A Cemetery of Symmetry: Chiastic Structure in
Wandering Rocks and Ulysses
Jordan Howie
Department of English
Mc Gill University, Montreal
June 2006
A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the
degree of M.A.
Copyright © 2006 by Jordan Howie
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Contents
Abstract
III
Acknowledgments
Introduction
IV
1
Chapter 1: Objectivity and Coincidence in Wandering Rocks
Chapter II: Structure in Wandering Rocks
21
i. Entitlement 22
ii. The Chiasmus
36
iii. Sweets of Sin
43
Chapter III: Wandering Rocks and Ulysses 51
i. Chiastic Elements in Ulysses
ii. Polytropia 63
iii. Conclusion 73
52
6
Abstract / Résumé
This thesis is an analysis of the chiastic structure in the tenth episode of James Joyce's
Ulysses, Wandering Rocks, and how it relates to the chiastic elements in the novel as a
whole. My reading of Wandering Rocks and Ulysses is designed to explain the
contradiction between the episode's appearance of structural stability and the novel's
consistent denial of unifying structures. Chiastic structure will be shown to reflect a
formal process of simultaneous growth and decay that develops in the novel, and the
reading of Wandering Rocks will establish how the pattern traces points of convergence
between the novel' s aesthetics and the organic processes that occur in the referentiallevel
of the text. While 1 argue that Wandering Rocks announces an inevitable loss of
structural stability, the examination of its structure reveals formaI principles that remain
consistent throughout Ulysses.
Cette thèse se vaut une considération de la structure chiasrnique du dixième épisode,
Wandering Rocks, du roman de James Joyce intitulé Ulysses, ainsi que de la façon dont
cette structure se rapporte aux éléments chiasmiques du roman en entier. Mon étude de
Wandering Rocks et de Ulysses explique la contradiction entre l'apparente stabilité
structurale de cet épisode et la dénégation constante de structures unifiantes dans le reste
du roman. La structure chiasmique reflète un processus formel de croissance et de
décomposition simultanées qui se développe dans le roman, et ma lecture de Wandering
Rocks établit comment ce motif trace des points de convergence entre l'esthétique du
roman et les processus organiques qui se produisent au niveau référentiel du texte. Alors
que je démontre comment Wandering Rocks annonce l'inévitable perte de toute stabilité
structurale, l'étude détaillée de la structure de cet épisode révèle des principes formels qui
demeurent cohérents tout au long de Ulysses.
Acknowledgements
Professor Kerry McSweeney supervised the formulation, the research, and the writing of
this thesis, and 1 thank him for his help editing it and his encouragement. 1 am grateful to
Professor Miranda Hickman as well for her advice at an early stage of the project.
Thanks are also due to the SSHRC for funding, to Danielle Leblanc for her translation of
the abstract, and to friends and family for support and distraction.
1
Introduction
The schema of Ulysses that Joyce prepared for his friends lists "mechanics" as the art of
the nov el 's tenth episode, Wandering Rocks-a designation that connotes an artificial
design and a cold but precise method of presentation. Such expectations are quickly
fulfilled by the episode, which assembles a series of unrelated details into an
interconnected unit. Mechanics appear in abundance among the se details. In the
episode's first sentence, a re-set watch is retumed to the interior pocket of a priest who
worships the "cheerful decorum" (10.121) appropriate to a tidy universe: "It was idyllic:
and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of the Creator who had made turf to be in
bogs whence men might dig it out and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the
houses of poor people" (l0.103-6). The ninth section features another, though simpler,
mechanism operating smoothly: it opens with Tom Rochford demonstrating his invention
that will display the current act and scene of an opera for latecomers (10.464-84). These
inclusions, and the intricacy of the episode' s formaI arrangement (which will be discussed
at length) make it easy to see the episode as textual clockwork.
Such a description supports a consistent attack on Ulysses, which was first made
by contemporaries such as Wyndham Lewis. In Time and Western Man, Lewis deduces
from Ulysses that "what stimulates [Joyce] ... is ways af daing things, and technical
processes, and not things ta be dane" (106-7). The implication is that Joyce's work is a
mere game, with no real purpose beyond the orchestration of technical feats. The wellknown parallels with Homer's Odyssey, outlined in the schema to which l have already
referred, show the importance of systems to the work, and Joyce took such criticism
seriously enough to concede its potential truth in a famous remark to Samuel Beckett: "1
2
may have oversystematized Ulysses" (JJll 702). However, the implicit scom given to
Father Conmee's orderly cosmos alone shows signs of a contrary impulse to the systems
of Ulysses, and the novel is as often condemned and celebrated for its inexhaustible
obscurity, its chaotic or nihilistic denial of meaning, or its rejection of convention al
structures. Wolfgang Iser, for instance, declares the novel "a vast network of
expectations, simultaneously evoked and made empty ... [a] gigantic mass of
information [that] is deprived of aIl coherence" (134). The self-indulgent game of
system, technique for technique's sake, somehow also manages to provide steadfast
resistance to aIl principles of organisation.
This contradiction relates to a major division in Joyce criticism between a
humanist reading, represented by Richard Ellmann, in which the Homeric parallels reveal
the heroic in an apparently mundane modem wOrld; and a Catholic-sceptic reading
represented by Hugh Kenner,1 for whom Joyce is "the artist whose possessing theme is
men's inability to sustain heroic conceptions" (Joyce's Voices 61). As more recent
critical work attempts to deal with the novel by addressing the above contradiction, it
tends toward the sceptical reading. Like Kenner, this work stresses the text's insistence
on revealing its own artificiality by "disjoining matter and manner, forcing against us a
sheer stylistic arbitrariness" (Voices 49). Thus Leo Bersani discusses Joyce's schema as
"a model of interpretive nihilism ... [that] propose[s], with a kind of wild structural
neatness, meanings so remote from our tex tuaI experience as to suggest that there is no
other basis for sense than the 'line' that can be drawn between two intratextual and
1 David Fuller's critical summary makes this distinction; as does the critical history described by Jeri
Johnson, who makes T.S. Eliot and Stuart Gilbert the forerunners of Ellmann, and groups Ezra Pound and
Frank Budgen with Kenner.
3
intertextual points" (225); that is, between a detail and its corresponding significance in
the system of Homeric parallels. For Bersani the novel's oversystematization, its "wild
structural neatness," divorces the text from meaning. The system is only coherent at a
distance from the novel; its application denies sense, producing a fragmented and
arbitrary meaning: "a model of the cultural fragmentation which it represents" (227).
As Jeri Johnson notes, the increased attention to the textual surface of Ulysses
reflects a redirection of originally hostile assessments, such as that of Lewis quoted
above: "the last twenty [years of critical work] have brought Lewis's (unintended)
progeny to the fore" (xix). While Johnson sees this focus as a departure from the
Ellmann-Kenner schism, such work continues to regard artificial structures such as the
Homeric schema as deliberately inappropriate in much the same way that Kenner argues
that Homer and Hamlet provide only incongruous alignments: the wrong parallels and no
hope for right ones (Voices 59-62). The focus of critics such as Bersani or Iser on how
the text operates essentially defends the novel's systematic technical aspects on the basis
of their inability to align with the contradictory chaos of the text' s referentiallevel. The
text states its particular meaning in this model by means of an illustration in which
systems attempt to impose frames of meaning (which corne from the extemal schema or
pre-existing novelistic conventions) onto formless material: "The anxiety which Ulysses
massively, encyc10paedically struggles to transcend ... is that of disconnectedness"
(Bersani 227). Many other readings adopt a similar perspective, with the similar result
that the distance between the text's artifice and its referentiallevel is se en to be a
significant gap.l
1
See the discussion of Iser in Section III.
4
ln the context of such work, Wandering Rocks is of special interest. The episode
appears, on the one hand, to be formaI c1ockwork; on the other hand, it is frequently
identified with labyrinths, puzzles, and games. 1 Its rigidity-cum-trickiness recalls the
contradiction seen in the Iarger work to which it belongs. The contradictions of
Wandering Rocks are extended by its strict adherence to a chiastic arrangement. As 1 will
show, the chiasmus in Wandering Rocks appears to be the only place that Ulysses
presents a complete, stable, and self-contained development of a single form. This
apparently ideal structure, however, disrupts the novel's Homeric structure. Wandering
Rocks corresponds to a specific point in the Odyssey, but the Wandering Rocks of
mythology do not create any trial that Odysseus must endure; for the hero the y are instead
a potential encounter on a route he rejects. The episode of Ulysses therefore makes
concrete what is only a possibility in Homer.
From the perspective of the novel's Odyssean structure Wandering Rocks is an
outsider, and to properly understand the structure we must first explain why it includes
the outsider. This reading will examine how characteristics of the episode relate to the
novel's ultimate use of structure. My first chapter will establish how Wandering Rocks
stages the convergence of two distinct Ievels of the text - the referential and
artificiallstructural distinction made by the work mentioned above. The coincidence of
structure and event will extend into the second chapter' s examination of how the poli tic al
authority of the episode provides a model for the imposition of its chiastic arrangement.
Again, the fixed structure will be shown to lead to a principle of multiplicity that disrupts
1 The association begins with Frank Budgen's account of Joyce's composition of the episode in James
Joyce and the Making ofUlysses: "While working on the Wandering Rocks Joyce bought at Franz Karl
Weber's on the Bahnofstrasse agame called "Labyrinth," which he played every evening for a time with his
daughter Lucia." (123)
5
the initial stability the structure seems to provide. Finally, the third chapter will establish
the points of convergence traced in Wandering Rocks as basic principles of the structure
and form of Ulysses. The episode's use of structure will therefore be related directly to
the developing events of the novel' s narrative, and the artifice of Ulysses will be shown to
be an extension of Bloom' s story, as weIl as a reflection of organic processes. Because
my reading locates the novel's source of meaning in the coincidence of its referential and
artificiallevels, it offers a non-arbitrary principle of structure.
6
Chapter 1
Objectivity and Coincidence in Wandering Rocks
An investigation of how Wandering Rocks relates to the rest of the novel must first
address the material and technique that comprise the episode (it will be shown at a later
point how the nature of this relationship contributes to larger questions of structure). The
episode's unique lack of a Homeric equivalent suggests its difference from the rest of the
novel, but at first glance Wandering Rocks is remarkably simple and perspicuous. The
episode divides its presentation of Dublin and the citizens circulating its streets into
nineteen sections: descriptive scenes that pay careful attention to detail with an exactness
that makes them vivid in spite of their brevity. The impression of precision and accuracy
is supported by the unobtrusive narrative voice, which produces a sense of objectivity.
As Clive Hart notes, "the narrative manner" used in the episode is "apparently simple,
lucid, self-contained, unencumbered by allusion or linguistic complexity" ("Wandering
Rocks" 188). This description contrasts the less difficult language of Wandering Rocks
with a more challenging language typical of Ulysses. The episode distinguishes itself
with a restrained idiom that contains neither the lengthy and tortuous trains of thought
that complicate earlier episodes, nor the wild linguistic effects of those that follow.
A comparatively modest use of language disguises the fact that the text continues
to rely on sorne of its key techniques, which are made to perform crucial new tasks. The
episode's narrator continues to enter the inner thoughts of characters, and to pass in and
out of these thoughts in unannounced transitions. Ulysses as a whole regularly fluctuates
between external narrative description and interior monologue; in Wandering Rocks, the
shifts from external scenes to internal thought processes are strongly marked. The
7
episode tends to formally introduce each action that a character performs in a separate
paragraph as though beginning a new section. As we follow Tom Kernan in the twelfth
section, for instance, the narrator alternates between describing his movements and
transcribing his thoughts. Physical actions call for formaI reintroductions, as though "Mr
Keman" were the heading under which the text records the behaviour of a certain
phenomenon. Each observable action therefore begins its own paragraph:
Mr Kernan halted and preened himself before the sloping mirror of Peter
Kennedy, hairdresser. Stylish coat, beyond a doubt. (10.742-3)
The reintroduction of Kernan as a physical entity sets off a new series of his internaI
thoughts, which begin with his pleased assessment of a second-hand coat. From this
point we follow the movements of his thought until we are brought back to physical
objects, again signalled by a new paragraph that reiterates his title: "Mr Keman glanced
in farewell at his image" (10.755). The concision ofWandering Rocks makes paragraph
breaks both more regular and more frequent, and this regularity fashions each inclusion
into an independent block. With scenes that are not so much narrated as assembled into
stacks of detail, the episode emphasizes the physicality of its details. The apparently
unmediated inclusion of object increases the sense of objectivity, but also the sense of a
mindless, mechanical compilation: what Karen Lawrence de scribes as a lost "ability to
synthesize knowledge while accumulating it" (85).
A similar use of the paragraph signaIs spatialleaps that the episode makes from
one location to another. The episode performs seemingly random interpolations of
material from section to section, thirty-two in aIl, which create the episode's most radical
effect. The interpolations frequently interrupt the focus of a given section in Wandering
Rocks with objects that are physically separate from the location in question, and are
8
usually taken from another section. For example, an interpolation immediately follows
the above passage describing Tom Keman. After he has halted and preened, but before
he gives his image a farewell glance - between the two points where his thoughts are
fused to his physical actions - a different object inexplicably appears: "North wall and sir
John Rogerson's quay, with hulls and anchorchains, sailing westward, sailed by a skiff, a
crumpled throwaway, rocked on the ferrywash, Elijah is coming" (10.752-4). The
sentence, self-contained in a single paragraph, relates the progress of a crumpled paper
skiff floating on the Liffey. We then retum to Mr Keman who is halted in front of a
mirror, taking leave of his reflection. The ex ample illustrates how the episode facilitates
such interpolations with its particular use of paragraph. A regular separation of details is
common to the episode in general, so the text can negotiate a sudden jump from Tom
Keman to crumpled paper floating in the Liffey and yet retain narrative consistency.
While disruptive, then, the interpolations nevertheless follow established guidelines, for
the y insert new material in the same way the text might insert a character's thoughts. In
an episode that seems to be a set of piled objects, it seems no impropriety for the narrator
to take up a given detail and place it amid others.
The interpolations of Wandering Rocks are notoriously disruptive and disorienting
to readers with convention al expectations, but the handling of a character' s memory or a
fantasy as an object-a removable and replaceable object-aligns with other basic
techniques of Ulysses. In Joyce's Voices, Kenner identifies a similar effect as a general
characteristic of Joyce's work with interior monologue. He notes how the narrator of
Ulysses enjoys an "effortless symbiosis of phenomenon with word" (32), while the
thoughts of the novel' s characters are trapped in the surface of the language. The
narrator' s accuracy thus establishes a level of reality from which a character' s mind
9
remains separate, and this division creates the "odd conclusion ... that the domain of the
interior monologue is actually external" (32). Kenner identifies how language in Ulysses
externalizes its characters' thoughts by contrasting the narrator's words, which are fused
with their signified objects, with the wordy words that represent the minds of the
characters. Though he describes this effect as an inversion, it is better explained as a
collapsed distinction between interior and exterior experience. In Wandering Rocks the
difference between a linguistic surface and a street is the difference between a book and a
table where the book sits. Such a presentation of Dublin implicitly argues that the interior
experiences of characters have a substantial presence in the represented physical world.
