Sholarship & Criticism | Writings of Robert H. Bell

[Published by Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 24, #3/4, Summer 2001, pp. 360-499]

"Preparatory to anything else": Introduction to Joyce's "Hades"

by Robert H. Bell

The following notes for the Hades episode of Joyce's Ulysses aim to be as comprehensive and useful as possible. Organized by line numbers in Gabler's 1986 Random House Corrected Text, they provide definitions, annotations, and critical comments by Gifford, Thornton, Ellmann, Benstock, Senn, Johnson, Kiberd and other editors and scholars; countless critics have contributed explications of specific passages and details. These notes are intended for all audiences: the boldface entries will be most helpful to beginning readers; the "regular" type entries are directed toward intermediate readers, and the italicized entries are for dedicated scholars and advanced Joyceans.

These notes for Hades will eventually be one part of James Joyce's Ulysses in Hypermedia. James Joyce's Ulysses is, for many reasons, an ideal literary work to present in the newly emerging form of computer-based hypertext or hypermedia. For students and other beginners, the widely varied contents that are possible in a hypermedia Ulysses can help to make the book more enjoyable to read, and for experienced readers and scholars the presentation in this new format will make Ulysses more fruitful and rewarding to study. In addition, Ulysses in hypermedia will teach us a lot about the differences between presenting a text in print and on a screen and also about the ways in which a text originally written for print changes when it is put into an electronic hypermedia environment. Over 115 Joyce critics, scholars, and enthusiasts from around the world are contributing to the project, and an advisory board of 13 leading hypertext authors and scholars is overseeing the work. The project's Director is Michael Groden, Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.

Hades is the sixth episode in Ulysses, the first three of which are devoted to Stephen Dedalus, the next three to Leopold Bloom. Just as we learned the most about Stephen in his solitary meditations on the beach in episode three, we are afforded particularly rich insight and privileged access into Bloom in episode six. Bloom's "descent" into the underworld in Hades anticipates and foreshadows his later, more harrowing travail in episode 15, the Circe episode. In both instances, Bloom survives rigorous challenges and disheartening discoveries. In both episodes, our hero not only endures but triumphs, in remarkable if not traditional or spectacular heroic fashion.

As the Hades episode begins, it is 11 A. M. Mr. Bloom attends the funeral of an acquaintance who died of alcoholism, Paddy Dignam. Bloom joins the funeral cortege at the Dignam home in Sandymount, a suburb of Dublin on the coast southeast of the city, and travels by carriage across Dublin to the Prospect Cemetery in Glasnevin, north of Dublin. Bloom was not particularly close to Dignam, nor is he easily accepted or especially well-regarded by his peers attending the funeral: Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, and John Henry Menton.

The narrative point-of-view and technique in Hades are consistent with the first five episodes. We move back and forth between Bloom's internal, subjective consciousness and an external, more reliable perspective. The procession across Dublin and into the cemetery is a lucid recreation of a very real world; Joyce's setting is vividly accurate in its evocation of Dublin, of streets and buildings, statues and memorials, pubs and people and places. Virginia Woolf singles out Hades for praise: "The scene in the cemetery . . . with its brilliancy, its sordidity, its incoherence, its sudden flashes of significance, does undoubtedly come so close to the quick of the mind that . . . it is difficult not to acclaim it a masterpiece" (Woolf, pp. 154-155).

Almost uniformly, with some brief exceptions, we see things from Bloom's point-of-view or observe Bloom in action. The so-called Initial Style, the narrative rock of Gibraltar, persists, and by this point in the reader's odyssey, is both accessible and reassuring; in this episode we usually know where we are and what's what . The action is clear and uncomplicated; characterization lucid and revealing. By itself, Joyce's chapter is no more difficult than, and of a piece with, his stories in Dubliners.

While his social status and standing among his peers are unimpressive, Bloom's moral weight and stature in our eyes are reinforced. This is the first time we view Bloom in extensive social context, and an opportunity to assess his responses to both the petty indignities of life and the larger challenges of mortality. Like visits to Hades in Homer and Virgil, Bloom's voyage to the cemetery is a challenging test and an enabling vision. We learn much more about the hero's nature, beliefs, attitudes, and traits: his abiding compassion, magnanimity, and charity; the painful losses of his son Rudy and his father; his estrangement from and yearning for his wife Molly; his outward awkwardness and reticence; his busy, sprightly, supple inner life; his effulgent perceptions; the capacity of his heart and mind.

One might say that both Bloom and the reader are ultimately heartened by Hades. Indeed, Joyce designated the heart as the organ of this episode, and makes numerous references, literal and figurative, to the heart. Joyce's classical correspondences are more insistent and illuminating here than in many other chapters; see the appendix prompts for detailed links between Hades and Homer and Hades and Virgil. Another (less helpful) motif is the color scheme, in this chapter, black and white.

A student encountering Ulysses for the first time gleans much useful information and experiences substantial grounding in Hades. Read carefully and upon reconsideration, Hades offers richly rendered, provocative, and essential material for our understanding of Bloom, his world, and his inner and outer space.

"What's this here, Guv'nor?": Notes on Annotation

--"In spite of careful and repeated reading of certain classical passages, aided by a glossary, he had derived imperfect conviction from the text, the answers not bearing in all points" (Ulysses, 17.389-391).

--"Pure fluke of mine: the bias" (6.1111-1112).

When my four-year-old daughter finished D'Aulier's Greek Myths, she tried her own hand at myth-making-- writing, illustrating and binding with colored pipe cleaners a story she called Zoo-Bear. Before reading her story aloud, she asked me if I remembered Zeus, "because Zoo-Bear is based on Zeus, and it helps if you know the myths."

As my daughter apparently realized but was too discreet to say, annotation is always "a testimony to alienation from a text, always represents a prior culture from which one believes oneself (and consequently, nearly everyone else) distanced." We strive to bridge the gap, get back, go home, make up the distance. But readers of Joyce never know enough about anything, not Greek myths nor Irish history nor music nor etymologies nor theologies. Over and over we learn that there are no Ithacas.

Still we persevere, and collectively we have made great progress, even if the individual annotation can never suffice, can only cease, or abandon what cannot be finished. Joyce was a notable self-annotator and enabler of annotation, an author who (conspicuously) provided numerous summaries, schemata, correspondences, hints and footnotes to his own text; he was also (notoriously) an avatar of red herrings, chimera, will o'the wisps, whimsy, and blarney. Joyce famously boasted of insuring his immortality by keeping the professors busy forever. Some of Joyce's annotations, such as the episode titles, are effectively canonical. Some Joycean text, such as pages 260-268 of Finnegans Wake, includes marginalia or annotations. Though Joyce once remarked that he could respond to any reader asking of any passage in Ulysses, "Eh, what's this here, Guv'nor?" we must remember that Joyce the masterbuilder, the giver of correspondences, is also the bringer of plurabilities-- and a notable mock-annotator, in the tradition of Pope's Dunciad, Eliot's The Waste Land, Nabokov's Pale Fire, and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Let the reader enjoy--and beware!

Though the word annotate, meaning "to add notes to a work or an author," only enters the English language in 1733, the practice of annotation had been going on for centuries, by priests and rabbis, clerks and apprentices, scholars and schoolmasters. From time immemorial, or at least since texts were inscribed, professional and learned readers have provided subsequent and ignorant readers with identifications, denotations, clarifications, anticipations, connotations. To be a Joycean is to be, if not a priest of the eternal imagination, always at work annotating the word, and disputing the annotations of others.

In Talmudic tradition, the commentary upon Torah becomes sacred, like the inspired text itself. But the mere annotator must also remember the tried-and-true method of Talmudic discourse, answering every question with another question. Even when the word seems lucidly clear, it may dazzle and confound. When Micah defines "what is good" and "what the Lord [doth] require of thee," and implores us to "to do justly, and love mercy, / And to walk humbly with thy God" (Micah 6:8), one commentator has commented, "All the rest is commentary." There's been a lot of commentary.

As editor of the Hades episode for the Joyce's Ulysses Hyper-Media Project, I brought some basic assumptions about the process of annotation. I knew that the task was endless, that life is short, and that I better walk humbly. Still, nearly all my premises have been greatly complicated and many of my specific annotations rendered problematic by my participation in the Annotation Workshop at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation in July 1999. Herewith some rules of thumb, theoretical issues, and Joycean complications with which one working editor/annotator emerged.

I began with a broad distiction between two kinds of annotation, denotation and connotation. Denotation provides information, explains the verifiable, consensual meaning; for instance, in Dignam's funeral cortege, what is a "craped knocker" (6.27)? I set out to gloss slang, archaic words, idiom, foreign words, hard words, and neologisms, such as "huggermugger" (6.15) or "slipperslappers" (6.28), and fidus Achates (6.49), to draw from the first fifty lines of Hades. Connotation I conceived as everything beyond denotation, including evaluation, critical, interpretive, disputable questions, and cruxes: Who was M'Intosh, what did Bloom intend to write in the sand, and does Bloom request eggs for breakfast?

The distinction between connotation and denotation seemed fine in theory, or at least easy enough to define and justify. But as James Mill taught his son John, whatever makes a difference in theory must make a difference in fact. And in practice, it is very difficult and often impossible to distinguish my neat categories. The HyperMedia Ulysses plans to take advantage of the layering opportunities of hypertext: a novice is given basic material for a first-time study, more experienced readers can pursue more complex or obscure lines of inquiry, and the veritable Joycean can compare interpretations and arguments. But in practice editors confront the Joycean distrust of categories, that instinct not to separate but amalgamate, or an urge not to settle but muddle the hash.

Here are some vexing problems contemplated in our Annotation Workshop that complicated my comfortable assumptions. First, the timing of a note. Not only what we say but what we tell may spill the beans and spoil the fun. One perpetually risks saying too much, too soon. Bloom, intending to pass on a used newspaper, is understood by Bantam Lyons to be giving a hot tip on the Gold Cup race: "I was just going to throw it away, Mr Bloom said" (5.534). Fritz Senn objected vehemently to notes which anticipate information subsequently provided or reasonably inferred; but a teacher might use this passage to show that the reader can eventually, gradually hope to make sense of much apparently meaningless flux. Yet such annotations or interventions do rob the reader of her just inheritance, the delight of discovery. A variation of untimely annotation is to spoil the fun by spelling out the joke. Humor depends on something being left unsaid, inviting or requiring another step in the mind of the perceiver or audience. If you have to ask what's so funny, it's too late to be amused.

Even something as apparently straightforward as cross-referencing phrases or reiterated elements turns out to be fussier work than I'd thought. Characters in Ulysses regularly remember words of other characters and the text frequently quotes itself, without specifying or using quotation marks. Everybody recalls "I paid the rent" (1.631) or "Before my patience are exhausted" (6.170). But who (besides Fritz) recognizes Simon Dedalus's question, "Do you follow me?" (6.93-94) as Simon imitating Corny Kelleher, who indeed and apparently often says those words (as he does in Nighttown). I like to know, and certainly want to tell people, that an innocuous utterance I might never have glossed, like "Do you follow me?" has a tone, an effect, significance.

We pondered the need for annotative tact. Also easier said than done, and surely more honored in the breach than in the observance. How does an editor determine what notation might be useful? Joyce cites infinitely, alludes perpetually. Certainly the annotator should remind the reader about the gravediggers in Hamlet, or Penelope's web, but how much context or source material one should provide is far from self-evident. Consider the annotator's competing possibilities and responsibilities when Mr Best casually informs Haines at the Library that Stephen will "see you after at the D.B.C. He's gone to Gill's to buy Hyde's Lovesongs of Connacht " (9.513-514). Ever since Hyde's book of Irish poems was found to contain a verse suspiciously like Stephen's little vampire quatrain, critic after critic has "exposed" Stephen's relationship to Hyde. We debated whether the annotator should provide what few present at the Library or in Dublin in 1904 or 1922 could possibly remember, the poem that inspired Stephen, or influenced him, or that he plagiarizes or echoes or plunders or to which he pays homage or alludes . . . In annotation you have to choose your verbs carefully, time your revelations cunningly, and dispense information tactfully. A snatch of song may be merely a bit of local free association. If the text reveals the tip of the iceberg (Lucia, Hamlet, The Odyssey, whatever) there may well be vast hidden depths. How does the annotator decide if that particular iceberg is worth exploring? For every Peary there are lots of Scotts.

A related issue is the scope or comprehensiveness of the note. Ulysses is full of lyrics, tidbits, bricolage. Do we identify everything we can? How much context does one provide to a passing reference: do we give the lyrics of the whole song or the entire "Last act of Lucia" (6.852)? It's tempting to put forth everything you have, even if it is not your best foot or longest and strongest suit. Fritz Senn, reviewing Gifford's Ulysses Annotated, warns against the common practice of "reading certain passages as though they belonged to a context different from the apparent one."

What about errors in the text, Bloomers on the Liffey? It's not so clear that the editor must always flag and correct a mistake. Critics have frequently been eager to correct and patronize Mr Bloom, perhaps because displaying their own knowledge "[m]akes them feel more important" (6.602). Such condescension can be downright misleading. In the cemetery, Bloom, vaguely remembering Gray's "Elegy," thinks of "that poem of whose is it Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell" (6.941). Though he mistakes the poet, he wittily revises the title: "Eulogy in a country churchyard." That's not simply an error, as many annotators assume and proclaim; it's a joke, funny and telling, as Bloom knows: "Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be" (6.940-41; my emphasis, Bloom's jest). Another example of over-zealous corrective annotation is Bloom's supposed boner, "Shakespeare has no rhymes" (11.63). Teachers leap to contradict and correct Bloom. But it's perfectly true that "Shakespeare has no rhymes," meaning he has rhymes and he also has no rhymes, speeches of unrhymed blank verse and prose. The intonation is everything.

Joyce leaves thousands of references vague or merely implicit, sometimes because they are meant to be ambiguous or indecidable, like "Could never like it again after Rudy" (8.610). And what about the countless textual lacunae? Does the annotator fill in the blank for a thought like "Just that moment I was thinking" (6.197) to underscore Bloom's dread and hate of Blazes Boylan? How heavy-handed should one be? After all, vague or indirect references may be nearly self-evident. Only a very pedantic or hyperactive annotator would footnote Simon Dedalus's "Her grave is over there" (6.645). Joyce often withholds annotations earlier or simpler writers provide; he once complained about a character in a George Moore novel consulting a timetable for the local train, to give the reader what any local resident would surely know.

Which brings us to the question of the imagined audience or reader of the annotations. Ralph Hanna suggests that not only does an annotator create his audience, he also creates his own author; Hanna sees annotation as "necessary aggression." For whom are we annotating: a novice reader, a doctoral candidate, a fellow Joycean? What is necessary, helpful, or enriching for a reader especially interested in, say, Irish political history, will differ from the material aimed at a reader passionately curious about music or mythology. How educated, alert, persistent, and retentive is our Imagined Reader? Smart ones may not appreciate or enjoy being patronized or schooled every sentence. One can't assume "They love reading about it" (6.479), no matter what it is, Lacan or George Bernard Shaw or "Elvis" spottings in the Wake.

When does annotation become smothering, gratuitous, counter-productive, the word which killeth rather than the spirit which giveth life?

Ultimately annotation is a form of rhetoric, whose success depends in part on the annotator's conception of the audience. But should we note what the typical Dubliner probably knew on June 16, 1904, or what an Irish reader might have known in 1922, or what an American college student doesn't recognize in 2000? Layering via hypertext is one means of responding, but one can't personalize the notes for a given reader: what's obvious to one person may be news to the next. For the annotator, ordinarily a harmless drudge, it is difficult to know where to start or stop.

So annotating is forever making mountains out of molehills. As Michael Groden, our editor-in-chief, put it, "One person's necessary annotation is someone else's superfluous one. . . Whatever preoccupation the annotator brings to the passage or episode (what it means, how it works) will affect the annotation at every stage." Or, as it is written, "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thy own eye" (Luke, 6.41).

Identifying what Gifford terms "Dublin street-furniture" is almost endless and only sometimes pertinent or interesting. How much does a reader want or need about the Tritonville Road or the real Moses Herzog? Except that a given detail just might be significantly used or misused, as in Wandering Rocks, when the text gets something wrong that any Dubliner worth his bitter would certainly know, or even significance in the fact that something like a gate, now renamed, is indicated by its previous name. Who knows what one might make of "that small act, trivial in itself" (7.764), apparently random or gratuitous but possibly vitalizing or vibrant. There are needles in haysticks, as readers have always found and will continue to discover. An assiduous reader of street maps might discover that Stephen has located the Archdiocese right in the middle of the red light district.

So, much as I'd like to maintain it, my putative line between intrinsic and extrinsic doesn't hold for Ulysses, which blurs the distinction between inside and outside the text. Not only are "surface and symbol" confounded, as Robert Adams has demonstrated so tellingly, but basic ignorance of Dublin dailiness can lead us astray. Arguing for a degree of prophetic power in that holy fool Buck Mulligan, I wondered how Mulligan could know his "long slow whistle of call" would imminently provoke "two strong whistles answer[ing] through the calm" (1.24, 26-27). But Buck isn't supernaturally endowed; he simply expects that at this time every morning he will hear the whistle of "the mailboat clearing the harbermouth of Kingstown" (1. 83-84). It's right there on the second page: should the eager annotator tells us it's the mailboat before the book reveals it?

And what about material that doesn't come clear in the text? Another way Joyce confounds theorists and discombobulates annotators is to include some private or autobiographical allusions, such as "A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella . . . Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then Cranly, Mulligan: now these" (9.974-978). What intrigues me is that there is no other mention of a Dedalus brother in Ulysses; Stanislaus Joyce, working temporarily as a pharmacist, never survived the revisions of Stephen Hero. Perhaps it's fair enough for Joyce to expect his readers to know his previous publications very well indeed--but are we supposed to remember details he edited out of his unpublished writings?

A valuable contributor to our Zurich workshop was Harald Beck, who has for a decade been translating Ulysses into German. Constantly we were reminded not only of the difficulty of saying it in German but of the pervasive strangeness of our text, its remarkable specificity and generalizability, its protean inglossabilities, as Fritz Senn has it. Beck notes that a reference to "adelite" in 6.308 is for Joyce a very current reference, technical information published in a Swedish scientific paper in 1891 and not generally in use at the turn of the century.

We learned to recognize the ever-present danger that the annotator will become an interpreter, impose his presence on the text and on the reader. Ralph Hanna stresses that the annotator is always creating himself as reader, becoming an exaggerated version of a reader, viewing what he half perceives and half creates or enveloping the text, always invading it, or defining its meaning, and hence restricting possibility.

If annotation is as subjective as Hanna insists, equal parts aggression and self-defense, it is always crucial to query the apparent finality of annotations, lest an inquiry or possibility become in anyone's mind an identification, an answer, the last word, the meaning. Inevitably, and no matter how scrupulously the editor tries to distinguish denotation from connotation, or first, second, and third-level annotation, whatever one says or does not say biases the reader. That I noticed and commented on something may or not be a "Pure fluke of mine" (6.1011-12) but it is certainly "the bias" (6.1011-12) of my sense of what's there and what's important. No matter how objective or factual I try to be, any note I make gives stress to a text which doesn't necessarily distinguish the essential from the marginal, the central from the peripheral. As so often, Fritz Senn makes this point forcefully and cogently: "Notes by nature look resultative, not explorative. They pretend that the goal has somehow been reached, when, usually and Joyceanly, the goal itself is in question." Annotation, the most pedantic as

well as pedagogic of subjects, turns out under scrutiny to be the most fundamental and crucial of concerns: how we read and make sense.

LINE NOTES to HADES, Episode 6

boldface: level #1, for introductory readers;

regular type: level #2, for intermediate readers;

italics: level #3, for advanced readers.

6.1. Martin Cunningham

A contemporary of Bloom's who works at Dublin Castle. "Martin Cunningham opens the chapter because as a 'good practical Catholic,' he embodies formal religion--as he does in 'Grace'" (Tindall, p. 161).

6.1 first

Martin Cunninham appears at the beginning and the end of the episode, in accordance with scripture: "The first shall be last and the last shall be first."

6.1. silkhatted

"Another Homeric epic compound word." (Senn, p. 156).

6.1-2. first . . . after him

"A seating arrangement that calls for Bloom and Power, on the back seat, facing Dedalus and Cunningham, respectively" (Van Caspel, p. 102).

Ellmann believes, however, that Joyce "is setting [Stephen's] two fathers side by side in the funeral carriage" (Ellmann, p. 47).

"Telemachus and Hades are social or group chapters which might be qualified as dramatic units" (Hayman, p. 79).

In Hades, Bloom is "confronted with his fellow men more closely than we have seen hitherto." Bloom's "companions seem all to be in still worse circumstances" than Bloom in terms of marital difficulties (Hart, pp. 50-51).

"In that funeral carriage . . . a quartet of separate and individual men are soon easily identified as husbands, playing out a variety of marital possibilities within the prospects of middle-aging members of the Dublin community. Simon Dedalus as widower becomes distinct from the other three, while the varied 'roles' of the three wives become distinguishing characteristics within Bloom's speculations on the others . . . Set apart from the other middle-class husbands in Dublin, Leopold Bloom may still not have the most enviable marriage imaginable, but surveyed within the context of the represented grouping his situation clarifies as decidedly better . . . From where he stands Bloom would certainly not choose to trade places with any of these other husbands" (Benstock, p. 90).

"In the Hades chapter . . . transparent narrative once again suggests itself through many of the early portions, where a balance of dialogue and internalisation carries the narrational burden" (Benstock, p. 35).

6.2. Mr. Power

Jack Power is a friend of Martin Cunningham who works at the offices of the Royal Irish Constabulary in Dublin Castle; he is also a character in "Grace," in Joyce's Dubliners.

"Gladstone called the R.I.C. a 'semi-military police'; it modeled itself after Scotland Yard, but its members were armed and, charged with the control and suppression of Irish political dissidents and thus with the maintenance of British overlordship in Ireland, its functions were much more political than the Yard's" (Gifford, pp.104-105).

6.4. Simon

Simon Dedalus, father of Stephen and several other children, a widower who lost his wife, Mary, a year earlier.

Simon is, "particularly in his manner of visual expression and reckless living, modeled after Joyce's father, John Stanislaus Joyce. 'He was the silliest man and yet cruelly shrewd . . . . I was very fond of him always, being a sinner myself, and even liked his faults. Hundreds of pages and scores of characters in my books came from him. His dry (or rather wet) wit and his expression of face convulsed me often with laughter' (Joyce on January 17, 1932, after the death of his father)" (Senn, p. 156).

"Stephen's perplexity over Christ's two fathers achieves its parallel in his having himself two fathers in Simon Dedalus and Bloom; but Joyce is able to solve this confusion by setting the two fathers side by side in the funeral carriage. It is the first time in literature that this problem has been overcome, as well as the first time it has been posed" (Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey, p. 47).

6.6. covered himself

I.e., put on his hat.

6.8. we all

"The sixth chapter begins, as Joyce might have said, epiphanically . . . . Bloom's relationship to his group, to those he thinks of as social equals and as friends (the closest thing to a community in a modern city), is fully characterized . . . . The 'we all' distinguished from the occupant of a 'vacant' place (6.9) focuses the relationship sharply" between Bloom and his peers (Sultan, p. 98).

Cunningham's question "'Are we all here now' implicitly excludes Bloom from the intimate social group identified as 'we'" (Henke, p. 96).

"As a Jew, Bloom is an outcast in Dublin, and we can see in the Hades and Cyclops episodes that he is treated as such. Frank Budgen notes that Joyce once commented on Bloom's 'loneliness as a Jew who finds no warmth of fellowship either among Jews or Gentiles' (Budgen, Further Recollections of James Joyce, 4) (Rickard, p. 77).

"Ulysses is totally lacking in the epic virtues of love, friendship, and magnanimity" (Levin, p. 131).

"In Hades we see Bloom in a social group and discover how alone he actually is. The gap between his interior monologue and the dialogue of his companions is as noticeable as that which separates the two narrators in Cyclops, the episode that officially marks the dissolution of the initial style. We know Bloom from the inside, whereas our only experience of Simon Dedalus and his friends comes from the talk we overhear" (Kelly, p. 18).

6.8. Bloom

His companions address him as "Bloom," while they call each other by their first names.

6.9. sat in the vacant place

(See 6.8 note "we all.")

Adams sees at the heart of Hades "a great hollow resonance. And that is the real development of this chapter, the sounding of that resonance, the deepening and darkening in Bloom's mind of an immense emptiness." When we reach Hades, Adams continues, "we shall surely be surprised and perhaps distressed to see how much we have lightened and trivialized his being--how far we have moved him toward the Charlie Chaplin pole of his existence, how much of his interior distance has been foreshortened" (Adams, "Hades," pp. 96-97).

6.10. slammed it twice till it shut tight

"Like the Martello tower, the carriage is a figure of spiritual asphyxiation. Its door slams shut as tightly as a coffin lid. Bloom has stepped into a mausoleum of Dublin life, a world of mental paralysis that immures the Irish in a common tomb" (Henke, p. 96).

In the original handwritten version (Rosenbach), the text reads, "slammed it twice till it shut tight." Some written manuscripts, however, read "slammed it tight till it shut tight." Gabler corrected this, ascribing it to a typographical error, but its status as erroneous is contested: "The publisher of the Synoptic Edition ascribed 'tight' to a lapse of attention during the transcription (in anticipation of the following use of 'tight.') Others found a uniquely Joycean convention in the repetition of the word: the awkward repetition can be seen as a somewhat embarrassing yet significant break. Bloom, an obvious outsider, comes in last and feels uncomfortable; he fumbles with the door, believes he has shut it, but then has to try again before the condition of 'tight' has been achieved. The first 'tight' belongs to a subjective impression, the second to an actually achieved situation. All of this can be understood as an example of Leopold Bloom's constant attempt at justification and improvement--this requires of course the assumption that the repeated adverb was intended by the author and was not just an oversight" (Senn, pp. 156-157).

6.11-12. looked seriously . . . an old woman peeping

"Each of the daytime outdoors chapters repeats the continued interaction of the carefully perceptive Bloom as the object of the observation of others . . . As soon as Bloom has settled himself in the funeral carriage in Hades he 'looked seriously' . . . and immediately noticed 'an old woman peeping'" (Benstock, Narrative, pp. 184-185). Bloom is not only the object, but the source of a circular gaze that is reinforced throughout the episode.

