James Joyce: A Very Short Introduction by Colin MacCabe

Author:Colin MacCabe [MacCabe, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Literary Criticism, General
ISBN: 9780192894472
Google: w7dFEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-01-03T20:32:53+00:00

Joyce ends the quotation there but the succeeding lines are an almost perfect introduction to the next episode:

Publish we this peace

To all our subjects. Set we forward: let

A Roman and a British ensign wave

Friendly together: so through Lud’s-town march.

It is Dublin rather than London (Lud’s town) through which we march in this episode, but the episode is bookended by Fr Conmee at the beginning and a viceregal cavalcade at the end representing the powers of Rome and Britain which hold Dublin in their tyrannical grip. In between these two vignettes there are a further seventeen short episodes. Bloom features in one and Stephen in two but we also encounter a host of Dubliners both familiar, such as Lenehan, and unfamiliar, such as Paddy Dignam’s son. At first glance the episode might read as the apogee of Joyce’s naturalistic depiction of Dublin with which we have been familiar since Dubliners but each vignette is interrupted by sentences from other vignettes that are not integrated into the host narrative. These interruptions emphasize that we are dealing with a set of synchronous events, but they also draw attention to the different perspectives that make up the chapter. This is cubist naturalism.

The multiplication of perspectives emphasizes the limitations of naturalism but the episodes themselves exhibit Joyce’s extraordinary mastery of what has been his chosen form since his first stories in Dubliners. The chapter also weaves a multitude of existing narrative threads into a more complex cloth. Paddy Dignam is one such thread. It is Dignam’s funeral that pervades Bloom’s thoughts in the morning and it is Bloom’s efforts to help his widow which will bring him both to Barney Kiernan’s pub and a violent altercation with the Citizen and to Sandymount Strand and his sexual encounter with Gerty McDowell. Dignam’s wife does not appear as a character in the novel but the penultimate episode of The Wandering Rocks introduces us to Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam as he runs an errand for his mother. He is pleased to get out of the house but his enjoyment of Dublin’s streets is marred by his collar stud: ‘His collar sprang up again and he tugged it down. The blooming stud was too small for the buttonhole of the shirt, blooming end to it’ (323). The final sentences skirt sentimentality while evoking real pathos:

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 is in purgatory now because he went to confession to father Conroy on Saturday night. (324)

The chapter marks Joyce’s envoi to the naturalist method and it also is his farewell to the most striking creation of that method: Stephen Dedalus. Stephen will continue to be a major character in the final chapters in Ulysses and we will observe his actions and hear his words. However, the

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