526.16), (Gabler 14.864)

(Map of Dublin showing Ely Pl, Baggot ct, Merrion Square & Holles St with the maternity hospital)

Last week we were in the middle of the paragraph written in the style of Samuel Pepys, the diarist. (As Fritz Senn explained, this episode is in two time frames simultaneously: one referring to the time of the day (it is 10 pm) and the other to the time frame of the history of literature.) There was a big thunder with rain following. A swash of water was flowing in Ely place, Baggot street, Duke's lawn, thence through Merrion green up to Holles street that was all bonedry before. 

Buck Mulligan, who had been attending a party at Mr. Moore's (Penguin p. 275), had just left the party when he met the smartly dressed Alec. Bannon, who had come from Mullingar, where he had met Bloom's daughter, Milly. Mulligan knows Bannon as his (Mulligan's) brother was staying with the Bannons (Penguin p. 26). Both Mulligan and Bannon head to the maternity hospital.

In the hospital, Leop. Bloom and a covey of wags (group of young men) such as Dixon, Stephen, Punch Costello, Lenehan, Madden, Lynch are assembled. Bloom has been dreaming (thinking?) not only of Molly with red slippers on in a pair of Turkey trunks but also of Mrs Purefoy in labour and of her family ('Tis her ninth chick to live.... Her hub fifty odd and a methodist....)

With the change in style imitating that of Daniel Defoe, the topic changes too to describing the behavior/character of Lenehan, a kind of sport gentleman (i.e., interested in horse races), one who often had many stories to tell. Lenehan says that the has made sure that Mr. Deasy's letter (which Stephen had brought to Mr Russell, Penguin p. 246) on the foot and mouth disease is in that night's gazette. On hearing that the cows are to be butchered, Bloom, who had once worked for Mr Joseph Cuffe, a cattle, corn and wool salesman, questions whether the cows indeed have the foot and mouth disease.

What follows is a play on the word 'bull'. In the style of Jonathan Swift, the assembly talks in turn of a bull that's Irish (a statement that is apparently logical but which in fact is nonsense),  of an Irish bull in an English chinashop (a proverb meaning clumsiness) and of the papal bull that was sent to the island by farmer Nicholas (aka Pope Adrian IV, granting the overlordship of Ireland to Henry II - here referred to as lord Harry - of England). The word 'bull' becomes just an excuse to discuss Irish history at length.

It is at this time that Mulligan appears with Bannon. Mulligan comes in again as a harbinger of fun, of lightheartedness. He hands around a set of pasteboard cards which he had got printed that day: Mr Malachi Mulligan, Fertilizer and Incubator, Lambay Island. In flamboyant language - in fact in the style of two journalists, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, who wrote essays for the Tatler and the Spectator - Mulligan explains how it grieved him plaguily, to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its dearest pledges, and how to curb this inconvenient , he had resolved to purchase .. the freehold of Lambay island from ... Lord Talbot de Malahide, a Tory gentleman of note much in favor with our ascendancy party.

Tuesday, 10 November 2015, Pages 512 - 518, Oxen of the Sun, episode 14

We read as far as "...  womenfolk skipping off with kirtles catched up soon as the pour came."   (Penguin 518.29), (Gabler 14.490)

We are still witnesses to the drinking bash of a group of young people in a room of the maternity hospital in Holles Street. Mr. Bloom is also present. The young ones are drunk. An young nurse has come in and asked them to be quiet, as after all it is a hospital. 

Stephen is extremely drunk. In what is reminiscent of the earlier episode in the library, Stephen is being very voluble. He is making liberally allusions not only to the old testament (for example: ... even from Horeb and from Nebo and from Pisgah and from the Horns of Hatten, Penguin 514.16) but he is also referring to other well known (and also not so well known) works of poets (for instance, Master John Fletcher and Master Francis Beaumont, Penguin 513.13) , writers, philosophers (for instance, to Thus spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche, Penguin 513.31) etc. Naturally Shakespeare makes an appearance in the references to the secondbest bed, to Hamlet and his father. 

What does Stephen want to achieve with his 'lecture'? Can one, who is so very drunk, talk so incessantly and for so long? Even if he can and does have the knack to go off on topics that are obviously of little interest to the people around him, could we, the readers, feel comfortable with what we read on these pages? Things start to fall into place if one can accept that what we are confronted with here is really memories (Special thanks to Ashraf Noor for this explanation.) Memories of the book, memories of mankind's past, memories of history.  What we read here are not just examples of Stephen's scholarship.  Rather what we are offered here are snippets from Joyce's  repertoire. Stephen, after all, turns out to be a mere peg on which Joyce hangs his ideas. 

