Clew-Cleaving in the Ulysses-Labyrinth

(Jian Lotfi, 16 December 2012)

     "The division of man into seven categories, or seven numbers, explains thousands of things which otherwise cannot be understood. This division gives the first conception of relativity as applied to man. Things may be one thing or another thing according to the kind of man from whose point of view, or in relation to whom, they are taken. 

     "In accordance with this, all the inner and all the outer manifestations of man, all that belongs to man, and all that is created by him, is also divided into seven categories. 

     "It can now be said that there exists a knowledge number one, based upon imitation or upon instincts, or learned by heart, crammed or drilled into a man. Number one, if he is man number one in the full sense of the term, learns everything like a parrot or a monkey. 

     "The knowledge of man number two is merely the knowledge of what he likes; what he does not like he does not know. Always and in everything he wants something pleasant. Or, if he is a sick man, he will, on the contrary, know only what he dislikes, what repels him and what evokes in him fear, horror, and loathing. 

     "The knowledge of man number three is knowledge based upon subjectively logical thinking, upon words, upon literal understanding. It is the knowledge of bookworms, of scholastics. Men number three, for example, have counted how many times each letter of the Arabic alphabet is repeated in the Koran of Mohammed, and upon this have based a whole system of interpretation of the Koran..." (Ouspensky 72)

     "This topic led Master Wang to a discussion of the trouble with modern education: the range of thinking activity of those who receive education becomes narrower and narrower the more schooling they have. In primary and middle school, children all learn some astronomy, geography, history, math, physics, chemistry, fine arts, music, zoology, botany, biology, and so on. When they get to high school, though, they are divided into departments of humanities and sciences, reducing their perspective, making it directional and limited. In college, furthermore, there is specialization, where one concentrates on one particular field of knowledge. When it comes to reading for the master's and doctorate degrees, study becomes even more highly specialized, focusing on one branch or one point. The structure of knowledge and the flow of thought are then like a pyramid, becoming smaller in compass the higher up you go.

     "Taoist development of human thought patterns is precisely the opposite. As one ascends,... with each leap the individual's thinking activity becomes broader, vaster, and deeper in both time and space." (Kaiguo 281)

     With that in mind...

     H.G. Wells wrote, in review of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that "Mr. Joyce has a cloacal obsession. He would bring back into the general picture of life aspects which modern drainage and modern decorum have taken out of ordinary discourse and conversation" (Gifford 137). Well -- Wells was right, but he misunderstood the meaning of both his own words and of Joyce's: the world thanks Joyce for his cloacal obsession, which gave depth to life-in-words by putting all of life into it. Wells seems not to have known that food grows in shit, that corpses feed life; sewered cities and sterilized discourse are a denial of reality, which is rich enough in its beauty to embrace all things, distinguishing neither high nor low.

      And it is that quality in particular, that thread in Ulysses, which I wish to follow here: the fullness and richness of life, which is made up of complementary opposites, and which turns and flows and grows by their endless interaction. But that is a rather long and deep-woven weft to pick out and follow the winding of. More specifically, then, I wish to follow a theme which appears throughout Ulysses, in both grand and simple scale, usually in the background and indirectly: what I will call the circle of life. It will prove to be a wide and much-compassing circle, truer in sense than in name.

     Whereas in the previous papers I have imposed an order on my words, working finely into a forethought frame such examples and excerpts as fill it out, here they will follow a more fluid course, their only frame the unfolding of Ulysses as devised by Joyce, and that which writing itself imposes; but out of these the music and its themes will arise on their own, whose harmony will grow clearer in time.

     "The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh" (III, 37)(1). Though later -- I cannot resist some forethought and frame-making -- it will become apparent that the circle-of-life theme in Ulysses begins even in the first pages, here, in "Proteus," we might say it has its clearest introduction. And what better image is there for beginnings than the navelcord(2)? What better episode to begin this with than "Proteus"?