Lesley Higgins observes in Gender in Joyce that "After Calypso, four male-centered episodes (Lotus Eaters, Hades, Aeolus, Lestrygonians) chart the best and the worst of Dublin's androcentric society. Women are conspicuous by their absence in public, sisters to the figure espied by Bloom at the beginning of Hades: "the lowered blinds of the avenue. One dragged aside: an old woman peeping. Nose whiteflattened against the pane" (6.11-13) (Higgins, "Fatal Women in Ulysses," p. 53).

6.11-12. the lowered blinds of the avenue

"In Irish tradition, blinds were lowered and shops closed during a funeral in a village or, as here, on a street or in a neighborhood. The 'avenue' is Newbridge Avenue in Sandymount." (Gifford, p. 105).

6.13-14. thanking her stars she was passed over

This phrase recalls Passover, a yearly Jewish holiday during which celebrants offer thanks to God, whose angel "passed over" Jewish houses, sparing their firstborn sons, in the final plague before the Exodus out of Egypt. See Exodus XII, especially verses 13 and 23.

See also 11.644, 14.1063, 16.378.

6.54. Ringsend road

Runs west from Ringsend toward central Dublin.

6.54-55. Wallace Bros: the bottleworks

At 34 Ringsend Road.

"The coach goes through an industrial and relatively desolate area" (Senn, p. 163).

6.55. Dodder bridge

"The River Dodder flows north and enters the Liffey just west of Ringsend and Irishtown" (Gifford, p. 105).

Corresponds, perhaps, to the first of the four rivers of Hades, the Styx.

"The story 'An Encounter' in Dubliners ends on the banks of the Dodder" (Senn, p. 163).

6.56. Richie Goulding

Brother-in-law of Simon Dedalus and a cost drawer at Collins and Ward.

6.56. legal bag

In episode 3, Stephen notices the midwives carrying a bag, just before his thoughts turn to Richie Goulding: "What has she in the bag?" (3.36).

6.56. Goulding, Collis and Ward

Goulding apparently (and facetiously) deems himself a name partner of Collis and Ward, solicitors, 31 Dame Street, in the southeast quadrant of Dublin.

6.57. a bit damp

See note 6.4 ("Simon") on Joyce's father.

6.57. Great card he was.

A "card" is a joker, a funny guy.

6.58. Stamer street

"In south-central Dublin near the Grand Canal" (Gifford, p. 105).

6.58. Ignatius Gallaher

Appears as a character in "A Little Cloud," Dubliners. In Aeolus (7.732-33) he is identified as an employee of the Irish-born English publisher Alfred C. Harmsworth on either the London Daily Mail or the London Evening News. In Aeolus, Myles Crawford recounts "the smartest piece of journalism ever known" (7.631), and the way Gallaher "made his mark" (7.630-631).

"Waltzing" with him "on a Sunday" suggests another parody of the church service. In later episodes (9:163, 12:1678), Joyce refers to St. Ignatius of Loyola, a 16th Century Spanish soldier who, after his conversion, founded the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), and also to Ignatius Rice, founder of the Christian Brothers. The name "Ignatius" thus connotes Christian fraternity, here secularized and rendered playful by Joyce.

6.60. ironing

Massaging.

6.61. All breadcrumbs

Bloom, typically considering the profit and the loss, reflects skeptically on the pills Richie Goulding takes.

6.64. Doubledyed

"Dyed-in-the-wool"; completely, utterly.

6.67. gate

C.f., the gates of Hades.

6.67-68. I'll tickle his catastrophe

That is, get his attention and/or cause him trouble.

"Away, you scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I'll tickle your catastrophe [buttocks]!" (II Henry IV.II.1.65-66).

6.70-71. counterjumper's son

The son of a shop clerk.

6.71. selling tapes in my cousin, Peter Paul M'Swiney's

Probably means, "selling wares in the shop of my cousin, Peter Paul M'Swiney."

"For a time Oliver St. John Gogarty's father worked in Clery & Co. (formerly M'Swiney & Co.), drapers, silk mercers, hosiers, glovers, haberdashers, jewelers, boot and shoe makers, tailors, woolen drapers, and general warehousers, 21-27 Sackville (now O'Connell) Street. Peter Paul M'Swiney, a cousin of Joyce's grandmother's, was a successful merchant-politician and lord mayor of Dublin in 1864 and 1875" (Gifford, p. 106).

6.74. Full of his son

The theme of fatherhood and, in particular, the father-son relationship is crucial to Book 6 of the Aeneid; the purpose of Aeneas' trip to the underworld is to speak with his father, Anchises. Thus fatherhood surfaces repeatedly in this chapter through both Bloom and the Dedaluses.

"Bloom begins to show his unusual concern with families and maternity in the present chapter" (Sultan, p. 101).

Groden cites this passage, lines 74-84, as "among the most moving in Ulysses; [its] pathos derives from Joyce's startling use of very simple words: 'My son. Me in his eyes . . . . From me.' (This is Bloom's equivalent of Stephen's more intellectual definition of fatherhood: 'a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten')" (Groden, pp. 47-48).

"Indeed, it is the sight of the grown Stephen and the memory of the young Stephen throughout Bloomsday that have triggered Bloom's nostalgia for the lost Rudy" (Tymoczko, p. 199).

"[Bloom's] need for a son remains but, young as he and his wife still are, the philoprogenitive urge is gone (we anticipate the Shakespeare of Stephen's discourse--his son Hamnet dead at eleven, but no second--second-best--son)" (Burgess, p. 145).

6.74-75. something to hand on

The thought, "Something to hand on," and the subsequent "Me in his eyes" are "echoes of the concept evolved by Stephen in the third chapter . . . of the umbilical chain of ancestry" (Sultan, p. 101).

6.75. little Rudy

Bloom's son, who died in infancy.

6.75-6.77 if little Rudy had lived . . . from me

"Like Agamemnon, Bloom has been deprived of the happiness of looking upon his son--he can only fantasize wishful images, as he does here. The thought 'me in his eyes' suggests the father's desired visual imprinting of himself in the facial region of vision itself; it also conveys a desire for recognition from the son, an insistent need for paternal self-reflection in the offspring's look--the explicitly visual acknowledgment that the phantasmic Rudy of Circe refuses to grant to Bloom: the mirage of the lost child 'gazes, unseeing, into Bloom's eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling' (15.4964)" (Devlin, p. 75).

The phrase "me in his eyes" also echoes Stephen's earlier musing on "the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father" (1.658).

6.76. Eton suit

"A fashionable costume for young boys (in imitation of the 'uniform' worn by the students at Eton, one of the most exclusive and establishmentarian of the English public schools): a short, waist-length jacket with broad lapels and a shirt with a broad white linen collar" (Gifford, p. 106).

See 15.4958.

6.78. Raymond terrace

"The Blooms once lived in a southwestern suburb of Dublin in the quarter where a small Jewish community lived" (Senn, p. 165).

"That section of South Circular Road (nos. 22 to 34, including St. Kevin's Church) opposite the Wellington (now Griffith) Barracks in south-central Dublin, not far north of the Grand Canal and not far west of Lombard Street West. Apparently Rudy was conceived there early in 1893, shortly before the Blooms moved to Lombard Street West" (Gifford, p. 106).

6.79. The cease to do evil

The jail.

"'Cease to do evil; learn to do well' was the motto over the door of the Richmond bridewell (jail) in South Circular Road, where Daniel O'Connell was briefly imprisoned in 1844. By the late nineteenth century the jail had been absorbed into the Wellington (now Griffith) Barracks complex" (Gifford, p. 106).

6.80. a touch

Slang for sexual intercourse.

6.81. dying for it

In speaking of the very pulse of life, Molly uses a death-inflected idiom.

6.81. How life begins

"When Bloom generalizes about life, he thinks in tropes of cycles [see discussion of metempsychosis in 4.339 and following] or 'the stream,' ongoing like comedy, not truncated like tragedy or static like satire. The jocoserious rhythm is evidenced by an almost oxymoronic fusion of down and up, death and regeneration, fall and revival, poison and cures. When Bloom remembers Molly saying, 'Give us a touch, Poldy. God I'm dying for it,' he instinctively adds, 'How life begins' to link death and life" (Bell, p. 46).

Bloom's memory "concludes with an almost oxymoronic fusion between sacred and profane, eros and thanatos" (Bell, p. 84).

"Bloom has engaged in an unconsciously self-deprecating recollection: not his own sexual allure, nor any love Molly might have had for him, brought about the conception of Rudy . . . . The incident is a typical Joycean view of the sexual act: bestial (two dogs) and obscene (the sergeant's grin and Molly's exhortation). It also adumbrates the Joycean view of poor Bloom as flaccid and ineffectual, for two dogs and a leering sergeant were as much responsible for Rudy as Bloom himself. And Bloom's dwelling with evident pleasure on Rudy's bizarre conception compromises the pity one feels for him as a grieving father" (O'Brien, pp. 124-125).

"Birth and death both result from accidents. Human intercourse can be inspired by canine copulation or by the reminiscence of an earlier attraction. Rudy was conceived because Molly spied two mating dogs and a flirtatious officer who reminded her of Mulvey. The grotesque situation makes life no less sacred at its inception" (Henke, p. 99).

6.82-83 got big then. Had to refuse the Greystones concert. My son inside her.

"In a strange but not uncommon en-gendering of progeny, Bloom tends to see the lost Rudy as his child (‘My son inside her’ he revealingly thinks, as opposed to ‘our child inside her’) and, in turn, repeatedly thinks of the surviving Milly as Molly’s. . . As is often the case, in Molly's past, one form of imminent labor interferes with another" (Devlin, pp. 75, 78).

6.82. the Greystones concert

Greystones, a small fishing village on the coast eighteen miles south-southeast of Dublin, was also a fashionable summer resort.

6.84. Learn German too

"In Bloom's paternal family a German tradition has barely survived and he hopes to revive it. Bloom's father came from the Hungarian region Szombathely and escaped the pogroms by fleeing to Ireland through London" (Senn, p. 165).

"For the reader, the passage avoids sentimentality because of Bloom's idiosyncratic plans for Rudy, including the Eton suit and the German lessons. Joyce thus allows Bloom the dignity of his sorrow while he invites us to laugh at the comedy of his unique ideas" (Groden, p. 48).

6.87. Molly. Milly

"Just when Bloom regrets losing Rudy . . . he takes pleasure in the reincarnation of his wife [another echo of the discussion of metempsychosis in Episode Four]" (Bell, p. 83).

"His memories of Milly are not without the father's inevitable jealousy and barely suppressed incestuous impulses" (Schwarz, p. 106).

"Unlike Simon Dedalus in his reaction to his wife's death, Bloom refuses to sentimentalize the major loss in his life; his mind quickly moves from Rudy to the very alive Molly and Milly" (Groden, p. 48)

"Rudy's death has intensified the anxiety Bloom associates with women. Only the female, it would seem, has enough strength to sustain ongoing life. She can exist independently because she harbors the source of regeneration" (Henke, p. 100).

"In an elaboration of this patriarchal gender logic, the daughter becomes a diluted version of the mother . . . whereas a son, in marked contrast, is conceptualized as 'the substance' (6.552)" (Devlin, p. 76).

6.87. Same thing watered down

Perhaps refers to water as a trope for birth. Also, the narrative-at-large is a "watered down" recapitulation of Homer, as the secularized liturgical moments are Eucharistic waterings-down.

6.89. Mullingar

Mullingar is a town 50 miles from Dublin.

6.90. Life, life

"It is striking that the theme of life and vitality is so extensively developed in this chapter of death . . . Bloom's message is constantly one of life" (Bowen, A Companion to Joyce Studies, p. 457).

It is equally true that in Hades, Bloom is "obsessed, even in the metaphoric substructure of his thought, with circumstances and imagery of mortality" (Adams, p. 102).

6.92. Corny

Cornelius "Corny" Kelleher, undertaker's assistant.

6.92. yoke

"Hiberno-English slang for 'object,' here a carriage, but with classical echoes" (Kiberd, p. 983).

6.93. that squint

"After the tailor who lacks material and therefore 'squints,' or skimps" (Gifford, p. 106).

6.93-94. Do you follow me?

Here Simon Dedalus is imitating Corny Kelleher, who says, "Do you follow me?" in Circe, 15.4814-15. Like many good raconteurs, Simon is also an attentive listener to (and appropriator of) the stories, idioms, inflections, and details of other people's discourse.

6.97. What is this, he said, in the name of God? Crumbs?

Again, a parody of the Eucharist: "Martin Cunningham brushes off what are said (perhaps euphemistically) to be 'crustcrumbs' from the carriage seat . . . bread imagery can seem irrepressible. Joyce has made a fetish of it. Besides being eaten, bread is delivered, smelled, sung about, fed to birds, and sold in the novel, in contexts that strive to recuperate it for theology" (Restuccia, pp. 77-78).

6.98. picnic party

"Life must go on at death's feast. The chapter is filled with revivifying hints . . . The death chapter in Ulysses is, in a way, its chapter of reincarnations" (Seidel, p. 162).

"In the morning Bloom wondered about his black suit, 'But I couldn't go in that light suit. Make a picnic of it' (4.80-81)" (Senn, p. 165).

6.108. the most natural thing in the world

That is, the activity that seems to have gone on in the carriage; consider sex as both life-producing and inextricably linked to death.

6.109. Tom Kernan

A tea salesman and a heavy drinker.

6.111. Ned Lambert

Edward J. "Ned" Lambert is another friend of Simon's, who works in a seed and grain store in Mary's Abbey in central Dublin.

6.111. Hynes

"Joseph M'Carthy 'Joe' Hynes is a sometime newspaper reporter. Hynes appears as the loyal Parnellite in 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room,' Dubliners. In Ulysses he seems still relatively unemployed and down on his luck, though he does do a paragraph on Dignam's funeral for the Freeman's Journal" (Gifford, p. 106).

6.114. M'Coy

C. P. "Charlie" M'Coy, once an adman for the Freeman, clerk in Midland Railway and/or assistant to the Coroner.

See 5.82-176.

"As almost always, Bloom's attempts to take part in all discussions are ignored" (Senn, p. 165).

6.120. The grand canal

The most important canal in Ireland; it skirts the southern perimeter of central Dublin and links Dublin with the west coast of Ireland. The carriage stops at Victoria Bridge over the canal. Perhaps corresponds to the second river of

6.121. Gasworks

"The Alliance and Consumer Gas Company at 110 Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street, just southwest of the bridge over the Grand Canal. The works, notoriously odoriferous, transformed coal into gas for lighting and heating" (Gifford, p. 106).

6.121. cures

Blamires writes that "the smell from the gasworks is said to cure whooping cough" (Blamires, p. 35); it seems equally plausible that this reflection is ironic.

6.121-128. Whooping cough . . . dogs usually are

"The passage . . . reveals far more about Bloom than about the objects he is supposedly looking at, so that even in this apparently simple case, the subjective-objective distinction is much more precarious than it may seem at first sight" (Goldberg, pp. 271-272).

6.122. Scarlatina

Scarlet fever (OED).

6.124. Flaxseed tea

"A tea made of flaxseed (from which linseed oil is also derived). Linseed oil was a popular 'natural remedy,' and flaxseed tea shared this popularity" (Gifford, p. 106).

6.124. Influenza epidemic

Perhaps refers to the influenza epidemic of 1873-5 that spread through both Europe and the United States.

6.124. Canvassing

Soliciting. Recalls Bloom's position as an advertising "canvasser" (See line 6.706).

6.125. Dogs' home

"On Grand Canal Quay, the Dogs' and Cats' Home, established and maintained by the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The home advertised its interest in strays and proclaimed: 'The diseased painlessly destroyed'" (Gifford, p. 106).

The Dogs' home is "a whiff of the Cerberus motif to come" (Burgess, p. 145).

6.125. Athos

"Bloom's father's dog, apparently named after one of the three musketeers (Aramis, Athos, and Porthos) from Alexandre Dumas pere's (1802-70) popular novel Les trois musquetaires (Paris, 1844). In The Odyssey, when Odysseus first approaches his manor house he weeps at the sight of his old dog Argos, 'abandoned' on a dung heap outside the gates. The dog struggles to greet his master, 'but death and darkness in that instant closed / the eyes of Argos, who had seen his master / Odysseus, after twenty years' (17:326-27; Fitzgerald, pp. 331-32)" (Gifford, pp. 106-107).

"The name Athos name may suggest 'a-theos'--'dog' is the opposite of 'god'" (Sultan, p. 102).

For more snippets from Bloom's father's suicide note, see 17:1822ff. Bloom, the "dutiful son . . . carries out his father's last wishes" (Osteen, p. 174).

6.126. Thy will be done

After the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:10; Luke 11:2): "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven."

Reiterates and elevates the recurrent theme of fatherhood in this episode.

6.126. We obey them in the grave

"The Dublin dead constantly control the Dublin living, if not directly, at least through the complex patterns of memory and association . . . . Simon Dedalus is haunted by thoughts of his dead wife, as Bloom is by thoughts of his dead father, his dead father's dead dog, and his own dead son" (Adams, p. 100).

Freud maintained that the dead father, internalized by the melancholic son, is more powerful than when he was alive precisely because he becomes constitutive of the son, and therefore utterly inescapable.

6.127. heart

The word recurs over 20 times in Hades, the vast majority of times in the second half of the episode. The "recurrence of 'heart' is nearer to an irony--the heart of the Dubliners is in the grave, in a buried past" (Peake, p. 188).

"Functioning or failing to function, the organ is deeply woven into the texture of the prose" (Adams, p. 105).

6.130. grey flags

I.e. flagstones.

6.131. my boots were creaking

Possibly memory of Bloom's discovery of his father's suicide. The word "boots" is overdetermined; see "boots giving evidence" (6.361-62).

6.131. colander

A perforated vessel used as a strainer in cookery (OED).

6.134. wanted for the country

In the spring of 1904, Ireland was suffering from a drought.

6.136 peering through his glasses toward the veiled sun

"The city of the Kimmerer is 'veiled in gloom and clouds, and Helios never looks down upon it with his rays' (Odyssey, 17.291-327)" (Senn, p. 166).

As we draw closer to the cemetery, the scene grows continually darker--this particular phrase indicates a double-removal of the source of light (one should also read "light" as signifying illumination, knowledge, and life), emphasizing the characters' inability to see or understand anything clearly. C.f., "now we see through a glass darkly" (I Corinthians 13:12).

This passage also suggests an allusion to Daedalus, who cursed the sky when Icarus flew too close to the sun. This connection between son and sun is made by Mr. Dedalus who proclaims the sun to be "as uncertain as a child's bottom." Simon Dedalus is unable to see the sun or the son (6.44), both of whom are "clad in mourning" (6.39-40).

6.140. trunks

Notice that the characters are depicted as mere bodies, yet "trunks" also calls to mind "trees," a trope for natural life and cyclical renewal. Trees also stand at the intersection of three spheres, mediators of this world with the world above and the world below.

Trunks also resemble boxes, like the coffin that they are bringing to the cemetary.

6.141. twirled more quickly

In Hades, the pace of everything (the carriage, the conversation, and even nervous habits) accelerates. See 6.30.

6.142. Tom Kernan was immense last night

The sobriety Kernan had achieved in the story "Grace" has "evidently been short lived" (Osteen, p. 161).

"Kernan's pretentious manner of expression will be repeatedly displayed throughout the course of the story" (Senn, pp. 166-167).

6.142. Paddy Leonard

A frequent customer at Davy Byrnes' pub, Paddy appears as a character in "Counterparts," Dubliners, in Lestrygonians, and elsewhere in Ulysses.

6.142-43. taking him off

Imitating him.

6.145. Ben Dollard's

Ben Dollard is a solicitor, basso singer, and crony of Simon Dedalus.

6.145. singing of "The Croppy Boy"

Ben Dollard is famous for his version of the revolutionary song, "The Croppy Boy," which he sings in Sirens (11.991ff). This well-known Irish nationalist song by Caroll Malone (pseudonym of poet William B. McBurney, ca. 1844-ca. 1892) is alluded to repeatedly in the Sirens episode. Croppies were rebels from Wexford who wore their hair cropped. A boy on his way to fight in the Revolution of 1789 declares, "I bear no grudge against living thing/But I love my country above the king."

R. M. Adams discusses "a singing of the ballad in June, 1897, which was described in the Freeman's Journal in terms that may have given Joyce some hints for Ben Dollard's performance of it" (Adams, Surface and Symbol, p. 65; the source cited is Freeman's Journal, June 10, 1897, p. 6).

"Kernan, having been relatively unaffected by his spiritual, allegorical journey in 'Grace,' presumably is qualified to pass on the celestial voice of Dollard singing this song of priestly or fatherly betrayal. As we will see later in Hades, Kernan still holds his Protestant biases. These remarks serve to foreshadow the rendering of this key ballad in the Sirens section" (Bowen, Allusions, p. 103).

6.149. dead nuts on that

"To be crazy about; one of the many idioms that echoes the theme of death" (Senn, p. 167).

6.150. retrospective arrangement

This motif recurs throughout Ulysses. (Cf., 10.783; 11.798; 14.1044; 15.443; 16.1401; 17.1907).

"It applies in fact to the whole of Ulysses, and suggests again that Mr. Kernan is capable of meaning much more than he understands" (Adams, p. 107).

This motif suggests Joyce's "doubling" of characters: "Like the 'law' of doubling, this phrase plays an important part in Joyce's dramatization of the mysteries of identity. . . . As it recurs, and especially after it changes hands, it gathers nuances of meaning. When a character knowingly doubles with another character, his attention is focused on the present moment of recognition. Yet that recognition is shaped by the character's knowledge of his past. 'Retrospective arrangement' becomes associated not only with the order given to past events, but also with the memory and the process of remembering. Through the phrase Joyce links this process to the poetic process itself. The individual creates himself and his world as the artist does, through the imaginative recollection of times past" (Dick, pp. 148-9).

6.151. Dawson's speech

Dan Dawson is a baker and a politician. Cunningham's rhetoric leads to Dan Dawson's speech, an example of inflated rhetoric in Aeolus, 7.243ff.

"It does not appear in the Freeman's Journal for 16 June 1904. Charles (Dan) Dawson was a successful baker who owned the Dublin Bread Company in Stephen's Street. He became one of Dublin's merchant-politicians: member of Parliament for County Carlow, lord mayor of Dublin (1882, 1883), and, in 1904, collector of rates (taxes) for the Dublin Corporation" (Gifford, p. 107).

6.154. that book

Bloom remembers that Molly wants to read another smutty novel (4.358).

6.156. No, no

"Bloom's obsequious contribution to the conversation is once again disregarded. One reason for the disrespect, apart from Bloom's place in society, is simply the size of his newspaper, the Freeman's Journal. Fully-unfolded (a good 60 x 130 cm), it would certainly make the already uncomfortable size of the coach even tighter" (Senn, pp. 167-168).

6.157. down the edge of the paper

The Freeman's Journal carried obituaries at the top of the left-hand column on page one.

C.f., a textualized progression of souls, comparable to the physical processions in The Odyssey (11.268-377) and the Aeneid (11.420-430).

"The names Bloom reads do not appear in the 16 June 1904 edition, and none seems to have any significance except momentarily Peake, who is mentioned as 'hounded . . . out of the office' in 'Counterparts,' Dubliners" (Gifford, p. 107).

6.159. Crosbie and Alleyne's

C. W. Alleyne, a solicitor, had offices at 24 Dame Street (on the corner of Eustace Street) in central Dublin just south of the Liffey (Thom's 1904, p. 1468).

"No Crosbie is mentioned in Thom's. However, the same Mr. Alleyne appears in 'Counterparts,' Dubliners, and repeatedly mentions his absent partner Mr. Crosbie" (Gifford, p. 107).

Ellmann reveals that Henry Alleyne persuaded John Joyce, James' father, to invest in his distilling company. The elder Joyce found evidence that Alleyne was embezzling funds from the company and had him removed, but not until after all the money had vanished. Alleyne "is the name of the unpleasant employer in the story 'Counterparts'; James Joyce liked paying off his father's scores" (Ellmann, pp. 14-15).

6.159. Sexton

"Officer charged with care of church and churchyard, and often with duties of parish clerk, bell-ringer, and grave-digger" (OED).

6.160. Inked characters fast fading on the frayed breaking paper

Bloom meditates lyrically on ephemerality, in the style of Stephen Dedalus, who contemplates mortality in Proteus.

"Bloom's marked sensitivity to opticality forces him to recognize recurrently its vulnerability. He imagines that the recently published obituaries recording Paddy's death are already undergoing visual erasure" (Devlin, p. 74).

6.161-63. Thanks to the little . . . Jesus have mercy

Typical snippets of obituary-column prose.

"'The Little Flower' is a popular name for St. Teresa of Lisieux (St. Teresa-of-the-Child-Jesus, 1873-97), whose cultus grew with such rapidity and intensity after her death that Butler's Lives of the Saints (ed. Herbert Thurston, S.J., and Donald Attwater [London, 1956]) calls it 'the most impressive and significant religious phenomenon of contemporary times' (4:12). St. Teresa (beatified in 1923, canonized in 1925) promised: 'After my death I will let fall a shower of roses' (4:15); hence her nickname, 'the Little Flower.' Another 'little flower,' a poem by Tennyson titled 'Flower in the Crannied Wall' (1869), appears at the top of the right-hand column of the Evening Telegraph of 16 June 1904 under the heading 'Gleaned from All Sources': 'flower in the crannied wall, / I pluck you out of the crannies, / I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, / Little flower; but if I could understand / What you are, root and all, and all in all, / I should know what God and man is'" (Gifford, p. 107).

6.162. Month's mind

"A commemorative requiem mass said on the thirtieth day after death" (Gifford, p. 107).

6.164-67. It is now a month . . . meet him on high

"Typical of the sort of verse that appeared under 'In Memoriam' in the obituary columns of daily newspapers (inserted in this case as an advertisement of the month's mind). The linkage of Henry with 'Little Flower' above recalls Bloom's assumed name" (Gifford, p. 107).

6.164. since dear Henry fled

"The coincidence of 'dear Henry' and 'Flower' in the verse reminds Bloom of the letter in his pocket (or bag) that he had read an hour before. In his role as a potential lover, Bloom changes his surname to Flower and gives himself the first name Henry, indeed without realizing that Henry actually means 'ruler of the house,' which is exactly what Bloom is not. The political hopes of the Irish come together in the desire for 'Home Rule,' control in one's own home" (Senn, pp. 169-170).

6.168. I tore up the envelope?

Bloom makes sure not to leave incriminating evidence of his correspondence with Martha.