This externalization is evidence of shifting priorities in the novel's representation
of its characters' environment. While the placement of internaI experiences alongside the
external world disrupts realist convention, it appears to be in pursuit of a stricter accuracy
in the representation of the environ ment. The episode is the territory of the object, as
Hart suggests, where Dublin is "merely a conglomeration of discrete physical
phenomena" to which Bloom belongs in so far as he is another phenomenon among many
("WR" 186). In fact, the objectifying logic of Wandering Rocks goes a step further:
Bloom' s thoughts, and those of his fellow Dubliners, are also part of the physical
conglomeration presented to us as Dublin. Interpolations and sudden jumps may cause
confusion, but they need to be recognized as more than simply "a trap for the naïve
reader" ("WR" 188). As 1 have shown, they are a key element in the episode' s
objectifying perspective. Ultimately, this process argues for the presence of what is not
actually present by including in the physical environ ment what exists elsewhere, what
existed elsewhere or earlier, and what may exist or might have existed. Father Conmee,
for instance, seems to walk as concretely through the fields of Clongowes as he does
10
through Dublin: the memory, or imaginative remove, is so tangible that "His thinsocked
ankles were tickled by the stubble" (10.185-6). The concrete incarnations created by the
episode's interpolative technique makes it appropriate that, in terms ofthe Odyssey,
Wandering Rocks represents the territory of an adventure that does not actually happen.
The presentation of the text as a series of independent but undifferentiated objects
relies on the episode's structure to shape the seemingly random and unconnected
incidents. As we have seen, the technique of Wandering Rocks creates the impression
that the episode's details are not described but directly reproduced, just as speaking
characters are not quoted by the narrator but seem to insert their speech directly. The
illusion that the episode is a series of assembled objects leaves the language's spatial
arrangement as the only means of guiding the presentation of events and characters.
While the episode's language maintains the stricte st objectivity, our perception of the
episode' s material becomes more influenced by the structure that orders events but is
separate from them. For most of the sections it would not seem to matter if they were
placed earlier or later in the episode. Section five concludes with Boylan making a
telephone caU that occurs later in section seven (10.336; 339-46), and most of the
characters reappear greeting or ignoring the viceregal cavalcade moving through Dublin
in the final section, but there is nothing conclusive in that section for the respective
glimpses of their movements given earlier. In general the sections are not causally related
and their incidents do not logically lead to or result from what happens in other sections:
nothing, for instance, occurs in Stephen's conversation with Almidano Artifoni in the
sixth section that affects his later reappearance in section thirteen, or Artifoni' s
appearance in section seventeen. The interpolations of extemal material emphasize a lack
of progression as weIl, for the y seem to suggest that no relationships can exist among the
Il
various scenes without artificial imposition. Though the sequence given to events cannot
calculate the dramatic effects or construct the causal relationships that usually drive a
narrative's plot, the episode's alignment of a chiastic pattern with its sequence will reflect
back on the various incidents to qualify their description.
A good indication that structure takes on new roles in Wandering Rocks is the
degree to which structural activities become more histrionic and therefore more
noticeable. The swollen presence of structure draws frequent comment: Hart describes
the episode's formaI arrangement as exhibiting its own "difficult personality [which] is
the most salient thing about the chapter" ("WR" 186). Since Hart explains the use of
interpolated material as traps for the reader, he accordingly finds in the structural
manoeuvres an attempt to baffle. By now it should be clear that interpolations serve more
constructive purposes, but it is true that no explanation accompanies these manoeuvres
and that they are difficult to follow. A difficulty, of course, only caUs more attention to
its source, and the extent of the structure's interference demands not only our notice but
also our identification of structure as the basis of the narrative material' s presentation.
Hart, and others after him, meet these demands by referring to the episode' s Arranger
instead of its narrator. The Arranger' s method, as 1 have aIready noted, is certainly
ostentatious and, as we will see, virtuosic. It also has its virtues, and does not merely
work to frustrate the reader and aggrandize itself. Our redirected attention discovers that
the episode is meticulously, not seamlessly, constructed, and that a great deal of the
episode's significance resides in the obtrusive seams.
The increased prominence of structure is similarly classified as hostile or
indifferent to the episode's characters, but the framework it provides does not ignore
these characters' various concerns. On the contrary, many of the sections appear
12
inconclusive if not pointless on their own, and the structure' s order brings out their
relevance. If the Arranger obscures the clear exposition of the Dublin scenes, it does so
to fashion them into an intricate form: the chiasmus. Many critics, notably Hart, have
demonstrated how exactly the nineteen fragments ofWandering Rocks follow a chiastic
pattern, moving from a furthest outward point to a centre where the pattern inverts itself
and moves outward again until it reaches a point equivalent to the beginning. The pattern
thus mirrors its initial narrowing with a subsequent expansion: the first section of
Wandering Rocks corresponds with the nineteenth section, the second corresponds with
the eighteenth, and so on, until aIl sections are paired around a single unpaired section
(the tenth) at the episode' s centre. The chiastic-minded Arranger destroys unities of time,
place, and character in order to create unit y on the level of external structure: Dublin
broken into nineteen sections forms a perfect chiasmus in Wandering Rocks. Since we
know that the episode is negotiating new roles for its sequence and its structure, it seems
odd to explain this rearrangement as calculated to confuse the reader. The hostile
disposition of one critic's reading is the playful disposition of another's, and we can
better explain the episode's technique once we recognize that it is tailored to serve a
purpose for which the development of plot or character is subordinate, not irrelevant. It is
not that the Arranger performs his task under what Kenner caUs a "principle of pervasive
indifference" (Ulysses 63), but rather that it addresses the text's concerns in a sphere
separate from the naturalistic level of Dublin and Dubliner.
Obviously neither the city nor its inhabitants are responsible for the chiasmus that
the y become in Wandering Rocks: the pattern is imposed from outside the narrative and is
only observable from an external position. It is not, however, accurate to label the
episode's structure an arbitrarily imposed arrangement. While the Arranger's divisions
13
make the various incidents into the components of a chiasmus, the se incidents continue to
follow the natural order of their setting. The chiastic pattern's presence does not provide
a teleological explanation of the sequence of events; a brief consideration of the episode' s
progress soon establishes the independence of that sequence. As in other episodes of
Ulysses, Wandering Rocks accounts for an hour of the day. Sections may overlap, so that
one will start at an earlier point than its predecessor left off, but each new section
progresses further ahead in time. The order is chronological and does not simply fit the
requirements of an external pattern. Boylan' s fifth section, for example, matches in
chiasmus Martin Cunningham's charitable campaign in section fifteen, but it also occurs
at an earlier moment in time than the intervening nine sections, so that after the cavalcade
has passed Cunningham and company Boylan is in another part of the city, jaunting past
"the provost's wall" (10.1241). The consistency on the representationallevel emphasizes
that the Arranger' s chiastic pattern is imposed on a separate level, that the pattern does
not wholly determine the episode's form. Instead, the referentiallevel ofthe episode
(which the unobtrusive language emphasizes as unmediated) collaborates with the
externallevel of structure (which is ostentatiously artificial). If we preserve the
impression that the events are independent of their presentation, then the alignment of
these two levels appears to be the achievement of an elaborate coincidence.
The challenge for such an episode is how to frame the collaboration of the se levels
so that the relevance of its events does not wholly depend on structure. The episode's
linear progression cannot get us anywhere except further ahead in time: no tension is
resolved, no unfulfilled expectation is fulfilled, no chain of events finds its conclusion.
Because the Arranger' s principal task is to link the various incidents through a chiastic
pattern, direct or causal links are rare. The alignment of the structure with
14
chronologically ordered events, however, provides a point for the episode to move toward
by building on the expectation of approaching crises. The concept of a goal is prevalent
in Wandering Rocks: Boylan sends the gift that forecasts and prepares his liaison with
Molly, the men advertising for Wisdom Hely's are "plodding toward their goal" (10.311),
the last lap of a bicycle race spurs "the wheelmen to their sprint" (10.651-3), and the
"crumpled throwaway" (10.294) floating along the Liffey heralds both the coming of
Elijah and the Gold Cup's winning horse, Throwaway. The ever-moving cavalcade of the
episode's final section also has a thematically significant destination: "Mirus bazaar in aid
of funds for Mercer's hospital" (10.1268-9). Through the se various scenes the
progressive movement of the episode extends from an immediate physical reality into the
anticipation of actual and symbolic fulfillments that are among the novel's most eventfuI.
Fulfillment of much of the episode's incidents relies on the chiastic structure, and
the development of that pattern itself offers a goal toward which the episode works.
Since the episode's incidents relate to one another through the chiasmus, when the
unfolding events complete it they achieve a conclusion that is both thematic and formaI.
Particular qualities of the final section suggest that conclusion: the nineteenth section
completes the chiasmus and thereby connects itself with the first section, so that the
episode's completion emphasizes its unity. The viceregal carriages are the most mobile
of the phenomena that Wandering Rocks studies, and their steady path through Dublin
allows us to reencounter most of the episode's characters, aIl of whom cross the
cavalcade's path at sorne point. l The final section is purely external movement, offering
no glimpse into any mind, but providing instead a summary catalogue of the past hour of
1 See the passage from Ellmann's Ulysses on the Liffey (91), quoted on my fifty-third page, in which he
influentially claims that this final section is the episode's coda.
15
incidents. The final section enacts a physical version of what the completed chiastic
pattern promises to do: by crossing Dublin it provides a common perspective for the
episode's many incidents. It also provides the final piece of the chiasmus, which will
secure for the episode's disparate happenings a structural perspective that daims them as
more than circumstantially relevant to one another. Through the chiasmus the episode
progresses toward a unit y composed of connections that are not merely incidental.
Such a progression suggests that the episode's separate layer of correspondence is
in part a response to dramatic shortcomings of the brief presentations of Dublin life.
While these various scenes occur on a naturalistic level that must faithfully accord with
the actual passage of time, the episode' s framework restricts any sense of progression by
limiting most scenes to a few brief minutes. A constant division among many short
scenes, which denies the usual ability of a temporal sequence to drive the narrative
forward, might result in a very aimless hour for the reader. It can be read that way: critics
tend to see the action in Wandering Rocks greatly reduced and find its real domain of
interest in structural operations. Hart explains the episode partly as "a relatively static
moment ... [of] very little action" that allows a beleaguered reader "time to look around
and observe the setting" ("WR" 186). Such a description seems a poor fit, though, if one
considers the sudden anger that surfaces in the episode's many curses, or the desperation
and misery present in many of the scenes. Of course Hart is correct to suggest that there
is relatively little time given to Stephen and Bloom, whom we follow much less than in
aIl earlier episodes. Nevertheless, most selections from this three o'dock hour contain a
great deal of significant and emotionally charged events, both actual and symbolic,
induding those portraying Stephen and BIoom.
16
Indeed, the frequent change of scene allows the episode to gather an especially
vivid collection of incidents. The scenes the Arranger has selected are certainly
compelling and seem to be more telling moments skimmed off the top of mundane
experience. That practise can be interestingly compared to the aesthetic epiphany that
Stephen formulates in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A.
Walton Litz describes the origin of the epiphanies: "In the years between 1901-02 and
1904 Joyce recorded crucial fragments of overheard dialogue or personal meditation"
(Introduction, Poems and Shorter Writings 157). Out of these fragments Joyce compiled
a collection of brief sketches, sorne of which were later inserted into his extended prose
works, along with an aesthetic theory as explanation and support. The fragmentary
quality of the original sketches suggests their affinity with the scenes of Wandering
Rocks, though the "crucial" aspect of the se moments tells us more about their use in
Ulysses. Stephen Hero de scribes the epiphany emerging from "the most delicate and
evanescent of moments" (188), then gives an account of its original manifestation, which
forces itself upon the attention of the young protagonist:
Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of
colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his
sensitiveness very severely ... This triviality made him think of collecting
many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. (188)
This initial experience explains Joyce's use of the term "epiphany" as much as the
lofty phrase of the narrator that has become the standard definition of the practice: "By an
epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or
of gesture or in a memorable phase ofthe mind itself' (188). The passage illuminates
how the occurrence can be considered sudden, and how this suddenness relates to what
Litz calls "crucial." The impression Stephen receives is "keen" and its effect is "severe";
17
the overheard colloquy, though, is an unremarkable and quiet exchange between a
"Young Lady" who is "drawling discreetly" and "softly," and a "Young Gentleman"
whose speech is almost wholly inaudible to Stephen (188). Because their speech contains
nothing sudden, severe, or significant the narrator labels it a "triviality." Nevertheless, as
an epiphany, the recording of what Stephen cannot entirely hear is described as the
achievement of an "exact focus" on the incident: which must be taken down "with
extreme care" (188). Clearly the sudden occurrence in question is not the colloquy itself,
but what Stephen Dedalus describes in the associated aesthetics of A Portrait as "[t]he
first step in the direction of beauty": "to comprehend the act itself of esthetic
apprehension" (235). The overheard colloquy is quiet and surreptitious; the resultant
affliction of the hearer' s aesthetic imagination is sudden and severe, and his
representation is accordingly abrupt.
Joyce's early efforts to record minutiae of experience clearly inform his approach
in Wandering Rocks, in which the fragmented form presents the various scenes as a series
of epiphanies. The scenes have the same sharpness that Richard Ellmann recognizes in
the original epiphanies; like that developed in the earlier sketches, the technique "seeks a
presentation so sharp that comment by the author would be an interference" (J]II 84).
The problem such sketches present is how to develop the power of their effect beyond the
short scene: they must be abrupt to create the desired "sharp" effect, but as a result they
are too short to deal adequately with larger themes. Joyce solved the problem in Stephen
Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by transforming detailed
accounts of a situation suddenly into rarefied equivalents. In the se works, the epiphanic
moment becomes a culmination or a consummation of themes that are de ait with
extensively beforehand.
18
An extension of the brief scenes of Wandering Rocks presents the same difficulty,
but the episode's divided attention makes a similar solution impossible. Its incidents
draw on previous acquaintanceship with characters in sorne cases: sections that include
Bloom, Molly, Boylan, or the Dedalus family, for instance, are naturally charged by the
reader's interest. But these sections are not necessarily relevant to their characters'
fortunes, and many inclusions cannot be said to have any previously established context.
What, for instance, do we make of Torn Keman's relatively lengthy passage? The reader
may recall Bloom's brief conversations with Keman in Hades (U 6.535-42,654-71), but
that scene focuses on Bloom' s mind and, aside from reminding us of his Protestantism,
Keman' s speech concems nothing that ex tends to his thoughts in Wandering Rocks.
Molly's thoughts are similarly unqualified by the Keman ofWandering Rocks: her brief
reminiscence of his insobriety in Penelope (18.1264-6) seems spurred by Bloom's
account of the funeral, and alludes only to Keman's mishap in the Dubliners story
"Grace." Relative to Kernan, the twelfth section has no external significance, for Kernan
himself is only our concem during the short presentation of him in that section. His
section is part ofthe episode's structure, however, and his alignment in the chiasmus
places his experience into an external, formalized context, where his Protestantism
complements the portrait of the Protestant priest Hugh C. Love in section eight. The
special use of structure thereby solves the difficulty of integrating these brief moments
without compromising their isolation and independence.
While events are linked through the chiasmus, they align themselves in other
ways. Interpolations provide further links by pointing out events that occur
simultaneously, and links are sometimes established simply by a common location.
