The Dædalus family and their neighbourhood—their pawn-brokers, shopkeepers, spiritual advisers; the people they despised, those they envied, the Viceroy of Ireland, now come in for consideration. Mr. Dædalus is a sweet-tempered, mealy-mouthed man given to strong drink and high-grade vagrancy who calls his daughters “an insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother died.” Their appearances and emotional reactions, and their contacts with Stephen and Bloom who are passing the time till they shall begin the orgy which is the high-water mark of the book, are instructive to the student of behaviouristic psychology.
Readers of Dostoievsky rarely fail to note the fact that occurrences of a few hours required hundreds of pages to narrate. The element of time seems to have been eliminated. It is the same in “Ulysses.” This enormous volume of seven hundred and thirty-two pages is taken up with thoughts of two men during twelve hours of sobriety and six of drunkenness. I do not know the population of Dublin, but whatever it may be, a vast number of these people come into the ken of Dædalus and Bloom during those hours, and into the readers'; for it is through their eyes and their ears that we see and hear what transpires and is said. And so the trusting reader accompanies one or both of them to the beach, and observes them in revery and in repose; or to a café concert, and observes them in ructions and in ruminations. A countryman of Mr. Joyce, Edmund Burke, said “custom reconciles us to everything,” and after we have accompanied these earthly twins, Stephen and Leopold, thus far, we do not baulk at the lying-in hospital or even the red light district, though others more sensitive and less tolerant than myself would surely wish they had deserted the “bark-waggons” when the occupants were invited into the brothel.
The book in reality is a moving picture with picturesque legends, many profane and more vulgar. For a brief time Mr. Joyce was associated with the “movies,” and the form in which “Ulysses” was cast may have been suggested by experiences with the Volta Theatre, as his cinematograph enterprise was called.
Mr. Joyce learned from St. Thomas Aquinas what Socrates learned from his mother: how to bring thoughts into the world; and from his boyhood he had a tenderness for rhythm. It crops out frequently in “Ulysses.”
“In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept, warrior and princes of high renown. A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gunnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the mixed coarse fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the east the lofty trees wave in different directions their first class foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which that region is thoroughly well supplied. Lovely maidens sit in close proximity to the roots of the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs while they play with all kinds of lovely objects as for example golden ingots, silvery fishes, crans of herrings, drafts of eels, codlings, creels of fingerlings, purple seagems and playful insects. And heroes voyage from afar to woo them, from Eblana to Slievemargy, the peerless princes of unfettered Munster and of Connacht the just and of smooth sleek Leinster and of Cruachan's land and of Armagh the splendid and of the noble district of Boyle, princes, the sons of kings.”
At other times he seems to echo the sonorous phrasing of some forgotten master: Pater or Rabelais, or to paraphrase William Morris or Walt Whitman, or to pilfer from the Reverend William Sunday.
“The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed red-haired freely freckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced, sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble.”
The chapter from which these quotations are taken, when the friends turn into Barney Kiernan's to slake their thirst, shows Mr. Joyce with loosed tongue—the voluble, witty, philosophic Celt, with an extraordinary faculty of words. If an expert stenographer had taken down the ejaculations as they spurted from the mouth of Tom and Jerry, and the deliberations of Alf and Joe, and the other characters of impulsive energy and vivid desire, then accurately transcribed them, interpolating “says” frequently, they would read like this chapter.
Conspicuous amongst Mr. Joyce's possessions is a gift for facile emotional utterance. The reader feels himself affected by his impulses and swept along by his eloquence. He is scathingly sarcastic about Irish cultural and political aspirations; loathsomely lewd about their morals and habits; merciless in his revelations of their temperamental possessions and infirmities; and arbitrary and unyielding in his belief that their degeneration is beyond redemption. Like the buckets on an endless chain of a dredger, the vials of his wrath are poured time after time upon England and the British Empire “on which the sun never rises,” but they are never emptied. Finally he embodies his sentiment in paraphrase of the Creed.
“They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.”