6.168. Where did I put her letter

Derrida traces the discursive progression of the postcard (la carte postale) in Ulysses, and notes that "it surfaces here. . . . We can assume that the reassuring 'yes' accompanies and confirms the return of memory: the letter has been relocated (le lieu de la lettre est retrouvé). A little further, after Reggy's 'silly postcard,' (13.595) there is the 'silly letter' (13.787) . . . . Let us leave enough time for the bath fragrance to reach us" (Derrida, "Ulysses Gramophone," p. 31).

6.169. Henry

I.e., Henry Flower, Bloom's pseudonym in correspondence with Martha Clifford. See note 6.164.

6.170. Before my patience are exhausted

A line from Martha's letter to Bloom (5.254).

6.171. National School. Meade's yard.

"The carriage first passes St. Andrew's Boys' and Girls' National School and Michael Meade & Son, building contractors, located at 114 and 153 Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street, respectively" (Gifford, p. 107).

6.171. The hazard

A cab-stand.

"Cabman's Shelter and Coffee Stand outside Westland Row station" (Gifford, p. 107).

6.172. Only two there now

That is, taxi drivers.

6.172. Nodding

Perhaps in sleepiness and/or inebriation.

6.172. Full as a tick

Brimful, satiated.

6.172. Too much bone in their skulls

C.f. "boneheads."

6.173. jarvies

Drivers of jaunting cars (OED).

6.175. pointsman's

"A man who has charge of the "points" on a railway, the tapering, movable rails that direct vehicles from one line of rails to another" (Gifford, p. 107).

6.176. standard

A pole.

6.176-179. Couldn't they invent . . . new invention

Typically, Bloom thinks in practical and pragmatic terms. He is many-minded and meandering, observing and reflecting upon his observations. He tends to circle around such observations and issues, occasionally tautologically, in a kind of thought process that mimics the wheels of the carriage beneath him.

6.177. the wheel itself

"Is perhaps reminiscent of the fiery wheel of the sun to which Ixion was tied in Hell." (Senn, p. 171).

"Ixion is condemned to become part of the operating mechanism of Zeus' universe, as Sisyphus heaves the sun-disc up to the zenith only to see it roll back down" (Oxford Classical Dictionary).

6.180. Antient concert rooms

"A hall where privately sponsored concerts were given, 42 Great Brunswick Street" (Gifford, p. 107).

"The place where 'A Mother' (Dubliners) was performed. Also, Joyce himself performed there in a singing competition" (Senn, p. 171).

6.180. buff

A pale yellow color.

Frequently refers to the color of Caucasian skin; Bloom could be playing with connotations with nakedness. In either case, a buff suit is inappropriate mourning garb.

6.180-81. with a crape armlet

"A small band of black cloth worn on the arm in token of mourning, usually for a person who was not a close relation" (Gifford, pp. 107-108).

6.181. Quarter mourning

"None of the mourners is particularly aggrieved at the loss of Paddy Dignam--the widow of course is not present at the gravesite--and 'Quarter mourning' serves well to describe most of those congregated at the Glasnevin cemetery" (Benstock, p. 36).

6.181. People in law

E.g. fathers-in-law, brothers-in-law, etc., who might be less mournful than blood relations and close friends.

6.183. the bleak pulpit of saint Mark's

"The church (c. 1737) is on Mark Street, just off Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street. Built in a neoclassical style so severe as to be bleak, the west front is typical: rugged and black, the sweeping curve of the walls unrelieved by the slit windows that are intended to light the staircases within" (Gifford, 108).

"During Joyce's time it was equipped with a wooden pulpit facing outwards; "a wooden pulpit in the churchyard, divided from a busy thoroughfare by a railing, is used in open-air services on Sunday evenings in summer" (Samuel Fitzpatrick, Dublin: A Historical and Topographical Account of the City, 209). Maurice Craig, chronicler of Dublin, spoke of the "uncompromising bleakness" of the view (Dublin 1660-1860: A Social and Architectural History, 112)" (Senn, 171).

"Here bleak certainly involves a qualitative, even evaluative, response, but it is not appropriate to attribute the term to any individual in the carriage, especially in light of the plural’They.’ . . . It has the hallmarks, that is, of authorial omniscience" (Thornton, p. 50).

6.183-84. the railway bridge

"Carries the City of Dublin Junction Railway (the Loop Line) over Great Brunswick Street" (Gifford, p. 108).

6.184. the Queen's theatre

"At 209 Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street, one of the three major theaters in Dublin at the turn of the century. The Theatre Royal was primarily used for dramatic presentations, the Gaiety for the more socially prominent musical events, and the Queen's for productions that fit neither category" (Gifford, p. 108).

6.184. Hoardings

Billboards, signs posting the name of a shop or an advertisement.

6.184. Eugene Stratton

Billed by the Theatre Royal as "'The World Renowned Comedian' in a series of Recitals from his Celebrated Repertoire," Eugene Stratton was the stage name of Eugene Augustus Ruhlmann (1861-1918), an American who became a music-hall star as a Negro impersonator. He toured primarily in the British Isles, first with a minstrel group and then as a solo performer. His routine involved 'coon songs' with whistled refrains and soft-shoe dancing 'on a darkened, spotlighted stage, a noiseless, moving shadow'" (Gifford, p. 108).

"Eugene Stratton was born Eugene Augustus Ruhlmann (1861-1918) in Buffalo, New York, of Alsatian parents (see his obituary in the London Times, Sept. 16, 1918, p. 5, col. d). Stratton is praised very highly by W.J. MacQueen Pope in The Melodies Linger On, where he says that Stratton, who went to England with a minstrel troupe and 'joined the Moore and Burgess Minstrels at the old St. James hall in Piccadilly,' was a song writer and performer and 'was a master of the soft-shoe dance.' MacQueen Pope goes on to call Stratton 'a tremendous star of Music Hall, one of the most artistic of them all' (p. 411). Both the Freeman's Journal and the Evening Telegraph for June 16, 1904, advertise 'The World Renowned Comedian' at the Theatre Royal" (Thornton, 90-91).

6.185. Mrs. Bandmann Palmer . . . Leah

"Millicent Palmer (1865-1905) an American actress who made her first tour of the British Isles in 1883. Her performance in Leah [the Jewish Maiden] at the Gaiety Theatre was advertised in the Freeman's Journal, 16 June 1904. Leah the Forsaken (1862) was a translation and adaptation by the American playwright John Augustin Daly (1833-99) of the German Deborah (1850) by Saloman Hermann Rosenthal (1821-77), a German Austrian playwright and archivist. The play is set in an Austrian village in the early eighteenth century; its central theme involves an attack on anti-Semitism. The villain, Nathan, is an apostate Jew who masquerades as a pharisaical and anti-Semitic Christian to protect his place in the village. Leah, the Jew, is hounded by Nathan and 'forsaken' by her Christian lover, achieving peace only by self-immolation at the play's end" (Gifford, 88).

"In 5.197 Bloom compared her role [in Leah] with Hamlet ('Perhaps [Hamlet] was a woman. Why Ophelia committed suicide') and in doing so also thought of his father ('Poor Papa')" (Senn, p. 173).

6.185. I said I

Bloom remembers telling Molly he would not return home until late. This fragment anticipates similar articulations in Molly's soliloquy ("I said I washed up and down . . ." (16:204)); the text is haunted with proleptic echoes such as this.

Bloom frequently (if vaguely) meditates on the insubstantiality of selfhood, most conspicuously in 13:1258, where he inscribes "I" in the sand. See note 6.203, Henke, re: Bloom's transcendental ego.

6.186. the Lily of Killarney? Elster Grimes Opera Company

"The Queen's Royal Theatre advertised the Elster-Grimes Grand Opera Company in that 'Irish' opera (1862), a melodramatic, musical version of The Colleen Bawn, libretto by Dion Boucicault (1822-90) and John Oxenford (1812-77), music by the German-English composer Sir Julius Benedict (1804-85). The opera was first performed at Convent Garden Opera House, in February, 1862. The Dublin newspapers of the day advertised as a 'Tremendous Success' The Lily of Killarney being done at the Queen's Royal Theatre by the Elster-Grime Grand Opera Company. There was at this time an opera company called the Elster-Grime (not Grimes) Grand Opera Company, which was currently playing in Dublin" (Thornton, p. 91).

"Plot summary: Eily, the Colleen Bawn (Irish: 'the blond'), is a peasant girl secretly married to a gentleman, Hardress Creegan. Creegan and his mother are in financial straits, but these are apparently to be resolved because Creegan is apparently betrothed to a rich gentlewoman, Anne, the Colleen Ruaidh ('the redhead'). Then Creegan's best friend, Kyrle, falls in love with Anne and she with him, but she mistakenly thinks that he, not Creegan, is Eily's husband. The melodramatic tangle is compounded by Creegan's pride; by a pettifogging lawyer with a mortgage to foreclose unless Mrs. Creegan marries him; by Creegan's faithful servant, whose mistaken zeal leads him to attempt to murder Eily; by the lawyer, who has Creegan arrested for the murder that has not been committed; etc. All is resolved by revelation and confession: Creegan is reunited with Eily, Anne marries Kyrle, the mortgage blows away, and the lawyer is ducked in the horsepond" (Gifford, p. 108).

"This is the first of seven references to the opera [Lily of Killarney] in Ulysses. The happy conclusion of the opera tends, then, to give added weight to the argument that the novel ends in a successful reconciliation between Leopold and Molly" (Bowen, Allusions, p. 103).

6.186-187. Big powerful change

"Common expression on theatre advertisements for changes in the program" (Senn, p. 174).

6.187. wet bright bills for next week

I.e., the posters advertising coming attractions, still wet from being pasted up.

6.187. Fun on the Bristol

"The New York musical-comedy version of Henry C. Jarret's 'American Eccentric Comedy-Oddity,' Fun on the Bristol; or, A Night on the Sound, was advertised as 'funnier than a pantomime' and was enormously popular in the provinces in the late nineteenth century; together with Eugene Stratton's recital, it constituted the Theatre Royal's 'double feature' for 16 June 1904" (Gifford, p. 108).

"Allardyce Nicoll lists Fun on the Bristol; or, A Night at Sea as an anonymous farce (History of English Drama, V, 682). It was first performed at Manchester on May 15 1882, and, in a revised version, at the Gaiety Theatre, London, on September 5, 1887" (Thornton, p. 91).

6.188. the Gaiety

"One of the three major theatres in Dublin at the turn of the century . . ., the Gaiety [was primarily used] for the more socially prominent musical events" (Gifford, p. 108).

"Bloom thinks constantly of the privileges to be gained through acquaintances" (Senn, p. 174).

6.189. As broad as it's long

Proverbial expression, meaning that it would cost Bloom as much to stand the drinks as it would to buy the tickets.

6.190. He's coming

Bloom thinks about Blazes Boylan, who is scheduled to visit Molly this afternoon to work out the program for the tour. Blazes will be "coming" in both senses.

"Even Bloom himself avoids thinking about the name of the man who is supposed to come to his home that afternoon" (Senn, p. 174).

"Because the Other behind the gaze has both maternal and paternal aspects, Bloom not only has Molly on his mind all day, but also the demonic Boylan, who must in effect be perpetually berating his weakness. While Boylan's image might seem to deter Bloom from what he does, in fact this image is part of the mechanism that keeps him on his course. His desire cannot resist the dynamism of evil" (Brivic, The Veil of Signs, p. 103).

6.191-249. Plasto's . . . Liberator's form

"In Hades . . . the brooding presence of the dead . . . is to be found in that predominating mood of Joyce's Dublin, the shabby-genteel recollection of better days . . . which lives on the memories of its dead patriots, dead tenors, and dead journalists. Such memories are especially prominent in Hades, as the carriage ride to the cemetery becomes a tour through the city of the dead. For perhaps no other novel so meticulously lists the statues of a city--in this chapter, Sir Philip Crampton's bust and the long line of statues up O'Connell Street: the Liberator (Daniel O'Connell), Sir John Gray, Nelson, Father Mathew, the foundation stone for Parnell's monument . . . . And the procession of monuments does not stop with the journey: the graves of both O'Connell and Parnell are in Prospect cemetery. The statues and graves are signs of that essential element of Dublin life: the enervating allegiance to a past which is glorious but dead" (Maddox, Assault Upon Character, p. 53).

6.191. Plasto's

Hatter at 1 Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street, where Bloom purchased his hat. See "Plasto's highgrade ha" (4:69-70).

Brivic points out that Bloom forces himself not to think of Blazes by focusing on the statue, but that Blazes remains "exactly where he should be in Lacan's scheme: in an invisible center" (Brivic, The Veil of Signs, p. 104).

6.191. Sir Philip Crampton's . . . bust

"The Crampton Memorial, a bust above a fountain and surmounted by a cascade of metal foliage, stood in College Street at the west end of Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street. The procession angles north at this point, toward O'Connell Bridge over the Liffey. Crampton (1777-1858) was a Dublin surgeon whose 'fame was almost European' and who served for several years as surgeon general of Her Majesty's Forces. The memorial has been removed" (Gifford, p. 108).

"[Crampton] was known for his ugliness . . . . In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus asked ironically, 'Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical, epical, or dramatic?' (Portrait, 214)" (Senn, pp. 175-176).

6.191. who was he?

"The colonized city was filled with statues--in this case to Crampton, a Dublin-born Surgeon-General to Her Majesty's Forces--whose subjects were unknown to the local citizenry" (Kiberd, p. 983).

"Statues . . . figure prominently in the Hades episode. . . This is exactly the same bust that Stephen thinks of when reaching out for his definition of the dramatic artist as the indifferent God of creation, paring his fingernails: "Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical , epical, or dramatic?" (P 214) (Rathjen, p. 117).

6.196. airing his quiff

That is, with his hat off.

"'Quiff' can mean an oiled lock of hair plastered on the forehead; but it can also mean smartly dressed, in which case Boylan is showing off" (Gifford, p. 108).

"Hatless (unusual for a man of that day)" (Kiberd, p. 983).

6.197. Just that moment I was thinking

Another Bloomian lacuna: he was thinking of Blazes "coming in the afternoon" (see 6.190).

Bloom "has no idea that the reason he thought of Blazes was that he saw him subliminally. Boylan has been the center of Bloom's perception, but Bloom has not seen him, and it is common for the objects Bloom focuses on to screen what is really on his mind. Often this is obviously Blazes, but it is also Molly watching him from behind her veil, for the Other includes both parents. Lacan argues that the center of the visual field is a screen over desire, and that external reality is marginal to this screen and can only appear after the screen has been constructed" (Brivic, The Veil of Signs, p. 104).

"The rock upon which James Joyce builds his church is the theme of betrayal" (Levitt, p. 72).

6.197-204. Just that moment I was thinking . . . well pared.

"Each time that Bloom tries to escape his thought, the narrator assists by a sudden lurch in and out of the third person . . . at the precise moment when Bloom desperately needs help. Bloom’s attempts at equanimity ("I am just looking at them" are ably assisted by the narrator (Mr Bloom reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right hand"), who retreats briefly and tactfully out of the character’s mind" (Knowles, The Dublin Helix, p. 74)

6.198. the Red Bank

"Burton Bindon's Red Bank Restaurant, 19-20 D'Olier Street" (Gifford, p. 108).

6.199. of a straw hat

"The text mentions only 'the white disc of a straw hat,' but the phrase is a metonymic figure, and subsequent more elaborate descriptions of Boylan seem almost superfluous" (Sultan, p. 99).

"The psychic inside turns into the social outside, an inversion that signals Joyce's major attempt to rewrite novel as epic; to work the private subject into the public landscape" (Sherry, p. 43).

"To Bloom, Boylan is never more than clothes and a name: in Hades, he is a white straw hat in salute (6.199); after lunch he appears as a 'straw hat in sunlight,' 'tan shoes,' and 'turnedup trousers' (8.1168); and his 'gay hat' returns to mock Bloom's lugubriousness in Sirens (11.302)" (Mahaffey, p. 176).

6.199. spruce

Neat and/or stylish.

6.201. more in him that they she sees

"The double pronoun illustrates Bloom's confusion. He first wonders what women in general ('they') see in Boylan. But before he can articulate the thought, his interest turns to the question of how Molly ('she') can be attracted to such a rogue" (Henke, p. 101)

A "grammatical equation of Molly with her entire sex" (Devlin, p. 76).

6.202. Fascination. Worst man in Dublin

"Bloom is always loath to think of Boylan and will do anything to avoid uttering his name" (Van Caspel, p. 101), but this is the most cogent assessment he makes of his rival.

Bloom "uses the word 'fascination' to criticize Molly, but there is another voice speaking in the word that feels that fascination, which is expressed by a breakdown of syntax throughout this paragraph, as typified by the single-word sentence 'Fascination.' The ideal cannot exist without the threat, Bella without Bello" (Brivic, The Veil of Signs, p. 103).

6.202. That keeps him alive

Perhaps, "the fascination women feel for such a man makes him more lively tna the rest of us mortal men."

6.203. my nails

"The emphasis on the 'nails' of his hands suggests that here is Bloom's private crucifixion" (Blamires, p. 33).

Maddox cites this passage as an "especially clear instance of [Bloom's] diversionary attention to detail," the tendency to seize upon "a physical detail which will distract his thoughts from that knot of feeling which consists of Rudy, Molly, and Boylan. . . . Bloom, then, is not simply attracted to the phenomenal world. At his most painful moments, he is psychologically addicted to it. . . . He is in this respect the precise opposite of Stephen, who suffers a kind of spiritual anemia from being so removed from Bloom's world. . . . Bloom is incomplete because his nature is so completely subdued to what it works in. Immersed in the physical world, he is incapable of personalized distance from himself, and so he cannot grasp even the nature of his own dilemma" (Maddox, pp. 57-58).

In the Ithaca chapter, Karen Lawrence notes "a mechanism of avoidance in the narrative that resembles Bloom's sudden scrutiny of his fingernails at the mention of Blazes Boylan" (Lawrence, p. 182).

C.f., Stephen's Dedalus's Flaubertian notion, in Portrait, of the creative artist "above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

"In as petty an act as studying his nails . . . Bloom is likened to Christ, especially since toward the end of Lotus-Eaters he recalls Molly's interpretation of I.N.R.I.: 'Iron Nails ran in' " (Restuccia, p. 36).

Once again, Bloom reflects on mortality--this time his own--see line 6.19.

6.203-4. I am just looking at them

"The progressive verb, 'am looking,' affirms the experience of continuing temporality. Bloom not only studies his fingernails; he makes a deliberate effort to see himself in terms of conscious perception. By constituting the 'I' as a subjective agent, he asserts a transcendental ego--the self aware of itself in the act of mental reflection" (Henke, pp. 101-2).

6.204. well pared

"Bloom busies himself zealously with his fingernails, a natural weapon, apparently to conceal his embarrassment from Boylan. His nails are 'well clipped;' well pared sounds like well paired, which is an expression of exactly that which Bloom is trying desperately to ignore or repress. Perhaps an echo of 'yet it seemed as useless as the paring of one's nails' (W.B. Yeats, Countess Cathleen)" (Senn, p. 176).

Friedhelm Rathjen elaborates upon the parallel between this passage and Stephen’s conception of the artist as God "indifferent, paring his fingernails" in Portrait. "In both cases, the character forcing the protagonist to pull himself together and play the role of the fingernail parer is located near the entrance of a public building. Boylan in Ulysses is seen saluting the passing cab from "the door of the Red Bank" (6.198) and Emma Clery, Stephen’s beloved, stands "near the entrance door" (P 215) of the National Library, "on the steps of the colonnade" (P 216). In both cases, not only jealousy but also a certain element of emptiness is involved. When Stephen catches sight of Emma, "[h]is mind, emptied of theory and courage, lapse[s] back into a listless peace" (P 216); Bloom, following his musings on his nails, sends "his vacant glance over [his fellow passengers’] faces (6.209-10). This glance may even recall Stephen’s "turning his eyes towards her from time to time" (P 215)" (Rathjen, p. 117).

"Bloom attempts to wrest attention away from Molly and Boylan and to relocate it somewhere else, anyplace else . . . . It is an especially clear example of Bloom's drugging himself through attention to the specific" (Maddox, p. 58).

6.204. And after: thinking alone

Bloom may be imagining Molly's post-coital reflections.

"It is no stupid or superficial man who senses, for example, Molly's view of Boylan" (Goldberg, p. 279).

6.204-5. Body getting a bit softy

Is Bloom thinking of his own body or that of Molly? It looks as though he elides from the former to the latter, in which case Henke's point is apposite: "Once again, he sympathizes with his spouse by imagining the lonely aftermath of adultery. He thinks of Molly lamenting her flabbiness and facing the terrors of approaching old age" (Henke, p. 102).

6.206-207. shape is there still

"Bloom, internalizing the other, sees himself through the implied eye of an onlooking woman, specifically Molly" (Kiberd, p. 983).

"So his mind turns, after its customary centripetal fashion, to that centre which, like the leg of Donne's compasses, it constantly yearns and leans after--Molly, her shoulders, hips, plump buttocks" (Blamires, p. 36).

6.209 satisfied

"But from what does he derive satisfaction? From thoughts about Molly; more particularly, from thoughts about her body. His brief meditation begins with the slightly nasty thought that Molly is getting older and her body is ‘getting a bit softy.’ Such a thought is most likely a sign of envy. But, he soon realizes, only he would notice this, because only he can remember her younger days and her harder body" (Sicari, p. 61).

6.209-210. vacant glance

As he so often does, Joyce highlights a wide gap between Bloom's turbulent inner life and his external appearance.

6.215. are you going yourself?

Although Kiberd writes, "throughout the conversation, the men twit Bloom" (Kiberd, 983), it is equally plausible that this is an entirely innocent question.

6.216-17. the county Clare

Bloom plans a trip to the town of Ennis, on the west coast of Ireland.

"Bloom's father had run a hotel in Ennis, in county Clare, and took his own life there [on June 27, 1886]. Bloom has lost his father and his son and is therefore the last male bearer of the Bloom name" (Senn, pp. 176-177).

6.217. on some private business

I.e., Bloom's observance of the anniversary of his father's death.

6.218. What you lose on one you can make up on the other

"This phrase describing Molly's tours also sums up the social and economic relations in Bloom's circle" (Osteen, p. 164).

Bloom often experiences and articulates a pattern of loss and recovery, played out in Hades as an economy of life and death, in which one generates the other.

6.219. Mary Anderson

"Ulster Hall, Belfast, 16 June 1904, advertised a visit of 'the World-Renowned Actress, Miss Mary Anderson (Madame de Marano) in the Balcony Scene from Romeo and Juliet, etc. etc.' Other 'eminent and celebrated artists' (vocal and instrumental, including Clyde Twelvetrees, cellist) were also to appear" (Gifford, p. 109).

6.221. Louis Werner

"Billed as 'Conductor and Accompanist' with Miss Anderson and company in Belfast" (Gifford, p. 109).

"Bloom first reacts to the name Mary Anderson and then he answers the question" (Senn, p. 331).

6.222. topnobbers

"Toffs," distinguished people, fancy folk.

6.222. J. C. Doyle and John MacCormack

"Doyle, a baritone, won the award at the 1899 Feis Ceoil (annual Dublin music festival and competition). MacCormack (1884-1945), a tenor, also won a gold medal at the Feis Ceoil. He was a member of the Palestrina Choir of the Metropolitan Procathedral (temporary Roman Catholic cathedral in Dublin) and in 1904 sang with that choir at the St. Louis Exposition, St. Louis, Missouri. The two were regarded as among the cream of contemporary Irish musicians in the early twentieth century" (Gifford, p. 109).

"In the second week of June 1904, John MacCormack began a six-month engagement as a solo tenor at the St. Louis Exposition. However, in protest against a stage-Irish act on the same stage at the Irish Village, MacCormack resigned and returned to Ireland in early August. He appeared on the same stage as James Joyce on August 27. So, contrary to Bloom's expectations, he would not have been available for the concert tour of the North, which commenced on June 23 (18.332)" (Owens, p. 20).

"Joyce puts Molly in the best of company and thereby elevates her status to that of a capable singer" (Senn, p. 177).

6.224. And madame

"Power's ironic 'And madame' sets off reminiscences of Mozart's Don Giovanni, the musical motif of Bloom's cuckoldry [in 6.38-240]" (Henke, p. 102).

Levitt argues that "The Joyce of Ulysses is never himself a narrator, never speaking in his own voice, not in judgment, not even descriptively. We must not confuse his characters’ occasional narration with his" (Levitt, p. 158). Examining 6.224-237, Levitt notes, "By dint of sheer unspoken will, close physical observation, careful psychological avoidance, and imaginative recreation based on long knowledge, in the first occurrence of his sustained stream of consciousness in the novel (a stream very different from Stephen’s), Bloom has himself changed the subject. He asks none of the relevant narrative questions and answers none. But to follow him fully, we must both ask and attempt to answer. Our profound connection to Bloom, even at this early point, is the product of his point of view inducing us to ask and to answer and to empathize. Yet we cannot quite answer all the narrative questions that he does not quite ask." (Levitt, p. 163).

6.226. Smith O'Brien

A statue of William Smith O'Brien, nationalist hero of 1848, stood at the intersection of Westmoreland and D'Olier streets where they converge at O'Connell Bridge.

"The anniversary of O'Brien's death was actually the 16th of June, thus it seems that the wreath would have been in celebration of the 40th anniversary" (Senn, p. 178).

6.227. For many happy returns

The traditional salute upon birthdays and anniversaries, reinforcing the pattern of loss and recovery (see note 6.218) and reemphasizing the theme of metempsychosis that runs throughout the episode. See Thomas, James Joyce's Ulysses: A Book of Many Happy Returns.

"One of the many connections between birth and death" (Senn, p. 179).

6.228. Farrell's statue

"The statue of O'Brien (1869) was the work of Sir Thomas Farrell (1827-1900), Irish sculptor. The inscription says, 'William Smith O'Brien/ born/ 17th October 1803/ sentenced to death for/ high treason/ on the/ 9th October 1848/ died/ 16th June 1864,' so Bloom is right in surmising that this is his 'deathday' [6.227]" (Thornton, p. 91).

6.228. unresisting

The mourners, including Bloom, are carried along almost without agency, by a process of ritualized repetition.

6.229-30. Oot

Bloom hears a fragment of the old man's beseeching advertisement.

"Bloom is thinking about the womb and the tomb in Hades . . . . As Bloom in a carriage passes an old man selling bootlaces, what he hears is 'Oot,' which is repeated (6.229-30). Bloom is thinking about death at this point, and 'Oot' evokes a hollowness similar to that of 'Oomb,' so Bloom is also involved in the signification of vowels" (Brivic, The Veil of Signs, p. 87).