Stephen halted at the bookcart asks himself "Who has passed here before me?" (10.846);
19
though he does not know it, his question alludes in part to Bloom three sections
previously. The coincidences suggest that the se incidents have significance outside
themselves: that the significance of an incident may include a meaningful connection to
other situations with which it is not directly in contact. On the structurallevel, the
scene's position in an imposed design creates such connections; on the referentiallevel,
the connections enact a physical version of the same process of coincidence - they are
incidental counterparts of those symbolic alignments. On either level, the process
suggests that the full significance of any section's inclusion lies beyond the section itself
in the chiastic network of interrelated meanings.
Whether formed by correspondence with an externally imposed pattern, or by
similar circumstances, the tex tuaI coincidences of Ulysses unite separate incidents in an
overarching design. This process of coincidence emphasizes structure and incident as
distinct. At the same time, it establishes the novel' s events as the points where these
distinct categories converge. One must understand the events as such to recognize their
resistance to both the fatal predetermination that the level of structure offers and to the
sheer randomness that threatens the level of incident. The text insists that either level is
potentially meaningful while refusing to regularize the roles the y play in generating
meaning. Hence the frequently noted paradox of the episode's copious naturalistic detail
existing within a highly artificial design. Structures offer meanings to various incidents,
and these incidents prove either capable or incapable of supporting those various
meanings. The novel's meaning, however, is not predetermined or arbitrary, because a
given structure is only meaningful when it coincides with incidents in the narrative. The
point of convergence is the source of meaning in Ulysses, and the evocation of parallels
follows narrative demands. Kenner even suggests that the Homeric parallels are designed
20
primarily to establish "the requirement that Ulysses and Telemachus shall meet" (Ulysses
62).
21
Chapter II
Structure in Wandering Rocks
In addition to stating the episode's mechanical nature, Joyce's schema describes
Wandering Rocks as a kind of puzzle: the episode's technic is "labyrinth," and the more
extensive Linati schema lists among the symbols of Wandering Rocks "Errors;
Homonyms; Synchronic correspondences; Resemblances." The previous discussion
focused on one contributing factor of the episode' s celebrated traps: its show of
unremarkable lucidity and plainness. The impression the episode gives of objectivity, of
confinement to the physical space of the city, was revealed to be a trick of its narrator,
whose technique treats as physical object less tangible, occasionally immaterial, aspects
of Dublin: the talk of its inhabitants, their thoughts, memories, and imaginings. The
following reading of the episode will consider other illusions generated by the episode's
techniques in relation to the integration of its referentiallevel into the chiastic structure.
Much recent work on Wandering Rocks has focused on how the physical details
of the city diagnose a specific, historical situation. This criticism is naturally interested in
how physical conditions produce ideological constructs. The work of Edward Gibson is
particularly helpful for its analysis of the gap between the appearance of reality and the
actual city, but it deals awkwardly with, and largely ignores, the integration of this
process within the episode. My reading will ex tend its examination of what directs the
illusory in the episode to establish how the episode's structure, particularly its use ofthe
chiasmus, relates to the order imposed by political forces. The correspondences
suggested by the chiasmus are perhaps the most frequently noted source of false
appearances in the episode - illusions, errors, false parallels, etc. The chiasmus is another
22
extemal structure imposing its order on Dublin, and has been charged with the creation of
inauthentic, meaningless relationships. Discussions such as Gibson's focus on how the
episode exposes a political situation that creates similarly false appearances and
inauthentic relationships. The processes of mediating between the concrete and the
immaterial depicted on the referentiallevel of the text therefore provide models for the
operation of the chiasmus. Since the chiasmus is the link between the events of
Wandering Rocks and its role in the novel as a transition point, the pattem's associations
as an imposed structure will elucidate the nature of that role.
i. Entitlement. The objective, detached tone ofWandering Rocks is partly produced by
the use of formai language, especially titles. Both the narrator and the episode's
characters carefully select different titles to address and refer to one another, and their
selections reveal how the citizenry relate to larger structures, or how certain larger
structures daim the constituent parts of Dublin. The first words of the episode are, not
surprisingly, a title: "The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. J. reset his smooth
watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps" (10.1-2). The
resistance of capitalletters is consistent with earlier episodes ("The imperial British state,
Stephen answered ... and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church" [1.643-4]); here
too the suppression of capitals makes Father Conmee's title appropriately ambiguous.
Both "superior" and "reverend" are adjectives that might describe John Conmee's
character, though the y might only be official forms of address that the text has adopted.
The lowercase sand r suggest the terms are personal characteristics while the narrative
reveals the contrary: that neither applies to Conmee except as the name of his
23
ecclesiastical position. The ambiguity of this use of titles hints at an ambivalent view of
authority and an inadequate spiritual service of Dublin.
The formality of this opening also has an epithetic quality. It casts more doubt on
Father Conmee's role by echoing the novel's earlier opening description of a dubious
priest: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather
on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed" (1.1). Although Mulligan' s mockery of the
priest's role is deliberate and exaggerated, Father Conmee also performs a corrupt
spiritual service during his progress through Dublin. He first sets out to sec ure Master
Patrick Dignam a place in Artane at the instigation of Martin Cunningham, whose efforts
are described by Keman in Hades: "Martin is trying to get the youngster into Artane"
(6.537). Conmee's thoughts begin with his charitable mission, but lead in the same
sequence to utility:
What was that boy's name again? Dignam. Yeso Vere dignum et iustum
est. Brother Swan was the pers on to see. Mr Cunningham's letter. Yeso
Oblige him, if possible. Good practical catholic: useful at mission time.
(10.3-6)
The equation of a Catholic's goodness with his usefulness reveals the source of Conmee's
charity, which is at bottom motivated by his desire to maintain the social institution he
serves.
A similar practicality govems Conmee's meeting with the onelegged sailor who
moves on crutches begging through Dublin. Their meeting reiterates the correspondence
between Conmee's spiritual service and his concem for more worldly matters:
A onelegged sailor, swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his
crutches, growled sorne notes. He jerked short before the convent of the
sisters of charity and held out a peaked cap for alms towards the very
reverend John Conmee S. J. Father Conmee blessed him in the sun for his
purse held, he knew, one silver crown.
(10.7-11)
24
Conmee thinks here not of the sailor' s salvation but of the coin in his purse: he blesses the
sailor to keep the crown. Thus Conmee devalues his spiritual offering by equating it with
a relatively low monetary value. The text implies that if he had a smaller coin, he might
offer it instead of blessing the soldier. This detail not only establishes that his blessing
may be assigned a material value, it also sets that value at substantially less than five
shillings. In each instance the text shows material considerations determining the
performance of Conmee's spiritual services.
The first section ofWandering Rocks develops Father Conmee's preoccupations
and failings at length, but this initiallink between the priest's blessing and the crown in
his purse makes a condensed announcement of the episode' s themes. In the first episode,
as quoted above, Stephen declares the Catholic Church and the British Crown to be his
masters; Wandering Rocks corroborates Stephen's claim by repeatedly associating church
and state as complicit in one another' s control. The initial glimpse of the crown in
Conmee's purse anticipates the final association that the text makes through its chiastic
arrangement, which matches Conmee's first section with the viceregal cavalcade of the
final section. For many critics Wandering Rocks is most relevant for its treatment of
these forces that figuratively coyer the city in the routes of Conmee and Humble, who
together mark an X through the city of Dublin 1•
Trevor William argues that "[t]he journeys of Conmee and the viceroy powerfully
enclose the episode" (269) in order to explicate the "form of consciousness" that forces
itself upon the Dubliners. Conmee' s mentality typifies for William the beliefs and
attitudes that afflict the city, and his position with the viceroy attest to the pervasiveness
1 See Clive Hart's extended analysis of the various paths travelled by characters in the "Wandering Rocks"
article in James Joyce's Ulysses, eds. Hart and Hayman.
25
of their influence. The significance of Dublin' s figurative encasernent escapes no one,
and critics such as William and Edward Gibson are right to note the episode's interest in
the reflection of political power in personal realms as "latent and explicit" (Gibson 28).
But it remains for such critical accounts to explain why Wandering Rocks makes its
critique in such an obtrusive way. Neither William nor Gibson directly addresses the
question of the episode' s place in the novel, or how this political diagnosis provides a
transition between the first part of the novel and the last. While William and especially
Gibson provide an important analysis of how Wandering Rocks reveals Dublin's political
situation, the y work under the assumption that the episode' s project justifies itself as "a
coherent literary attempt to forge a link between a socioeconomic base and the
construction of consciousness" (William 268). The problem with this approach is that it
reads the episode' s initial premise, that two foreign masters subject the city to their joint
rule and its stagnating effects, as its ultimate revelation and conclusive statement. It is
not hard to see why the episode is frequently labelled a pause in the novel's action if it
has nothing to do but repeat this point with various instances of a futile citizenry thwarted
by greater forces and acting under their influence. In this reading, the novel' s usual
concems are removed to provide a clearer, comprehensive diagnosis of Dublin's
colonized consciousness -the episode is thus more of a divertimento th an an entr' acte. 1
While there are obvious representatives of Dublin' s foreign masters present, the
implications of the technique used to include them must be taken into account in order to
1 The episode is associated by man y critics with an entr' acte. In a letter Joyce wrote on 24 October 1920 to
Frank Budgen, he described an entr'acte in the novel, but at this time he had long since completed the initial
th
version of Wandering Rocks: "Last night 1 thought of an Entr' acte for Ulysses in middle of book after 9
episode Scylla and Charybdis. Short with absolutely no relation to what precedes or follows like a pause in
the action of a play. It wou Id have to be balanced by a matutine (very short) before the opening and a
26
assess how the scrutiny of power dynamics relates to the episode as a transition point.
The density of representative symbols and structure in the episode's opening lines
immediately complicates the figures of church and state. Here the domination of church
and state is also formally associated with the chiastic structure, which is the dominant
structure of the first two paragraphs as weIl as the episode as a whole. These paragraphs
form their own chiasmus while the y connect the two powers that rule Dublin life:
The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. J. reset his smooth
watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. Five to
three. Just nice time to walk to Artane. What was that boy's name again?
Dignam. Yeso Vere dignum et iustum est. Brother Swan was the person
to see. Mr Cunningham's letter. Yeso Oblige him, if possible. Good
practical catholic: useful at mission time.
A onelegged sailor, swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his
crutches, growled sorne notes. He jerked short before the convent of the
sisters of charity and held out a peaked cap for alms towards the very
reverend John Conmee S. J. Father Conmee blessed him in the sun for his
purse held, he knew, one silver crown. (10.1-11)
The first paragraph is Conmee's: it begins with his title as its subject. The second
paragraph might easily be taken for the start of a new section or an interpolation due to its
introduction of a new subject, the onelegged sailor, but it retums to Father Conmee at the
end. When the text inc1udes the full title of Father Conmee once more, the position of his
title in the paragraph is inverted: it cornes now at the end of a sentence as the object of the
sailor' s actions. The reappearance of this full title, which is thereafter replaced with
Father, emphasizes the chiastic inversion that fastens the two paragraphs together as a
unit.
If the first paragraph belongs to the church, the second belongs to the state. In
addition to the crown in Conmee's purse, the paragraph inc1udes the sailor who growls
nocturne (also short) after the end. What?" (Letters 1, 149). See my objections to the association on page
fifty-four.
27
notes from "The Death of Nelson": "For England . .. home and beauty" (10.232; 235).
The paragraph also recalls an earlier figure of English power. As the first tine of this
paragraph-unit echoes Mulligan' s religious performance at the opening of the novel' s first
episode, so does the finalline's crown recall the closing flourish ofthe second episode:
"On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles,
dancing coins" (1.448-9). The passage ironically lauds Mr. Garrett Deasy, whose English
"wisdom" makes Shakespeare quote Iago to advise Stephen: "Put but money in thy purse"
(2.239). The sun, and of course the dancing coins, are symbols of imperial power in the
episode, if not in the whole of Joyce's work (see, for instance, the sovereign shining in
Corley' s palm at the conclusion of "Two Gallants"). Both of these symbols help create
Deasy's ironic apotheosis, and both are clearly referenced, along with Iago's advice, by
the crown in Conmee's purse and his blessing of the sailor in the sun. The latter moment
in Wandering Rocks uses similarly overt symbolism with the crown, purse and sun, and
the images are interwoven with a formaI tone that is similar to Nestor' s grandiose
conclusion. These echoes of earlier representations of colonial power enforce the churchstate dynamic in Wandering Rocks, but the tightly-packed opening of the episode also
associate this dynamic with contrived language and flagrant signifiers.
The episode in its entirety attempts to recreate the same model of this dynamic
with its structure. As previously noted, the first and last sections frame aH others with
representatives of church and state. In previous episodes the presence of church and state
is certainly ubiquitous, but recognition of their presence is limited: they elicit muted and
naïve considerations from Bloom, dark and terse commentary from Stephen. It is notable,
then, that Wandering Rocks directly acknowledges their power and moves legitimate
representatives of their authority into the foreground. The initial unit of the first two
28
paragraphs in Wandering Rocks serves as a transfer point that restates the presence of
church and state in a way that recalls earlier figurations in Mulligan's parody and Deasy's
commentary. What was once presented with a great degree of irony-the Catholic rituals
mocked by Mulligan's performance; England's commercial virtues extolled by the
contemptible Deasy-is now charged by the episode' s structure with authority and power.
The episode has been accordingly treated as the novel's comprehensive study of Dublin's
colonial influences, but the peculiarities of structure in Wandering Rocks (discussed in
the previous chapter) make it clear that the structural prominence given to Father Conmee
and the viceroy cannot be directly equated with their actual roles in the city. To be sure,
Conmee and Humble are the most public, most visible, and therefore most recognized of
Dublin' s citizens, and this prorninence is reflected by their salient place in the
arrangement of the episode's nineteen sections. However, because the episode's
arrangement follows an elaborate pattern, its structural significance is particularly
differentiated from the representationallevel. The explicit announcement of poli tic al
dominance made by the chiastic arrangement and by the initial set of paragraphs, also
associates that dominance with a kind of structural officialdom. Thus the recognition that
the text gives the se figures locates their influence in official quarters.
Since the text begins and ends with a declaration of official control, what happens
in between needs to be examined to see how that control is sustained in more personal
spheres, and how the stability of that control is challenged or undermined. The opening
paragraphs associate a number of tex tuaI elements with Conmee and his crown:
significantly, the use of titles and the chiasmus are presented here as weIl. In the inner
sections of the episode these elements become themselves representatives of power that
work independently of the officiaIs. This is immediately clear in Conmee's meeting with
29
Mrs. Sheehy. In this passage, the text carefully notes that Conmee and the narrator use
different forms of address:
Towards him came the wife ofMr David Sheehy M. P.
-Very weIl, indeed, father. And you, father? ...
Father Conmee was very glad to see the wife of Mr David Sheehy M. P.
looking so weIl and he begged to be remembered to Mr David Sheehy M.
P. Yes, he would certainly call.
-Good afternoon, Mrs Sheehy.
(10.17-8; 26-9)
The indirectly reported words from Conmee's speech insert the more extensive title,
which would sound ludicrous if spoken and which Conmee's direct speech does not use.