     In "Proteus," gestating and germinating proto-artist Stephen Dedalus is walking the boundary between earth and sea, swimming in a sea of thought; Proteus is the very image of shape-shifting, of the cycling of forms through time. It is here, amid the flow of form and being, that Stephen sees two women(3) and thinks of that bond of flesh which unites creation with creatrix, all creation to all that was created before, a changeless changing continuity through time and space.

     Throughout the episode this theme recurs ever and again in some way or other, if always less strongly than shown above; but, most notably, just as it begins with birth, it ends with death, linking the two, as one cycle, in a cycle: "God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead" (III, 477). Of course, Stephen colors this "'variant of the kabalistic axiom of metempsychosis'"(Gilbert 65) with characteristic somberness, but the essence, again, is that, in the "protean ebb and flow of living matter" (ibid.), the continuity of being never ends: spirit becomes flesh becomes other flesh becomes death becomes dust becomes food. All things are all things, ends are beginnings, beginnings ends.

     As if by metempsychosis(4), this thought, this theme, next incarnates in the mind of Ulysses's other main character, Leopold Bloom, whom we first meet in "Calypso":

He bent down to regard a lean file of spearmint growing by the wall. Make a summerhouse here. Scarlet runners. Virginia creepers. Want to manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur. All soil like that without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this that is? The hens in the next garden: their droppings are very good top dressing. Best of all though are the cattle, especially when they are fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Best thing to clean ladies' kid gloves. Dirty cleans. Ashes too. (IV, 475)

Bloom has just eaten breakfast (feeding his life with "a urinous offal," the kidney of a dead animal(5)) and, before heading out to attend Paddy Dignam's funeral, walks to the outhouse to make shit -- the meeting of life and death and a manifestation of their cycling, amid their cycling. Along the way, he considers a garden of ornamental and sustentative growth, then reflects that, without the addition of cows' and chickens' dung, the soil would be too sickly and lifeless for that use: no life without death and waste. This point is made further in Bloom's reflection that the lowest filth cleans the most delicate articles, that the burned remains of dead life renew. Interestingly, too, after leaving the outhouse, "coming forth from the gloom into the air," Bloom thinks straightway, "What time is the funeral?" (IV, 539).

     But -- speaking of metempsychosis -- a little earlier, Bloom is in the bedroom with his wife Molly, who is eating her breakfast. She has found the word in a book and, missaying it, asks him what it means. "Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It's Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls" (IV, 341). He continues a little later: "Some people believe... that we go on living in another body after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That we all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or some other planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their past lives" (IV, 362). And, " Metempsychosis... is what the ancient Greeks called it. They used to believe you could be changed into an animal or tree, for instance" (375). This is a rather explicit reference to the circle of life -- that is, to one essence appearing again and again, outwardly different, inwardly the same, across many times and in many shapes. Not without reason do we read, immediately after Bloom's explanation, that the "sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea" (IV, 366) -- winding, spiraling, cur(d)ling. But -- why metempsychosis? And at breakfast, no less?

     Searching for a better way to explain it to Molly, Bloom thinks, "An example would be better. An example?" (IV, 367) and then in the very next line Joyce gives us the image of Bath of the Nymph, right over Molly's head. This is why metempsychosis: one of the most significant manifestations of the circle-of-life thread in Ulysses is the sub-thread -- the constituent filament, if you like -- of the persistence and reincarnation of literary characters and dramas through time.

     Ulysses is, and has in it, almost all things, but one of the chief features of its design is its web, mostly subtle, of many and fine-wrought correspondences to Homer's Odyssey. Each chapter mirrors an episode of the Odyssey: Bloom is Odysseus, Stephen Telemachus, Molly Penelope; there is a Hades, a cyclops, a Cerberus; there are cannibals, sirens, and lotus-eaters; a Nausicaa, a Circe, and a Scylla. But Joyce is much deeper than that -- he is not simply cobbling together a new Odyssey from a list of character-correspondences, to show his cleverness off.

