“A procession of whitesmocked men marched slowly towards him along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like that priest they are this morning: we have sinned, we have suffered. He read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats: H. E. L. Y. S. Wisdom Hely's. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. Our staple food. Three bob a day, walking along the gutters, street after street. Just keep skin and bone together, bread and skilly. They are not Boyl: no: M'Glade's men. Doesn't bring in any business either. I suggested to him about a transparent show cart with two smart girls sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blotting paper. I bet that would have caught on. Smart girls writing something catch the eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she's writing. Get twenty of them round you if you stare at nothing. Have a finger in the pie. Women too. Curiosity. Pillar of salt. Wouldn't have it of course because he didn't think of it himself first. Or the inkbottle I suggested with a false stain of black celluloid. His ideas for ads like Plumtree's potted under the obituaries, cold meat department. You can't like 'em. What? Our envelops. Hello! Jones, where are you going? Can't stop, Robinson, I am hastening to purchase the only reliable inkeraser Kansell, sold by Hely's Ltd., 85 Dame Street. Well out of that ruck I am. Devil of a job it was collecting accounts of those convents. Tranquilla convent. That was a nice nun there, really sweet face. Wimple suited her small head. Sister? Sister? I am sure she was crossed in love by her eyes. Very hard to bargain with that sort of a woman. I disturbed her at her devotions that morning. But glad to communicate with the outside world. Our great day, she said, Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Sweet name too: caramel. She knew, I think she knew by the way she. If she had married she would have changed. I suppose they really were short of money. Fried everything in the best butter all the same. No lard for them. My heart's broke eating dripping. They like buttering themselves in and out. Molly tasting it, her veil up. Sister? Pat Claffey, the pawn-broker's daughter. It was a nun they say invented barbed wire.”
Man may not think like this, but it is up to the psychologist to prove it. So far as I know he does. Lunatics do, in manic “flights”; and flights of ideas are but accentuations of normal mental activity.
The following is a specimen of what psychologists call “flight of ideas.” To the uninitiated reader it means nothing. To the initiated it is like the writing on the wall.
“Bloom. Flood of warm jimjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow, invading. Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o'er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joy-gush, tupthrop. Now! Language of love.”
In the next section Stephen holds forth on ideals and literature and gives the world that which Mr. Joyce gave his fellow students in Dublin to satiety, viz. his views of Shakespeare, and particularly his conception of Hamlet. “Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance,” one of his cronies remarked. Even in those days Mr. Joyce's ideas of grandeur suggested to a student of psychiatry who heard him talk that he had the mental disease with which that symptom is most constantly associated, and to another of his auditors that he had an idée fixe, and that “the moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny, of retribution.” They never hurt Mr. Joyce—such views as these. The armour of his amour propre has never been pierced; the belief in his destiny has never wavered. The meeting in the National Library twenty years ago gives him opportunity to display philosophic erudition, dialectic skill, and artistic feeling in his talk with the young men and their elders. It would be interesting to know from any of them, or from Mr. T. S. Eliot, if the following is the sort of grist that is brought to the free-verse miller, and can poetry be made from it.
“Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. Isis Unveiled. Their Pali book we tried to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma. The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship, ringroundabout him. Louis H. Victory. T. Caulfield Irwin. Lotus ladies tend them i' the eyes, their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god he thrones, Buddh under plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. He souls, she souls, shoals of souls. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled, whirling, they bewail.”
In contrast with this take the following description of the drowned man in Dublin Bay as a specimen of masterly realism:
“Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin Bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now. Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine.... Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust.... Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snorting to the sun.”
There are so many “specimens” of writing in the volume that it is quite impossible to give examples of them. Frankness compels me to state that he goes out of his way to scoff at God and to besmirch convention, but that's to show he is not afraid, like the man who defied God to kill him at 9.48 p.m.
“The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call bio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.”