The distinction between Conmee' s language and a distinctly officiaI idiom of the episode
does not mean that the two are unrelated. It does, however, insist that the idiom reflects
more than Conmee's consciousness alone-it extends further in the episode as a principle
associated with domination in general, of which Conmee is one of many actual
representatives. The full title may indicate the significance Mrs. Sheehy has for Conmee,
but the text is careful not to assign this unnecessary formaIity to any specific source. If
the scene reveals a tendency in Conmee to fawn toward politicaI power, as Gibson argues,
the unattached presence of an overly elaborate formaI title aIso suggests a pervasive
tendency to consider individuals in terms of their officiaI status. This tendency explains
why Karen Lawrence finds the episode favouring, as it were, the names of Dublin over its
life, "as if these [the episode' s] linguistic labels exhausted the potentiaI of the characters"
(86). The careful differentiation the text makes between the term Conmee uses when
speaking to Mrs. Sheehy, and the term that defines her as the wife of a Member of
Parliament, shows how the use of titles places individuals into larger contexts.
A particularly formaI use of language and personal titles has aIready been noted in
the initial paragraphs, and the association of titles with the enclosing powers is confirmed
30
by the final section's similarly superfluous use of them. The last section, despite its
shortness, has an even more conspicuous use of titles: it is essentially a series of the
names of citizens and streets that the viceroy and his followers pass. It therefore offers a
completely external view of Dublin as a counterpiece to Conmee' s extended interior
monologue in the first section. The characters of Ulysses appear in this final section as
the actions the y perform at the moment the y encounter the cavalcade. Most of the se
Dubliners are featured in previous sections of the episode or occasionally in other
episodes, and various encounters with the cavalcade are reported in language
characteristic ofthe saluting citizen's consciousness. Young Patrick Dignam's sighting
of the viceroy, for instance, echoes section eighteen by describing Humble in Dignam's
terms: "Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, waiting, saw salutes being given to the gent
with the topper and raised also his new black cap" (10.1265-7). Because the cavalcade' s
drive forms a catalogue of much of the episode, cri tics such as Ellmann consider the final
section a coda; however, the cavalcade itself is barely glimpsed before this section, and
the reduction of aIl other events to those directly attached to the cavalcade's movements
does not summarize the episode so much as provide a final development in the episode' s
themes. While each character is condensed into the action with which he or she greets the
viceroy, these actions are recorded under titles that are expanded or modified into a more
official representation of the character.
The use of titles therefore recalls the inflated formality used in Conmee's section
at the same time that the fluctuation in the kinds of titles used deviates from that initial
section's uniformity. The titles are sometimes more extensive than previously, as in the
inclusion of Dignam's middle name Aloysius. As often, though, the titles reflect the
characters' position relative to the rest of Dublin: the full name of Hugh E. Boylan, for
31
instance, is omitted in favour of his nickname "Blazes" (10.1241). This variance suggests
an adjustment that conforms to the character' s sense of importance, or their sense of
where they draw their importance. Boylan's nickname therefore serves as his title since it
is bound up with the great reputation he enjoys in Dublin. In another similar instance,
Richie Goulding keeps the familiar form of his name, though that name is immediately
linked to the legal offices, Collis and Ward, that he works in and that bear his name in the
jokes of others: "Richie Goulding with the costbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward"
(10.1191). Dignam' s name, on the other hand, is given its most expansive form, but in
similar anticipation of greater recognition. Dignam's own thoughts detect the power of
titles. As he attempts to connect the importance of death to his father' s person, he
experiments with his father's different names: "Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is
dead ... Poor pa. That was Mr Dignam, my father" (1 0.1170-1172). Young Dignam
also considers the distinction his father' s death affords him:
He met schoolboys with satchels. l'm not going tomOITOW either, stay
away till Monday. He met other schoolboys. Do they notice l'm in
mouming? Uncle Barney said he'd get it in the paper tonight. Then
they'll aIl see it in the paper and read my name printed and pa's name.
(10.1157-60)
Like Goulding, the inclusion of Dignam's full name in the final section looks forward to
the status of a printed name. Of course, the actual account of his father' s funeral in the
Telegraph abbreviates his name to "Ptk. Dignam (son)" (16.1256), and in the
conversations of Dublin he becomes "the youngster" (6.537). Thus the event that
Dignam expects will distinguish him in fact reduces his relevance to the bracketed son;
nevertheless, the final section fulfills his anticipated status by including what separates
him from his father: his Saint' s name and the title Master. The disparity between his
relevance and his title illustrates how the final section's fulfillments are conditioned by
32
the cavalcade's pomp. The trappings of officialdom are lent to citizens who, at the same
time, are reduced to a moment of passing involvement with the cavalcade.
One of the functions of the appellations given to characters, then, is to indicate the
connection between an individu al and a source of power, as the use of Father to address
Conmee acknowledges his status in connection with the Catholic Church. But titles are
also a key strategy in Wandering Rocks for characters to negotiate their own and others'
proximity to sources of power. Blazes Boylan acts "gallantly" (10.329) and "roguishly"
(10.336) in part to coax a gift from the girl in Thornton's, but his actions in this scene are
also clearly a performance that maintains his reputation. The advantageous recognition
Boylan enjoys among Dubliners, which makes his nickname universal, depends on his
self-presentation. Hence the attention given to his "new tan shoes" (10.307) and the
"gold watch" he holds "at its chain's length" (10.312-3): both details show the substantial
investment Boylan makes in his appearance. Similar bids for notoriety are made by
Wisdom Hely's, whose name parades on "five tallwhitehatted sandwichmen" (10.377),
and "Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c" (10.56), whose elaborate dress and
"grave deportment" (10.59) attract public attention, as Bloom notes earlier in
Lestrygonians: "Didn't cost him a red like Maginni the dancing master self
advertisement" (8.98-9).
These attempts to achieve public recognition respond to the colonial situation in
1904 Dublin that Gibson describes. As measurements of recognition where recognition is
advantage, the titles that characters give to one another in Wandering Rocks are sought
after as a means of claiming advantage. Gibson argues that the general political
disempowerment of Dublin produces a pursuit of symbols that will deny or disguise that
lack of power: "the urgency with which many of the characters chase small, temporary
33
gains in money, power and even identity is in direct proportion to their lack of and
distance from real power" (43). This inverse ratio of power is illustrated, as we have
seen, by the cavalcade' s contagious transmission of meaningless pomp that condudes the
episode. While the successful Blazes Boylan may rely on his own notoriety, the more
common form of aggrandizement in Wandering Rocks, actual or fantasized, relies on
those titles that evoke authority. It is significant that the figure who introduces the text's
preoccupation with titles is Father Conmee, whose admiration for both nobility and
pawnbrokers also exemplifies, in Gibson's reading, the political servility pervasive in
Dublin.
Though Gibson's reading identifies the formula that Dubliners enact in their
daims for status, those daims rely on the ability of titles to misrepresent or modify
identity. While the instability of identity aids the bid for power, it extends into other
are as of the text as well. When Conmee's preoccupation with status, for instance,
illustrates the connection of fantasy with servility, the text relies on a transformative
power of titles:
Don John Conmee walked and moved in times of yore. He was humane
and honoured there. He bore in mind secrets confessed and he smiled at
smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawingroom, ceiled with full fruit
dusters. And the hands of a bride and bride groom, noble to noble, were
impalmed by Don John Conmee. (10.174-178)
Since the text, as usual, enters and exits Conmee's fantasy directly from his present
reality, the change in title alerts readers of the change in the text's focus. But it also
implies that Conmee's fantasy indudes his existence as a different person, and it may be
that transformed identity as much as the past' s honour and nobility that Conmee desires.
However mild this transformation, it anticipates the hallucinatory technique of Circe, in
which identities transform in much the same way, though in a much wilder accordance
34
with released sexual energy, "that tyrannous incontinence" (10.171) from which
Conmee' s gentle fantasy allows him to escape. The essential similarity of the two
processes is emphasized by Conmee' s appearance in Circe under the same fantasy-name:
"(Mild, benign, reproving, the head of Don John Conmee rises from the pianola coffin.)"
(15.3673-4). Other details in Wandering Rocks signal Circe's impending release of
sexual energy and dissolution of the unified self: one of Bella Cohen' s prostitutes, Kitty
Ricketts, is spotted by Conmee (10.199-203); Boylan steps to, and Humble draws
attention to, the song "My girl's a Yorkshire girl" (10.1242; 48-57) that Cissy Caffrey and
the English privates sing (15.3995-6) and that begins the dance in the brothel (15.4026);
Bloom handles Talesfrom the Ghetto (10.591-2) (one of the books by Sacher-Masoch
that Joyce drew on to write Circe) and the passages he reads from Sweets of Sin (10.608617) will be parti y enacted by Molly and Boylan in a Circe hallucination: "Raoul darling,
come and dry me" (15.3770). While titles form part of the tame order that Conmee or
Humble represent, then, the text makes it clear that the same titles include a latent
tendency to distort or transform reality.
Although titles do not run amok in Wandering Rocks, the dominant forces of the
episode rely on an inherently unstable device. The use of titles to erode identity is
already present in Scylla and Charybdis, where the influence of Stephen's consciousness
rewrites the names of his interlocutors; Conmee' s dream of serving nobility is a
continuation of this erosion. Furthermore, the mutability of titles is shown to operate
outside imaginative or fantasy worlds; for instance, the text abandons the usual
consistency with which it refers to characters in its treatment of William Humble. In the
brief final section Humble receives eleven different appellations, sorne of which register
another perspective (such as the Dignamesque "gent with the topper" [10.1266]), and
35
others which extend the episode's exaggeration of titular power (such as "[t]he Right
Honourable William Humble, earl of Dudley, G.V.C.O. [Knight, Grand Cross of Royal
Victorian Order]" [10.1213-4]). Humble's multiple referents, whether loyal or
disrespectful, represent a degree of public recognition that is, in the context of the
episode, universal. It is a telling paradox that the univers al quality of his presence causes
his section to be read as the coda of Wandering Rocks. Although Humble has the most
encounters of the episode, these meetings tell us the least about the characters involved.
His presence remains detached from those featured in the episode--even those like
Keman who strive to connect with it: "At Bloody bridge Mr Thomas Keman beyond the
river greeted him vainly from afar" (10.1183).
Of course his many titles evoke the adaptability that Humble's actual power
affords him, but 1 am interested in how the text makes itself complicit in the assertion of
that power. Wandering Rocks is concemed with poli tic al domination that is maintained
by illusion, and the text' s presentation of Dublin mirrors that domination with an
exaggerated statement of its control. The above discussion of the final section makes it
clear that Humble's section by no means achieves a reiteration ofthe balance with which
the initial two paragraphs of Conmee's section announce the correspondence of church
and state. Instead, the order and servi lit y of Conmee's perspective is immediately shown
to require a carefully tumed blind-eye and a complacency that the motto he associates
with Dignam's name epitomizes: "Vere dignum et iustum est [It is indeed fitting and
right]" (10.4). Although the episode certainly traces Dublin's power relations, the
development from the first to the final section reveals the degree of illusion needed to
maintain those relations. What the text presents as deference suggestively becomes more
and more absurd: cabbages are "curtseying" to Conmee (10.181), and Humble receives
36
salutes from "a tongue of liquid sewage" (10.1197). Such comical misrepresentations
form the narrative perspective that participates in the appearance of Dublin' s obedience,
in which hostility and contempt are indistinguishable from allegiance. From the
episode's irony we can infer that naiveté and obliviousness are prerequisites for the
official representation of church and state. Their rule is limited to a superficial vision of
Dublin: a wholly external, public realm which is spurned by the episode's final image of
an indifferent Almidano Artifoni's trouser-Ieg "swallowed by a closing door" (10.1282).
ii. The Chiasmus. The episode also imposes a formaI order onto Dublin with its chiastic
design. In other are as of the novel, as we will see, the chiasmus mirrors biological or
aesthetic processes relevant to the narrative, but in Wandering Rocks there is litde organic
justification for the pattern' s presence. Indeed, part of the significance of the chiasmus is
its detachment from the text's highly accurate representational or historicallevel. Hart,
who provides the most extensive analysis of the episode's chiastic design, notes this
detachment: he describes the Arranger of the episode as "remote, 'behind or beyond' his
handiwork" ("WR" 190), and the resultant arrangement produces a "tension between
inner and outer [that is] drawn to an extreme" ("WR" 187). Though the episode "seems
at first to be singularly disjointed and fragmented," Hart writes that "here also there is
structural unit y, and in defining that unit y we define Bloom's circumstances" ("WR"
188). In Hart's reading, the meaning of episode is created at a distance from its narrative,
in the chiastic structure that reorders its incongrue nt surface.
The chiasmus is evoked by symbols of cyclicality and reflection, such as the
mirrors, curves, and arches noted by Leo Knuth (410), but these details have no
significant thematic relation to the episode's narratives. erities most often explain the
37
pattern's integration as the fulfillment of the technic ofWandering Rocks in Joyce's
schema: the labyrinth. In its externality, though, the chiasmus might be seen to mimic the
foreign power that ideologically-minded critics find acting on Dublin through the figures
of Conmee and Humble. Since many critics concerned with the politics of Wandering
Rocks read the episode' s fragmentation into nineteen sections as indicative of the effects
of the city's disempowerment, it is significant that the chiasmus demands the same
fragmentation. If the chiasmus is associated with the illusory control of church and state,
the many significant parallels and associations that it outlines might be implicated as
more official than actual.
Although the connection between the chiasmus and poli tic al power is not
investigated in any critical account ofWandering Rocks, their association illurninates
sorne crucial symbolic points. The most obvious link between the two, the first chiastic
link, is overt: the figures of Conmee and Humble are sirnilarly public and authoritative,
their complicity is already stated by Stephen, their sections have the most salient positions
of the episode, and they share a penchant for titles. The correspondence of one si de of the
episode with the other, when applied to the rest of the sections, reveals the chiastic
pattern. In this sense, the application of the chiasmus originates with the representatives
of Dublin's two rulers, and their authority provides a kind of official announcement for
the chiastic arrangement.
Further links are made in Conmee's section, where the first corresponding figures
of church and state, Conmee and the onelegged sailor, are placed in a chiastic unit. The
association is made even more explicitly in the passage on the tramway - another symbol
of inversion and thus of chiastic movement:
38
On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee S. J. of saint
Francis Xavier' s church, upper Gardiner street, stepped on to an outward
bound tram.
Off an inward bound tram stepped the reverend Nicholas Dudley C. C.
of saint Agatha's church, north William street, on to Newcomen bridge.
At Newcomen bridge Father Conmee stepped into an outward bound
tram for he disliked to traverse on foot the dingy way past Mud Island.
(10.107-14)
The last paragraph here, with its familiar form of Conmee's name and relation of
Conmee's actions and his characteristic avoidance of penury, clearly sets off the other
two paragraphs, which it makes completely superfluous for the continuance of Conmee's
narrative. As in the first paragraphs of Conmee's section, the se two closely reflect each
other to form a chiastic unit: Conmee's paragraph begins "[o]n Newcomen bridge" and
ends "on" an "outward bound tram", which is exactly inverted by the direction of the
exiting Dudley, his "inward bound tram," and his paragraph which ends with Newcomen
bridge. As Henry Staten notes, the tram itself is a symbol of cyclical movement in
Ulysses and the Aeolus episode associates that movement with the novel' s chiastic
inversion of language. The opening image of the tram in that episode continues into the
narrator' s language before the narrative enters the print office, where backwards type
produces legible print:
Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck
moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel ...
Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince's stores
and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped
dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince's stores.
(7.10-3; 21-4)
This earlier passage shows Wandering Rocks again drawing on pre-established figures to
make further symbolic associations. The pattem's association with trams adds to the
already conspicuous chiastic passage describing the inverted joumeys of Conmee and
Nicholas Dudley. In doing so, it announces the chiastic significance ofthe episode's
39
structure in an overt manner that recalls the episode's initial cluster of imperial symbols.