     No; the point is, what is the Odyssey? Were the seafaring Greeks not, essentially -- rapists and pirates? Did not Scylla and Charybdis, the cyclopes, Troy -- all these magnificent people and places -- correspond to much smaller, earthier, real things? Of course; but their stories were told, re-told, built up, elevated, refined, and abstracted along the way, transmuted through words into something finer than their first base selves. Odysseus the cunning sailor became something greater, a symbol almost, his adventures archetypal. Is this not also a kind of cycle?

     And Bloom is a Jew -- why? In part, because even the story of the Odyssey's evolution might not be the full tale of its origins. Through the comparative evidence of Sinbad the Sailor and his stories, so like Odysseus and his own, it became clear to many that both of the sailors and their stories probably sprang from one (likely proto-Semitic) proto-story, which itself might go back through unnumbered earlier forms to some real ancient mariner; by a sort of metempsychosis, he appears in Greece, in the Orient, and, "by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to" Dublin, in a Semite, Leopold Bloom. And the living man becomes myth, becomes living man again, again to be made myth, as in "Cyclops," or in the report of Dignam's funeral -- an endless circle of rising and falling, expansion and contraction.

     Again, this is mostly done by implication and indirect indication, but here, in "Calypso," Joyce spells it out: Molly is, in part, a metempsychosised(6) nymph, a Calypso made real, believable in the dimensions of her being and influence; this symbolizes in small what Joyce is doing at large.

     The theme arises again in "Lotus Eaters," as Bloom, tired, narcotized almost, thinks of the weather as he goes for a bath: "Heatwave. Won't last. Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer thaaan them all" (V, 563). This is not an unusually rich or obscure allusion. Simply, we are reminded, here in the context of weather, of the ceaseless changeability of all things in life. It is worth noting, however, that Bloom is heading waterward as he thinks that thought; later, in "Lestrygonians," when the thought arises again, as "It's always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream" (VIII, 94) and "Stream of life" (VIII, 176), Bloom is by water, there the Liffey (thinking also of his happier days and his changed fortunes).

     Having had his bath, Bloom appears next in a carriage being driven to "Hades," to Glasvenin Cemetery. The thread we are following is especially evident in the "Hades" episode; naturally, a graveyard and a scene of fresh death should be instructive toward the end of understanding the circle of life. So rich, in fact, is this chapter in such juxtapositions that, this general evocation of their ubiquity aside, only the most salient examples, fit to this discursive look, will be used.

     As the group of men with Bloom among them is headed to the cemetery, they pass by a child's coffin being borne to the same place. Not long after, amid the scenes and thoughts of death, Martin Cunningham says, "In the midst of life" (VI, 334), leaving us and the other men to supply the rest of the phrase -- "... we are in death." There is no separation between the two: Joyce is saying it quite clearly here.

     A little later, after the service for Dignam, Bloom, "admir[ing] the caretaker's prosperous bulk," -- grown fat and vital on death -- begins to think of the caretaker's life:

Fancy being his wife. Wonder he had the gumption to propose to any girl. Come out and live in the graveyard. Dangle that before her. It might thrill her at first. Courting death... Still they'd kiss all right if properly keyed up. Whores in Turkish graveyards... You might pick up a young widow here. Men like that. Love among the tombstones. Romeo. Spice of pleasure. In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet. Tantalising for the poor dead. Smell of grilled beefsteaks to the starving. Gnawing their vitals. (VI, 746)

     What more striking opposition, what clearer illustration of the circle of life, is there than this: sexual excitement, arousal -- that is, the summoning and movement of the life-creating urge -- drawn from death? It is the sowing of seeds (potential life) in soil (expired life). As Bloom says, "both ends meet" -- the two are one.

     And the point of life and death being two poles of the same thing is emphasized again with Bloom repeating Cunningham's line, only with its objects reversed: "In the midst of death we are in life." Joyce also draws the theme out by showing not only the commingling of creation and destruction in one fluid process, through sexuality, but also through grosser appetite -- eating. So, it is as if corpses are food for the dead, food for the earth, as stimulating to them as the smell of "grilled beefsteaks" is to the living: death feeds life in the end.

