Ulysses and Us by Declan Kiberd

Author:Declan Kiberd [Declan Kiberd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571258321
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

Notes – 12. Drinking

1 vocabulary be revealed: C. P. Curran, James Joyce Remembered, 70

2 national parallelism: Séan de Fréine, The Great Silence, Dublin, 1965, 108

3 admirer of Bloom: Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, 169

4 conscience of his race: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane, London, 1992, 276

13.

Ogling

Two hours are lost between the previous episode and ‘Nausikaa’, a huge span in a book whose earlier sections minutely documented every passing moment. During this interval Bloom and Boylan were visiting lonely women – Bloom to comfort Mrs Dignam, Boylan to take his pleasure with Mrs Bloom. At the start of the next episode, Bloom will visit another woman, Mrs Purefoy, at the lying-in hospital.

In the Odyssey the encounter between the grizzled old traveller and the king’s beautiful daughter is narrated with the same delicacy and tact shown by the couple for one another. Here Bloom’s encounter on Sandymount Strand with Gerty MacDowell is free of all speech, yet he muses afterward that it was ‘a kind of language between us’ (435). If Homer’s reader/listener is expected to supply the unspoken feeling, the two interior monologues do so here – Gerty’s in what Joyce called ‘a namby-pamby jamsy marmalady drawersy style’, Bloom’s in a more blunt, matter-of-fact idiom. The episode develops the notion of a male/female duet suggested in ‘Sirens’, even down to verbal echoes of the formula (‘Big he and little she’, 487; ‘Her high notes and her low notes’, 488), with both voices blending for a time in mid-episode.

Gerty opens the episode, and with her comes a shift from the macho-heroic language of ‘Cyclops’ to a dainty exercise in the feminine mode. Joyce sardonically contrasts the masculine tone of Irish Revival writing and the increasingly feminine character of popular culture, which such writing sought to challenge. This is a difficult feat in a land of whose people Synge could mischievously comment that ‘every healthy mind is more interested in Titbits than in Idylls of the King’. But in some aspects at least, Gerty’s monologue is revivalist – in its love of aristocratic values (‘Had kind fate but willed her to be born a gentlewoman’, 453) and in its insistence on the racial quality of her beauty (‘as fair a specimen of win some Irish girlhood as one could wish to see’ with eyes of ‘the bluest Irish blue’, 452–3). She follows old Gaelic superstitions (cutting her hair for luck in love on the appearance of a new moon), as well as the latest advice offered to young ladies in fashion magazines, the modern form of folklore.

T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Ernest Hemingway, as well as many other modernist males, saw their art as a counter-move to the feminine–commercial code of popular magazines. They called for an end to the idea of ‘poetry for ladies’ and a return to what they would consider the harsh, surgical modes of modern life. Joyce’s mockery of Gerty’s anxiety to convert herself into

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