Indeed, with its retum to the initial formality of the episode - the very reverend John
Conmee S. J. - the passage solidifies the connection between the chiasmus and authority.
Typically the chiastic movements of the episode are seen by critics to operate at a
far remove from the poli tic al forces. Those concerned with the political responses in the
episode tend to emphasize its highly accurate documentary approach, as the frequent
comparisons to Dubliners suggest. Hart's focus, though directed toward the chiasmus, is
similarly one-sided: he argues that the pattern's relevance grows as the episode leaves the
poiitical reaIm: "Joyce's mockery oftheir [the Church and Empire's] twin domination,
while both biting and amusing, is a relatively simple piece of social commentary. Of
greater importance is what goes on between the extremes" (186). Other critics have
criticized Hart's reading as too mechanistic. Vincent Sherry describes it as "a determining
scheme" (32), arguing that much of the rearranged details Hart tries to explain provide no
new contexts. Sherry insists on their irrelevancy as the basis of a principle of "gratuity"
(33) that grows meaningless as the inclusions becomes systematized: "the most
predictable and perfunctory of mechanisms by the second half of the episode, ... when he
[Joyce] no longer accompanies it with the gift motif' (36). In Sherry's reading, the
affirmation of gratuity is an irreverent challenge ta system, and thus opposes political and
formaI order alike. His conceptual model is problematic - we have seen how irreverent
sorne of the final section' s gratuitous salutes are - but the common ground it shares with
Hart's reading is noteworthy. For each critic, the episode's design directs readers away
from a hollow poli tic al arder to more meaningful areas that contain either hidden
relevance or a conceptually significant irrelevance.
40
An examination of the chiastic correspondences clarifies how their connection to
authority reflects the relationship between the outlying authorities and the more obscure,
pers on al concerns of the episode. The previous chapter revealed that the episode' s events
occur as an interaction between two levels, so that an insignificant event on the level of
incident may be charged with symbolic importance by structure. The chiastic
correspondences demonstrate this process. The alignment of Conmee' s section and
Humble's represents figuratively the situation that the narrative will demonstrate. The
next match, between section two and eighteen, aligns Corny Kelleher, the undertaker who
attends to the deceased Patrick Dignam, with the late Dignam's son. The coffin in
Kelleher's workplace mirrors Master Dignam's recollection of his father's coffin. Since
Dignam worries about his father's soul ("1 hope he's in purgatory now because he went to
confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night" [10.1172-4 D, and Kelleher shows
himself a police informant (10.224-6), their common theme of death further qualifies the
joint rule of church and state. A subtler correspondence reminds us of Boylan' s treachery
by associating him with Kelleher: as Hart notes (25), Kelleher chews a blade of hay
(10.210) and Dignam sees Boylan with a red carnation in his mou th, or, less precisely, "a
red flower in a toff' s mouth" (10.1150). This link anticipates the citizen' s response to
Blazes' boxing fraud in Cyclops: "The traitor's son. We know what put English gold in
his pocket" (12.949-50). Dignam sees Boylan immediately after regarding an
advertisement for the Keogh-Bennett match that Boylan allegedly fixed, but this
connection, too, can only be made if we can identify the "toff' as Boylan from an earlier
interpolation: "Outside la maison Claire Blazes Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney's brotherin-Iaw, humpy, tight, making for the liberties" (10.984-5). An extremely covert charge
41
against Boylan, then, sits on display in Madame Doyle's window, and the textuallinks
required to see it depend on the revelatory quality of the chiasmus.
Hart argues that the se "associations are of a definitive personality" (193) that
exerts a "totalitarian dominance" (193) in arrangements that ironically juxtapose the
characters and deliberately frustrate the reader's attempt to find coherence. The
interpolations and the chiastic arrangement produce abrupt and unmediated comparisons
that are often described as hostile. The severity of the approach, however, is nevertheless
consistent with the novel's moral perspective. The pairing of the Dedalus girls with
Mulligan and Haines, for instance, justifies Kenner in noting the episode's special talent
for irony (U 62). Previous episodes have persistently noted Mulligan's prirnrose
waistcoat and his Panama hat: "Prirnrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama
as with a bauble" (9.489-90). Their significance is now tumed sharply against Mulligan's
show of being "stony" (1.476) as the chiasmus places the penniless and malnourished
Dedalus girls sharing yellow pea soup alongside Mulligan's yellow vest that shakes
"gaily" as he mocks Stephen, "chewing and laughing" (10.1089). The design's irony is
merciless here, but it is not universally sour or unsympathetic. Are the Dedalus girls, for
instance, satirized in any way? It is true that Maggie's pi ety directs her shocked reproach
toward her sister Boody's blasphemy, "our father who art not in heaven" (10.291), instead
of her father's negligence (to which Boody's joke refers). But Maggie's response directs
irony toward Father Conmee, especially since he admires as "queenly" (10.67) Mrs.
M'Guiness, the pawnbroker who the girls curse for refusing to put money down on
Stephen' s books. If the episode' s alignments recast its material with irony and malice,
that irony and malice is carefully directed toward the same targets.
42
The undermining of those asserting their dominance in the episode thus relies on
more covert alignments of the chiasmus. As it reveals the unspoken hostilities and the
secrets of the city, the chiasmus traces the same boundaries of authority that the episode
outlines with its use of titles. Hart describes how the structure directs readers toward the
more obscure with "patterns that are clearly present and meaningful ... [which] persuade
the reader to extrapolate the idea of the [chiastic] relationship to those sections where one
might not otherwise have noticed it" (23). The same process directs readers from the
open associations that cluster around Dublin's political masters toward a different
authority, coinciding with the gap between English rule and Irish content identified by
Gibson: "a gap between a particular form of representation and a clandestine set of
indications as to 'what is really going on' ... a gap between an English system of
representation and an Irish content" (56).
The chiasmus operates with a lack of discrimination that mirrors the obliviousness
of Conmee and the parading Humble. Sorne of the pattern's corresponding sections
comment directly on one another, such as Boylan's self-interested gift to Molly paired
with Cunningham's selfless efforts to aid the Dignam family; other connections are more
symbolic, such as the pairing of Molly' s section with the seventeenth, which includes
Artifoni (who, as Stephen's Master, is a father-figure) walking Merrion square and the
blind stripling (an artist figure associated by his stick and decaying sight with Stephen)
coming to misfortune in front of "Mr Bloom's dental windows" (10.1115). This link
anticipates the convergence of Bloom and Stephen in Molly's thoughts by placing one of
the rare glimpses of Molly in the flesh opposite a failed reunion of father and son figures.
The impression of irrelevancy noted by Sherry can be explained by the structure's
dependence on narrative details, which can create symbolic events of import, such as the
43
alignment of Artifoni and the blind stripling, but can also make arbitrary alignments that
seem only to further establish the chiasmus: a possible link that Hart suggests between
section ni ne and eleven, for example, connects the gutter M'Coy nudges a banana peel
toward with the gutter in which Simon Dedalus daims to be looking for money ("Chiastic
Patterns" 26). The differences among the chiastic links therefore indicate an adaptation to
the city' s less obtrusive elements, not the structure' s eventual detachment or irrelevance.
iii. Sweets of Sin: The universality of the chiasmus in Wandering Rocks depends on such
adaptability; as the episode moves inward, the pattern shifts to reflect a different principle
of authority which, 1 will argue, is associated with Bloom. Aside from his central
position in Dublin and the chiasmus, there are sorne key associations that invest Bloom's
section with another source of power. It has been previously noted that Father Conmee
recalls Mulligan's parody of the priest's role, and shows himself directed more toward
worldly power than spiritual. The false priest recurs throughout the episode: when
Conmee and Mrs. Sheehy discuss Father Bernard Vaughan, an English Jesuit who,
Gibson notes, "espoused the cause of 'business people'" (30); as weIl as in the figure of
Father Bob Cowley, who is an actual false priest. The role of the priest that Marguerite
Harkness discusses was previously important to Joyce's work, for example with
"Stephen's metaphor of the artist-priest" (32) in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Wandering Rocks restores the priest role by transferring it from the false priests to a
legitimate "representative of an eternal form" (Harkness 32): Bloom. Lee A. Jacobus
points out that the five shillings Bloom contributes to Dignam's memorial fund gives
away the same sum that Conmee keeps in his purse despite the lame sailor's appeal (483).
The last glimpse of Conmee performing his spiritual office ends with his "secret"
44
(10.193) reading of the Psalm under the designation "Sin" (10.204), which foreshadows
Bloom' s surreptitious reading of Sweets of Sin. The transference of the priest' s role to
Bloom coincides with the episode's movement from the outlying points of the chiasmus
to its centre, thus suggesting the replacement of the institutional and public with the
personal and covert.
Bloom's distance from the outlying points ofWandering Rocks, synonymous with
political power, is nevertheless a place of central importance to the chiasmus. Other
symbolic associations in the novel expand on Bloom's alternative holy office. The first
links Bloom with Moses, who is evoked in the episode by a spurious "Eighth and ninth
book of Moses" (10.844-5) that Stephen peruses, and by the eighth and ninth sections of
the episode, in which the sneezing Ned Lambert exclaims "Mother of Moses!" (10.463),
and M'Coy "peer[s] into Marcus Tertius Moses' sombre office" (10.508) to check the
time. The Mosaic reiterations strengthen an indirect connection that Knuth points out:
Bloom's association with the Elijah-is-coming throwaway and the Gold Cup's winning
horse Throwaway draw on two passages that align him with Moses (414-5). In Aeolus,
Professor MacHugh quotes a speech by John F. Taylor that describes Moses descending
from Sinaï' s mountaïntop "with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and
bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw" (7.867-9);
in Ithaca, Bloom is described in a matching phrase, "with the light of inspiration shining
in his countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of the race, graven in the language
of prediction" (17.339-41). The association indicates an interrelated contrast more than a
division; Hart's assertion that the episode leaves the extremes that flank the more
introspective concerns of Bloom and Stephen does not necessarily dismiss their
importance to the chiastic order. By completing a transference of power, Bloom's
45
Mosaic role balances the structure. John F. Taylor's nationalist speech evokes Moses as a
figure of resistance and celebrates the heralding of a new law "graven in the language of
the outlaw" (7.869). Though Bloom plays other holy parts in the novel, including Elijah
and Christ, specific aspects of the Mosaic association provide a crucial perspective for the
act he performs in this episode.
A more obscure allusion identifies Bloom's securing of Sweets of Sin as analogous
to bearing the Tables of the Law. In Stephen Hero, Stephen discovers a story by Yeats
entitled "The Tables of the Law" in the same place that Stephen and Bloom examine
books in Wandering Rocks: "He had found on one of the carts of books near the river an
unpublished book containing two stories by W. B. Yeats. One of the se stories was called
The Tables of the Law" (157).1 The Yeats story itself begins its second part with a
reference to the same locale: "1 was walking along one of the Dublin quays, on the side
nearest the river ... stopping from time to time to tum over the works upon an old bookstaIl" (159). In Ulysses, Stephen further alludes to Joachim of Flora, whose fictitious
book of prophecy is the subject of Yeats' story, when he holds a book of charms to be
"As good as any other abbot's charms, as mumbling Joachim's" (10.851-2). The scomful
allusion to Yeats' story continues Stephen's quarrel with Dublin mystics, seen earlier in
the library with George Russell, of whom he has just been thinking: "Old Russell with a
smeared shammy rag bumished again his gem, tumed it and held it at the point of his
Moses' beard" (10.812-4, emphasis mine). The hostility Stephen imagines as their
1 Leo Knuth has noted this story in his discussion of the allusions to Moses in Aeolus and Ithaca, but the
connection he makes between it and Wandering Rocks is extremely thin: "In Yeats's story the hero is
incapable of sin because he 'had discovered the law of [his] being and could only express or fail to express
[his] being.' As it happens, according to sorne etymologists, the word 'sin' derives from a verb, meaning
'to be,' so that 'Sweets of Sin' can be translated as 'Sweets of Being'" (416). Knuth does not note the
connection to Stephen Hero, to the book-carts, the many references to Moses, or Stephen's allusion to
Joachim of Flora.
46
response-which associates him with the bald figure of Aristotle-supports this reading:
"Down, baldynoddle, or we'll wool your wool" (10.852-3). While the allusion fits
Stephen's concerns, it also combines with the location, the connection between Bloom
and Moses, and the pervasiveness of readings and books, to add to the density of
associations with the Tables of the Law. This density tacitly charges the episode's centre
with symbolic power just as the outlying sections overtly declare their authority.
The Ithaca episode fulfills the cluster of symbolism gathered around Bloom with
an addition al designation given to his acquisition of Sweets of Sin: "Simchath Torah"
(17.2049). The Jewish festival celebrates Moses' reception of the Law, and "the
completion of the yearlong cycle of Torah reading in the synagogue and its resumption"
(Joly 303). As a festival of reading and a celebration of the Law, Simchath Torah points
to Bloom's Moses-like reception of Sweets of Sin and implies his acquisition of the
pornographie novel as the establishment of a sacred Law. The rite is also relevant as a
marker of an ending that coincides with a beginning, and for its procession that revolves
around the Law. Ralph Robert Joly argues that the central section's alignment with the
festival defines Bloom's priest-like role: "Bloom's task is to effect a new beginning"
(305). The label of Simchath Torah relates to both the Mosaic allusions and Bloom's
central position; it therefore fuses the episode's chiastic structure with its status as a
turning point in the nove!.
Few critics note the status that the Torah designation confers on the episode's
central event, and there is no consensus as to what Bloom's discovery of Sweets of Sin
represents. For Joly, it is the first of Bloom's attempts to "attain[ ... ] Molly's oYes' with
its resonance of renewal" (305) by atoning for a sin. He attaches the title of Bloom's
book and the episode's Torah significations to the Mosaic law of orthodox Judaism,
47
which "holds that sexual relations constitute one of the husband' s primary obligations to
the wife" (304). The context of Law and sin he establishes insinuates that Bloom's sin is
"his abandonment of conjugal obligations" (304); namely, the sexual neglect of Molly
reported in Ithaca: "there remained a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days during
which camaI intercourse had been incomplete" (17.2282-3). In Joly' s reading Bloom' s
gift for Molly looks forward to an effective change in his marriage; the offering, however,
has ironic undertones that his reading overlooks. Bloom's budget in Ithaca makes it clear
that the book is rented and not technically a gift (17.1465). Furthermore, the "smutty"
(4.355) books that Bloom procures for Molly (Sweets of Sin replaces Ruby: the Pride of
the Ring [4.346]) would seem to be offered in compensation for his sexual inactivity, and
Joly does not explain why this novel signals a renewed sexual commitment to Molly.
The passage that Bloom tums to in Sweets of Sin suggests that the book represents
more to him than the completion of an errand or a favour. Though Bloom searches for a
book "in her line" (10.606), Kenner points out that "his own ecstatic response" (Voices
116) is the basis for his choice. The fantasy that follows Bloom's reading includes
significant details:
Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded
amply amid rumpled clothes: whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils
arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (jor him! for
Raoull). Armpits' oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving
embonpoint!). Fee!! Press! Chrished! Sulphur dung of lions!
Young! Young!