     After some more discursive thought in the same vein, Bloom then thinks, "It's the blood sinking in the earth gives new life" (VI, 771). But the theme reaches its climax in this episode after Dignam has been buried, when Bloom is reflecting on the many graves around him and their contents: "How many! All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we" (VI, 960). Walking a little farther along, he hears something, the movement of life:

Rtststr! A rattle of pebbles. Wait. Stop!

He looked down intently into a stone crypt. Some animal. Wait. There he goes.

An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the pebbles. An old stager: greatgrandfather: he knows the ropes. The grey alive crushed itself under the plinth, wriggled itself under it. Good hidingplace for treasure.... Making his rounds.

Tail gone now.

One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. (VI, 970)

     A rat, grown fat and vital -- in fact, referred to as "the grey alive," aliveness personified, -- knowing nothing of sorrow or mourning, being an "old stager," master treasure-hunter, feasts on the ordinary dead meat of a human corpse. And this is the circle of life, the heart of the episode: one man goes under as death, which another eats as life. No end, no beginning, or else both at once.

     It is with another animal, or series of animals, that Joyce picks this theme up again, in "Aeolus." Bloom has just spoken with Nannetti in the Telegraph office, and on the way out stops to watch the typesetters. Seeing them setting the type backwards reminds him of his father reading Hebrew, which in turn makes him think of the Chad Gadya, sung at Passover, which he summarizes in his mind:

And then the lamb and the cat and the dog and the stick and the water and the butcher. And then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well. Justice it means but it's everybody eating everybody else. That's what life is after all. (VII, 210)

While some have interpreted -- and Joyce cannot have been ignorant of this -- the story as being a miniaturized and parabolic retelling of the Jews' many wanderings and captivities, it is also a continuation of the theme we are following here: life feeds on life, one form becomes another through another, which is what the cycle is all about. 

     How right it is, then, that when the theme arises again, it is in the next episode, "Lestrygonians," which features cannibalistic devouring. But there Bloom is in Davy Byrne's pub, having eaten at last, thinking of food and of goddesses: "Nectar imagine it drinking electricity: gods' food. Lovely forms of women sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food" (VIII 929). This refers to Giordano Bruno's Cause, Principle, and Unity; while, in the context of this paper, we can easily infer Bloom's meaning, the proper quotation from Bruno himself makes the implication explicit, while also renewing our appreciation for the subtlety of Joyce's allusion:

Don't you see that what was seed becomes stalk, and what was stalk becomes corn, and what was corn becomes bread -- that out of bread comes chyle, out of chyle blood, out of blood the seed, out of the seed the embryo, and then man, corpse, earth, stone, or something else in succession -- on and on, involving all natural forms?" (Gifford 183)

Earlier than this, though, Joyce continues another thought from "Hades" on the circle of life; more specifically, he expands Bloom's reflection on the numberless dead who once were living. Here, the cyclical nature of the process is more explicitly emphasized:

One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. (VIII, 480)

     Now, we saw earlier that, in a more abstract way, Joyce is illustrating the circle of life throughout Ulysses by "metempsychosis" of literary characters and dramas. Even as the references to life-amid-death so thoroughly pervade "Hades" as to make full reference to them here impractical, so are the examples of characters being de- and re-mythologized throughout the entire book too numerous to be given a full account of. But one example in particular stands out, in "Sirens."

     Lenehan has come to the bar in the Ormond Hotel to cadge drinks and finds Simon Dedalus there; so he begins to tell him the story of his son's rhetorical brilliance, which he had witnessed earlier in the day: "The élite of Erin hung upon his lips. The ponderous pundit, Hugh MacHugh, Dublin's most brilliant scribe and editor and that minstrel boy of the wild wet west who is known by the euphonious appellation of the O'Madden Burke" (XI, 267). We have the Odyssey as an elevation of a more mundane reality (and rebirth of an earlier form), which is brought back down to earth in Ulysses; but Lenehan, who was witness to the simple event itself, has, only a few hours later, begun to make abstractions of its actors, raising and refining them through poetic and inflated speech(7). That is, the cycle never really ends, but is always rising and falling, expanding and contracting.