Things start to get a bit calmer as we move from the above Elizabethan style of writing to John Bunyan's style in Pilgrim's Progress.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilgrim%27s_Progress#/media/File:Christian_in_Pilgrim%27s_Progress.jpg)

Stephen's oratory is interrupted by Punch Costello. As he recites George Burleigh's parody of the nursery rhyme, 'The house that Jack built', thunder is heard from outside. Just like Joyce in real life, Stephen too is scared of thunder. (... the braggart boaster - i.e-. Stephen - cried that an old Nobodaddy - i.e., god - was in his cups... But the was only to dye his desperation... ) Bloom tries to calm him down, explaining in his typical manner the cause of thunder as a natural phenomenon! But Bloom's words do not succeed in quietening  Stephen's fear. .. he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could bot be words be done away (Penguin 516.19)

As storm rages outside the hospital, the style of the episode changes yet again, this time to that of Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist. And the happenings of the day, Thursday sixteenth June are summarized. 

Tuesday, 3 November 2015, Pages 507 - 512, Oxen of the Sun, episode 14

We read to, "In Horne's house rest should reign" (Gabler 14.333) (Penguin p. 512).

This is one of the densest parts of the chapter (if not of the whole book). It is worth pulling through, though (and it will become easier as we go on), if only to see how "Oxen of the Sun" works in its stylistic imitations of various periods. The imitations of styles can be seen as a translation of sorts: everything is translated into an earlier period. Ulysses has indeed been described as the book that translates itself.

With "Now let us speak" (in the style of Sir Thomas Malory of the Middle English period) we get a roundup of who is present (14.187): the company consists of Dixon, Lynch, and Madden, who are medical students, Lenehan, Crotthers, Punch Costello, and Stephen. Mulligan is expected.

The young men are discussing what should be done when a choice has to be made in childbirth between the life of the mother and the life of the baby. Views about this conflict, of course (the church taking the stance that the child should be saved, the law refraining from taking any position at all). The tenor among the students seems to be that the mother should be saved. Stephen makes a few ironic comments and states the Catholic view against contraception as a sinful abuse of our true nature. Bawdy talk and laughter follow (they all make jokes about masturbation, genitals etc.). When Bloom is appealed to for an opinion on whether the child or the mother should be saved, his reaction is:

laying hand to jaw, he said dissembling, as his wont was, that as it was informed him, who had ever loved the art of physic as might a layman, and agreeing also with his experience of so seldomseen an accident it was good for that mother Church belike at one blow had birth and death pence and in such sort deliverly he scaped their questions. (14.254)

In other words, he takes refuge in a joke about the church seeming alright as it would get the financial advantage of both, a birth and a death -- thereby, "as his wont was" (as he usually did) "dissembling" and "escaping", true to type for the Odysseus figure he is.

Stephen launches into quite a monologue, most of it probably remaining unclear to most people. To try to snatch a few things about which he seems to be speaking, we may note that: he comments on the Church's condemnation of abortion, brings in the figures of the two medieval philosophers Averroes and Moses Maimonides, claims that the foetus is endowed with a soul after two months (with which we have moved into the second month of the embryo's development), all the while putting in quotations from a variety of sources. He also imitates a sermon, talks about Eve (who brought sin into the world) and of the Virgin Mary (who brought us the redeemer of all the sins), he blasphemes, shows off his money and lies about where he got it from (i.e. being paid for a poem he wrote), he quotes Mulligan (which he does surprisingly often, considering his dislike of him) and goes into more, rather confusing talk. Fritz Senn points out (also by way of general comfort) that he too doesn't know what Stephen is trying to convey (wondering also if he may simply be showing off or if he is just rambling). We are reminded here of the Stephen of chapter 9 (the library chapter) where his listeners probably couldn't follow his argument either. Stephen does not really seem to care or consider who his audience. In contrast to him stands Bloom, who is always aware of who he's talking to and trying to explain, although nobody ever listens.

Bloom's thoughts go to Mrs Purefoy, who is suffering because of the difficult birth, as well as to the memory of his son Rudy, who died only eleven days old. He observes Stephen and is sorry to see him live a wasteful life of debauchery (he seems to feel rather fatherly toward Stephen). Despite the obscurity of the language, some of Bloom's sorrow for his dead son does come through.

Finally, Punch Costello then strikes up a bawdy song, but Nurse Quigley comes to the door and asks for restraint. The other join drunkenly in the rebuke of Costello, and we end our reading on their mock-curses of him:

thou chuff, thou puny, thou got in peasestraw, thou losel, thou chitterling, thou spawn of a rebel, thou dykedropt, thou abortion thou, to shut up his drunken drool out of that like a curse of God ape. (14.327)