(10.619-24)
Kenner argues that Bloom expects the novel to tell Molly that "he knows ... why Boylan
is coming to the hou se" (Voices 116), but such a hint depends on the analogous adultery
Bloom first spots when he opens the book: "All the dollarbills her husband gave her were
spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliestfrillies. For him! For Raoul!"
48
(10.608-9). The numerous appearances of this passage in Bloom's later thoughts makes it
clear that he associates Raoul and Boylan, but he can hardi y have been searching for a
book with such an analogy. Instead the description of adultery seems to excite sensual
fantasy, not schemes for implicit communication with Molly.
Stefan Haag argues that "when he reads Sweets of Sin . .. Bloom is experiencing
pleasure rather than bliss in relating the book to the pleasures of his life, and particularly
those of his youth (Young! Young!)" (134). But the novel makes it clear that Bloom's
fantasy also relates the book to his own betrayal. Zoe, the prostitute of Circe who entices
Bloom into Bella Cohen's brothel, allures Bloom with qualities that echo his fantasy:
(He [Bloom] hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him
towards the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her
painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion
reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her.) (15.2014-17)
The Male Brutes appear "exhaling sulphur of rut and dung" (15.2018-9), and Molly's
thoughts on Boylan complete the connection: "sure you might as well be in bed with what
with a lion God lm sure hed have something better to say for himself an old Lion would"
(18.1376-8). "Armpits' oniony sweat" and "[s]ulphur dung of lions" are alluring to
Bloom as indicators of a woman's previous sex with brutal men, which suggests Boylan
to both Bloom and Molly. The past therefore collaborates with an anticipated sexual
betrayal in the Sweets of Sin template to construct Bloom's fantasy. At the centre of
Wandering Rocks Bloom imaginatively anticipates the same sexual act for which Boylan
too is preparing.
With such ingredients, Sweets of Sin offers a form of adultery that, in its less
direct, imaginative form, allows Bloom to acknowledge not only the event but his own
desire for it. Circe expresses this desire most emphatically in the farce presented among
49
its masochistic sexual hallucinations, in which Bloom "in flunkey's" (15.3760) attire
ushers Boylan in to a bathing Marion and watches them copulate. The seene echoes
Sweets of Sin (Molly addresses Boylan as "Raoul" [15.3770]) and confinns, however
grotesquely, that Bloom's response to the novel reflects a fascination with Molly's
infidelity:
BLOOM
(his eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself) Show! Hide!
Show! Plough her! More! Shoot! (15.3814-16)
The hallucinated adulteress asserts that Bloom's servility plays an active part in the act,
"Let him look, the pishogue! Pimp!" (15.3778); Molly too imagines that Bloom might
take sexual pleasure in the act in much the same accusation: "Ive a mind to tell him every
scrap and make him do it out in front of me serve him right its aIl his own fault if l am an
adulteress" (18.1515-6). Critics often take the technique of Ciree as the stimulant of the
eruption of Bloom's sexual unconscious, or the Cireean brothel that tums men to swine,
but the appearance of "Tales of the Ghetto by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch" (10.592) on
the same counter as Sweets of Sin locates Wandering Rocks as an earlier point where
Bloom masochistically anticipates his betrayal.
The sin of neglected sexual dut y that Joly identifies with the Simchath Torah label
already insinuates that Sweets of Sin is Bloom's repentant acknowledgement of his own
role in the breach ofhis marri age. The masochistic elements of Bloom's fantasy,
however, suggest that Bloorn's rentaI of the novel acknowledges an active participation in
the adultery. Such an acknowledgernent enriches the well-established link between the
cuckolded Shakespeare of Stephen' s the ory and the cuckolded Bloorn, sinee Stephen is
largely interested in the degree to which Shakespeare authors his own betrayal. Bloorn is
50
a similar author, whose show of obliviousness is an act: the "touch ofthe artist" (10.582)
that Lenehan gives to Bloom concludes a similar story of sexualliberties taken with
Molly under an oblivious Bloom's nose. According to Stephen, "[a] man of genius
makes no mistakes. His errors are volition al and are the portais of discovery" (9.229-30),
and in his unfaithful wife Shakespeare finds the "note of banishment ... from the heart,
banishment from home" (9.999-1000) that informs his work: "[a]n original sin and, like
original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned ... It is in infinite
variety everywhere in the world he has created" (9.1008-9). In his role as Ulysses, as
Jewish outsider, and as Irishman, Bloom also enters into this banishment. 1 Joly points out
that Bloom accepts responsibility partly in hope for forgiveness, "MolI! 1 forgot!
Forgive! Moll ... We ... Still ... " (15.3151). But, as Stephen says twice, "There can be
no reconciliation ... ifthere has not been a sundering" (9.37-8). Bloom's rentai of
Sweets of Sin represents an atonement and desire for reconciliation, but this desire is
indistinguishable from his desire for the act that will stimulate and condition the possible
reconciliation. The centring of this act in the episode's dominant structure and its cluster
of associations suggests its weight; however trivial and seemingly futile, Bloom's rentai
signifies a willingness to confront his own psyche along with MolIy's adultery.
1 The theme of betrayal in Irish history runs throughout Ulysses and informs Joyce's earlier depiction of
betrayal as banishment, or exile, in the play Exiles. Joyce explicitly states the theme's national relevance in
his notes to the play, which Mr Garrett Deasy and the citizen both echo in Ulysses: "The two greatest
Irishmen of modern times - Swift and Parnell - broke their lives over women. And it was the adulterous
wife of the King of Leinster who brought the first Saxon to the Irish coast" (160). Like Bloom, the play's
husband Richard Rowan does not attempt to prevent his wife's potential adultery out of a desire for his own
51
Chapter III
Wandering Rocks and Ulysses
Because the chiasmus of Wandering Rocks presents Bloom' s surreptitious reading of
Sweets of Sin at the centre of an obtrusive pattern, critics generally conclude that the
structure justifies itself - that the point of its inclusion is to foreground a gratuitously or
insolently instituted arrangement. It must mean little in most novels to locate the detail at
the centre of an unrelated pattern; an ostentatiously external pattern like the chiasmus in
Wandering Rocks must seem only able to create arbitrary alignments. Since the episode's
disparate events depend on the chiasmus for any sense of unit y or overall significance,
readings that see the se events as more or less insignificant naturally conclude that
Wandering Rocks is about structure itself. Hart writes that the episode's patterns "remind
us that Ulysses, dense with formalism, is among other things an exercise in the imposition
of a pattern on a vast and essentially formless body of urban material and human
experience" ("Chiastic Patterns" 25). The episode' s elaborate rearrangement of the city
exemplifies the imposition of a pattern, but the disruptions and fragmentation that
institute the chiasmus in Wandering Rocks also identify it as the point where anti-mimetic
techniques throw over the initial stability. The dominance of structure in Wandering
Rocks ironically signaIs the imminent decay of structural coherence. Many critics see a
new phase of parody in the novel beginning at this point; Karen Lawrence sees the
meticulous documentation of the episode swelling to include "what might have
happened" as weIl as "what failed to happen" (87). The episode's use of structure is thus
betrayal: "1 have wounded my soul for you - a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed ... for this
1 longed" (147).
52
relevant to the rest of Ulysses as a transition. Once these fonnal principles are integrated
into the novel, the relationship between Bloom's central discovery of Sweets of Sin and
the shift that occurs concomitantly in the novel will become dear.
i. Chiastic Elements in Ulysses. Though the chiastic elements that dominate Wandering
Rocks pervade the novel' s fonn, the use of the chiasmus there contrasts the qualities that
are attached to the pattern and its use in Ulysses. It is not surprising that critical accounts
frequently integrate the episode into the novel structurally. The most obvious connection
between the two is the chiastic arrangement of the novel's episodes, which nearly mirrors
the sections of Wandering Rocks. As the centre of the episode' s chiasmus is its tenth
section, so the episode itself takes the tenth position in Ulysses. The heavily involved
chiasmus in Wandering Rocks, from which an aware reader can gather so many important
connections, suggests the possibility of applying that pattern to the entire novel. The
matching chiastic centre of the episode and its position in the novel encourages this
application, so that Wandering Rocks seems to dedare itself a microchiasmus of the
greater work and a key to the fonn of Ulysses.
Much critical discussion of the episode accordingly examines it as a microcosm of
the novel. In Ulysses on the Liffey, Ellmann daims that "the number of this episode' s
parts duplicates the total number of episodes in Ulysses, like a distorting mirror-image,"
(91) and sees this mirror as the means by which "Dublin asserts itself as micropolis" (91):
a petty world that hurls its "onslaught of intricate fact" (90) into the teeth of any grander
conception of reality. Kathleen McCormick's more recent study, Ulysses, "Wandering
Rocks, " and the Reader, replaces the "treacherous and undependable" (91) spirit that
inhabits Ellmann's reading with a playful disposition that governs the episode's
53
uncertainties and provides us with "certain distinctive pleasures" (7). But her pleased
response to the narrative peculiarities also makes Wandering Rocks "an index to the
multiple pleasures ... of Joyce's masterpiece" (13), and thereby aligns herself with
Ellmann' s classification of the episode as a rnicrocosm of the larger nove!.
The problem with either reading is that the numbers needed to support the view of
Wandering Rocks as a microcosm do not add up. The eighteen episodes of Ulysses come
short of the nineteen sections that make up Wandering Rocks. Ellmann gets around this
problem rather weakly by suggesting that the episode breaks the city into "eighteen little
heaps and a coda, to be precise" (91). The coda is presumably the final section that
features William Humble's cavalcade passing through Dublin, but my discussion of the
section makes it clear that it continues to develop the episode. Ellmann offers no
explanation of why that section should not count; neither does he notice the chiastic
arrangement placed around Bloom, which his coda would upset. To be precise, then,
there is no numerical alignment of the greater work with the sections of Wandering
Rocks, though the numbers seem deliberately close: as Hart notes, this is an episode of
"not-quite-parallels" ("Chiastic Patterns" 18). Much critical work on Wandering Rocks
increases the temptation toward this misreading by focusing on the episode as a signal
with primarily external significance, which accords with the perception of the episode' s
events as relatively irrelevant. Both Ellmann and McCormick have this tendency, as do
Hart and Kenner, to the extent that they read the episode as "a resting place, a diversion, a
labyrinth" (McCorrnick 13); "a relatively static moment ... [giving] readers time to look
around" (Hart, "WR" 186); a view that "draws back as though to locate and also lose
the se two [Bloom and Stephen] in a fragmented Dublin" (Kenner, U 62). As my first
section has shown, these readings argue that not much happens on the basis of absent
54
causal links among the episode's events. The same impulse leads many critics to identify
Wandering Rocks with the earlier plan to include an entr'acte in the novel that Joyce
described in a letter to Frank Budgen (noted on my twenty-fifth page). In the perceived
absence of any real action, the episode appears to be a purely structural dumb show of
Ulysses that announces the imminent dominance of artifice and surface.
The relegation of the episode' s significance to the novel' s structure encourages
misreading Wandering Rocks as a microcosm. This misreading is helpful, though,
because it suggests that something is significant about the placement of Wandering Rocks
in the novel. Many critics explain the presence in Ulysses ofthe episode's detached and
general survey of Dublin by discussing it as a signal of change. This explanation often
supports the microcosm interpretation, since both readings focus on the placement of the
episode at a turning point in the novel. The transition al significance of Wandering Rocks,
however, does not depend on a direct numerical alignment; it rather points to changes in
the novel' s fOfffi. Kenner describes Wandering Rocks as the cue for the novel' s more
disorienting effects to begin and the point where strange powers begin to be exercised "as
though a giant were slowly coming awake" (U 64). He bases his argument on a
distinction between the first ten episodes of Ulysses and the final eight: the novel' s initial
"ten-episode Ulysses," in which the "governing note is irony" (U 62), gives way in the
remaining eight episodes to a new mode in which "'style' ... is more expressive and
more apparent than narration" (U 64). For Kenner, Wandering Rocks marks this division:
it shows the defeat of "the storyteller" and the takeover of a radically innovative narrator
that announces its presence in Wandering Rocks with its "certain indifference" to the
reader' s (U 65).
55
My connection of structural principles in Wandering Rocks to those of the greater
work is not intended to establish the episode as a key to structure in Ulysses; but the
episode' s chiasmus represents an exaggerated illustration of the techniques that the novel
uses to destabilize its initial structure. The exaggeration of technique in Wandering
Rocks informs the reader of Ulysses that structure' s more dominant role there is not a
concession of its inevitable supremacy, or of the inadequacy of modem life, but a
demarcation of its limitations and weaknesses. The text' s surfaces project the existence
of something beyond a merely structural coherence by continually disrupting such
coherence, while its application to the referentiallevel remains consistent. Much recent
work on Ulysses resists identifying the novel' s play with conventions as a destruction of
them, focusing instead on its ability to employ the same conventions that it
simultaneously parodies and ignores. The text's wildest foolery relies on rigid
convention, as a vaudeville act relies on a straight man. If its self-parody forces readers
to con front the process through which Ulysses makes meaning, it nevertheless represents
a response to a threatened loss of meaning that the text both registers and engages by
addressing art, infidelity, death, birth, and digestion.
As the previous section showed, the Ithaca episode explicitly summarizes
Wandering Rocks as a transitional episode. It receives an altemate title as Bloom
"silently recapitulate[s]" the day's "consecutive causes ... of accumulated fatigue"
(17.2042-3): "the bookhunt along Bedford row, Merchants' Arch, Wellington Quay" is
parenthetically labelled "Simchath Torah" (17.2048-9). The celebration of a
simultaneous beginning and end complements the transitional status that Kenner gives to
Wandering Rocks, by not only figuratively associating the sections that revolve around
Bloom's reading with the dancing processions that circle around the altar in the Jewish
56
ceremony, but also qualifying the specific situation that the episode's centre depicts. Joly
notes this qualification, and so counters the critical tendency to focus on the episode as a
signal of transition in the external structure of Ulysses. Other work certainly links the
episode's imagery with a cycIical pattern. Knuth, for example, lists the episode's
pervasive round objects as "cIocks and watches, beads and bells, eyeglasses, round
pillarboxes, wheels, cups and pots and kettle-lids, flowers and peaches and tomatoes,
gaping mouths and ogling disks, the eucharist and a man named Love (zero), stars, the
sun and the moon, hats and caps, cannonballs and coins" (410). Knuth, however, joins
many others in reducing the episode' s material to its correspondence with an external
framework: "the action and the structure are determined by the concept of the labyrinth"
(406). As a result he reads the list of circular images only as conceptuallinks to the
overall structure of the novel that tell us nothing about what happens in the episode.
Joly, on the other hand, shows that both the episode's status as transition point and
its chiastic structure can provide important insight into the episode' s events. For
example, in his reading the many books and frequent instances of reading in Wandering
Rocks evoke the "primary importance of Simchath Torah as a festival of 'readings'"
(304); but Father Conmee's Nones and Stephen and Dilly's perusal of the bookcart do not
merely support the conceptual understanding of the episode as a transition. These are
also cIues that point to Bloom' s central act of reading: Simchath Torah does not only
direct Joly to the central section (which Bloom's presence and the chiasmus make easy
enough to spot), but charges Bloom's actions there as centrally important to the novel.
Although Joly problematically concIudes that Bloom's rental of the book is a
"compensatory act" that promises "renewal" for his and Molly' s marriage (305), his
argument remains most valu able for its application of the episode' s transitional status to
57
the question of what happens within the episode, and for the subsequent assertion that an
important transition occurs on the referentiallevel of the text.