6.229. dullgarbed old man

"Like Charon in the Aeneid" (Senn, p. 179).

"The bootlace vendor appears among the 'mute inhuman faces' leering at Bloom in Circe (15.3044) when he is being accused by 'The Sins of the Past'" (Benstock and Benstock, p. 14).

6.232. struck off the rolls

Disbarred.

"To be struck from the rolls of lawyers is the result of extreme misconduct and is therefore a sort of professional death" (Senn, p. 179).

6.232-34. Hume street . . . solicitor for Waterford

"Henry R. Tweedy, Crown solicitor for County Waterford (in southern Ireland), 13 Hume Street, in the southeast quadrant of Dublin" (Gifford, p. 109).

6.234. Relics of old decency

This line is from a song titled "The Hat Me Father Wore," a song which "thematically provides the background of dignity and Irish history and tradition which become symbolized in [the] sequence" of hats we see on display. From the chorus:"It's old, but it's beautiful, / The best was ever seen, / 'Twas worn for more than ninety years / In that little isle of green. / From my father's great ancestors / It's descended with galore, / 'Tis the relic of old decency, / The hat my father wore" (Bowen, Allusions, 104).

"The latter phrase [relics of old decency] epigramatically sums up the condition of a majority of the male Dubliners in Ulysses" (Osteen, pp. 159-160).

6.235. Kicked about like snuff at a wake

"Popular expression for indiscriminate use, after the assumption that snuff would be in demand at a wake to mask the odor of death" (Gifford, p. 109).

Senn quotes P.W. Joyce, Irish As We Speak It in Ireland, "If any commodity is supplied plentifully, it is knocked about like snuff at a wake." He continues: "Irish wakes were known for their rambunctiousness" (Senn, p. 180).

6.236. O'Callaghan on his last legs

"I do not know whether the disbarred attorney now selling bootlaces was named O'Callaghan, but His Last Legs (London, 1839) is the title of a brief and once-popular two-act farce by the American William Bayle Bernard (1807-75). The charlatan-hero of the farce is a stage-Irishman, Felix O'Callaghan, who, as the play opens, is 'shabby genteel' and down on his luck. Once a landed gentleman and 'the reigning star of Cheltenham [a fashionable resort town in England],' he has for ten years been the 'football of Fortune,' a failure at everything he has touched. The farce repairs all that through an elaborate pattern of coincidence aided by what playwright and audience apparently assumed was O'Callaghan's all-too-Irish skill as an impostor and manipulator of others. He winds up about to marry the wealthy widow whom he had courted and lost before his fall from fortune (Quotations from New York, 1847, edition)" (Gifford, p. 109).

6.237. Twenty past eleven

John Rickard focuses on "the two predominant traditional interpretations of the number eleven, both of which are relevant to Joyce's use of the number in Ulysses. 1. The medieval Christian interpretation derives primarily from the biblical exegesis of Augustine and others, who sought both to Christianize earlier pagan numerological systems and to explain and expand their perception that certain biblical passages imply a numerological basis for God's creation. Augustine writes in The City of God that 'the Law is clearly indicated by the number ten (hence the never-to-be-forgotten 'decalogue') and therefore the number eleven undoubtedly symbolizes the transgression of the Law, since it oversteps ten; and so it is a symbol of sin' 2. The Renaissance interpretation derives from Classical, rather than biblical, sources, and associates eleven with death and mourning. This interpretation of eleven derives from precedents in the works of Homer and Ovid, among others. In the last book of the Iliad, for example, Achilles grants Priam's request that the Trojans be allowed eleven days for Hector's funeral rites before the battle must begin again, and it is in Book XI of the Odyssey . . . that Odysseus descends to Hades to speak with the dead--including his dead mother--and is beseeched by Elpenor to perform proper funeral rites for him (Joyce's schema for Hades substitutes Dignam for Elpenor, and Dignam's funeral appropriately begins at 11 A. M. . . .Joyce was certainly aware of Homer's use of eleven as a key to the underworld, for he took care to remind himself, in notes he took while reading Victor Berard's Les Phénicienns et l'Odyssée, that in Homer's epic we find 'Nekia XI canto' " (Rickard, p. 152).

6.237. Up

Bloom thinks that Molly has risen by now.

Also c.f. "u.p." (8.257).

6.238. voglio e non vorrei.

"Italian: 'I want to and I wouldn't like to.' These are lines from the Don Giovanni-Zerlina duet in Mozart's Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni comes upon some villagers 'merrymaking,' is 'smitten' by the 'innocent' Zerlina, and attempts to seduce her away from her peasant fiancé, Massetto. Zerlina answers, 'Vorrei e non vorrei': 'I would like to and I wouldn't like to; / My heart beats a little faster. / It's true I would be happy, / But he can still make a fool of me.' Here Bloom misquotes Zerlina's line. Zerlina sings the more delicately ambiguous line 'Vorrei e non vorrei' (I would like to and I wouldn't like to). Bloom changes the conditional would to the unconditional want " (Gifford, p. 109).

6.238. No: vorrei e non

Bloom now corrects his error. "Bloom has found the right word, at last. It is vorrei not voglio, but he still finds a substitute for thinking about Blazes and Molly by thinking of Molly's voice--a substitute as good as thinking of pronunciation if he wants to avoid thinking about what the words signify" (Hall, cited by Bowen, Allusions, pp. 104-105).

6.239. Mi trema un poco il

The rest of the line is "cuore!" "Italian: 'My heart beats a little faster!' Zerlina to Don Giovanni in the 'La ci darem' duet" (Gifford, p. 109).

"We are not surprised that Bloom, humming 'La ci darem', stops just short on the verge of the ill-omened word," heart (Adams, p. 105).

The heart (the missing word) is the organ to which this chapter relates.

6.240. A thrush. A throstle

"Throstle" is a variant of "thrush" (OED).

This formulation, "A thrush. A throstle," is reiterated in Sirens (11.631).

6.242. Greyish over the ears

In Hades, Bloom is particularly sensitive to signs of aging and mortality (see 6.204-205).

6.245. the woman he keeps

Powers apparently has a mistress, a bar-maid.

6.247. Crofton

"J. T. A. Crofton is an employee of the Collector General's Office. The 'decent Orangeman,' appears as a character in 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room,' Dubliners. In real life he was J. T. A. Crofton (1838-1907), an associate of John J. Joyce's (Simon Dedalus's) in the Dublin Rates Office (the Collector General's Office) in 1888 (see Adams, p. 6)" (Gifford, p. 109).

Benstock notes that "Bloom now employs Crofton as his delegated observer as previously he had employed Dedalus, since he is not intimate in these circles and needs someone who can provide an on-site report. For someone whose wife could become an immediate embarrassment to him, he oddly enough identifies with the victimised wife in this situation" (Benstock, p. 90).

6.248. Jury's

Jury's Commercial and Family Hotel, 7-8 College Green, in the southeast quadrant of Dublin.

6.248. the Moira

Moira Hotel, 15 Trinity Street, in the southeast quadrant of Dublin. .

"Moira is also a Greek word for (and a personification of) fate" (Senn, p. 181).

6.249. Liberator's form

"Daniel O'Connell . . . successfully led the movement for Catholic Emancipation in 1829; and thereafter sought repeal of the Act of Union" (Kiberd, p. 984).

"A twelve-foot statue of Daniel O'Connell on a twenty-eight-foot pedestal by the Irish sculptor John Henry Foley (1818-74) stands in the northern approach to O'Connell Bridge. The procession moves north along Sackville (now O'Connell) Street. O'Connell is depicted wrapped in his cloak" (Thornton, p. 92).

"Perhaps no other novel so meticulously lists the statues of a city . . . The statues and graves are signs of that essential element of Dublin life: the enervating allegiance to a past which is glorious but dead" (Maddox, p. 53).

"The shades of the famous dead are represented by statues that the carriage passes" (Adams, p. 95).

6.251. the tribe of Reuben

"That is, Jewish, after Reuben, the eldest son of Jacob and Leah (Genesis 29:32) and the patriarch of one of the twelve tribes of Israel (Numbers 1:5 and 21). He distinguished himself by saving and protecting his younger half-brother, Joseph, and (known for his impetuosity) disgraced himself by his adulterous relationship with his father's concubine, Bilhah. The tribe of Reuben, composed of herdsmen and warriors, occupied a remote part of the Promised Land and eventually renounced its Judaism. In Christian tradition Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, is frequently identified as 'of the tribe of Reuben'" (Gifford, p. 110).

6.252. a tall blackbearded figure

I.e., Reuben J. Dodd; see note 6.264-65.

6.253. Elvery's Elephant house

"46-47 Sackville Street Lower, advertised themselves as 'Waterproofers,' selling 'Waterproofs for Fishing, Shooting, Riding, Walking'" (Gifford, p. 110).

6.256. The devil break the hasp of your back!

In Circe, "looking at Bloom, Stephen sees the picture of another (supposed) Jew, Reuben J. Dodd, as presented in Hades. Bloom-Dodd is clutching his spine because, as Bloom alone mentions later, he feels a 'twinge of sciatica' in his 'left glutear muscle' and so is massaging it, and because in Hades Simon wanted to break the hasp of Dodd's back" (Gordon, p. 97).

6.256. hasp

A fastening, or clasp for fastening a door on a lid (OED); here probably means "spine."

6.257. collapsing in laughter, shaded his face

Powers is "habitually depicted as 'collapsing' in laughter. . . . Powers is rapidly becoming a shade--both Bloom and Molly comment on his rapidly graying hair," as in 6.242 (Osteen, p. 166).

6.258. Gray's statue

Another monument by Sir Thomas Farrell, on a pedestal in the middle of Sackville St.

"Sir John Gray (1816-75) was a Protestant Irish patriot, owner and editor of the Freeman's Journal. He advocated disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (accomplished in 1869), land reform, and free denominational education" (Gifford, p. 110).

Gray was "best known as main procurer for Dublin of its fine supply of 'Vartry water'" (Thornton, pp. 92-93).

"A favorite joke among Dubliners is to explain to visitors that Sir John Gray's exploits are to be found on the back of his statue in O'Connell Street. When the curious stop to read, they find the pediment blank" (Kain, p. 17).

6.259. We have all been there

That is, have had recourse to "Jewish" moneylenders.

"The sale of the [Joyce family's] properties...was made necessary mainly by heavy debts John Joyce had contracted to Reuben J. Dodd, a Dublin solicitor who lent money and who already owned mortgages on the property. The land and buildings had sentimental associations. . . Of course, if Reuben J. Dodd had not lent him the money, John Joyce would have borrowed elsewhere, but Dodd was the manifest, if not the basic cause of the poverty which now descended" (Ellmann, pp. 37-39).

6.262-63. to his companions' faces

"Joyce was no Marxist, but he was well able to represent the effects of alienated labor on the human body and mind . . . In Hades Bloom tries (hopelessly) to tell the story of Reuben J. Dodd 'to his companions' faces '" (Williams, p. 172).

6.264. an awfully good one

"Bloom's sudden eagerness to speak indicates his nervousness during the anti-Jewish innuendoes which preceded his intervention; and, perhaps, a desire to suggest that he is with the other men on these matters" (Kiberd, 984).

Benstock points out that Bloom's anecdote "meanders along a trail of ambiguous pronoun referents that eventually conflate the principal characters and leave the audience in total confusion" (Benstock, 1982, p. 708). Bloom, unlike his companions, is a lousy story-teller--partly because he lacks verbal poise, but also because his audience continually interrupts him.

"Bloom's attempt to conform is apparent in the anecdote ridiculing Reuben J. Dodd; after all, Bloom is a second-generation Jew. Bloom's father came from the Hungarian region of Szombathely and fled in a roundabout way to Ireland, where he changed his name from Virag to Bloom and, after practical consideration, let himself be converted to Protestantism. Bloom's formulation of the story . . . proves him to be a clumsy storyteller. The Irish manner of speaking fails him, and so his attempts to be seen as an equally competent storyteller are thwarted. His story, interrupted many times, finally dies and is brought to an end by Cunningham" (Senn, pp. 182-184).

"When Bloom's 'Jewishness' becomes an outlet for his self-hatred, he willingly participates in the stereotype of 'the Jew' as unscrupulous in usury--Shylock without a heart. In the carriage, however, Bloom is perhaps the sole passenger who best understands the historical dynamic behind the stereotype. His failure to register this understanding, even in his own thoughts, demonstrates his avoidance of his Jewish consciousness that is ironically most crucial to his claim as an Irishman; without confronting the first, he can never fully accept himself as the second" (Davison, p. 206).

6.264-65. Reuben J and the son

"Reuben J. Dodd, solicitor, 34 Ormond Quay Upper, agent for the Patriotic Assurance Company and Mutual Assurance Company of New York" (Gifford, p. 110).

"Of the tribe of Reuben" might be taken "not to mean that Cunningham thinks Dodd is literally a Jew but to indicate that he fits the stereotype of the Jewish usurer . . . as Adams notes, 'The phrase . . . is customarily applied to Judas Iscariot,' so Cunningham's remark might call attention to Dodd's role as the userer who betrays his fellow Irishmen when he collects his thirty pieces of silver through interest . . . Although 'Reuben' is often a Jewish name, it is not exclusively Jewish. Nor was it unknown for Christians living in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland to have Biblical names. Ulysses gives us such examples as Adam Findlater (4.128) and Aaron Figatner (11.149) as well as the more prominent Malachi Mulligan and Simon Dedalus" (McCarthy, p. 80).

According to Senn, "Reuben J. Dodd did not have Jewish ancestry; the anti-semitic prejudice is therefore directed at an inappropriate object." The remarks, however, fit in a series of such comments: "Anti-semitism is expressed in the first chapter by the Englishman Haines and again, at the end of chapter 2, by Mr. Deasy and reaches its culmination in chapter 12 (Cyclops), where Bloom is made a scapegoat and a target of provincial xenophobia" (Senn, p. 184).

Ellmann relates the actual history behind this story: Reuben J. Dodd was a money-lender who held mortgages on John Joyce's property. After mortgaging the property was finally sold. "John Joyce and his son returned now to Dublin, pockets full of Dodd's money. Their irritation with Dodd for emptying them was a lasting one, fueled for James by the fact that Dodd's son was in his class at Belvedere. He snubbed Reuben, Jr., at school, and in Ulysses scored on him again by transferring to 1904 an incident that occurred in 1911: the younger Dodd threw himself into the Liffey to commit suicide for love, but was fished out" (Ellmann, pp. 38, 38n.).

6.270. the Isle of Man

"In the Irish Sea, a port of call on Dublin-Liverpool steamship routes; an out-of-the-way [and still unappealing] but not expensive place of exile" (Gifford, p. 110).

"Bloom tells his companions that Reuben's son dived into the Liffey to avoid being sent to the Isle of Man and away from the girl he loved. The scene in Hades establishes the Isle of Man as a symbol of isolation and sterility, and this central meaning is elaborated upon during succeeding episodes" (Litz, p. 26).

6.271. hobbledehoy

Blackguard, young upstart.

6.272-73 he tried to drown

"The Irish Worker of December 2, 1911, carried a leading article about the incident, [entitled], 'Half-a-Crown for Saving a Life'" (Ellmann, p. 38n.). Ellmann quotes the text of the article, a rather melodramatic piece, which speaks witheringly of the Dodd boy's suicide attempt, valorizes the poor "common docker" who saved him, and heaps scorn upon the elder Dodd for his lack of gratitude toward the hero. The article ends by saying, "Mr. Dodd thinks his son is worth half-a-crown. We wouldn't give that amount for a whole family of Dodds." Ellmann adds that Dodd, Jr., later "contended that he had jumped into the river 'after my hat'" (Ellmann, p. 39n.).

Interesting fact: "In 1954 Reuben J. Dodd, the son, sued the Joyce estate for libel" (Tindall, p. 162).

6.274. Drown Barabbas

Pilate, sitting in judgment of Jesus, offers the Jews a choice between the release of Barabbas (a thief and rebel leader) and the release of Jesus. "But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus" (Matthew 27:20).

"In Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1589), the treacherous central character, Barabas, dies at the end of Act V in a caldron of scalding water, which he has prepared as a trap for his enemies" (Gifford, p. 110).

"This expression is especially tactless in Bloom's presence" (Senn, p. 184).

6.274. I wish to Christ he did!

Simon Dedalus "is--or pretends to be--under the impression that in Bloom's story, as it develops in fits and starts, the son tried to drown the father--not the other way around, as is sometimes thought. Hence his cry 'Drown Barabbas!' to which he adds that he would not be sorry at all if the boy did drown Dodd Senior. 'Barabbas', of course, is Reuben J. Dodd" (Van Caspel, p. 103).

6.275. shaded

Throughout Hades, Joyce frequently deploys "shade" as both noun and verb, recalling the shades of the antique underworld, and almost providing a stage direction for lighting.

6.277. thwarted his speech rudely

"Probably the best of many examples of [Bloom's] relative incapacity is his funny, lame attempt to tell the story . . . when Martin Cunninham rudely--but for the sake of the story, mercifully--intrudes to give the narration a much-needed oiling" (Maddox, "Mockery," p. 148).

"The Hades chapter assesses Bloom's place in society. Attention rarely turns to him and, when it does, it is against his will. This happens when Molly's concert tour is mentioned, and again when his unorthodox remarks on death, in a different key from accepted ones, clash with the appropriate ritualized formulae. But he is ignored or thwarted when he wants to contribute to the conversation, when he volunteers his story. . . . There is, however, also good rhetorical reason for usurpation of Bloom's tale. He gets off on a risky start by announcing, twice, how 'awfully good' the story is, and only a skilled storyteller can live up to such a promise. When he settles down to the unmistakeable tone that is required ('There was a girl in the case . . . and he determined to send him to the Isle of Man out of harm's way . . .'), he is not too successful in keeping paternal and filial identities apart, and there are interruptions for clarification until Cunningham takes the story from him and presents a reedited, and superior, version, which he insists on carrying to its climax. Clearly Bloom's narrative talent would not qualify him to negotiate 'the funny part' (Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions, pp. 150-151).

6.278. piking it

Leaving abruptly, making one's way. Perhaps slang for "to die."

6.278. the quay

6.279. chiseller

Irish: child; "a hardy child, usually a boy; a child prone to stealing" (DHE, p. 58).

6.280. Liffey

River through the middle of Dublin.

6.282, 286. boatman

The rescuer, Moses Goldin, was actually a "docker"; Joyce calls him a "boatman" in order to recall Charon, mythological boatman of the River Styx (Acheron in Dante), who ferries the shades across the river into Hades proper: "The swamp of Styx beyond, infernal power / By which the gods take oath and fear to break it. / All in the nearby crowd you notice here / Are pauper souls, the souls of the unburied. / Charon's the boatman. Those the water bears are the souls of buried men" (Aeneid, 322-33). If the souls are not buried, they will be forced to wander for 100 years before crossing the river. Ancient burial, of course, included the practice of placing a coin on each eye of the deceased (see "florin," 6.286).

"The bargeman bobs up [again] in Wandering Rocks 'moored under the trees of Charleville Mall' (10.101), and [is] quoted in Oxen of the Sun on the state of the drought in Ireland (14.475ff) . . . . On a decidedly smaller scale the bargeman, like M'Intosh (or the Rosevean or the Elijah throwaway), is a mysterious emanation appearing and reappearing in various places, a wandering rock" (Benstock and Benstock, p. 14).

6.283. landed up

"We sense the counterpoint, 'down, up, forward, back' (3:123), or 'life's upsomdowns' (FW 49:24), everywhere, as in the anecdote [where] a young man falls and rises--'more dead than alive,' returned 'to the father'--in a mini-comic resurrection" (Bell, p. 81).

The "motif of the drowning man . . . reveals a crucial set of relationships between physical salvation and economic grace in Ulysses" (Osteen, p. 168).

6.285. the funny part is

Bloom's narration has been interrupted all through, and now his punchline is stolen. Yet another story on the father/son theme.

6.286. florin

In modern British pre-decimal coinage: the silver, later cupro-nickel, two-shilling piece, first minted in 1849 (OED).

"When ghosts descend to Tartarus, the main entrance to which lies in a grove of black poplars beside the Ocean stream, each is supplied by pious relatives with a coin laid under the tongue of its corpse. They are thus able to pay Charon, the miser who ferries them in a crazy boat across the Styx" (Graves, p. 120).

6.289. like a hero

Martin Cunningham's words recall Stephen's self-condemnation (1.62), also in a conversation about saving a drowning man.

6.291. one and eightpence too much

In Circe (15:3089), "a voice" repeats Simon's punchline.

"When this episode was read aloud 50 years later on BBC radio, the son of the real Reuben J. Dodd accused the station of slander" (Senn, p. 185).

6.293. Nelson's pillar

"In the middle of Sackville (now O'Connell) Street, a column 121 feet tall, surmounted by a thirteen-foot statue of Admiral Lord Nelson (1758-1805). In the early twentieth century most of the electric trams that served Dublin and its suburbs started from Nelson's Pillar. The monument was rather ineptly destroyed by Irish patriots in 1966 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter 1916 Uprising" (Gifford, p. 110).

"The two old women in Stephen's story in Aeolus climb this monument" (Thornton, p. 93).

"Nelson's Pillar is known as the center of Dublin . . . . The next chapter starts there" (Senn, p. 185).

6.294. Eight plums a penny!

Presumably, the cry of a hawker on the street.

In Aeolus (7.931-1027), Stephen tells the story of two Dublin "Vestal virgins" (7.952) who buy plums, climb Nelson's pillar, and spit out the plum stones from the top of the monument.

6.300. Poor Paddy!

"Bloom recalls little about Paddy Dignam… only a man of unusual sympathies would turn out for the funeral of a friend whom he had known so slightly" (Adams, p. 93).

Adams argues that "Paddy Dignam is an imaginary creature, surrounded by and related to all sorts of very specific social reality . . . Yet Paddy himself remains a most shadowy creation. One reason for this is no doubt the fact that the materials for his character were derived from another character in Ulysses, the man who is shown making himself most responsible for Paddy Dignanm's surviving children. This is Mathew F. Kane, who is Martin Cunningham in the novel. . . . The mournful ghost of little Paddy Dignam, created only in the article of death, and most poignant in the fading, characterless, condescending affection he evokes, haunts the world of Ulysses" (Adams, Surface and Symbol, pp.62-63). Patrick Dignam "is an avatar of Elpenor who, it will be remembered, broke his neck in a fall from the roof of Circe's house, where he had been sleeping, heavy with wine" (Gilbert, p. 166). When Odysseus meets Elpenor in the underworld, the shade entreats Odysseus to perform a proper burial ritual for him: "But first / the ghost of Elpenor, my companion, came toward me / He'd not been buried under the wide ways of earth, not yet, we'd left his body in Circe's house, / unwept, unburied--this other labor pressed us." Elpenor implores Odysseus, "my lord, remember me, I beg you! Don't sail off / and desert me, left behind unwept, unburied, don't, or my curse may draw god's fury on your head. / No, bury me in full armor. . ." (Odyssey, 11, 56-87).

Mr Power's "Poor Paddy!" also echoes Bloom's thought earlier that morning: "Poor Dignam!" (4.550).

6.303. as ever wore a hat

C.f. Osteen’s comment on 6.40.

6.307. Blazing face

Dignam corresponds to Homer's Elpenor (see note 6.300), and Gilbert cites Berard's derivation of "the name El-penor from a Semitic root meaning 'the blazing-face'" (Gilbert, p. 167).

Significantly, Senn notes, Elpenor, like Dignam, died of drink; he "fell in a drunken stupor from the roof of Circe's house" (Senn, p. 185).

"A shadowy figure, this Dignam: practically the only thing Bloom remembers about him is that he had a red face from drinking too much whiskey, and Molly depicts him as one of those good-for-nothings who squander the household money on their drinking companions, recalling him as 'always stuck up in some pub corner' (18.1281-82). Still, Bloom has dressed in black on this hot day to attend Dignam's funeral; this tells us more about Bloom than about Dignam" (Van Caspel, p. 88)

6.307. John Barleycorn

Whiskey or ale, especially homebrewed.

"From the poem 'Tom O'Shanter' by Burns: 'Inspiring bold John Barleycorn, / What dangers thou canst make us scorn.' In the poem, John Barleycorn is dead" (Senn, p. 186).

6.308. adelite

An obscure mineral which does not appear in any of the standard minerology texts, usually green, sometimes gray or grayish-yellow. It is an oxide of calcium, magnesium, arsenic, and water. At the "Annotation" workshop in July 1999 at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, Harald Beck noted that the word "adelite" is not in the OED, and that it was first mentioned in an 1891 scientific paper in Swedish, not at all widely known by the turn-of-the-century. Joyce was making a very current scientific reference to quite specialized information.

Is it possible that Joyce wrote or intended to write aconite, the wolfsbane or poison taken by Bloom's father and referred to several times subsequently (15.746, 15.967, 15.2394, 17.624-625, 17.1890)?

6.313. wideopen eyes

"The others, of course, as Catholics, inwardly deplore the very fact that there cannot have been time for the last rites of the Church to be performed" (Van Caspel, p. 90).

As well as expressing astonishment at Bloom's observation, the "wideopen eyes" ironically stage the very "sudden death" that so offends them.

"What Bloom says is neither profound nor original; but it happens to be the truth in the sense that, from the point of view of this social group, it should not have been spoken. Basically, he refuses to mourn, to participate in a general state of mourning, to engage in the ceremony and ritual which attempt to erect the literality of death into a rigid symbolic form" (McGee, p. 30).

6.316. Dead side of the street

This side of the street--the west, or left, side--is also Bloom's side.

"The structure of the chapter is basically a development of moral awareness--Bloom's in the first instance, ours in the last. . . . [Bloom develops from] very largely a passive reflector of the casual passing scene . . . [to] a reflector more conscious, more alert. . . . He penetrates further into the given object and focuses perceptions of value [and] registers the significance" (Goldberg, pp. 274-275).

6.316. land agents

"In the nineteenth century land agents were important in the management of Irish landlords' (many of them absentee) large land holdings. A succession of land reforms in the late nineteenth century, climaxing in 1903, dismantled these estates and displaced the land agents as a class" (Gifford, p. 110).

6.317. temperance hotel

The Edinburgh Temperance Hotel, 56 Sackville Street Upper.

6.317. Falconer's railway guide

"At 53 Sackville (now O'Connell) Street Upper: John Falconer, printer, publisher, wholesale stationer, depot for the sale of Irish national school books; office of the Irish Law Times, the Solicitor's Journal, and the ABC Railway Guide" (Gifford, p. 111).