     In this same episode, Bloom returns to an earlier thought, an aspect of this paper's theme as illustrated in "Hades"; here it is colored by a gloominess which we can attribute to his knowledge that Molly is probably just about to have her affair with Boylan:

Cruel it seems. Let people get fond of each other: lure them on. Then tear asunder. Death. Explos. Knock on the head. Outtohelloutofthat. Human life. Dignam. Ugh, that rat's tail wiggling! Five bob I gave. Corpus paradisum. Corncrake croaker: belly like a poisoned pup. Gone. They sing. Forgotten. I too. (XI, 802)

The idea is that there is union, division; life, death; coming, going: all these as one, with Bloom himself and all those he knows in the center of, and subject to, the cycle.

     And it is a later returning to thought, in "Nausicaa," that next brings us back to the circle-cycle theme. There, Bloom, detumescent, watching Gertie, is borne back in memory to his early days with Molly: "June that was too I wooed. The year returns. History repeats itself. Ye crags and peaks I'm with you once again. Life, love, voyage round your own little world" (XIII, 1092). Joyce, as ever, has put so much into so little here!

     As in "Proteus" and in "Lestrygonians," here in "Nausicaa" the character whose mind we are witnessing is by water as he thinks of the circular flow of life; in fact, this is the very beach where Stephen swam in thought during "Proteus." As in one June Bloom wooed Molly, so in this June Bloom was wooed by Gertie, after her fashion -- "the year returns."

     More than that, in saying quite plainly that "history repeats itself," Joyce is expressing positively what he expressed negatively earlier, in "Nestor"; that is, this is a direct refutation of Deasy's (and, symbolically, the imperialist, patriarchal "establishment's") assertion of a linear, progressive, teleological view of life and history, that "[a]ll human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God" (II, 380). Nor is it insignificant that both "Proteus" and "Nausicaa" occur on the same beach -- with all the implications of that, -- after a main character has had an encounter with a blind or Procrustean antagonist.

     Further, Bloom's thinking "[l]ife, love, voyage round your own little world" not only reflects in small the larger cycle within the Odyssey and Ulysses, taken in themselves and as a whole -- the hero's out-going, wandering, the rise and fall of his fortunes and passions, ending in his homecoming, -- but also alludes to something Stephen said in "Scylla and Charybdis," illustrative of the same theme, if in different and deeper colors: 

He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended... Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. (IX, 1030)

Bloom even thinks of this again not long after: "So it returns. Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home" (XIII, 1109). Also not insignificantly, he then thinks again of metempsychosis.

     Joyce picks the theme up again, openly, though with the characteristic exuberance of expression of the episode, in "Oxen of the Sun." Stephen, drunk on words and beer, says amid his "hellprate and paganry" that:

...as the ends and ultimates of all things accord in some mean and measure with their inceptions and originals, that same multiplicit concordance which leads forth growth from birth accomplishing by a retrogressive metamorphosis that minishing and ablation towards the final which is agreeable unto nature so is it with our subsolar being. The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they bend. (XIV, 388)

For such a passage -- and not for difficulty's sake alone, but also so that its beauty might not be marred nor minished -- a wordwise translation into simpler speech, thought it might tempt us, is neither needful nor worthwhile. All Stephen is saying is that there is a sort of natural harmony which, in a single movement, brings us into the world as a speck and expands us, then contracts us and takes us back out; and that this cycle, too, describes the whole movement of our living days.(8) So, we are born, grow fat, play, embrace, let go, diminish, and die, with women bringing us into the world as midwives, and laying us out in death: the endless game and circle of life. Nor, as ever, is it without purpose that Joyce has women -- microcosms of the mother-universe, giving and taking life -- at both poles of the cycle, nor that in this speech Stephen is alluding to the three Fates and "the three phases -- mother, lover, and hag of death -- of the Triple Goddess, the goddess of the whole cycle of life" (Gifford 420).