We have seen that for Bloom this moment marks the beginning of a confrontation
with Molly' s infidelity and all that it represents. The coincidence of that moment with a
point of structural transition links his confrontation to the techniques of the last eight
episodes of Ulysses. Henry Staten identifies chiastic elements in the novel's major
thematic preoccupations which reinforces this connection by tracing a point of
convergence between artificial and referential aspects of the text. Their convergence also
relates to Bloom's situation: "the undoing of aIl ontological security and the unleashing of
the anxiety of individuation ... linked ... to the fear of infidelity" (175). Staten's
reading begins by identifying a chiastic process of simultaneous composition and
decomposition in the novel's linguistic play and its treatment oflife and art. He notes
that Stephen "declares the identity of this double movement in body and in text" (174)
during his discussion of Hamlet: "As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies
... so does the artist weave and unweave his image" (9.376-8). Staten shows that the
double movement named in theory is made concrete in Bloom's use of ajournaI at the
end of Calypso: here "Bloom defecates while reading a story ... [then] tears away 'half
the prize story' and wipes himself with it" (173). Staten describes the moment as "a witt y
and profound allegory of literature touching reality" that "emblematizes the
correspondence" (173-4) between organic and aesthetic forms in Ulysses. The text' s
organic and aesthetic processes come together where composition and decomposition
merge: in Staten's words, where "no ultimate distinction can be drawn between
formlessness as degradation of the logos ... and formlessness as the becoming-feces of
the human body" (174). Staten's work therefore identifies a chiasmus process as the
58
basis ofthe text' s composition, and links the centre of the pattern to the point where
opposite movements are indistinguishable, where composition reverses itself, life
becomes death, and form becomes formless.
Staten also identifies in the meeting of linguistic and bodily functions in the jakes
of Calypso "the universal reversibility of the cycle of (de)composition that encompasses
the text," which he calls its "general gastronomics" (182). Since the emblem of the se
merging forces is another point of reversaI, it suggests that the text presents their merger
as chiastic. Staten does not develop the general gastronomies in relation to the chiasmus,
but his treatment of this principle calls attention to further chiastic reversaI in the text.
For example, Staten opposes reading the jakes scene as merely ajoking "comment on the
subliterary character of the titbit in question," by emphasising that the nov el "freely
allows the subliterary to circulate within it" (173). Indeed, this scene marks the beginning
of the highly consumable "subliterary" titbit' s metamorphosis at the same time that
Bloom's feces associate it with the end of a decornpositional process - digestion. The
story that meets Bloorn' s feces at the conclusion of Calypso, "Matcham' s Masterstroke ..
. by Mr Philip Beaufoy" (4.503), is also the inspiration for the literary endeavour Bloom
conternplates in the cabrnan's shelter of Eumaeus. While he sits with Stephen, Bloom
wonders "whether he might meet with anything approaching the same luck as Mr Philip
Beaufoy if taken down in writing suppose he were to pen something out of the cornrnon
groove (as he fully intended doing) ... My Experiences, let us say, in a Cabman's
Shelter" (16.1227-31). The narrative technique of Eurnaeus, in turn, perforrns Bloom's
planned emulation of Beaufoy: it provides the account of his experiences in the cabrnan' s
shelter in an identifiably Bloornesque fashion. Thus Ulysses absorbs the story that it first
associates with the collapse of organic form to make it the formai basis of its own
59
sixteenth chapter. The emblematic moment in Bloom's toilet not only represents the
point where matter is released as waste, but also where a "tearaway" is fashioned into
meaningful form. The chiasmus reflects the continuity of each of these processes by
focusing on the point where a movement or progression changes direction or reverses
itself: in this case, where decomposition is recomposed. As a figure of convergence and
transition, the chiasmus operates as a key organizing principle of Ulysses.
1 have already established the chiastic pattern's convergence with the details and
incidents that occur on the representationallevel of Wandering Rocks as a particularly
meaningful area of Ulysses where differentiated elements merge. In Staten's reading of
the novel's "general gastronomics," the point of convergence is also a point of
simultaneity: the moment in Bloom's toilet, for instance, is not only "the meeting of
language and reality" (188) on the referentiallevel, but also represents the text's
strategies to merge with reality and renovate literary mimesis: "realist mimesis is
reconceived as the isomorphism of two decompositional series" (173). The crux of these
strategies is the novel's attempt to stage its own decay as part of its creation. Realism in
Ulysses, according to Staten, dissolves "only through a process that simultaneously
reconstitutes it" (173). The text's ability to do so is recognized by many critics interested
in the novel's aesthetics: Umberto Eco's The Middle Ages of James Joyce locates the
genesis of the destabilized form particular to Ulysses amid the decomposition of organic
matter that, as in Staten, will coincide with the dissolution of classical form. Eco sees the
novellooking forward to this dissolution in the progressively soggy mind of Stephen in
Proteus:
gradually his [Stephen's] eyes turn towards the sea where the figure of the
drowned man is outlined ... [and] the ordered divisions of the topics
bec orne an uninterrupted flow ...
60
It is not so much the content but the form of Stephen's thoughts which
signaIs the passage from an orderly cosmos to a fluid and watery chaos.
Here death and rebirth, the outlines of objects, human destiny itself
becomes amorphous and pregnant with possibility. (35-6)
Decay is perhaps a more dominant theme in the early episodes, where the notoriously
pliable narrator of Ulysses adapts to the atmosphere of death in Stephen's brooding and
Dignam's funeral. The novel's focus on death enriches the text's mimic form with great
creative energy - "pregnant with possibility." Through the adaptation to Stephen's mind,
the early novel finds possibilities for departure from a stable form; Stephen's weariness of
form similarly registers a desire for form' s overthrow with the imagined "ruin of aIl
space" (2.9) that prefaces his Aristotelian consideration of an incorruptible "soul ... the
form of forms [Joyce's own translation of Aristotle's entelechia]" (2.75). The result is a
"uni verse in which new connections are established among things" (36): the chaotic
linguistic effects of the latter part of Ulysses realize an inherent capacity for
metamorphosis in the early episode's formaI regularity and significantly, not by rejecting
that form, but by multiplying it so that its stability is lost.
In this model, the shifting forms of Ulysses are inherent in its initial stability and
their release is inevitable. This inevitability accords with the general critical consensus
that Ulysses begins to parody the conventions on which it relied in the immature phase of
its development. Such a model also applies to the apparent order that Wandering Rocks
has been shown to impose on Dublin, for the elements of the text, such as its use of titles,
lead toward a similarly inherent release, such as the fantastic sexual potential fulfilled in
Circe. In this context, the episode' s use of the chiasmus as the basis of its structural
consistency realizes its ironie significance: the exaggerated presence of structure in
Wandering Rocks presents a fixed, extemal version of the chiasmus that, in the rest of the
61
novel, traces the novel's exploration of the point where composition becomes
decomposition and structures are undone.
The episode has been previousl y noted as an end of the novel' s stable first half
and beginning of the erratic second half; as a marker, the fixed chiasmus, which directs us
to the chiastic process of simultaneous formation and dissolution, also states the
coincidence of that process with Bloom' s story. The chiasmus reflects the exploration
Bloom embarks on in confronting Molly's adultery and his complicity in it. However
distinctly orchestrated, the series of alignments imposed by the external chiasmus
culminate in Bloom's silent act. My initial discussion of the episode's technique
examined how it merges a seemingly direct and unmediated record of physical
phenomena with the externally coordinated chiasmus, an intricate and artificial design.
The distinction between the referential level and the structurallevel of the text that this
produces explains the critical tendency to focus on the implications of Bloom' s reading
for the external structure of the novel. However, my first section showed how the
separateness of these two levels of the text makes their convergence the more dramatic.
Details of various kinds coincide temporally and spatially through the episode's elaborate
structure, and the expanded amount of coincidences emphasize that the ultimate source of
meaning is the point of convergence.
The relationship between the novel' s particular form and a simultaneous fusion of
growth and decay can also be found at the basic level of how the novel structures its own
reading. Iser's work on Ulysses, and his theory of reader-response that uses Joyce's work
as its basis, focuses on the text's ab il it y to simultaneously evoke and destabilize various
62
frameworks of meaning. 1 The simultaneous invocation and frustration of the frameworks
that promise to compose the novel's massive amounts of detail into coherent meaning is
for him the most significant aspect of Ulysses, "a novel whose driving force is the
thwarting of its reader's expectations" ("U and the Reader" 135). Iser's the ory is
particularly valu able for its analysis of how the text conducts this simultaneous process,
in which he identifies and develops the concept of the gap in a text's consistency. Since
the se gaps work by deliberately evoking and frustrating expectations, the y offer a
significant perspective to examine the structures relevant to Wandering Rocks and the
chiasmus. My discussion so far has involved a number of approaches, aH of which
associate the novel' s centre with a structuring principle that govems the entire work. The
use of a deliberate evocation and frustration of expectation as a principle of order helps
explain the novel's transition al points where a chiasmus inverts its order and where
composition becomes decomposition. In his articles Iser positions his theory as
necessitated by the resistance of modemist texts to consistent meaning, for which Ulysses
is made the primary model, and accordingly emphasizes the novel as whoHy lacking in
coherence. Only the rhetoric Iser uses to defend his theory necessitates this conclusion,
however, and one can therefore separate that conclusion from his approach, which can
provide an exarnination of how the textual gaps of Ulysses are a key element of its
coherence. The gap's resistance to any one system works as a structuring principle of the
novel that aligns with the aspects of the text associated with structure: the unregularized
interaction of structure and incident, the concept of polytropia, and the chiasmus.
1 Iser's article on Ulysses in his book Prospecting declares that "in Ulysses we are confronted with the
processing of reality rather than with its representation ... Through this process, the novel itself brings
about the necessary shift in the perspective of interpretation. It is therefore the act of response that we must
focus on, because it is this act that sheds light on ... [the] novel" (135).
63
Wandering Rocks provides an exaggerated enactment of the se structural
operations in the novel. The consistency of the chiasmus that structures Wandering
Rocks appears to make the episode an exception to the general instability of structure; at
the same time, it often functions in similar ways to Iser's gap. Critics continually
describe the episode as particularly playful or tricky, and note its penchant for creating
traps and false parallels for the reader. It therefore relies on evoking expectations in the
reader that will not be realised. The concept of the tex tuaI gap as a structural principle
helps deal with the se aspects of the episode without systematising them: rather than
assigning the traps to a destabilizing function, 1 read them as illustrating the principle of
partial alignment which extends to the episode' s position in the overall structure and
which operates in other episodes. Thus the structural completeness of Wandering Rocks'
chiasmus can also be read as a gap: my reading of the episode and the novel reveals how
the difference between its structure and that of Ulysses illustrates the same concept of
gaps that operates intemaIly among tex tuaI processes.
ii. Polytropia. The integration of the structure of Wandering Rocks into Ulysses marks
the novel's changing technique, but as a transition it also names Bloom's situation as the
basis of the novel' s movement into its metamorphic phase. The episode' s fixed structure
provides a kind of structural allegory that helps formulate as weIl as announce the novel' s
structural principles. The inherent instability that the excessively dominant chiasmus of
Wandering Rocks betrays, which revolves around Bloom's acknowledged cuckolding,
presents a general principle of unfixed structure that becomes the formaI basis for
aesthetic composition in Ulysses. As we have seen, Stephen de scribes such a basis when
he uses an organic model for Shakespeare' s works; but Bloom too has a the ory of
64
composition, which suggests the consequences of Ulysses' destabilized form. In Aeolus
Bloom's thoughts drift from typesetting to Martin Cunningham's "spellingbee
conundrum": "it is amusing to view the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double
ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging the symmetry with a y of a peeled pear under
a cemetery wall" (7.166-9). Staten notes how the passage represents typographical decay,
where "words begin to decompose into their constitutive units as individualletters emerge
into quasi autonomy" (179). In this context, the puzzle' s concentration of the potential
for linguistic error contributes to Ulysses' satire of the repeatable and incorruptible forms
of classical mimesis. The construction of reality from print in the novelleads to
inevitable distortion-sorne of the type set in this scene will distort Dignam' s funeral
both deliberately, in the supposed attendance of M'Coy, and accidentally, when it makes
Bloom into "L. Boom" (16.1256).
Bloom's care in spelling calls attention to the arbitrariness of language, which the
passage also dramatizes with the breakdown in the narrative: pieces of words, Bloom's
hesitant checks, and sounds are so jumbled together in the passage that the reader must
sort them out. The text's muddle reminds us that Cunningham's puzzle is a kind of
literary composition that exploits the reducibility of language to senseless parts-a
suggestive double for Joyce's text so often celebrated as a puzzle or ridd1e. The logic
behind Cunningham's puzzle, as expounded by Bloom, points to an essential principle of
the novel's unstable structure: "Silly, isn't it?" Bloom thinks, "Cemetery put in of course
on account of the symmetry" (7.169-70). Bloom notes in these similarly-pronounced but
differently-spelled words how the puzzle suggests relationships that cannot be
consistently applied: the single r in "unparalleled" and "harassed" might cause an
incorrect spelling of embarrassment. The play in Bloom's comment on symmetry
65
suggests a symmetry based on two things: first, on the word's deceptive closeness to
cemetery, or, the kind of near-parallels and false-parallels that the chiastic patterns in
Wandering Rocks also create; and second, on the cemetery as death-as the organic
decomposition that reflects the text' s instability.
The logic that the novel' s metamorphoses follow, exemplified in the spelling
conundrum, is essentially the same unsettling logic with which Molly's infidelity
confronts Bloom. Bloom's consideration of Cunningham's composition, like Stephen's
theory of Hamiet, also interprets the work of a put-upon husband. When Bloom reflects
on Cunningham's compassion in Hades he thinks both of his face, "[l]ike Shakespeare's
face" (6.345), and of "[t]hat awful drunkard of a wife of his ... Leading him the life of
the damned. Wear the heart out of a stone, that. Monday morning. Start afresh" (6.34952). Cunningham's creation aligns with that of Shakespeare in Stephen's argument, so
that the necessity in the puzzle to continu aIl y "start afresh" reflects a compassionate
response to his wife's misbehaviour. The conundrum develops its symmetry through
irregularity, death, and graduaI distortion, and to sorne degree responds to a spouse's
betrayal. As such it explains why the chiasmus of Wandering Rocks places the
anticipated betrayal of Bloom at the centre of a structure that marks the end of structural
stability in the novel. Adultery releases the text' s capacity for formal decay that begins
with organic decay because, as Staten makes clear, Bloom's conception ofboth adultery
and decay holds the same menacing conclusions for him: "being the object of infidelity
makes one feel so eminently contingent and replaceable ... an anxiety of nonbeing that
resonates with the pain of death" (188). These pains resonate concretely in Molly's bed,
which Bloom enters "reverently, the bed of conception and ofbirth, of consummation of
marriage and of breach of marriage, of sleep and of death" (17.2119-21). The adulteress'
66
bed becomes the deathbed: in merging the consummation and breach of marriage, it
evokes an indiscriminate force of sexuality that corrodes the distinctness of the
individual, as might death.
Stephen's discussion of Hamlet, which we have seen applies directly to Bloom's
role in the adultery of Ulysses, provides a theoretical basis for cuckoldry-as-evanescence.