6.317. civil service college

"Maguire's Civil Service College (a tutoring school for the British civil-service examinations), 51 Sackville (now O'Connell) Street Upper" (Gifford, p. 111).

"Joyce often wrote the names of institutions with lower-case letters, to emphasize their more general meaning or to blur the lines between nouns and names" (Senn, p. 186).

6.317. Gill's

"M. H. Gill & Son, Ltd., wholesale and retail booksellers, publishers, printers, and bookbinders, depot for religious goods, 50 Sackville (now O'Connell) Street Upper" (Gifford, p. 111).

6.318. catholic club

"Catholic Commercial Club, 42 Sackville (now O'Connell) Street Upper" (Gifford, p. 111).

6.318. the industrious blind

"Richmond National Institution for the Instruction of the Industrious Blind, 41 Sackville (now O'Connell) Street Upper" (Gifford, p. 111).

"The detailed listing indicates that Bloom, who once again feels left out of the conversation, studies his surroundings intently" (Senn, p. 187).

6.319. Chummies and slaveys

"That is, young boys with poor employment (after chum, a chimney sweep's boy), and girls employed as maids of all work (i.e., with no defined job status, in contrast to upstairs and downstairs maids, etc.)" (Gifford, p. 111).

6.319-20. the late father Mathew

"The procession passes a statue of the Reverend Theobald Mathew (1790-1861), the 'Apostle of Temperance,' famous for his work in the cholera epidemic of 1832 and the Great Famine (1846-49)" (Gifford, p. 111).

Father Mathew "died in 1856 (not 1861). Gifford's note fails to identify the principal reason for his fame: taking five million temperence pledges between 1839 and 1844 (and thereby putting an estimated 20,000 publicans out of business!)" (Owens, p. 20).

According to the Dictionary of National Biography, Father Mathew, after establishing a reputation for himself as a tireless worker for the poor and a gently forbearing mediator in political and religious disputes, "was appealed to by some of his nonconformist friends to place himself at the head of their temperance society. After a long interval of doubt, he agreed, and on 10 April, 1838, signed the pledge of total abstinence using the characteristic words, 'Here goes--in the name of the Lord.'...[Subsequently] a marvellous reform was made in the habits of his disciples, who numbered, it was said, nearly half the adult populaton of Ireland. The duties on Irish spirits fell [by nearly 50 percent, and] statistics showed an extraordinary diminution in crime. The judges in their charges attributed the unusual peace of the country to temperance." Father Mathew's work was undone by the Great Famine, however, "a disaster destined to check the social regeneration of the people, to overwhelm the Old Ireland for which Father Mathew had laboured; and to bring into existence a new country which should know him only by tradition" (DNB, pp. 32-34).

6.320. Foundation stone for Parnell.

Charles Parnell was the leader of the Irish Nationalist movement.

The procession passes the base (erected 8 October 1899) on which the Parnell monument by the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens would eventually be placed (in 1911).

Parnell's quest for "Home Rule" for the Irish "eventually failed, and he died in 1891 following a scandal. His relationship with the married Cathleen O'Shea became known after her divorce trial, and he was abandoned by the Church and his party. Many Irish perceived this abandonment as a betrayal, and Parnell was transformed in the contemporary political rhetoric into a kind of Moses- or Christ-figure. In the Homeric scheme, Parnell corresponds to the character of Agamemnon, also a betrayed leader" (Senn, pp. 187-188).

"The presence of Parnell hovers over the text. . . . In Hades, the funeral procession not only follows the approximate route of Parnell's funeral procession, but it brings Bloom to Parnell's grave. . . . In a sense, when Bloom descends to Hell, he sees the ghost of his predecessor" (Schwarz, p. 51).

"The foundation stone for the statue of Parnell which now stands at the north end of O'Connell street was laid on October 8, 1899, but the completed statue was not unveiled until October 1, 1911." (Thornton, 93).

6.320. Breakdown. Heart.

Bloom echoes Martin Cunningham’s phrase, 6.305.

"'Breakdown. Heart' refers to Parnell's death. As his leadership of the Irish Nationalists disintegrated following the divorce scandal (1889-90), Parnell intensified his efforts to regain control, and in so doing he seriously undermined his already precarious health. He finally broke down after being soaked in the rain during a speaking engagement and died of a complex of causes (rheumatism, pneumonia, etc.) simplistically diagnosed as 'heart attack'" (Gifford, p. 111).

"The whole city suffers from a breakdown of the heart, a loss of compassionate vitality. In Portrait, Simon Dedalus declared that 'the priests and the priests' pawns broke Parnell's heart and hounded him into his grave.' Just as Parnell died of a broken heart when spurned by his countrymen, so the Dubliners now offer their liberator a foundation stone crumbling for dearth of political sympathy" (Henke, p. 111).

"This is similar to the Christmas meal episode in Portrait of the Artist, in which the devastation after Parnall's fall contributes meaningfully to the scene" (Senn, pp. 188-89).

The Linati scheme designates the heart as the organ of Hades. Accordingly, the word recurs numerous times; see 6.127, 6.347, 6.305, 6.551, 6.352, 6.643, 6.644, 6.670, 6.672, 6.674, 6.676, 6.787, 6.793, 6.868, 6.874, 6.930, 6.954, 6.955, 6.1010.

6.321. white horses . . . white plumes

"Burial customs dictated that 'white and not black should be used in token of mourning' for a child (Catholic Encyclopedia [New York, 1908], vol. 3, p. 76a)" (Gifford, p. 111).

"The funeral of an illegitimate child (the white horses and their white plumes give this away)" (Blamires, p. 34).

6.321-22. Rotunda corner

"Where Sackville (now O'Connell) Street Upper gave into Cavendish Row, a group of houses on Rutland (now Parnell) Square East. 'The Rotunda' was a series of buildings that housed, variously, a maternity hospital, a theater, a concert hall, and 'assembly rooms'" (Gifford, p. 111).

"A conspicuous building; the first maternity ward in Europe" (Senn, p. 189).

6.322. A tiny coffin flashed by.

Devlin notes "countless visible objects that shimmer across the narrative ken, allowing the reader to experience vicariously the phenomenon of visual ephemerality–the defining sensation of the land of the dead, as Odysseus recalls it. . . [and part of ] a pervsasive discourse of ocularity" (Devlin, p. 68).

6.323. Piebald

Of two colors, irregularly arranged, especially black and white.

6.323. Dun

A dull, grayish brown color; dark, dusty.

6.326-30. A dwarf's face . . . Better luck next time.

"Bloom blames himself not only for Rudy's death, but for his weakness and deformity as well, and this sense of guilt has far-reaching effects. [Here] Bloom sees a child's coffin on a coach heading for Glasnevin Cemetary, and he imagines the corpse inside . . . Bloom's attempt to pass this troublesome memory off as meaningless is, as we will see, typical of him. The actual impact of Rudy's death becomes clearer, however, when we come to realize that no 'next time' occurred for Bloom and Molly" (Rickard, p. 39).

6.326. mauve and wrinkled

"Bloom pictures the pauper child with a face . . . like the skin of an old man" (Henke, p. 103). The deaths of Rudy and Rudolph the elder are thus linked.

When Rudy appears in Circe (15.2740), his face is in fact mauve.

6.327. Burial friendly society pays

The Friendly Societies were mutual insurance societies that paid sick benefits and funeral expenses to their members. [Perhaps] Rudy's funeral expenses were paid by this kind of insurance" (Gifford, p. 111).

6.329. If it's healthy . . . the man

"After the ancient Jewish belief that the health of a child is a reflection on the virility of the male. Jewish law asserts that a man should 'fulfill the precept of propagation,' that is, he should beget a son and a daughter, each in turn capable of having children" (Gifford, p. 111).

"Under the guise of cynicism, Bloom reveals the guilt he associates with Rudy's demise. He has judged himself culpable of the 'sin' of impotence, and the conviction has proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only does the world regard him as a defiled Jew, but Bloom considers himself defiled by the stigma of paternal failure" (Henke, p. 103).

6.332. Rutland square

"Now Parnell Square. The procession continues northwest along the east side of the square and into Frederick Street" (Gifford, p. 111).

6.332-33. Rattle his bones . . . Nobody owns

"From 'The Pauper's Drive,' a song by Thomas Noel. '[First verse and chorus:] There's a grim one-horse hearse in a jolly round trot / To the churchyard a pauper is going I wot; / The road it is rough, and the hearse has no springs; / And hark to the dirge which the sad driver sings: // Rattle his bones over the stones! / He's only a pauper, whom nobody owns! [Fifth and last verse with final chorus:] But a truce to this strain; for my soul it is sad, / To think that a heart in humanity clad / Should make, like the brutes, such a desolate end, / And depart from the light without leaving a friend! // Bear soft his bones over the stones! / Though a pauper, he's one whom his Maker yet owns!'" (Gifford, p. 111).

6.333. Nobody owns

Reminded by the child's coffin of his son Rudy, Bloom remembers the lines from a song, "The Pauper's Drive," with a chorus, "Rattle his bones over the stones: / He's only a pauper whom nobody owns." Bowen remarks, "During the chapter the song with its desolate unison chorus chant reappears in Bloom's mind as the embodiment of the harsh truth of Dignam's death, which is antithetical to the euphemisms and conventional platitudes of the mourners . . . These unison lines from the chorus are meant to sound like a crier's lament as the carriage winds its way through the streets, much like the cries of the dead-cart carriers during the London plague. This time the song is not meant for Dignam but the dead child whose hearse comes galloping by. For Bloom, who sees no hopes of a second life and little ultimate reward in the first, the song has the effect of reducing the dead to the common denominator of hopelessness" (Bowen, Allusions, pp. 103, 105).

This "childish rhyme . . . functions as a refrain whose meaning is explored in the different contexts of experience brought together by Bloom" (Goldberg, p. 276).

"An acceptance of contradiction is the root of [Bloom's] charity and compassion for others, for when we stop insisting that people be what we think they should be, when we stop idealizing and perverting them, when we see and appreciate them in their selfhood, we automatically relinquish those 'rights' Stephen describes Shakespeare as clutching. This relinquishment is at the root of Bloom's realization that 'nobody owns'" (French, p. 85).

"The phrase 'nobody owns' (6.333, 6.365) is meant to convey Bloom's sympathy for an unknown child whose hearse he has just seen and then pity for his father's suicide. The phrase may be further prompted by Bloom's social solitariness in the Hades chapter, his feeling that he now neither 'owns' a son nor is 'owned' by his father" (Williams, p. 5).

6.334. In the midst of life

"Bloom thinks of the aphorism, 'In the midst of life we are in death,' which appears in 'The Burial Service' in the Book of Common Prayer (Church of England). The phrase has no direct biblical source; it is said to derive from a ninth-century anthem. The Irish Book of Common Prayer, which differs only slightly from the English, contains this same phrase" (Thornton, p. 93).

6.335. But the worst . . . his own life

"St. Augustine defined suicide as a sin, and Church councils from the fifth century onward decreed that a suicide could not be buried with Church rites. Medieval law throughout Europe decreed confiscation of the suicide's property, and burial customs traditionally involved indignities to the corpse" (Gifford, p. 112).

6.338. The greatest disgrace

Suicide "literally dis-graces a Catholic" (Osteen, p. 167).

6.342. not for us to judge

"Judge not, that ye be not judged" (Matthew 7:1).

6.345. Like Shakespeare's face

Anticipates Shakespeare's appearance in the Circe episode (Cf. 15.3825-29; 15.3852-58). Cunningham is described the same way by the narrator of "Grace" in Dubliners.

6.346. no mercy on that here

"The 'here' suggests a provisional quality to Bloom's presence in Ireland; he, too, may be a wandering Jew" (Kiberd, p. 984).

6.346. Refuse christian burial

"Bloom is both right and wrong. The Catholic church did continue to refuse religious services and burial in consecrated ground, but English law (which technically included Ireland) provided for burial in consecrated ground in 1823 and permitted religious services in 1882" (Gifford, p. 112).

6.347. to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave

"The superstition was that suicides (like witches) would return to haunt the living; a stake through the heart and burial at a crossroads were supposed to prevent that. The custom persisted in Ireland until the early nineteenth century" (Gifford, p. 112).

"Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable explains that suicides 'were formerly buried ignominiously on the highroad, with a stake thrust through their body, and without Christian rites.' In his The Neighborhood of Dublin (Dublin, 1912), Weston St. John Joyce describes an old burial ground for suicides at Ballybough (in NE Dublin): 'Down to a hundred years ago Ballybough was a noted burial place for suicides, the bodies being interred in the time-honoured fashion, transfixed with stakes, in a waste plot of ground adjoining the crossroads at the bridge [Ballybough bridge]' (p. 247)" (Thornton, pp. 93-94).

6.348-49. Yet sometimes they repent too late . . . clutching rushes

Reynolds links these lines to a passage from the Purgatorio, 5.82-3. Montefeltro, a "late-repentent" soul, says, "I ran to the marsh, and the reeds and the mire so entangled me that I fell" (Reynolds, p. 273).

Perhaps also an allusion to Gertrude's description of the drowned Ophelia (Hamlet IV.7.167ff.), and possibly a reference to the infant Moses.

6.350. Setting up house . . . then pawning the furniture

Cunningham's "disrupted domestic economy seems typically Irish" (Osteen, p. 168).

"'People had great sympathy with him for it was known that he had married an unpresentable woman who was an incurable drunkard. He had set up house for her six times; and each time she had pawned the furniture on him' ("Grace," Dubliners, p.157). The almost identical wording indicates that Bloom had heard the same rumor. Typical of the style of an inner monologue is the complete substitution of the implied subjects in Bloom's thoughts--from Cunningham ('setting up house for her') to woman ('pawning the furniture on him'). An example of psychological grammar (that is, not just grammar learned in school)" (Senn, pp. 190-91).

6.352-53. Monday morning. Start afresh. Shoulder to the wheel.

Martin Cunningham corresponds to Sisyphus, "one of the sinners punished in Hades in Homer's Odyssey (11.553-600). He is pushing a large boulder up a hill, it keeps rolling back, and he has to start again" (OCD, p. 1414).

6.354. in there

An odd formulation; is Bloom suggesting that Dedalus was intimate with Mrs. Cunningham? (Also see song lyrics, 6.355-57.)

6.355-57. And they call . . . the geisha

A song, "The Jewel of Asia," from the light opera The Geisha, music by James Philip and libretto by Harry Greenbank, the chorus of which is : "He called her the Jewel of Asia, of Asia, of Asia / But she was the Queen of the Geisha, the Geisha, the Geisha." There is a character in the operetta called Miss Molly.

"Bloom recalls three lines from a light opera The Geisha, words which Bloom imagines Martin Cunningham's wife performs, and which confirm his absorption with the East" (Nadel, p. 166).

" . . . a useful Oriental theme for later development in Bloom's fantasy life" (Burgess, p. 146).

"Mrs. Cunningham switches the lyrics from the third to the first person, revealing her need for affection, but also reviving in Bloom's mind the love and faithlessness motif which he is trying so desperately to forget. The song in a way parodies the relationship between Bloom and Molly. . . . So the song provides a number of variations on the marital relationship of the Blooms and introduces additional nuances in the faithlessness pattern" (Bowen, Allusions, p. 106).

Gifford reprints the lyrics: "'A small Japanese once sat at her ease / In a garden cool and shady / When a foreigner gay who was passing that way / Said "May I come in, young lady?" / So she opened her gate, and I blush to relate / That he taught Japan's fair daughter / To flirt and to kiss like the little white miss / Who lives o'er the western water. // He called her the Jewel of Asia, of Asia, of Asia / But she was the Queen of the Geisha, the Geisha, the Geisha; / So she laughed, 'Tho' you're ready today, Sir / to flirt when I flutter my fan, / Tomorrow you'll go on your way, Sir, / Forgetting the girl of Japan. [Second verse:] But when he came back (Alas! and Alack!) / To the garden cool and shady, / The foreigner bold was decidedly cold, / And talked of an English lady. / With his heart in a whirl for the little white girl / He declared how much he missed her, / And forgot if you please, his poor Japanese, / For he never even kissed her. // But she was the Jewel of Asia, of Asia, of Asia, / The beautiful Queen of the Geisha, the Geisha, the Geisha, / And she laughed, 'It is just as they say, Sir, / You love for as long as you can! / A month, or a week, or a day, Sir, / Will do for a girl of Japan'" (Gifford, p. 112).

6.358. He knows

Martin Cunningham knows that Bloom’s father was a suicide.

6.358-366. Rattle his bones . . . Nobody owns . . . Over the stones

These phrases are reiterated from "The Pauper's Drive" (see note 6.332-33).

"The death of the innocent child in the beginning of life, the suicide of Virag with its concomitant shame, and the death of Dignam are all equalized in Bloom's mind by the great leveler, symbolized by the recurring, plaintive, unromantic, matter-of-fact strains of the dirge" (Bowen, Allusions, p. 107).

6.359. That afternoon of the inquest

Bloom tells us in Lotus Eaters that he was not present at the scene of his father's death (5.207-9).

6.359. redlabeled bottle

That is, the bottle that contained the poison that killed Bloom's father. See 14.1108-9: "Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign," on the label of a bottle.

6.360-1. Sunlight through the slats of the Venetian blinds

See 6.11-12, "at the lowered blinds of the avenue"; the custom of lowering blinds out of respect for the dead establishes the hotel room as a space of mourning.

Once again, Joyce highlights the partial transmission of light and understanding (see 6.130-1).

6.361. Boots giving evidence

"'Boots' is a common shortening of 'bootsboy,' the hotel boy. A possible double meaning: in the then-popular stories of Sherlock Holmes, for example, boots could plausibly represent circumstantial evidence" (Senn, p. 192).

Senn remarks upon the recurrence of "boots" as a motif in Hades and the rest of Ulysses. In episode 16, Bloom will use the phrase "lie like old boots" (16.823), prompting Senn to observe, "Bloom has a sharp eye for footwear . . . , he noticed a priest 'showing a large grey bootsole' (5.370) and that Stephen in the morning, had 'a good pair of boots on him today. Last time I saw him he had his heels in view' (7.985). The phrase 'lie like old boots' appears more out of line once we call up a memory of the inquest of Bloom's father: 'Boots giving evidence' (6.361). Boots can tell or hide the truth, except that 'boots' of course does not equal 'boots', a conflation that has its lexical analogy to questions of identification of the kind that Odysseus had to contend with in his native land after his return. In Ulysses identical shapes are unreliable. . . . Joyce uses the potential of his language to the breaking point" (Senn, Inductive Scrutinies, p. 160).

6.362-363. Thought he was asleep first

Bloom must be remembering the words of the boots, "the hotel servant, when heard as a witness . . . another unmistakable case of quotation within interior monologue" (Van Caspel, p. 91).

6.364. death by misadventure

Euphemism for suicide.

"Because suicide was considered a crime, the cause of death was often listed as 'accidental'" (Senn, p. 192).

6.365. Nobody owns

The snatch of song remembered earlier with reference to Rudy's death, line 333, now refers to Bloom's father. "Again Bloom has thought in terms of a chain of ancestry, of a continuous relationship of father and son who is in turn father. And following this development of the concept he has come to see that he is in isolation, cut off before and behind. He owns nobody and nobody owns him, for he has neither father nor son, neither root nor branch" (Sultan, p. 101).

Van Caspel asks, "Are those phrases from his father's letter, indeed? Or rather Leopold's own thoughts plus a phrase from the doggerel that had run through his mind earlier (6:332-333)?" (Van Caspel, p. 94).

The recurrence of "Nobody owns" with reference to the deaths of both Rudy and Bloom's father reflects Bloom's conflicting feelings of guilt, responsibility, and, as French suggests (6.333 note), relinquishment.

"Bloom is lured by the temptation of self-slaughter, as Stephen had been in Proteus" (Bell, p. 82).

6.366-376. Blessington street...Berkeley street...The Mater Misericordiae. Eccles street.

6.366. Blessington street

"The procession has moved northwest up Frederick Street from Rutland (Parnell) Square and then angled west-northwest along Blessington Street" (Gifford, p. 112).

6.367. We are going the pace

"The author had to trot Corny's horses very briskly indeed to haul dead Paddy clear across the city from Sandymount northward to Glasnevin in the time available" (Kenner, 1980, p. 26).

6.370. in Germany. The Gordon Bennett

"An annual international road race instituted by the American sportsman and journalist, James Gordon Bennett (1841-1918), and first run in 1900. In 1904 it was scheduled to be held outside of Homberg, a village near Frankfurt, Germany, on 17 June. The race was to be run against time over a 275- to 300-mile course. The Evening Telegraph for 16 June 1904 billed the race a test of the drivers' skill and endurance and, mechanically, a test of brakes. Top automobile speeds for a "flying kilometer" in 1904 were 85 to 90 m.p.h., but such speeds could not even be approached in a road race" (Gifford, p. 112).

"From 1900-1903 it was run on various circuits in France; in 1903 it was held in Ireland and in 1904 it was run on the Salzburg circuit in Germany. A list of locations and winners for the 1900-1905 races can be found in the 1905 World Almanac and Encyclopedia, p. 226. The Dublin newspapers of the day carried long spreads on the race. Joyce interviewed one of the French drivers for the 1903 race and drew on this material in the Dubliners story 'After the Race'" (Thornton, p. 94).

6.371. That will be worth seeing, faith.

Simon's wording here is ironic since, in the Christian tradition, faith and sight are often held in opposition. As Paul writes, faith is "the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1), and "we walk by faith, not by sight" (II Corinthians 5:7).

"Formerly weighty expressions for gods or the faith, used to swear or emphasize, have become just filler words; a sort of semantic demise" (Senn, p. 192).

6.372. Berkeley street

"The procession turns north-northwest out of Blessington Street into Berkeley Street and thence north into Berkeley Road (which crosses the west end of Eccles Street)" (Gifford, p. 112).

"Not named after the philosopher George Berkeley; instead, named after an 18th Century British statesman. The street names demonstrate the domination of the English" (Senn, p. 193).

6.372. the Basin

"The City Basin, a rectangular reservoir just west of Berkeley Street" (Gifford, p. 112).

6.373. song of the halls

That is, a popular song performed in the music halls.

6.373. Has anybody here seen Kelly

"As Bloom hears the melody of 'Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?' he supplies the lyrics to the song himself. The song is an American adaptation (1909), by William J. McKenna ('Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?'), from the English song 'Kelly from the Isle of Man' (1908) by C. W. Murphy and Will Letters. The English song tells the story of an Irishman from the Isle of Man who is taken in hand by a lady of leisure only to abandon her for a rival. The American version: 'Michael Kelly with his sweetheart came from County Cork / And bent upon a holiday, they landed in New York. / They strolled around to see the sights, alas, it's sad to say, / Poor Kelly lost his little girl upon the Great White Way. / She walked uptown from Herald Square to Forty-second Street, / The traffic stopped as she cried to the copper on the beat: [Chorus:] Has anybody here seen Kelly? / K-E-double-L-Y? / Has anybody here seen Kelly? / Have you seen him smile? / Sure his hair is red, his eyes are blue, / And he's Irish through and through. / Has anybody here seen Kelly? / Kelly from the Emerald Isle. [Second verse:] Over on Fifth Avenue, a band began to play, / Ten thousand men were marching for it was St. Patrick's Day, / The "Wearing of the Green" rang out upon the morning air. / 'Twas Kelly's favorite song, so Mary said, "I'll find him there." / She climbed upon the grandstand in hopes her Mike she'd see, / Five hundred Kellys left the ranks in answer to her plea'" (Gifford, p. 113).

6.374. Dead March from Saul

Bloom interrupts the chorus from "Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?" to refer to the Dead March from Saul, a 1739 oratorio by George Frederick Handel (1685-1759).

The Dead March is "a slow, stately procession. . . Joyce's view that all men live consubstantial lives is broadened to include the dead as well as the living" (Bowen, Allusions, p. 108).

"In Act III Saul's implacable jealousy of David drives David away and divides the Israelites, who are then defeated by the Philistines at the battle of Gilboa. Saul's son Jonathan is killed, and Saul is wounded and commits suicide. The Dead March occurs when the Israelites recover the bodies and carry them in just before the climactic Elegy. Handel's Dead March is traditionally played in British military funerals" (Gifford, p. 112).

But apparently the song was a common music hall number, as the present context suggests. In Weep Some More, My Lady (New York, 1927), Sigmund Spaeth prints a song called "Awfully Clever," after the third verse of which the following is spoken: 'I give them Hail, Columbia, you know, or else I give them the Dead March in Saul on the flute. Oh, it’s awfully jolly, they do laugh, it completely doubles them up (p. 56)'" (Thornton, p. 95).

6.374-75. He's as bad . . . on my ownio

"A song about an Italian ice-cream merchant who treats his benefactors much as Kelly from the Isle of Man treated his. The song was a forerunner of all the Kelly songs" (Gifford, p. 113).

Senn points out the theme of abandonment that runs through these "strange" songs (Senn, p. 194).

"The song about the ice-cream vendor Antonio that Bloom has remembered in Hades is a modern version of Shylock's speech to Antonio . . . . The song Bloom remembers links Antonio to another cluster of associations, because a few pages later Bloom repeats the line, 'Kay ee double ell. Become invisible.' This time the reference is to the mysterious man in the macintosh and his sudden disappearance at the funeral" (Thomas, pp. 136-137).

6.375-76. The Mater Misericordiae

"In 1904, the largest hospital in Dublin (at the intersection of Berkeley Road and Eccles Street). The hospital did have a ward for incurables" (Gifford, p. 113).

6.377. Our Lady's Hospice for the dying

"Our Lady's Hospice for the Dying at Harold's Cross, south of Dublin, maintained by the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity 'for those whose illness is likely to terminate fatally, within a limited period'" (Gifford, 93).

6.378. Deadhouse handy underneath

As Bloom in Hades is in the "Deadhouse . . . underneath."

6.378. Mrs Riordan

Appears as a character called "Dante" (for "Auntie") in Chapter l of Joyce's Portrait. She is a widow residing with the Dedaluses; later she lived at the City Arms Hotel, where she knew Leopold and Molly Bloom.

Known to both Stephen and Bloom, Mrs. Riordan is thus "another small stitch in the fabric of Bloom-Stephen rapprochement" (Burgess, p. 147).

Ellmann describes a "Mrs. 'Dante' Hearn Conway from Cork, who was to act as governess to the [Joyce] children. A fat, clever woman, she was too embittered by a disastrous marriage to fit easily into the tolerant, gay household" (Ellmann, p. 24).

6.379-380. Her feeding cup and her rubbing her mouth with the spoon.