     We can even say that this particular aspect of the theme is expanded to its fullest in "Penelope," whose sole "speaker" is a woman, Molly, and whose symbol is earth, both of which -- woman and earth alike -- are symbolically circles. Even the dedicated bodily organ of the chapter, flesh, is symbolic of the earth -- of deepest reality, the soil and ground of being. But Joyce himself expresses the properness of Molly and "Penelope" to the theme whose thread we are following here:

Penelope is the clou of the book... It begins and ends with the female word yes. It turns like the huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning, its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt expressed by the words because, bottom (in all senses bottom button, bottom of the class, bottom of the sea, bottom of his heart), woman, yes. Though probably more obscene than any preceding episode it seems to me to be perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent Weib. Ich bin der Fleisch der stets bejaht. (Ellman 501)

Like the greater life-circle, "Penelope" (and Molly's thought) rotates, embraces and affirms all, has neither end nor bounds, and is, ultimately, feminine.

     But how Joycean a paper would this be if, coming to the book's end, this investigation also ended there?

     Turning back a little -- wild waters carve their own course, yes? -- to "Circe," Stephen, still drunk, is in Bella Cohen's whorehouse, sitting at the piano and commenting on what he is playing. He says, "As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet's rest. It may be an old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate Coela enarrant gloriam Domini" (XV, 2087), to which Lynch's cap answers, "Ba! It is because it is. Woman's reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life. Ba!" (XV, 2097). This is another superficially senseless, inwardly rich passage which is deeply expressive of the circle-of-life theme. Gifford explains (487) that Marcello, "particularly noted for his setting [to music] of Girolamo Giustiniani's Italian paraphrases of the first fifty psalms,"

...limited his setting for the most part to two voices so that the words and sentiments would be clear as they were... in the "unisonous" music of the ancient Hebrews and Greeks, a music that he says had in its simplicity more power to affect the "passions" than "modern" music... [H]e attempted in his settings... to clothe "Ancient simplicity" in a garb of "modern harmony" so that the settings would not be "offensive" to the "modern" ear.

     This is exactly what Joyce has done with Ulysses, is it not? -- using the modern literary devices and modern settings to retell, in an ancient and simple way, a very ancient story of both Semitic and Greek provenance. And as Stephen says, nor does it matter who created the story -- it will always be told, it will reincarnate again and again. So, these few encoded lines affirm the presence of the theme, explained above, of a "circle of life" in Ulysses, with respect even to the narrower world of literary creation.

     And Lynch's cap agrees: note especially the phrase "Jewgreek is greekjew" -- that is, who knows where the story or music came from? It's the same, whether Sinbad or Odysseus or Bloom. Moreover, the theme is openly affirmed in "Extremes meet" and "Death is the highest form of life" -- opposites, seeming irreconcilable, are in fact complementary and unitary, -- and indirectly affirmed in "Ba," repeated three times here in "Circe," and once before, in "Nausicaa," there in the context given above. As Gifford explains,

"The life-breath"... [i]n ancient Egyptian religion, Ba was "the soul, represented by a bird with a human head, supposed to leave the body at death, but expected eventually to return and, if the body be preserved (together with the cher, the transfigured soul or intelligence, and the ka, or genius of the body), to revivify it. (400)

The reader's mind should be able to apprehend the metaphorical applicability of that bit of history by now, in all its facets. Nor -- ever again, as ever -- are the short phrases "It is because it is. Woman's reason" unmeaningful in this context, especially in light of "Penelope" and Joyce's elucidation of its meaning above.

     And as a last reference to this theme in "Circe," a tired Bloom, watching an "everflying moth" circle about a light, thinks, "But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then morrow as now was be past yester" (XV, 2409) -- simply, all time flows, and what is and what shall be, are all slow-flowing wasward, eternally.