The thematic compound the play makes with the Odyssey equates the father who, like
Odysseus, returns from exile with the father who, like King Hamlet, returns from death,
and both return, in part, to avenge attempts on their wives' fidelity. Stephen envisions
King Hamlet's ghost as Shakespeare's disembodied self: "What is a ghost? Stephen said
with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through
absence, through change of manners" (9.147-9). The novel generally translates Stephen's
theory into the flesh of Bloom's life, and Bloom faces the same decline into impalpability
in Molly's bed, which the narrative technique of Ithaca offers as a rigorously extended
mathematical formula:
If he had smiled why might he have smiled?
To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself ta be the first ta enter
whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first
term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself ta 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.
What preceding series?
Assuming Mulvey ta be the first term of his series, Penrose, Bartell
d'Arcy, professor Goodwin, Julius Mastiansky, John Henry Menton,
Father Bernard Corrigan, ... and so each and sa on to no last term.
(17.2126-31)
As Kenner notes, since the Answerer lists the members of this series and Boylan as its
latest member, "we easily imagine the improbable, that Molly has taken twenty-five men
67
at least into her bed" (88). Though exact, Ithaca's Answerer often works according to
assumptions that must be deduced: Kenner' s alternative is that the series "is nothing but a
list of Leopold's suspicions" (88), but this seems equally improbable since Bloom has
earlier thought without suspicion of sorne of the more unlikely inclusions, "a farmer at the
Royal Dublin Society's Horse Show ... an Italian organgrinder" (18.2935-7). Bloom
recalls in Sirens a hurdy-gurdy boy that Molly seemed to understand, possibly, Bloom
thinks, due to her Spanish background (11.1092); the farmer is remembered as somehow
stimulating a past sexual episode: "Molly, her underjaw stuck out, head back, about the
farmer in the ridingboots and spurs at the horse show. And when the painters were in
Lombard street west ... Same time doing it scraped her slipper on the floor so the y
wouldn't hear" (13.998-1004). As the latter incident suggests, the series of names that
Ithaca lists is a record of jealousy that extends past concrete suspicions. Though spurred
by Molly's actual betrayal, the list extends "to no last term" (17.2142) into the
recognition that the possible objects of her sexual attraction are infinite.
If Bloom' s confrontation uncovers "the species drive as the annihilation ofthe
individual" (189), as Staten argues, it also uncovers possibilities for the reinvestment of
meaning into such patterns. The parallel with Shakespeare gives the destabilized vision
of reality that Bloom' s confrontation produces an active and creative potential, since
Bloom bec ornes the novel's "allroundman" (10.581) by entering a similar portal of
discovery that Stephen claims is the source of Shakespeare's celebrated variety: "he is
bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted on ... His unremitting intellect is the hornmad
Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer" (9.1020-24). The abundance of
patterns that the novel begins to offer evokes the instability of identity, but it also
develops the interrelationship of the text's artificial structures and the seemingly random
68
inclusion of detail on the referentiallevel that destroys the form those structures offer.
While Eco links the enriched formaI possibilities released by Stephen's attention to decay
on the strand in Proteus to that episode's title by describing it as Prote an (35), the
metamorphosis possible in the novel' s evolving form also locates the text' s generative
power in the narrative's ability to distribute meaning among various structures: for
instance, the literary-mythical collage of the Odyssey, Ramlet, Sweets of Sin and the
Judaeo-Christian tradition.
The abundance of patterns in Ulysses that permits such overlapping mythical and
tex tuaI structures allows the text to move in and out of alignment with various structures.
While the result of this quality produces "the result," described by Iser, "that each form of
integration brings about a sort of kaleidoscope reshuffling of the material excluded"
(Patterns of Communication" 109), the expansion of possible alignments in the novel
constitutes a consistent quality of the text, which Fritz Senn discusses as an extension of
its theme. For Senn, the central, titular role of Ulysses is represented not by a single
character but by the instability of the text, which extends an Odyseean quality of
polytropia (given to the hero in the Odyssey's first line) as a principle throughout. He
considers, for instance, both Buck Mulligan and the old sailor in Eumaeus as men "of
many turns" (43-5) who demonstrate Odyssean versatility and cunning and who
contribute to the general trickiness that the title Ulysses announces as its subject. It would
be a severely distorted reading of Ulysses that held Mulligan or the sailor D. B. Murphy
to be more Odysseus than Bloom, but Senn argues that the many persons sharing
Odyssean qualities do not deteriorate the role's respective correspondences so much as
illustrate its essential promiscuity: "Polytropia in Ulysses ... is not limited to any one
feature, or level, or any one person ... [but] polytropically distributed and incarnated
69
throughout" (46). The novel relies on that polytropic distribution to keep its structures
unfixed. A reader is aware of the presence of the Odyssey in Ulysses, but Dublin
correspondents must compete for the official recognition of Homer. The abundance of
patterns in the novel means that the presence of a pattern does not necessarily indicate
which of the novel' s events or details it will correspond with in a meaningful way. If
Bloom's narrative declares itselfthe more worthy inheritor of Homer's story, it does so
with its own compelling qualities as much as with Homeric paralIels.
The characters of Ulysses also negotiate a kind of polytropia. Stephen's character,
for instance, is continualIy adopting and rejecting a number of roles both deliberately and
accidentally. The "Ioveliest mummer of them aIl" (1.97-8) is comfortable with the poet's
role that makes his hat Hamlet's (3.390), and pleased by that of "communard" (7.599)
devoted to Paris fads; however, as a "dreadful bard" (1.134) he is busy fighting back
Mulligan's facile Hellenism and the Celtic mysticism of George Russell and William
Butler Yeats. Stephen will not play chip off the block for his father' s friends, nor the
penitent son for his mother or her ghost, but he succumbs to the equally conventional role
ofbilious "Boasthard" (14.429), and courts that of a martyr. AlI Joyce's characters
encounter roles in this way, according to Kenner, who writes that Joyce's Dublin
produces "a sense ... that young people try out parts, the parts available to them, and get
trapped in the last part the y play" (Voices 52). The eventual fixation of a part creates the
trap that Kenner describes, which suggests that the polytropia of Ulysses is a potentially
redemptive force since it gives characters parts of which they are unaware but
nevertheless capable ofperforming. Bloom's alignment with Moses, or Elijah, does not
deteriorate his identification with Odysseus. The fixation on any one part is thus
70
potentially constrictive for readers too if they hold to the last part, or the forernost part
that the text suggests rnight correspond with a given character.
The application of a pattern rnay also not provide any rneaningful structure at aIl
in a text capable of so rnany. The rnathernaticallthaca episode, for example, leads ad
absurdurn a pattern that Stephen charges with rneaning in Ciree. During Bloorn's palrn
reading, Stephen atternpts to traee a rneaningfullink between his and Bloorn's respective
ages:
BLOOM
(points to his hand) That weal there is an accident. FeIl and cut it
twentytwo years ago. 1 was sixteen ...
STEPHEN
See? Moves to one great goal. 1 am twentytwo. Sixteen years ago he was
twentytwo too. Sixteen years ago 1 twentytwo turnbled. Twentytwo years
ago he sixteen feIl off his hobbyhorse. (he winces) Hurt my hand
somewhere.
(15.3712-3721)
When the connection between Stephen and Bloorn is examined in Ithaca, the episode's
Questioning and Answering narrators discuss the possibility of a similar link:
What relation existed between their ages?
16 years before in 1888 when Bloorn was of Stephen's present age
Stephen was 6. 16 years after in 1920 when Stephen would be of Bloorn' s
present age Bloorn would be 54.
(17.446-9)
From the se calculations the Answerer notes how the ratio between their ages decreases:
"dirninishing according as arbitrary future years were added, for if the proportion existing
in 1883 [17: 1] had continued irnmutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then 1904
when Stephen was 22 Bloorn would be 374" (17.451-4). Cornrnon sense concludes frorn
this that Bloom is sixteen years younger th an Stephen. The episode's Answerer,
however, continues to search for a link by calculating their hypothetical ages had Bloorn
71
begun to age seventeen times faster from 1883 onwards, until it conclu des with an
instance in which Bloom is "obliged to have been born in the year 81,396 B.C." (17.461).
The fixed ratio is the basis of the comedy here, not only as the source of increasingly
nonsensical figures, but as an indicator of the Answering narrator' s lack of the discretion
needed to construct meaning out of numbers in the way that Stephen does. Stephen
removes sixteen or twenty-two years from his age and from Bloom's age as needed in
order to align numbers with personal events - he then draws on these numbered events to
explain his present situation, such as a recently hurt hand. But from a completely
impersonal perspective (lthaca's "Technic" is "Catechism [impersonal]" in Joyce's
schema), the "one great goal" that the novel's events must move toward is a nullification
of aIl meaning: "the annihilation of the world and consequent extermination of the human
species, inevitable but unpredictable" (17.464-5). The consistency of the episode's math
is itself shaky, which emphasises the limitations of its conclusions.) The rigid logic that
concludes its search for meaningful connections with the ultimate "lack of connectedness
not only between human beings but also between the human and the cosmos" (Bersani
227) is also an indiscriminate, inhuman logic, and its conclusions are not the novel' s
conclusions.
Many of the novel' s comical deviations from reality or from sense take place
under the sponsorship of a pattern of sorne kind, and the inclusion of such deviations
illustrates how a possibility may be both presented and simultaneously intended for
rejection. If Stephen and Bloom jokingly converge as mathematical ratios or as dissolved
1After hypothetical ages are ca1culated according to the proposed 17: 1 ratio, the final two figures are
ca1culated according to a 70: 1 ratio. Don Gifford' s Ulysses Annotated provides an extended analysis of the
faulty numbers in this passage, but refrains from speculating on the source of the inconsistency.
72
linguistic constructions (Stoom and Blephen [17.549,551 D, these hypothetical absurdities
reflect our perception of Stephen and Bloom's connection; the y do not, however, serve as
the basis for that connection, nor do they disqualify it by their absurdity. Part of the joke
is our own tendency to derive meaning from nonsense, which the text notoriously
exploits. As Bersani argues, the narrator exhibits "superiority to the patterns and models
of representation which he insists that we recognize and analytically elaborate while he
himself partially neglects them" (207). The text' s evocation of conventional models is
one of many areas in which Ulysses encourages and allots for the reader's application of
inappropriate patterns that yield, mimetically speaking, unrealistic results. Many
examples in the narrative remind us that what is false at first does not necessarily stay
false, as Senn illustrates with Bantam Lyons's misinterpretation of "Bloom's innocent
statement" (5.537) as a tip for the Gold Cup horse race: "Reality then turns the initial
error into unexpected truth, and the reader can rely on sorne further non-realistic
relevance" (52). The process has been shown to happen on a physicallevel in Wandering
Rocks, where the episode's technique makes substantial what is not actually present, and
where interpolations disrupt the realist presentation. Similarly, the episode's most
consistent structure, the chiasmus, is frequently noted for leading readers astray by
suggesting false connections. John Hannay de scribes the episode's encouragement for
mistruth: "Joyce invites misreading by deliberately making two distinct characters,
objects, or events seem as one ... the reader must avoid the potential error of fusing
separate entities, even though this fusion might lead to a meaningful connection" (434).
The episode's inclusion of many easily-conflated elements creates this trap, showing
again how the text' s polytropia extends meaning beyond the factual into error. What is
false may yet be significant in the Ulysses that Wandering Rocks introduces.
73
iii. Conclusion. Bloom' s bookhunt gets the name Simchath Torah while he is recalling
the salient events of his day. The label therefore represents an assessment of his actions
in Wandering Rocks at the same time that it establishes the episode as a site of transition.
Bloom' s central position validates the seemingly arbitrary chiastic structure of Wandering
Rocks-its focus on Bloom and qualification of Bloom's actions make it an integral part
of the episode' s description of events. The chiasmus both demarcates and reflects the
transition that Bloom' s story is undergoing; the dominant structure of Wandering Rocks
is thus directly tied to the major thematic concems of Ulysses.
While the rigidity of structure in Wandering Rocks has been shown to expose the
inherent instability of the novel' s form, the alignment of the text' s artificial surface and
its referentiallevel remains a consistent source of meaning in the novel. The central
points of transition and convergence in the chiastic structure allow it to reflect structurally
the processes of composition and decomposition that operate in the major thematic
preoccupations of Ulysses. The loss of the structural stability that Wandering Rocks
invests in the chiasmus coincides with Bloom's confrontation of Molly's adultery, which
occurs at the episode's centre. The fixed form of the chiasmus that Wandering Rocks
attempts to impose is thus built on its own decomposition. The inevitable direction of the
chiasmus toward a loss of stability illustrates a principle of structure that remains
consistent in Ulysses, and provides a framework to read the novel's unstable and
unformed excesses through.
The off-centre position of Wandering Rocks and its disruption of the Homeric
parallels in Ulysses fittingly introduce the unstable phase of the novel, where multiple
structures will align with Stephen and Bloom' s stories. Because of the surplus of
74
corresponding signifiers, the relevance of any structure in Ulysses fluctuates in its
applicability to characters, events, and forms. Knuth, for ex ample , argues that "Bloom's
association with Odysseus is of less importance" in the context of Wandering Rocks
"than his association with Christ" (407). The alternation between the many available
structures might result, as Iser argues, in the continuaI frustration of the "organizing
principles" that each structure might offer ("Patterns" 108), and the inherent structural
instability dramatized by Wandering Rocks makes it clear that no single structure
provides the "network of coordinates" that will arrange the novel's "scattered fragments"
into a "coherent whole" ("U and the Reader" 134). But the denial of any one structure's
stability also aHows the possibility of a continuaI re-organizing of how structures are
applied, and the novel directs its re-construction along chiastic lines. A directed
movement is suggested by the significance the chiasmus has in Wandering Rocks as a
sign of transition. The episode therefore establishes that the destabilization of the novel' s
form represents a dramatic progression, of which it is the turning point. If the episode
marks the point that Ulysses moves toward in the first ni ne episodes (the gap between
Wandering Rocks and Scylla and Charybdis), then the following nine episodes must be a
movement away.
The re-organization of form that Ulysses performs also allows the novel to extend
and enrich the meaning of its narrative. The vastness of Ithaca' s mathematical
perspective showed that the novel' s deviation from conventional plot extends at its most
extreme points into utter meaninglessness. The consideration of an eighty-two-thousandyear-old Bloom is a conclusive example of the novel' s examination of what does not
happen-the calculation leads, after aH, to the nullification of all human life. But other
ex amples make highly relevant documentation of what is not occurring: the musicality
75
that infects the language of Sirens, for ex ample, is read by Kenner as compensation for
the non-musical nature of Boylan and Molly's meeting that supposedly concerns a
singing tour (Voices 91). Those events that do not take place still exist in the novel by
virtue of the influence they exert or the perspective they create by interacting with those
events presented as actual. The techniques of Wandering Rocks, Sirens, Ithaca, and Circe
have all been noted for their capacity to go too far; but despite an eventualloss of form or
deviation from sense, the chiastic element of decomposition in the novel focuses on a
point of convergence. In Wandering Rocks the fixed artificial structure reflects
meaningfully on the narrative of Ulysses. Bloom's threatened loss of identity, the organic
processes in the novel' s referentiallevel, and the deviation from stable form that occurs in
Ulysses' latter half are aligned through the pattern. While the chiasmus is synonymous in
Ulysses with an inevitable decay of form, it also confers meaning onto the movement
toward chaos, and thereby enables a convergence of the novel' s artifice and its imitation
of natural processes.
76
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