The imagery Bloom associates with the dying Mrs. Riordan is childlike, almost infantile, in keeping with the chapter's theme of going "from one extreme to another" (6.382), from death to new birth. Stephen makes a similar but more explicit connection between birth and death in Oxen of the Sun (14.107-110).

Here, as elsewhere in Hades, the connection between the extremes of birth and death is made by way of the female body. Women are the custodians of both birth and death (see 6.14-20) and are therefore uniquely capable of reconciling these opposite poles. Joyce himself seems to have held this view. As Ellmann writes, Joyce's childhood was dominated "emotionally by his mother with her practicality, her unquenchable indulgence, her tenacity, even her inveterate pregnancy. . . . [T]here are many testimonies that Joyce longed to reconstitute, in his relation with [his wife, Nora], the filial bond which his mother's death had broken . . . : 'O that I could nestle in your womb like a child born of your flesh and blood, sleep in the warm secret gloom of your body'" (Ellmann, James Joyce, pp. 292-3). For Joyce, as for Bloom, the female body is the shared site of birth and death, womb and tomb.

6.380. Nice young student

The student is Dixon (see 14.125ff.).

6.381. that bite the bee gave me

"A few weeks before, Bloom was stung by a bee in the garden and he was treated in a nearby hospital" (Senn, p. 195).

See 4.483.

6.381-82. the lying in hospital

The National Maternity Hospital, 29-31 Holles Street, the scene of Oxen of the Sun, episode 14.

6.372-82. From one extreme to another

That is, from treating the dying to tending the aborning.

"Joyce places the death from Hades opposite the birth in Oxen of the Sun" (Senn, p. 195).

6.383. The carriage galloped round a corner: stopped.

As if mimicking the sentence above, the carriage also goes "from one extreme to another."

6.385-91. drove of branded cattle . . . raddled sheep . . . drover's voice . . . Out of that!

"In the realm of the dead, Odysseus sees Orion, the fabulous hunter, driving the 'wild beasts he had overpowered in life' with an 'unbreakable' club (11:572-75; Fitzgerald, p. 215)" (Gifford, p. 113).

6.385. drove of branded cattle

6.387. croups

The rump or hindquarters of a beast, especially a beast of burden (OED).

6.387. raddled

"To paint or mark with raddle; to colour coarsely with red or rouge" (OED). Sheep were "raddled" as a form of branding.

6.392. killing day

Literally, the day the cattle are to be slaughtered; also calls to mind Good Friday.

The sheep, the characters at the funeral, and all humans are headed for death.

6.392. Springers

"A cow in calf (Irish)" (Gifford, p. 113).

6.392. Cuffe

"Joseph Cuffe, associated with Laurence Cuffe & Sons, cattle, corn, and wool salesmen, at 5 Smithfield (in the northwest quadrant of central Dublin), near the cattle market" (Gifford, p. 113).

6.393. quid

Slang: originally, a sovereign; a guinea. Now, one pound sterling.

6.393-94. Roastbeef for old England

"'The Roast Beef of Old England' is a well-known English song, one version of which goes back at least as far as Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England (1734). For words, music, and discussion, see William Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time (London, n.d.), 11, 636-38" (Thornton, p. 95).

"May refer to an old song, 'The Roast Beef for Old England,' which is probably used ironically, 'since the song indicates (stanza four) that there is a correlation between the oppressive, imperialistic tendencies of the English and the beef they eat'" (Bowen, Allusions, p. 109).

"When a drove of cattle appears . . . we know we are looking at the ghostly herd of Orion. . . . Death and hell forever supervene on life" (Burgess, p. 147).

6.394-397. Fifth quarter lost. . . . margerine.

Once again Bloom reflects pragmatically, cyclically, and optimistically. This economic consideration also resounds metaphysically: in a Christian sense, that which is "lost" can always be transmuted and redeemed.

6.397. dodge

A haggler (OED).

6.397. dicky

Slang for "dangerous" or "worrisome."

6.398. Clonsilla

"A junction in the Midland Great Western Railway, seven miles west of Dublin" (Gifford, p. 113).

6.400. the corporation

"The Dublin Corporation is the ruling body of the city, including the lord mayor, sheriffs, aldermen, councilmen, and their various committees and the bureaucracies that answer to those committees" (Gifford, p. 113).

Bloom’s practical mind buzzes with plans.

6.400-401. from the parkgate to the quays

"Along the north bank of the Liffey, from the western side of Dublin at the Parkgate, southeast entrance of Phoenix Park, to the eastern side of the city and the quays at the mouth of the Liffey" (Gifford, p. 113-114).

6.401-406. All those animals . . . municipal funeral trams

Bloom's scheme associates the cattle with human beings; both are mechanically conveyed toward death.

6.406. municipal funeral trams like they have in Milan

"A belt electric railway seven miles long passed from the center of Milan to a point near the graveyards outside the sixteenth-century walls. Special funeral cars were provided to alleviate traffic congestion in the old city" (Gifford, p. 114).

Bloom will re-describe these trams as "saloon motor hearses" in Circe (15.1687).

6.409. That be damned for a story

An expression of derision; "to hell with that," or "I don't believe what you're saying."

6.411. poor lookout

Raw deal.

Such a plan would put Corny Kelleher, the undertaker, out of business.

6.416. Dunphy's

"Dunphy's Corner, the intersection of North Circular and Phibsborough roads. From Berkeley Road the procession turns left (west) into North Circular Road and then right (north) into Phibsborough Road. The corner was named after a pub once owned by Thomas Dunphy. In 1904 the owner was John Doyle (Thom's 1904, p. 1569)" (Gifford, p. 114).

6.419. First round Dunphy's . . . Gordon Bennet cup.

Mr. Dedalus' mind wanders, as it tends to, to drinking (buying rounds at Dunphy's pub) and sports.

6.419. Gordon Bennett cup

6.421. Bom! Upset

Bloom imagines Dignam's coffin upset and opened.

Patrick McCarthy cites this passage as an example of Joyce's tendency to introduce "new elements or perspectives . . . each time we become comfortable with a given viewpoint . . . The natural inclination will be to read 'Bom! Upset,' and the rest, as the narrator's description of an event occurring before our eyes: just as the characters discuss an earlier incident in which a hearse overturned, the same thing happens again, this time to the hearse carrying Paddy Dignam's corpse. When the procession continues undisturbed by this event, however, and Bloom thinks, 'But suppose now it did happen. Would he bleed if a nail say cut him in the knocking about?' we know that we have read something other than a description of a current event, so we may turn to the alternate hypothesis that the entire paragraph is an example of interior monologue, or direct presentation of a character's thoughts without an intervening narrator. That's closer to the mark; but while 'Red face: grey now. Mouth fallen open. Asking what's up now,' and so forth, resembles the style of Bloom's thoughts as we see them elsewhere, the description of the coffin falling open is more like a sketch of a nonverbal scene that flashes through Bloom's mind, a description followed immediately by a commentary" (McCarthy, p. 26).

The passage anticipates the return of several spirits in Circe and begins to sound like a Circean stage direction.

6.422. A brown habit

"This implies that Paddy Dignam is a member of the Third Order of St. Francis, an association of laymen attached to the Franciscans. They are buried in the fraternal habit" (Owens, p. 20).

In the Hades epsode, brown, grey, and dull "are particularly frequent adjectives" (Adams, p. 101).

6.423. Red face: grey now

C.f., adelite (6.308).

6.424-426. Looks horrid open . . . seal up all

"In an episode of things swelling, simmering, threatening to burst (Simon Dedalus alone breaks out and breaks down), Bloom's response is always the same: 'Looks horrid open . . . seal up all'" (Gordon, p. 54).

John Rickard notes that later, "thinking of the normal privacy of the coffin, [Bloom] unintentionally and unconsciously 'buries' his and Stephen's central repressed problems when he thinks: 'Only a mother and deadborn child ever buried in the one coffin' (6.819-20). Stephen's dead mother and Bloom's dead child are buried in memory, shoved 'underground' into the unconscious and sealed up--or so Bloom and Stephen would like to think. As Freud observed, however, that which is buried may simply be better preserved. In Ulysses, it seems that what goes down must come up, and what is sealed and forced under will fester until it erupts into consciousness again . . ." (Rickard, p. 57).

6.425. With wax

Perhaps recalls Odysseus' plan to protect his men from the Sirens' song by sealing their ears with wax, as well as the wax that melted from Icarus' wings when he flew too close to the sun.

In Telemachus, Stephen recalls a dream of his mother's corpse, which gave off "an odour of wax" (1.104, 1.271).

6.430-31. Elixir of life

"A translation of the Irish usquebaugh: 'whiskey'" (Gifford, p. 114).

Here the phrase is both apt and ironic: apt because "in the midst of death," there is life; ironic because Dignam died of alcoholism.

6.432. bleed if a nail

Suggests the Crucifixion of Christ and recalls Bloom's earlier fixation on his own "nails" (6.200-203).

6.433. He would and he wouldn't

Could allude to the piercing of Christ's side after his death. Christ both did and didn't bleed: "One of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water" (John, 19:34). The phrase also echoes Don Giovanni's "vorrei e non vorrei" (6.238).

6.434. Still some might ooze

Despite Bloom's instincts to "seal up all," he is acutely aware of the failure of such efforts and of the persistence of life's messiness, even in the face of death. "Circulation" never really stops.

6.436. Phibsborough road

"Part of a main north-south thoroughfare that gives into Prospect Road beyond the Royal Canal" (Gifford, p. 114).

6.438. Crossguns bridge: the royal canal

"Phibsborough Road leads into Crossguns Bridge over the Royal Canal, which traces the northern perimeter of metropolitan Dublin and circles south toward the mouth of the Liffey. The canal was once a major link between Dublin and central Ireland" (Gifford, p. 114).

This canal corresponds to the fourth of the waterways of Hades.

6.438-447. Crossguns bridge . . . Developing waterways.

Bloom's thoughts shift from arteries to waterways, reinforcing the theme of circulation developed in this episode.

6.439-40. A man stood on his dropping barge

"The barge is being lowered in the lock just above (west of) Crossguns Bridge" (Gifford, p. 114).

"This recalls the ferryman Charon, who transports Aeneas across the river Styx during his visit to Hades. This is the most explicit of several situational correspondences in this episode which show that Joyce is drawing on Aeneas’ visit to Hades in Book VI of the Aeneid as well as on Ulysses’ in Book XI of The Odyssey" (Thornton, pp. 95-96).

The bargeman will resurface in 10.102 and 14.175.

6.441. Aboard of the Bugabu

"The title of a song about a boat also carrying turf. Hodgart and Washington list this as an allusion to 'Aboard the Bugaboo,' alternate titles 'On Board the Bugaboo,' 'The Cruise of the Bugaboo,' an Irish song by Rooney. Nugent’s Bohemian Songster (Dublin, n.d.; 16pp.) prints a song by J.P. Rooney entitled 'Wreck of the Bugaboo.' The first of its six stanzas goes, 'Come all you tender-hearted blokes and listen unto me - / I’ll tell you of the dangers I have passed upon the briny sea! / Many’s the hardships I have seen and dangers I went through / Since I shipped as cook and steward on board of the Bug-a-boo' (p. 12) " (Thornton, p. 96).

6.443-4. slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs

Houston notes that this "asyndetic descriptive triad of nouns [is] one of Flaubert's most characteristic patterns for solemn evocation, and, like all noun series, distinctly uncommon in the narrative of Ulysses" (Houston, p. 39).

6.444. carrion

Dead, putrifying flesh. A "carrion dog," therefore, would feed on such matter.

See Stephen's description of dog carrion in 3.286.

6.444-45. Athlone, Mullingar, Moyvalley

"Stations on the Royal Canal which connect these cities to one another. Milly Bloom is a photographer's apprentice in Mullingar" (Senn, p. 197).

"On the Royal Canal system: Athlone is 78 miles from Dublin and 48- 1/2 miles from Galway on the west coast; Mullingar, 50 miles from Dublin, 76-1/2 from Galway; Moyvalley, 30-1/2 miles from Dublin, 96 from Galway" (Gifford, p. 114).

6.446. crock

An old, worn-out vehicle, ship, bicycle (OED).

6.446. safety

Bicycles used to be called "safety bicycles."

6.446. Wren

"P. A. Wren of Wren's Auction Rooms, 9 Bachelor's Walk, in central Dublin, northwest quadrant" (Gifford, p. 114).

"The thrifty Bloom likes to find used items" (Senn, p. 197).

6.447-48. James M'Cann's hobby to row me o'er the ferry

"James M'Cann (d. 12 February 1904) was chairman of the court of directors of the Grand Canal Company, which maintained a regular fleet of trade boats on the Grand Canal (to central and southern Ireland). Thus M'Cann, who has already arrived in Hades, is another candidate for the role of Charon; cf. 6.439-40n" (Gifford, p. 114).

"McCann is depicted and discussed in Modern Ireland: Men of the Period (London: The Biographical Publishing Co. [1899?]), pp. 52-54" (Thornton, p. 96).

6.449. To heaven by water

As Bloom refines his plan for more efficient funeral rites, he also calls to mind the Christian rite of baptism and the journey across the River Styx to the classical underworld.

Reynolds cites the Inferno, 3.86 ("I come to carry you to the other shore" [Charon speaking]), and the Purgatorio, 2.41-42 ("A vessel so swift and light that the water took in naught of it. At the stern stood the celestial steersman") (Reynolds, pp. 273-4).

6.450. Leixlip, Clonsilla

"Leixlip, eleven miles west of Dublin, is on the Liffey (not on the Royal Canal); Clonsilla, seven miles west, is on the Royal Canal" (Gifford, p. 114).

6.453. Brian Boroimhe house

"A pub at 1 Prospect Terrace, on the corner of Prospect Road north of the Crossguns Bridge; J. M. Ryan, proprietor and family grocer, tea, wine, and spirit merchant. The pub is named after Brian Boru (Boroimhe) (926-1014), king of Munster from c. 978, principal king of Ireland from c. 1002. He achieved a major victory over the Danes at Clontarf (on the northeastern outskirts of Dublin) on Good Friday 1014. Although Brian was too old to participate in the battle, tradition holds that he remained in his tent at prayer and that he was killed at the end of the day by Danes fleeing the battle they had lost." (Gifford, p. 114).

"The house, which still stands, is so called because over its door there is a vivid painting depicting Brian Boru in battle" (Thornton, p. 96).

6.454. Fogarty

"A modest grocer" and a friend of Kernan, Power, and Cunningham with "a small shop on Glasnevin Road" in "Grace," Dubliners.

6.456. Left him weeping

"In 'Grace,' Dubliners, 'There was a small account for groceries unsettled' between Kernan and Fogarty. The implication is that what was once 'small' has grown and that Kernan has left Fogarty 'weeping at the church door,' that is, has not paid him and avoids him" (Gifford, p. 114).

6.457. Though lost to sight . . . to memory dear

"'To Memory You Are Dear,' song (1840) with words by George Linley (1798-1865): 'Though lost to sight, to memory dear, / You ever will remain; / One only hope my heart can cheer, / The hope to meet again. / Oft in the tranquil hour of night, / When stars illumine the sky, / I gaze upon each orb of light / And wish that you were by. / Yes, life then seemed one pure delight, / Though now each spot looks drear / Yet though your smile be lost to sight, / To memory you are dear'" (Gifford, pp. 114-115).

"W.H. Gratton Flood discussed the origin of the song in an article in Ireland's Own, August 7, 1907, p. 3. In his essay he points out that the title phrase was a frequent motto on tombstones, mortuary cards, etc., during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and he says that Linley was born in Leeds of Irish parents" (Thornton, p. 96).

6.458. Finglas road

"The southern boundary of the cemetery, angling northwest from Prospect Road" (Gifford, p. 115).

6.459-89. stonecutter's yard . . . builder and sculptor

"The modulations of style in so short a passage are amazing: from the neutral perceptional language we pass to an appositional and rather unbalanced asyndetic sentence, one without analogue in the narrative up to this point; the shift from hewn to appealing, parallel in construction but with a change from comma to colon to emphasize reaction, then introduces the language of advertising" (Houston, p. 79).

6.460. silent shapes . . . holding out calm hands

"At the beginning of Book 11 of The Odyssey, when Odysseus arrives in Hades and fills a sacrificial pit with blood, crowds of the shades of the dead gather around the pit in supplication. Odysseus fends them off with his sword until he has had a chance to consult Tiresias" (Gifford, p. 115).

6.462. Thos. H. Dennany

"His 'stonecutter's yard' and display of cemetery sculpture was just off Finglas Road on Prospect Avenue in Glasnevin" (Gifford, p. 115).

6.464. Jimmy Geary

"J. W Geary's address: Prospect Cemetery, Glasnevin" (Gifford, p. 115).

6.467. Gloomy gardens

"Recalls the Lugentes Campi (Latin: 'Fields of Mourning') where Aeneas sees the souls of those whom love has cruelly wasted (Aeneid, 6.440ff.)" (Gifford, p. 115).

6.469-82. where Childs was murdered . . . . Murder will out

"In Hades when the carriage passes the site of the Childs murder Bloom's thoughts begin to resemble sensationalistic press clippings" (Kelly, p. 74).

6.469. where Childs was murdered

"Samuel Childs was tried for and acquitted of the murder of his seventy-six-year-old brother, Thomas, in October 1899. The murder took place on 2 September 1898 at 5 Bengal Terrace in Glasnevin" (Gifford, p. 115).

The phrase also resonates with Bloom's preoccupation with the death of children.

Samuel will reappear in Oxen of the Sun and Circe; see 14.958, 14.1017, 14.1033, and 15.761.

6.470. Seymour Bushe

"One of the most eloquent Irish barristers" of the time (Ellmann, pp. 91-92).

"This continues the allusion to the Childs's murder trial, noted in the preceding entry . . . . The closing arguments and Bushe’s speech are given in great detail in the Evening Telegraph of Saturday, October 21, 1891, p. 5, cols. g and h, and p. 6, col. a. Ellmann says that Joyce attended the trial and took notes on Bushe’s speech" (Thornton, p. 97).

6.473. Only circumstantial

"In the course of the trial Bushe had spoken on the law of evidence, arguing that 'the evidence that Samuel Childs had murdered his brother Thomas rested chiefly on the fact that only Samuel had a key to the house, and that there was no evidence for the murderer's having entered by force' (Evening Telegraph, 21 October 1899, quoted in Ellmann, p. 756, n. 49)" (Gifford, p. 115).

6.474-75. Better for ninety-nine . . . to be wrongfully condemned

"This combines mild misquotations of Jesus--'Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance' (Luke 15:7) and Sir William Blackstone (1723-80), commenator on English law--'It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer' (Commentaries on the Laws of England [1765-69], volume 4, chapter 27)" (Gifford, p. 115).

Bloom will repeat this phrase, also in reference to the Childs murder case, in Circe 15.763.

6.476-477. Murderer's ground . . . darkly . . . . Whole place gone to hell.

As the episode progresses, it darkens both literally and figuratively, charting the characters' descent.

The phrase "murderer's ground" will reappear in Oxen of the Sun 14.1037 when Buck Mulligan discusses the Childs murder.

6.477. unweeded garden

C.f., Hamlet's first soliloquy, contemplating his mother's marriage to Claudius and envisioning the world as "an unweeded garden, / That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely" (Hamlet, I.2.135-137).

6.478. The murderer's image . . . the murdered

"Bloom dwells briefly on the superstition about visual fingerprints being left on the retinas of the dead . . . . the thought is patently connected to his earlier fantasy of 'me in his eyes,' albeit in phobically inverted form: it may record Bloom's illogical but lingering sense of responsibility of his son's failure to survive" (Devlin, pp. 75-6).

6.479. reading about it

Bloom often reflects on reading generally.

6.481-82. Murderer is still at large . . . Murder will out

Alluded to frequently, the "Childs Murder Case . . . is itself a trigger for Bloom's feelings of guilt over the death of his own child," as in this passage (Rickard, p. 147).

6.481. Clues.

Just as readers of crime stories find themselves searching detective-like among fragments for important signs, connections, and indicators, such is the experience of the reader of Ulysses (and of Joyce's annotator, that harmless drudge).

6.482. Murder will out

Proverbial wisdom, as in Chaucer's "The Nun's Priest's Tale."

"The prideful cock, Chantecleer, arguing the prophetic validity of dreams, concludes an elaborate example with the tag: 'Mordre wol out, that se we day by day' (l.3052). The idea is echoed in Hamlet's soliloquy on the possible effectiveness of the play 'The Mouse-trap' (III.2.247) as a way of catching 'the conscience of the King.' 'For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak / With most miraculous organ' (II.ii.622-23)" (Gifford, p. 115).

"The ODEP includes 'murder will out (cannot be hid)' and lists nine instances from ca. 1300 on. Among the best known instances of this phrase are those in Chaucer's 'Prioress' Tale' and 'Nun's Priest's Tale'" (Thornton, p. 97).

Like blood (6.434), murder cannot be contained.

6.485. Fifteen

I.e., Milly Bloom's age. It is often difficult to determine whether Bloom is thinking about his wife, Molly, or his daughter, Milly, as in "Catch them once with their pants down" (6.484-485). In this passage, the word "fifteen" lets us know he is thinking of Milly.

6.486. Prospect

The cemetery in Glasnevin is called Prospect Cemetery.

The cemetery is notable as the "open air Pantheon or Westminster Abbey of Catholic and Nationalist Ireland" (D. A. Chart, The Story of Dublin [London, 1907], p. 321).

"A high railing goes around Prospect Cemetary in Glasnevin which is northwest of Dublin. Odysseus must go to Hades, to his future (going home, death), his prospect. Death is every man's final prospect" (Senn, p. 201).

6.486-89. Dark poplars, rare . . . vain gestures on the air

"The description of the cemetery recalls Aeneas's initial vision of the underworld (Aeneid, 6:282ff.) when Aeneas sees 'throngs' of 'faint bodiless lives, flitting under a hollow semblance of form . . . in the midst an elm, shadowy and vast.' In fear, Aeneas threatens 'vainly' to draw his sword" (Gifford, p. 115).

"On occasion, a simple impression of natural objects serves to suggest an invisible world, as in the beautifully rhythmic incantation of the cemetery approach" (Adams, p. 104).

Senn also points out that "high poplars stand in the grove of Persephone (Odyssey 10.509, Aeneid 6.282)" (Senn, p. 201).

"Here we reach the extraordinary density of appositions and participles of the throwaway sentence in The Wandering Rocks. The collective consciousness of the men in the carriage now perceives in high poetic style in order to convey the solemnity of the occasion, if one insists on a realistic explanation" (Houston, p. 79).

6.490. felly

Variation of felloe: the outer rim or a part of the rim of a wheel, supported by the spokes; each of the curved pieces which join together to form a wheel rim (OED).

6.490. harshed

Rubbed or crashed roughly against (OED).

6.494. Bloom's hand unbuttoned . . . his other hand still held.

In Hades individual body parts frequently seem disconnected from the rest of the person and function independently.

6.498-499. Paltry funeral . . . Pomp of death.

Just as in the Aeneid a "hollow semblance of form" masks the nothingness of the shades in the underworld (see note 6.486-489), here the accoutrements and ceremonies of the funeral rites mask the emptiness of death.

6.498-502. Paltry funeral . . . Mourners coming out

Williams cites the charge that Bloom's monologue is sometimes, as in this passage, "interrupted by matter extraneous to, not immediately perceived by, Bloom's consciousness. . . . One can only appeal to the reader's experience of reading Ulysses here, but I would submit that however much the reader is totally absorbed into Bloom's consciousness . . . there is never any problem in distinguishing Bloom's mind from the wandering rocks of external matter. Even if in the above passage one were tempted to read 'Behind the hind carriage' as part of the monologue, the past tense 'stood' would quickly supply the necessary corrective" (Williams, p. 21).

6.500. hawker

A man who goes from place to place selling his goods, or who cries them in the street (OED).

6.501. Simnel cakes

"A kind of rich plumcake, enclosed in a very hard dough crust (especially for Mothering Sunday in mid-Lent, when parents were visited and presented with a gift)" (Gifford, p. 115).

6.501. cakes for the dead. Dogbiscuits.

"Not only because simnel cakes are hard but also after the Aeneid (6:417ff.) when the Sibyl, guiding Aeneas into the underworld, throws 'a morsel drowsy with honey and drugged meal' to the three-headed dog Cerberus" (Gifford, pp. 115-116).

"Besides being eaten, bread is delivered, smelled, sung about, fed to birds, and sold in the novel, in contexts that strive to recuperate it for theology" (Restuccia, pp. 77-78).

6.506. Where is that child’s fueral disappeared to?

"Like Homer’s pretext, Hades explores the precarious status of the visible, through recurrent references to vanishing acts. The question anticipates the equally puzzling appearance and disappearance ofM’Intosh (6.899-900)" (Devlin, p. 73).

6.507. Finglas

"A village northwest of the cemetery. There are quarries in the area" (Gifford, p. 116).

6.510. Got here before us, dead as he is

"Namely, Dignam in his role as Elpenor, the first shade Ulysses sees in Hades in Book XI. Ulysses is surprised and says, 'Elpenor, how hast thou come beneath the darkness and the shadow? Thou hast come fleeter on foot than I in my black ship?' (Butcher and Lang translation)" (Thornton, p. 97).

The others are physically following Dignam's corpse to the cemetary in this episode; they will also be following him (eventually) into death. The line evokes Christ's words to His apostles, "Whither I go . . . thou shalt follow me afterwards. . . . I go to prepare a place for you" (John, 13:36, 14:2).

6.511. skeowways

"Crooked, oblique"; Joyce's amalgam of "skewways" and "skowways." (DHE, 243).

6.511-512. Dull eye . . . or something

Bloom's sharp eye is ever sympathetic to suffering, animal or human.

"Another case of Bloom's fellow-feeling with animals" (Kiberd, p. 985).

6.512-522. Must be twenty or thirty . . . . Too many in the world . . . dead weight.

Bloom's dismal calculations depress him. His pity for particular suffering is overwhelmed by the enormous scope and relentless devestation of mortality. This shift in mood at the midpoint of the episode marks the episode's (and Bloom's) nadir.

6.513. Mount Jerome

"The Protestant cemetery at Harold's Cross, south-southwest of central Dublin" (Gifford, p. 116).

6.517. gates

C.f., gates of Hades.

6.517-520. Leanjawed harpy . . . bloodless and livid

Bloom's assessment seems gratuitously harsh, especially given his usual compassion for those suffering. His cruelty here is an indicator of how far his mood has fallen.

