He recounts his country's former days of fame and fortune, but he doesn't foresee any of the happenings of the past three years.
“Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world! And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquand de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis, Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish hobbies, with King Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for the right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths? And the beds of the Barrow and Shannon they won't deepen with millions of acres of marsh and bog to make us all die of consumption.”
Nowhere is his note-book more evident than in this chapter. Krafft-Ebing, a noted Viennese psychiatrist, said a certain disease was due to civilisation and syphilisation. Mr. Joyce made note of it and uses it. The Slocum steamboat disaster in New York, which touched all American hearts twenty years ago; the prurient details of a scandal in “loop” circles of Chicago; a lynching in the South are referred to as casually by Lenehan, Wyse et al while consuming their two pints, as if they were family matters.
That the author has succeeded in cutting and holding up to view a slice of life in this chapter and in the succeeding one—Bloom amongst the Nurse-girls—it would be idle to deny. That it is sordid and repulsive need scarcely be said. It has this in common with the writings of all the naturalists.
The author's familiarity with the Dadaists is best seen in his chapter on the visit to the Lying-in Hospital. Some of it is done in the pseudostyle of the English and Norse Saga; some in the method adopted by d'Annunzio in his composition of “Nocturne.” He wrote thousands and thousands of words on small pieces of paper, then threw them into a basket, and shuffled them thoroughly. With a blank sheet before him and a dripping mucilage brush in one hand, he proceeded to paste them one after another on the sheet. A sample of the result is:
“Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction.”
Tired of this, he paraphrases the Holy Writ.
“And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came against the place as they stood a young learning knight yclept Dixon. And the traveller Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they had had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this learning knight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. And he said now that he should go into that castle for to make merry with them that were there.”
When this palls, he apes a satirist like Rabelais, or a mystic like Bunyan. Weary of this, he turns to a treatise on embryology and a volume of obstetrics and strains them through his mind. One day some serious person, a disciple or a benighted admirer, such as M. Valery Larbaud, will go through “Ulysses” to find references to toxicology, Mosaic law, the Kamustra, eugenics, etc., as such persons and scholars have gone through Shakespeare. Until it is done no one will believe the number of subjects he touches is marvellous, and sometimes even the way he does it. For instance this on birth control:
“Murmur, Sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent now glorify their Maker, the one limbo gloom, the other in purge fire. But, Gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life.”