     Tired Bloom, coming home in "Ithaca," as tired reader is coming to this paper's end, in remembering several marriage-gifts of his and Molly's which he used "to interest and to instruct" his daughter Milly, thinks -- or, is described as thinking -- that the clock illustrates:

...the principle of the pendulum, exemplified in bob, wheelgear and regulator, the translation in terms of human or social regulation of the various positions of clockwise moveable indicators on an unmoving dial, the exactitude of the recurrence per hour of an instant in each hour when the longer and the shorter indicator were at the same angle of inclination, videlicet, 5 5/11 minute past each hour per hour in arithmetical progression. (XVII, 910)

As with the passage from "Oxen of the Sun," the general meaning of this passage is pertinent to the discussion here, even without recourse to direct translation; that is, that human life and interaction are somehow cyclical, returning again and again, as if by order and through swings between poles, to similar states over time. Or, there is a circle of life.

     Bloom comes to the circle-cycle theme again later in "Ithaca," in a deeper and more personal moment of remembering, reflecting that:

...each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity. (XVII, 2127)

Of course, he is thinking of (and accepting) the fact of Molly's affair, envisioning his place, or any other's, in the succession of a woman's lovers as ultimately one small part in an endless, beginningless cycle; but on more abstract and symbolic level, Joyce is also expressing this to be true textually. Ulysses, like the Odyssey, the Aeneid, or the stories of Sinbad the Sailor -- like the characters within them, -- is part of one grand cycle of the multiple manifestation of simple essence across time and space.

     In light of that understanding, we come to sleepy Bloom's last thoughts, his overworked mind untethered at last:

He rests. He has travelled.

With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer. (XVII, 2320)

It may be that these are all the people that Bloom met during the day, lifted on the verge of his dreaming to a mythical level of being -- this itself illustrates one aspect of this paper's theme as it has been described above. But it seems that, even more, with Bloom's last words, Joyce is saying again -- and why not, in a work so concerned with circles and repetition? -- that the same stories, the same dramas and characters, eternally recur; the forms may change, the names, too, may change, but this cycle will never break nor be broken -- the spirit which enlivens them will never die. No, he says -- yes.

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1. All references to the text of Ulysses itself are made with reference to the Gabler Edition; citations indicate the chapter number followed by the first line of the quotation from it.
2. This was to be my original theme: navelcords, omphaloi, wombs, and birth-images. It is enough to say, I have traced that group of images throughout as well, finding it rich in occurrence and meaning, and to have much overlap with this paper's proper theme; but it is beyond the compass of this paper to include all such references here.
3. It is worth noting that, symbolically, woman is the circle, and the first microcosmic reflection of the earth and the universe, with all the implications of that.
4. Like navelcords, metempsychosis is mentioned many times throughout the text, but such reference is not always strictly applicable to the kind of meaning being investigated here. Of course, as so often with Joyce, even when one meaning is not strictly and mainly meant, in a way, it still also is.
5. A pig no less, which "sleeps and roots in shit."
6. I hesitate to say metempsychoticized -- how degrading of Molly that sounds!
7. In that respect, the entirety of the "Cyclops" episode may be understood to be illustrating the same process, if in a more "gigantic" and parodic manner.
8. That this passage is a right choice for this paper's theme is further suggested in Gifford's annotation: "A paraphrase and summary of Aristotle's view of the relationship between 'seed' (origin) and the fully developed 'animal' as that view is presented in Physics... [where] Aristotle quotes from Empedocles... [who] had held a cyclical theory of creation -- that once creation has been achieved, hate gradually disintegrates it to chaos and then love again begins the process of creation" (420).

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Works Cited

Chen, Kaiguo and Shunchao Zheng. Opening the Dragon Gate. Boston: Tuttle, 1996. Print.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Web.

Gifford, Don and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated. Berkeley: University of California, 1988. Print.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1986. Print.

Ouspensky, P.D. In Search of the Miraculous. San Diego: Harcourt, 1949. Print.