"Ulysses . . . extends stereotypes of deceptive, protean, potentially fatal females through a matrix of creatures--sirens, mermaids, serpent-women--all derived from Medusa, the atavistic foremother with serpentine hair and piercing eyes whose deadly gaze would turn a man into stone. . . . With Dante-like speed, a woman is suddenly imagined as a rapacious monster; a grief-stricken girl's face masks a mermaid's secretly dangerous countenance. Casual references such as these proliferate in Ulysses, and complement the femme fatality of major female figures" (Higgins, p. 50).

6.518. harpy

1. A rapacious monster covered in filth, having a woman's face and body and a bird's wings and claws, supposed to be a minister of divine vengeance 2. a greedy, cruel or grasping person, esp. a rapacious woman (OED).

"Harpyien personifies wild winds in Homer (Odyssey 1.242, 14.371, 20.77); in later myths she became a monster. Virgil considers 'Harpyiae' hermaphrodites who stand before the gates of Avernus (Aeneid 6.289)" (Senn, p. 202).

6.520. fish's face

Bloom's own visage is frequently described as fish-like, apparently because of his intent, dark, open-eyed gaze.

6.521. The mutes

Professional mourners.

"Lalouette’s, a 'funeral and carriage establishment' in Dublin, advertised itself as supplying 'funeral requisites of every description,' including professional mourners called mutes" (Gifford, p. 18).

In Telemachus, Buck Mulligan says, "I don't whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette's" (1.214).

6.522. stepping out of that bath

That is, after reading the letter from Martha. Bloom takes this bath between Lotus Eaters and Hades.

6.525. All walked after

The narrative point-of-view momentarily leaves Bloom and moves to a conversation Bloom does not hear.

"The first time in Ulysses in which the perspective shifts and Bloom is seen from outside, narrated by others" (Senn, p. 202).

6.527. I was in moral agony with you talking of suicide before Bloom.

"Does Bloom overhear Martin Cunningham’s ‘whispered’ comment to Mr Power? It is possible that he does–how else could we hear it? But does he also overhear John Henry Menton’s question at the cemetery: ‘Who is that chap behind with Tom Kernan . . . I know his face’ (6.690-691). Bloom’s memory of Menton at ‘Mat Dillon’s long ago’ (6.108-1009) omitting reference to this question, would seem to suggest that he does not overhear. At the end, however, as they leave the cemetery, ‘Mr Bloom, chapfallen, drew behind a few paces so as not to overhear’ (6.1027-1028). Does this mean that he has, after all, overheard earlier? At this moment, certainly, we hear nothing at all. The narrative problems raised by Hades are tricky but still potentially resolvable" (Levitt, pp. 163-164).

6.529-30. the Queen's hotel in Ennis . . . Clare

"Ennis is an inland town in County Clare in western Ireland, 140 miles west-southwest of Dublin. The hotel that Bloom's father 'owned' was and is located in Church (now Abbey) Street, where 'it still enjoys a thriving business,' according to Mr. Vincent McHugh, chairman of the Ennis Urban District Council (1970)" (Gifford, p. 116).

"From the start Joyce located the suicide [of Bloom's father] in the Queen's Hotel in Ennis, but he added two references in Hades to link Ennis with County Clare" (Groden, p. 199).

While being the location for a suicide "hardly seems a strong recommendation for a hotel," Luftig remarks, "the brochure to the Queen's Hotel in Ennis notes, 'The hotel has a strong literary and historical connection--being mentioned in Joyce's great masterpiece Ulysses . . . . So why not treat yourself?'" (Wollaeger, Luftig, and Spoo, p. 152).

6.531. Anniversary

I.e., the anniversary of Bloom's father's death.

6.533. He glanced . . . dark thinking eyes

Many references are made to characters' eyes in Hades, stressing shifts in perspective and maintain an emphasis on acts of speculation. Also, Power's description of Bloom at this moment is surprisingly sympathetic. Perhaps the story of Virag's suicide has moved him, although his interest seems largely prurient.

For other references to Bloom's dark eyes, see 9.1210, 14.1056, and 15.958.

6.534. the cardinal's mausoleum

"Edward Cardinal MacCabe (1816-85), the archbishop of Dublin (1879-85), created cardinal in 1882. From an Irish point of view he was a 'townsman,' with little interest in land reform or Home Rule, the two central political issues of his time" (Gifford, p. 116).

6.534. Speaking

"If the viewpoint is still Jack Power’s, this would be nearing an inner monologue (or an inner revelation), in other words, a deviation from the previous style of narration" (Senn, p. 203).

6.535. Was he insured?

Bloom reappears and poses a practical, solicitous question.

6.537. Artane

"The village of Artane, in the parish of Donnycarney, is three miles north of the center of Dublin. The institution Martin Cunningham has in mind (see 10.3-5) is the O'Brien Institute for Destitute Children in Donnycarney, the Reverend Brother William A. Swan, director" (Gifford, p. 116).

6.539. Todd's

"That is, get her employment in Todd, Burns & Co., Ltd., silk mercers, linen and woolen drapers, tailors, and boot and shoe and furnishing merchandisers in Dublin. (May Joyce, one of Joyce's sisters, was at one point employed in Todd's)" (Gifford, p. 116).

6.540. A sad case, Bloom said gently. Five children

A quintessential Bloomian sentiment, compassionate, charitable, "lost in familial contemplation" (Bowen, p. 459).

6.543. Has the laugh at him now

That is, the widow has the last laugh now. Bloom knows but doesn't say that Mrs. Dignam might be relieved not to be living with an alcoholic.

6.546-47. Wise men say . . . in the world

"After a song by Murray and Leigh, 'Three Women to Every Man': 'Women are angels without any wings, / Still they are very peculiar things; / Men who have studied the ladies a lot, / Know what peculiar notions they've got. / Soon as a maiden gets married, you know, / She wants at once to be 'boss' of the show; / I think, though perhaps my opinion is small, / She ought to feel lucky she's married at all. [Chorus:] Wise men say there are more women than men in the world, / That's how some girls are single all their lives, / Three women to every man / Oh, girls, say if you can, / Why can't every man have three wives?'" (Bowen, Allusions, p. 110).

Thinking of the song, "Three Women to Every Man," Bloom apparently has a moment of levity, "one of a series of allusions reflecting his stream-of-conscious irreverence on predominantly solemn occasions" (Bowen, Allusions, p. 110).

"In Book 11 of The Odyssey, Persephone (11:225ff.) sends the shades of "great women" to talk to Odysseus and then (11:385ff.) those of great men. All told, including his mother, who has died in his absence, and Tiresias, Odysseus talks to sixteen women (plus Persephone) and sees or talks to twelve men" (Gifford, p. 116).

In Circe, we encounter this thought again only expressed, in almost the same words, by "THE MOTHER": "More women than men in the world" (15.4183), she instructs Stephen.

6.547. Condole with her

To grieve with, to express sympathy for another's affliction.

6.548. For hindu widows only

"That is, suttee, the Hindu practice of the wife immolating herself on her husband's funeral pyre, abolished by the British rulers of India in 1829" (Gifford, p. 116).

"The custom was once widely practiced in India. Though the practice was outlawed in the early nineteenth century, isolated voluntary instances have occurred in the twentieth" (Thornton, p. 98)

In the Circe episode Bloom will imagine Molly immolating herself on his funeral pyre (15.3232).

6.548. She would marry another. Him?

Bloom is probably speculating what Molly would do if he were gone, and wondering whether she would marry Blazes Boylan.

"Molly and Boylan, in the role of the liberator of Ithaca. Odysseus asks his mother in the underworld about Penelope, 'whether she is already married, to one of the best of the Achaern?' (Odyssey, 11.179)" (Senn, pp. 203-204).

6.549. Widowhood not . . . old queen died

"Queen Victoria (1819-1901; queen 1837-1901) had made the perpetual mourning of a dedicated widowhood fashionable after the death of Albert, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, her husband and prince consort, on 14 December 1861. But Victoria's protracted mourning led gradually to a widespread feeling that she was overdoing it; and by 1904 the rigid rules of mid-Victorian mourning had been considerably relaxed" (Gifford, p. 116).

6.550. Gun carriage . . . Frogmore memorial

"At the Frogmore Lodge at Windsor Castle, where Victoria had a special mausoleum constructed for herself, her husband, Prince Albert, and her mother, the duchess of Windsor. For her own funeral Victoria had commanded full military observance: her body was 'drawn in a gun carriage' in a remarkable funeral procession on 2 February 1901 and lay in state in St. George's Chapel in Windsor. On 4 February the coffin was privately removed to the Frogmore mausoleum and there placed in the sarcophagus that already held the remains of Prince Albert" (Gifford, p. 116).

"Lytton Strachey says that the Queen visited the Frogmore Memorial almost daily when the court was at Windsor (Queen Victoria, New York, 1921, p. 404)" (Thornton, p. 98).

6.550-52. But in the end . . . in her bonnet . . . all for a shadow

"Queen Victoria's self-imposed seclusion after her husband's death, together with her insistence on a protracted mourning, caused much controversy. Late in her life she did relax the strictures of her mourning somewhat" (Gifford, p. 116-117).

Bloom's observation is insightful: "It is no stupid or superficial man who places such widowed grief as Queen Victoria's: 'violets in her bonnet . . . Vain'" (Goldberg, p. 279).

Mourning, as Bloom sees it, is vain in both senses of the word: it frequently succumbs to ostentation, and it cannot alter the reality of death.

6.551. In her heart of hearts

C.f., Hamlet to Horatio, "Give me that man/ that is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core--aye, in my heart of heart, / As I do thee" (Hamlet III.2.76-79).

6.552. consort

A partner in marriage or sexual relations; a husband or wife, esp. of a monarch.

6.552. consort not even a king

"Prince Albert would not have succeeded Victoria to the throne had she died before him. Bloom feels similarly marginalized in his marriage to Molly, wondering if his death would free her. He then foresees that he will predecease his wife" (Kiberd, p. 985).

6.551-52. All for a shadow . . . was the substance

"Bloom echoes a common criticism of Queen Victoria's excessive mourning for the 'shadow' of her dead husband, who was, as prince consort, only the shadow of a king in real life. Bloom also echoes a related criticism of Queen Victoria's refusal to share the responsibilities of the Crown with her mature son, who was allowed to cool his heels until her death, when, at the age of sixty, he finally became a king in substance as Edward VII" (Gifford, p. 117).

In Hades, "Bloom ponders Queen Victoria's long period of mourning for her consort Albert and wonders why she would not look to the future . . . . The later episodes increasingly endorse this no-return view of time, rendering impossible any simple flight from the terror of history" (Spoo, p. 160).

Bloom "dimly echoes here Stephen's speculations about ghostiless and substance" in Proteus (Ellmann, p. 48).

Bloom's sentiment that Victoria's son was "the substance," her dead husband Albert "a shadow" is a poignant reference to Rudy Bloom and reiterates Bloom's preference for life. In this passage Maddox sees Bloom's paradoxical dilemma," that he is "the apostle of a compassionate humanity, but he is incapable of benefitting from his own creed . . . . Bloom is able to sympathize with the old queen but he is unable to follow her example. For Bloom, to look forward to the future is to be reminded of the past--the death of his son Rudy.

Cut off from continuity with either past or future, Bloom is unable to participate in the very processes of Nature to which he gives intellectual and emotional assent" (Maddox, p. 56).

See also Devlin's gloss of gender differences and heredity (6.87 note, "Molly. Milly").

6.553. the past she wanted back, waiting

"The transience of human grief is the condition of its value. The substance of life is the son, 'not the past she wanted back, waiting'" (Goldberg, p. 279).

6.555. in her warm bed

"It s by turning to thoughts of Molly that he wards of the gruesome contemplation of death" (Sicari, p. 60).

6.558. Cork's own town

"Simon Dedalus' hometown, and the title of a popular song, hence a cliche. The song 'Cork's Own Town' was written in 1825 by Thomas Crofton Croker (1798-1854): 'They may rail at the city where first I was born, / But it's there they've the whisky, and butter, and pork, / And a little neat spot for to walk in each morn - / They call it Daunt's Square, and the city is Cork. / The square has two sides - why one east and one west, / And convenient's the region of frolic and spree, / Where salmon, drisheens, and beefsteaks are cooked best: / Och! Fishamble's the Eden for you, love, and me!' (Gifford, p. 117).

The phrase 'Cork’s Own Town' occurs only in the title, not in the lyrics of the song" (Thornton, p. 98).

6.559. Cork park races

"An annual race meet held on a track in the city of Cork's public park. The most fashionable day of the meet (and the day of the principal purses) was Easter Monday (4 April in 1904)" (Gifford, p. 117).

6.560. Same old six and eightpence

"A usual and unchanging thing, after the usual fee for carrying back the body of an executed malefactor and giving it Christian burial" (Gifford, p. 117).

Sedate, steady, trustworthy.

6.564. get up a whip

Short for "whipround," a call or appeal to a number of persons for contributions to a sum or fund.

"Cunningham puts himself out for the Dignam family. From the tenth chapter the reader knows that he collects money for orphans" (Senn, p. 205).

6.565. bob

Shilling. "A few bob a skull" means that each mourner could contribute a small amount.

6.568. John Henry Menton

A solicitor and a former employer of Dignam. The real-life John Henry Menton had offices at 27 Bachelor's Walk, in central Dublin.

6.574. the mortuary chapel

6.577. Both unconscious

It is difficult to determine the referent of "both." It may refer either to Paddy Dignam and his son, or to Paddy Dignam and Bloom's father.

6.577-79. Lighten up . . . would he understand

This cryptic passage could be Bloom's retroactive construction of Dignam's death. The father, unconscious, revives long enough to look at his son, thinks of "all he might have done" (this "he" might refer either to the young boy or to Dignam himself), regrets having left his son in debt (John Joyce died in considerable debt), and hopes his son will forgive him.

6.578-79. I owe three shillings to O'Grady

Joyce's probable parody of Socrates' last words, "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; please pay it--do not neglect it" (Phaedo, 118a).

"Meehan suggests an allusion to the lrish comic song 'I Owe $10 to O'Grady,' written by Harry Kennedy (1887). The singer is down on his luck, out of work, and in debt to 'the little tailor-man,' Pat O'Grady. Chorus: 'I owe ten dollars to O'Grady, / You'd think he had a mortgage on my life; / He calls to see me early every morning, / At night he sends his wife. / He tried to have me pawn my girl's piano. / I think O'Grady has a dreadful gall; / Unless he wants to wait, / I'll rub it off the slate, / And the devil a cent he'll ever get at all.'" (Gifford, p. 117).

"The amount of three shillings corresponds to the debt of the journalist Joseph Hynes, whom Bloom will remind of this debt in the next chapter" (Senn, p. 206).

6.580. Which end is the head?

"Traditionally, the corpse is borne head-first, and oriented with the head toward the altar in the church and toward the headstone in the grave" (Gifford, p. 117).

Typically, Bloom is curious about practical considerations.

6.582. bier

A movable frame on which a coffin or corpse is placed before burial or cremation; a support on which a coffin or corpse is carried to the grave.

6.582. chancel

A part of a church near the altar, reserved for the clergy, choir, etc., and usually enclosed.

6.583. Always in front of me

Literally, the coffin; figuratively, death.

6.585. prayingdesks

"With a lectern for a prayer book and a step on which to kneel" (Gifford, p. 117).

"A prie-dieu, a kneeler with a rail to support the elbows or forearms (not a prayer book, as Gifford has it)" (Owens, p. 20).

"Here and later Bloom does not know religious terms and rituals, and tries to overcome this by just using a general description; this is in stark contrast to Stephen Dedalus" (Senn, p. 206).

6.585. The font

"At the chapel entrance, contains holy water with which worshipers moisten their fingers and touch their brow or cross themselves in blessing" (Gifford, p. 117).

6.587. knelt his right knee upon it

Bloom will remember this as he kneels over Bella's hoof in Circe (15.2807).

6.589. A server bearing a brass bucket

"Here, as in the visit to All Hallows, the religious ceremonies are seen through the eyes of Bloom who neither understands them nor has the appropriate vocabulary" (Blamires, p. 36).

"Does the weight of [the] satire fall on Bloom or on the ceremony? . . . . It's probable that this kind of response is meant to represent Bloom's limited, practical, factual mind; he has about as much sense of religious awe as an old shoe" (Adams, p. 99).

However, as Wollaeger notes, "the curtailment of Bloom's insight notwithstanding, [his] very activity of mind . . . permits Bloom a critical vantage on the Mass . . . . It is Bloom's personal history, mediating the ceremony, that permits him, in this instance . . . [to have] an inside/outside perspective. Born to a Catholic mother, later raised as a Jew by his father, then baptized as a Protestant before converting to Catholicism, Bloom the mature atheist bears traces of these subject positions without ever becoming bound to any in particular" (Wollaeger, Luftig, and Spoo, p. 96).

6.589. a brass bucket with something in it

"The vessel contains holy water and a rod (sprinkler) for shaking it over the coffin" (Gifford, p. 117).

6.590-92. The whitesmocked priest came after him . . . fluent croak

"Bloom and the narrator carry on a rapid and weird exchange of images . . . The narrator describes the priest's belly as 'his toad's belly': then it is Bloom presumably who thinks 'Who'll read the book? I, said the rook.' Again, the third-person narration resumes in what seems like the initial style, except for the presence of the word 'croak.' Soon after this passage, Bloom looks at the priest and thinks 'Eyes of a toad too,' and the word 'too' must refer to the 'toad's belly' mentioned in the narrator's statement. There is a strange kind of play between narrator and character, almost a parodic form of sympathy between the two. This is a kind of 'sympathy' that reduces the distance between the telling of the story and the story itself, a distance that will be manipulated in increasingly bizarre ways as the book progresses" (Lawrence, p. 50).

"But rather than seeing what is going on here as ‘parodic’ (of what?), or as involving bizarre narrative manipulation, we can simply note that Joyce’s initial style persistently involves an inextricable blending of authorial and figural perspectives–for reasons that are an integral part of his artistic aims in Ulysses" (Thornton, p. 72).

6.591-92. Who'll read the book? I, said the rook

"This alludes to the nursery rhyme 'Who Killed Cock Robin,' which is printed in ODNR, pp. 13-33. One stanza of the rhyme reads, 'Who'll be the parson? / I, said the rook, / With my little book, / I'll be the parson.'" (Thornton, p. 98).

"The effect again is to emphasize Bloom's irreverence at the proceedings. His mood is so uncongenial to the solemn surroundings that he is on the point of bursting into song" (Bowen, Allusions, p. 111).

6.595-612. Father Coffey . . . . doner

"We are now in the depths. The ultimate horrors of the Joycean underworld have that touch of humour, even of farcicality, which distinguishes his work. From the swollen figure of Fr Coffey Bloom's mind moves to the inflating power of bad gas and the grim need to burn off the accumulated gas from the coffins in the vaults of St Werburgh's. With this, the main theme in Bloom's mind is the monotonous repetitiousness of Fr Coffey's grim duties, 'every mortal day a fresh batch' of corpses to deal with" (Blamires, p. 39).

6.595. Father Coffey

The Reverend Francis Coffey, curate-in-charge and chaplain at Glasnevin cemetary.

6.595. Dominenamine

"This is an echo of the words Bloom hears the priest speaking, though not a direct quotation. Probably the priest said 'Domine,' and Bloom is here trying to form 'in nomine Domini' ('in the name of the Lord')" (Thornton, p. 98).

See also Wright note 6.852.

6.851. Devil in that picture of sinner's death showing him a woman.

Bloom, who "probably has a very definite picture in mind" (Senn, p. 223), seems to be remembering a picture in which the Devil distracts a dying sinner from repentance with the image of a woman.

6.852. Dying to embrace her in his shirt

C.f. Odyssey (11.233-245) and Aeneid (6.700-05).

"At the time he wrote Molly's monologue, Joyce was also revising [Hades] . . . and some of the additions he made to that episode are clearly meant to serve an anticipatory ironic gloss on Penelope (or a retrospective one if we are re-reading). He incorporated several verbal and imagistic echoes which precisely link together Molly's recollections of her sexual encounter with Boylan, and Bloom's meditations on death given in the graveyard scene. These links collectively reinforce the notion that Boylan is a deathly presence. There are two particularly noticeable echoes. Molly recalls Boylan's crassness in undressing, uninvited before her, and 'standing out that vulgar way in the half of a shirt they [men] wear to be admired' (18.1373-74). In Bloom's meditation on death he had imagined a depiction of the Devil showing a woman to a sinner, who responds by 'dying to embrace her in his shirt' (6.852). Still more strikingly, Molly recalls that during Boylan's visit her marital bed, unaccustomed as it had been to having such strenuous exertions performed on it, had 'jingled' perturbingly, 'till I suggested to put the quilt on the floor with the pillow under my bottom' (18.1132-33) and she and Boylan evidently finish their encounter on a pillow on the floor. When he was imagining a man dying in a room in the Hades episode, Bloom had reflected, 'Pull the pillow away, and finish it off on the floor since he's doomed' (6.850-851)" (Wright, pp. 63-64).

6.852-853. Last act of Lucia. Shall I nevermore behold thee? Bam! He expires.

Refers to "a tragedy rooted in a doom-laden father-son relationship" (Blamires, p. 39).

As does the picture Bloom recalls, this opera tells the story of a man forfeiting life and salvation for the love of a woman.

"Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), an opera by Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) after Sir Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor (1819). The opera deals with the 'tragic fate' of two lovers separated by family strife. In Act III, scene i, the heroine, Lucia, married against her will, goes mad; then Edgar, the hero, learns that Lucia is dead as he waits in a graveyard to duel with Lucia's villainous brother. He declares, 'Yet once more shall I behold thee,' and, on the wings of an appropriate aria, commits suicide while the chorus in the background prays heaven to be merciful and forgiving" (Gifford, p. 122).

"In his faulty recall of the operatic song, Bloom revealingly locates the agony of death in visual deprivation, in the loss of the ability to see a beloved being–Joyce may be alluding to Agamemnon’s lament about the son of whom he feels visually bereft. In the actual line of the aria from Lucia di Lammermoor–‘Yet once more shall I behold thee’ in the afterlife–death is quixotically affirmed as visual repossession of lost ones: Bloom’s parapraxis, with its distinctly visual nostalgia, hints at how much he values the visible realm and the penetrative eye that enables him to explore it" (Devlin, p. 71).

6.853-863. Gone at last . . . little Rudy

"Bloom's thoughts here have a hidden logic . . . The rapid alternation of somber acceptance, satire, and grief suggests the kind of equilibrium of consciousness which Bloom achieves in Hades. He gives death its due . . . but this large vision is exactly balanced by Bloom's acknowledgment of individual grief. Incapable of formulating a consistent philosophical consolation, Bloom by his self-contradictions incorporates death into his vision, into his very way of life" (Maddox, p. 56).

6.855. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out

"Parnell died 6 October 1891; on the anniversary of his death his partisans wore a leaf of ivy (evergreen, symbolic of fidelity) in his memory. See 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room,' Dubliners" (Gifford, p. 122).

6.857. for the repose of his soul

"The dead who are doing penance in purgatory before entrance into heaven are, according to Catholic doctrine, aided by the prayers of the living" (Gifford, p. 122).

6.857-858. Hoping you're well and not in hell

"Bloom's irreverent humor is ingratiating; it dispels the hypocritical solemnity of the occasion . . . In Hades Bloom is both capable of a good joke and deserving of pity" (O'Brien, pp. 121-122).

6.858-9. Out of the fryingpan of life into the fire of purgatory

"Another Bloom variation on a proverbial phrase. The ODEP lists 'Out of the frying-pan into the fire' and lists five instances from 1514 on" (Thornton, p. 103).

6.859. into the fire of purgatory

Dante calls Purgatory "the fire that refines" (Purgatorio, 26: 148). Purgatory is the condition or place of spiritual purging, especially of souls departing this life in grace of God but requiring to be cleansed from venial sins; a place of temporary suffering or of expiation.

6.860. Does he ever

Bloom's thoughts return to John O'Connell.

6.861. Someone walking over it

"The superstition is that when you shiver in the sun someone has walked over your grave, that is, has reminded you that you will die" (Gifford, p. 122).

"At times, this chapter reads as though Bloom were attending, variously, the funerals of Rudy, his father, or indeed himself" (Kiberd, p. 988).

"This alludes to the old superstition that Swift brings into his Polite Conversation. In the first conversation, Miss Notable shudders and then says, 'Lord, there's some Body walking over my Grave' (p. 102). In his note on this passage, Partridge says this is 'still said when one shivers for no apparent reason'" (Thornton, p. 103).

6.861. Callboy's warning.

A "callboy" is a messenger or a page.

6.862. towards Finglas

The village of Finglas is situated northwest of Prospect Cemetery.

McGee notes that in French, fin means "the end" and glas is "the death knell" (McGee, p. 30).

6.862-63. Mamma, poor mamma, and little Rudy

"After Odysseus has consulted with Tiresias, his mother, who unbeknownst to Odysseus has died during his absence from Ithaca, drinks of the sacrificial blood, recognizes her son, and talks to him (11:155-224). She tells him that his wife and son are alive and well but that she died of 'loneliness' for him (11:202-3). Odysseus longs to embrace her, 'but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable / as shadows are,' and this, Odysseus says, 'embittered all the pain I bore' (11:207-8; Fitzgerald pp. 202-3)" (Gifford, p. 122).

Benstock wonders, "Is Bloom . . . actually confirming her resting place as there in Glasnevin -- or only that she is dead?" (Benstock, p. 74).

6.866. And if he was alive all the time? Whew! By jingo, that would be awful

"It is in Hades where the Plumtree vision of life is made most explicit, where all the funeral roses bloom. Here, in Hades, is the thought that Paddy Dignam is buried alive . . . In Hades, Dignam's corpose has life: the coffin 'Got there before us, dead as he is' (6.510). Bloom wonders 'Would he bleed if a nail say cut him in the knocking about' (6.432-33) and remembers the practice of boring a hole into a coffin to let out the accumulated gas (6.609-11). He thinks of the nails and hair that 'Grows all the same after' (6.20), and the frantic search for one's body on the Last Day: 'Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps' (6.679-80). Though Bloom maintains that 'Once you are dead you are dead' (6.677), his interest in resurrection is more than idle curiosity about a Catholic belief, for he does believe in the physical life of the body after death, in the need for death as a necessary condition for a new life: 'It's the blood sinking in the earth gives new life' (6.771) (Knowles, "Opus Posthumous: James Joyce, Gottfried Keller, Othmar Schoeck, and Samuel Barber," in Knowles, p. 123).

6.868. pierce the heart

See note 6.347.

After the crucifixion, soldiers pierce Jesus' side to "make sure" he is dead.

6.868. telephone

C.f. Stephen Dedalus' musings about telephones in Proteus (3.35-40).

6.869. Three days

It has been three days since Dignam died. Also recalls the three days that elapsed between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Christ.

6.872. Out of sight, out of mind

"Ulysses is full of fossorial animals--animals that bury or dig up the dead, again reminding us (and Bloom and Stephen) that the dead will not stay peacefully at rest" (Rickard, p. 57).

"The spectacle of the procession becomes, in a sense, the dead’s final public visual appeal, his last command over the attention of others, the antithesis of his imminent invisibility and possible loss of intersubjective recognition" (Devlin, p. 74).

6.874. grace

"The free and undeserved gift that God gives us to respond to our vocation to become his adopted children . . . . God shares his divine life and friendship with us in a habitual gift, a stable and supernatural disposition that enables the soul to live with God, to act by his love." (Catechism of the Catholic Church).

"Most of the characters in 'Grace' in Dubliners appear again in the Hades chapter" (Senn, p. 225).

6.876-7. Quietly . . . dismal fields

A Virgilian inflection here.

"The derivation of 'dismal' is dies mali; here the word is, perhaps, a foretaste of the dies irae that is to come in the halls of Circe" (Gilbert, p. 169).

"Recalls the Lugentes Campi (Latin: 'Fields of Mourning') where Aeneas sees the souls of those whom love has cruelly wasted (Aeneid 6:440ff.)" (Gifford, p. 115).

"This may be the complement to the 'holy fields' Bloom thought of . . . and may therefore allude to Tartarus, which Aeneas visits in book VI of the Aeneid" (Thornton, p. 104).

"Shakespeare also speaks of 'dismal hell' (Romeo and Juliet III.2.44)" (Senn, p. 225).

6.876. the maze of graves

6.878. Hynes

"Joseph M'Carthy (Joe) Hynes, newspaper reporter and sentimental Parnellite" (Benstock and Benstock, p. 102).

6.881. christian name

First name

Though Hynes has borrowed money from Bloom he doesn't even know his first name.

"An insensitive phrase in Bloom's presence; this failure of the speaker was to Joyce a sign of provincialism, an inability of a culture to take a stance beyond itself, imagining how it might appear to supporters of other traditions. Another kind of provincialism went hand-in-glove with that: the blithe assurance that revivalist Ireland was the centre of the civilized world, as in Mulligan's omphalos" (Kiberd, p. 988).

6.882. L, Mr Bloom said. Leopold

"'Leopold' never makes it into the newspaper listing, and Bloom finds himself near the tail end, initialed rather than christianized, as the depleted 'L. Boom' 16.1260 -- no 'double ell'" (Benstock, p. 206).

"'L,' Bloom stresses, with odd irony in view of the fact that when the printed list of mourners does emerge the 'L' is lost from his surname 'Boom' (16.1260)" (Blamires, p. 41).

" . . . let me add, as others have before me, that El is Hebrew for God . . . " (Thomas, p. 71).

6.882. M'Coy's name

Bloom does M'Coy a favor, only to be incorrectly listed himself (see 16.1260).

When Bloom reads McCoy's name in the newspaper account of Dignam's funeral, it is cited as C. P. McCoy, though Bloom does not provide Hynes with McCoy's full name. "In a novel dependent entirely upon cause-and-effect action, we might regard the change of names as an oversight on the part of the author: we would suppose that although M'Coy asked to be listed under his initials, Bloom had not passed along that part of the request, so that the form of the name appearing in the newspaper represents either a pure coincidence (like the inclusion of Stephen) or an authorial error. In Ulysses, however, the discrepancy calls for a different explanation. Without necessarily ruling out any other interpretations, we might note that the connection between M'Coy's original request and the newspaper account diverts our attention from the realistic level of action to an impression of Ulysses as a book in which events are manipulated and arranged rather than simply narrated and (perhaps) commented upon, as in most previous novels" (McCarthy, p. 45).

6.885. Louis Byrne

Louis A. Byrne, M.D.: "Dublin coroner" (Benstock and Benstock, p. 62)

6.887. He died of a Tuesday

Of whom is Bloom speaking here? It cannot be Dignam, because Bloom knows that he died on Monday, 13th of June: "Of course he is dead. Monday he died" (6.867), Bloom reassures himself after imagining Dignam being buried alive.

Paul Van Caspel argues that once again, Bloom is haunted by Rudy: "In the turmoil of his emotions he tries to lay Rudy's ghost by concentrating on Dignam's death, repeating the formula he had heard before, 'Monday he died', but the charm does not work. A few minutes later he cannot suppress the stark truth any longer, he will have to perform a postmortem of his own: Dignam may have died on Monday, he (Rudy) died of a Tuesday. Did he? In time the reader will learn the exact date of Rudy's death: it was, as the Ithaca episode tells us, 9 January 1894. Was this then a Tuesday? It was indeed" (Van Caspel, JJB, p. 2).

6.887. got the run

Took off, absconded.

6.887. Levanted

Absconded, bolted, esp. with betting or gaming losses unpaid.

6.887-888. Levanted . . . asked me to.

Bloom implies that M'Coy no longer works for The Freeman because he embezzled funds and surmises that this is the reason M'Coy wished to avoid speaking with Hynes.

6.888. Charlie, you're my darling

M'Coy's brashness "reminds Bloom of a popular ballad, 'Charlie is My Darling'" (Bowen, Allusions, p. 115).

The words to the "Scottish folk song are by Lady Nairne (in honor of Charles Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie [1720-88], pretender to the throne of England): 'Twas on a Monday morn, / Right early in the year, / When Charlie came to our town, / The young chevalier. [Chorus:] Oh Charlie is my darlin', my darlin', my darlin', / The young chevalier. / Oh Charlie is my darlin', my darlin', my darlin', / The young chevalier. [Second verse:] As he came marchin' up the street, / The pipes played loud and clear, / And all the folk came runnin' out / To meet the chevalier. [Third verse:] With Highland bonnets on their heads, / And claymores bright and clear, / They came to fight for Scotland's Light, / And the young chevalier.' (Gifford, p. 122).

"For words, music, and a biographical sketch of Lady Caroline, see Helen K. Johnson, Our Familiar Songs, pp. 484, 486-7" (Thornton, p. 104).

6.890. Leave him under an obligation: costs nothing

French remarks Bloom's "distasteful habit of rationalizing the impulse behind his kind acts by imagining that he will derive some practical advantage from them" (French, p. 85).

6.891-892. do you know . . . over there in the . . .

"By presenting Bloom with a blank space to fill in, Hynes contributes as the author of the obfuscation, the false name of the unnameable. Hades is a repository of vague directions and unrecognised identities, and Hynes's casual 'over there' echoes references to several graves and gravesites: Simon Dedalus was equally unspecific when he referred to his wife's final resting place ('Her grave is over there' (6.645), as is Bloom about his own plot ('mine over there toward Finglas, the plot I bought' [5.862])" (Benstock, pp. 204-205).

6.895. M'Intosh

"Will appear as mourner in evening papers, another mark of the treachery of language" (Kiberd, p. 988).

"From a misunderstanding the character M'Intosh is born," and by way of a misprint Bloom will become "L. Boom" (16.1260):"'If we were all suddenly somebody else,' remarks Bloom" (6.836) (McGee, p. 32).

6.899. Not a sign.

Joyean commentators have stubbornly refused to heed this sign.

6.900. Has anybody here seen?

"Most of the versions of the song ['Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?'] relate the search for Kelly or Antonio by a lady of leisure who brought him along only to be abandoned by him for someone else. The stranger in the macintosh, like Kelly, has disappeared. He will reappear several times in the novel, but always mysteriously. Bloom, like Kelly's girl, is to worry about the man off and on all day" (Bowen, Allusions, p. 115).

6.900. Kay ee double ell

"Apart from reference to the anachronistic song, the phrase may involve allusions to the Book of Kells, to Kino's eleven-bob trousers, through 'Kay ee' to the key Bloom has lost and for which he is looking, through 'El' to the Hebrew name of the Lord, and to the cabalistic tradition of identifying K with 11 as a symbol of resurrection" (Adams, 103, summarizing Robert A. Day's monograph, 'Joyce's Waste Land and Eliot's Unknown God,' (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971).

"The clue to the comic life in Ulysses is that nothing ends, it simply changes forms: 'Kay ee double ell. Become invisible. Good Lord, what became of him?' " (Seidel, p. 163). "M'Intosh, then, as the spirit of his creator, returning to the world of his creation in the cemetery, only to refine himself once more out of an existence, temporarily to enjoy a state of invisibility. 'Has anybody here seen? Kay ee double ell. Become invisible. Good Lord, what became of him?' Bloom thinks of M'Intosh: 'Didn't hear. What? Where has he disappeared to? Not a sign. Well of all the.' And just to make sure that the identification of M'Intosh with the "Good Lord" of Ulysses is not without further textual support, let me add, as others have before me, that El is Hebrew for God and that in the cabalistic tradition K and 11 are symbolic of the resurrection. When M'Intosh is resurrected later in the day, the macintosh he is wearing adds a k; when Bloom appears with M'Intosh in the Evening Telegraph, he has lost an l, making him Boom--a noise in the street, or God" (Thomas, p. 71).

"If a macintosh is a garment that covers, it seems to make sense that M'Intosh's name implies that there is someone behind the name to be dis-covered. But perhaps that is our problem. Perhaps there is nothing behind the macintosh to grasp. Perhaps M'Intosh is truly a case in which clothes make the man. Because M'Intosh's identity, like everything in a work of fiction, relies on a word, there is no 'real' person beyond language to whom the word M'Intosh refers. If indeed there is nothing to be found under M'Intosh's coat of language, it seems to be wise to confine our investigations about him to the pure level of language, to realize that all that is in a name is a name. To be sure, it might be our fate never to escape the realm of language, since even what I have called identifying the 'real' M'Intosh would involve giving him another name. The real significance of M'Intosh may be that it is a folly to search for a referent in a name, that for all the readers intent on trying to rename him he will remain what Joyce called him in his notes: Mockintosh" (Thomas, p. 114).

6.900. Become invisible

"Joyce plays with the theme of the mysterious unfamiliar person who appears and then disappears. 'Invisible' is the etymological correspondent to the Greek 'Hades,' taken from 'a' (in Latin the negative 'in,' in German 'un') and '[v]idein' (to see). 'Hades' and the Latin 'invisibilis' derive from the same root. Hades is the un-seeable or that which renders invisible. Joyce notes: 'unseen' from Roscher's Lexicon: 'the invisible or that which makes invisible'" (Senn, p. 227).

6.908-915. The boy propped . . . Thanks in silence

"This lucidly explicit narration is a tour de force of anonymity, and although there is no reason to attach names to the insignificant gravediggers, the two persons who are constantly masked as 'the boy' and 'the brother-in-law' are specifically Master Patrick Dignam and Mr Bernard Corrigan, eldest son and brother-in-law of the deceased. Here in Hades they are consistently shrouded in anonymity, but their names will surface later in Ulysses . . . . The narrative depiction of the grave scene is exclusively determined by Bloom's incomplete knowledge and bored observations. What masquerades as open and objective narration is often unmasked as the interplay between observable phenomena and the limited consciousness of the subjective character, the basic causation of narrative exposition in these six morning chapters, and with many unusual variations thereafter in the succeeding chapters of Ulysses" (Benstock, p. 38).

6.912. haft

The wooden shaft of a pick-axe.

6.912-13. One . . . walked slowly on with shouldered weapon

"Possible resonance with the reconciliation of Odysseus with Poseidon predicted by Teiresias: if he pulls an oar over his shoulder towards the land and someone mistakes it for a shovel, then Odysseus can hope for a peaceful death away from the sea (Odyssey, 11.145-55)" (Senn, pp. 227-28).

913. blueglancing

Joyce's portmanteau word, evocative of Homeric epithets.

6.914. the coffin-band . . . his navelcord

C.f., in Proteus, Stephen thinking of the omphalos, and specifically of the navel cord as the "strand-entwining cable of all flesh" (3.37), tying us all back to the Garden of Eden. The coffin-band is a kind of inverse navel cord, Dignam's last connection to life.

6.916. I know that

"The outsider Bloom struggles to identify familiar phrases. He seems more moved than are those who know the ceremony by heart" (Kiberd, p. 988).

6.919. the chief's grave

That is, Parnell's grave, opposite the door of the mortuary chapel. In 1904 no tombstone had been erected, but the grave was "surrounded by iron railings, and almost covered by artificial wreaths and crosses" (Dublin and Its Environs [London, n.d.; after 1910, p. 84). "Parnell is cast in the role of Agamemnon, the chief of the Greeks, to whose shade Odysseus talks at length (Odyssey, 11:385ff.)" (Gifford, p. 123).

McGee remarks of this passage and of the many other monuments that figure in Hades, "This form, or the monument, has nothing to do with the real dead but with the living dead who want to transform the concrete relation to death--the transitory flower, the limp father--into an eternal erection" (McGee, 30).

6.919-921. Let us go . . . Let us . . . With awe Mr Power's blank voice spoke.

The characters' voices acquire a ceremonial formality, as befits the occasion.

6.923. not in that grave at all

"the well-known rumor that [Parnell] is not in the grave" is "another variation on the life-in-death theme" (Bowen, p. 461).

Bloom, like Stephen, "is acutely aware of the cyclical pattern of life, where birth and death merge" (Adams, p. 109).

6.923-24. Some say . . . That one day he will come again

Parnell is envisioned as the Irish Messiah.

"Rumors that Parnell was alive persisted, in part because he died relatively young (at 45) and in part because his body was not put on view but was almost immediately sealed in its coffin. One of the more popular rumors was that he was hiding out in South Africa (a rumor apparently excited by Irish sympathy for that territory's reluctance to accept Britain's imperial ambitions)" (Gifford, p. 123).

"Why, if Joyce felt so bitter about the Irish betrayal of Parnell, did he choose to place several pious Irishmen at Parnell's grave . . .? And why did he permit so ostensibly reverent and sincere and touching a visitation in an otherwise satiric chapter? 'Because,' Joyce once wrote pointedly, 'the Irish, even though they break the hearts of those who sacrifice their lives for their native land, never fail to show great respect for the dead' " (O'Brien, p. 126).

"If Joyce violated Parnell's axiom by leaving Ireland, Parnell himself had violated it by having died. . . . Joyce is to Parnell as expatriation is to death. Once you have left Ireland never to return, you have left Ireland never to return. Joyce's having left Ireland forever so that he could become a writer was effectually the 'death' of his power to intervene willingly in the affairs of the Irish. Though it was not also necessarily the 'death' of his responsibility for them, his responsibility for them survives only insofar as what he wrote is read" (McMichael, p. 153-4).

"A common legend about the famous dead; another example of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, by which persons or situations repeat themselves" (Kiberd, p. 988).

6.928-948. Mr Bloom walked unheeded . . . Immortelles

"Against the insidious sentimentalizing of Hynes and Power and the funeral monuments, his insight is sharp and antiseptic. Surrounded by the 'stone hopes', hearts and hands frozen in useless grief, he perceives that garlands of bronze foil express nothing, that the transience of human grief is the condition of its value. The substance of life is the son, 'not the past she wanted back, waiting'" (Goldberg, p. 279).

"Joyce, like Flaubert himself, tended, in putting together literary sentences of a parodic intent, to make sure that, in many technical ways, they were polished and elegant. It is only in retrospect, in the context of what follows, that we fully realize what Joyce is doing. Bloom, remembering the actual social condition of Dignam, Dedalus, and others, immediately thinks, 'More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living' (6.930-31). It is a high point in adapting Flaubert's tart tone to another syntax and another country" (Houston, p. 40).

6.930. old Ireland's hearts and hands

"The figures 'praying with upcast eyes' on the tombstones combine with the Irish patriotism of the preceding discourse on Parnell to remind Bloom of the Irish nostalgic song 'Old Ireland's Hearts and Hands.' The song, 'sung with immense success' by Madame Marie Rose and Miss Bess Craig, is a sentimental song of Erin sung by an expatriate who yearns for his native country . . . The veneration of the dead Parnell, the dead country, and all of the departed souls is not, however, for Bloom. . . . As the prospective savior of his country, Bloom wastes little time on the traditional Irish occupation of feeding entirely on memory for whatever vitality life holds. Bloom's schemes, social and otherwise, for the salvation of the country lie in the economic improvement of the Irish in his own time and in the future . . . it is in the parallax and reconciliation of the opposites that the real salvation of the dead lies. Nowhere else is that reconciliation of opposites so apparent as when life is blended with death in Hades" (Bowen, Allusions, p. 116-117).

A song by Richard F. Harvey from W. W. Delaney, Delaney's Irish Song Book (New York, n.d.): "Oh Erin, home of lovely scenes, / Oh land of love and song, / In joy once more my fond heart leans / On thee so we and strong: / For like a restless bird I've strayed, / And oft on far-off strands / I dreamed of love knots years have made / With Ireland's hearts and hands. [Chorus:] O sweetheart Erin, good old land, / Though near or far I stray, / I love them all, thy heart and hand, / I love thy shamrock spray: / Old Ireland's hearts and hands, / Old Ireland's hearts and hands, / Oh sweetheart Eire, good old land, / I love thy hearts and hands." (Gifford, p. 123).

6.931. Pray for the repose of the soul

"The dead who are doing penance in purgatory before entrance into heaven are, according to Catholic doctrine, aided by the prayers of the living" (Gifford, p. 122).

6.933. All souls' day

In the Roman Catholic church, 2 November, a holy day for the liturgical commemoration of the souls of the faithful dead still in purgatory.

"Perhaps an echo from Ovid's description of the kingdom of the dead, a place which accepts all the dead ('sic omnes animas locus accipit') (Metamorphoses, 4.441)" (Senn, pp. 228-29).

6.933-34. Twenty-seventh . . . at his grave

Every 27 June Bloom visits his father's grave in Ennis.

6.934. Ten shillings for the gardener

Bloom reminds himself to tip the gardener at the cemetery.

6.937. who kicked the bucket

Slang for "died."

6.938. What they were

Paul van Caspel writes that Bloom "may have been thinking of certain Jewish burial customs. In Jewish cemetaries, the gravestones--simple enough in themselves--frequently carry long-winded inscriptions, full of praise and usually mentioning the deceased's profession or function in the community" (Van Caspel, pp. 97-98).

Van Caspel also notes Bloom's bias toward life and distrust of sacramental ornamentation, "features unknown in Jewish cemeteries, as Bloom may have remembered" (Van Caspel, p. 96).

"Joyce may also be alluding once again to Book XI of The Odyssey, to the moment when the shade of Elpenor requests that his grave be marked with a metonymic artifact [an oar] patently symbolizing his role and identity" (Devlin, p. 72).

6.938. wheelwright.

A person who makes or repairs (esp. wooden) wheels and wheeled vehicles (OED).

6.939. cork lino

A floor covering made by laying hardened linseed oil mixed with ground cork on a canvas backing.

Gerty McDowell's father "travels for" (sells) cork lino (10.1206-7).

6.939. paid five shillings in the pound

"Went bankrupt and could only pay each creditor one-quarter of what was owed" (Gifford, p. 123).

"Ever the realist, he realizes with wry humor that this alternative iconography might not necessarily be flattering, as in Dublin it would necessarily (and frequently) record not only employment but also occupational failure and debts" (Devlin, pp. 72-73).

6.940-41. Eulogy in a country . . . Thomas Campbell

Either a Bloomism or an apt mistake. Bloom refers to "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751), by the English poet Thomas Gray, not William Wordsworth (1770-1850) or Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), poet and critic. Though some critics call attention here to Bloom's "ignorance or vulgarity," this is not self-evidently a mistake or a Bloomer. "Eulogy" might be Bloom's allusive revision, or a riff, free play.

6.942-43. Old Dr. Murren's . . . called him home

Apparently that saying was Dr. Murren's cliche for death. For Dr Murren, see 8.397.

6.943. it's God's acre for them

A cemetary

"That is, for Protestants, since "God's acre" is a standard Englishman's phrase for a cemetery" (Gifford, p. 123).

"This has long been a set phrase for a churchyard. The earliest examples the OED cites say the phrase is of German origin. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem entitled 'God's Acre,' in which he says, 'I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls the burial-ground God's-Acre.'" (Thornton, pp. 104-105).

6.945. the Church Times

"A weekly Church of England newspaper, quite conservative and High Church in its views, but it did contain an impressive number of genteel personal want ads (as Bloom recalls)" (Gifford, p. 123).

6.948. Immortelles

"French: literally, 'the immortals'; the meaning here is of a plant whose flowers may be dried without losing their form or color" (Gifford, p. 123).

6.949. A bird sat tamely perched on a poplar branch.

"See Aeneid 6.203: 'two doves both sit on the tree, as is their custom'" (Senn, p. 231).

6.949. poplars

See note 6.486-89.

6.949-950, 957-958. like stuffed . . . would birds then come

"The phobic realization that likeness is never lifeness, that visible signifiers ultimately fail us, is the psychic subtext of Odysseus' futile embrace of the maternal specter. Joyce provides versions of this delusive Homeric shade, so visually present it almost passes for its referent, when Bloom briefly contemplates [these] two types of imaging that aspire to absolute mimetic accuracy [that is, the stuffed bird and the painting of the grapes], two forms that aim to trick the eye into mistaking the artifactual for the real (at least temporarily) . . . In both instances Bloom ultimately acknowledges the inviolable difference between the living real and the dead record of it" (Devlin, p. 73).

6.950. alderman Hooper

"Alderman John Hooper (from Cork) gave the Blooms a stuffed owl as a wedding present (17.1338-39). He was a real person and the father of Paddy Hooper, a reporter on the Freeman's Journal who is mentioned at 7.456" (Gifford, p. 123).

6.951. catapults

Slingshots.

6.953. chainies

China; bits of broken cups and saucers (DHE, p. 56).

6.954. the Sacred Heart that is: showing it

"Passing a statue of the Sacred Heart, Mr Bloom censures the anatomical inaccuracy of the sculptor, but himself boggles at a classical remeniscence" (Gilbert, p. 165).

"The Blessed (in 1904; since 1920, St.) Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-90) experienced repeated visions in which Jesus took his heart, showed it to her, and placed it in hers. Eventually she consented to establish the festival of the Sacred Heart (since 1882, the second Sunday in July) and the Litany of the Sacred Heart, a method for practicing Christian devotion" (Gifford, p. 123).

In 7.305-6 Bloom will recall this statue.

6.954-66. Sacred Heart . . . . remind you of the voice

"The desire for memory and the mourning implicit in the word yes set in motion an anamnesic machine. And its hypermnesic overacceleration. The machine reproduces the quick (le vif), it doubles it with its automaton. The example I have chosen offers the privilege of a double contiguity: from the word yes to the word voice and to the word gramophone in a sequence expressing the desire for memory, desire as memory of desire and memory for desire. It takes place in Hades, in the cemetery, at about 11 o'clock in the morning, the time reserved for the heart (that is, as Heidegger would put it again, the place reserved for memory that is retained and for truth), here in the sense of the Sacred Heart" (Derrida, p. 44).

6.954. Heart on his sleeve

Proverbial phrase, as in Othello, when Iago declares, "I am not what I am," and implies that when he seems outwardly what he is inwardly "I will wear my heart upon my sleeve / For daws to peck at" (Othello I.1.64-65).

The Othello reference provides a possible bridge to the later thought about birds pecking.

6.955-56. Ireland was dedicated to it.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "churches, countries, and even professions are often dedicated to a particular saint or emblem of divinity as a mark of special devotion. In 1897 Leo XIII declared 'devotion to the Sacred Heart' to be a characteristic religious movement of our time . . . Oftentimes, especially since about 1850, groups, congregations, and countries have consecrated themselves to the Sacred Heart, and in 1875 this consecration was made throughout the Catholic world." (CE, entry "Patron Saints). "Devotion to the love of Jesus Christ in so far as this love is recalled and symbolically represented to us by His heart of flesh" (CE, entry "Sacred Heart").

"Devoted to the Sacred Heart, Dublin wears this heart on its sleeve" (Tindall, p. 160).

6.957-59. Would birds then come . . . Apollo that was

"Bloom is thinking of the fifth century B.C. Greek painter Zeuxis, who was famed for his realistic depictions. Pliny, in his Natural History, tells several stories of his realistic work, including two about grapes. The first involves a competition with Parrhasius, in which Zeuxis painted grapes so realistically that birds tried to eat them; but he still lost to Parrhasius, who painted a curtain so skillfully that it deceived Zeuxis himself. Then Pliny says, 'It is said that Zeuxis also subsequently painted a Child Carrying Grapes, and when birds flew to the fruit with the same frankness as before, he strode up to the picture in anger with it and said, "I have painted the grapes better than the child, as if I had made a success of that as well, the birds would inevitably have been afraid of it"' (Book XXXV, sec. xxxvi). Bloom probably thinks of Apollo because of Apollodorus, an earlier realistic painter, of whom Zeuxis was a more brilliant successor" (Thornton, p. 105).

As Gifford notes, Bloom may also be confusing Zeuxis with the more famous painter Apelles. Senn writes that "the mixing of these names [Apelles and Apollo] is not unprecedented," citing an Italian nursery rhyme and a letter Joyce wrote in Italian to his daughter, Lucia: "Perhaps you have the ambition of making a collection of seven nurses' caps because you are the daughter of Apelles, son of Apollo" (Senn, 232).

6.960. How many!

C.f., Dante: "So long a file of people, I never should have believed death could have unmade so many souls" (Inferno, 3:55-57).

6.961. As you are now so once were we

A common epitaph.

In Circe Bella/o Cohen says to Bloom, "as they are now, so will you be," referring to her/his whores and anticipating Bloom's transformation into a woman.

6.962. Eyes, walk, voice.

"The relationship between Bloom's thoughts and the three human characteristics according to Ovid is pertinent here. Morpheus, the son of Somnus, is the god of dreams and appears to the sleeping in the form of a dead person. His strength comes from his ability to imitate people: 'The way of walking, the expression, the sound of the voice; he knows how to do that better than anyone' (Metamorphoses, 11.635-6)" (Senn, p. 233).

6.963. Have a gramophone

Bloom imagines means of reconnection between the dead and the living. "Bloom's whimsy itself is an extension of, and link with, Stephen's fantasy in Proteus" (Bell, p. 84).

Bloom "contemplates a problem that must have plagued Joyce while writing Ulysses in self-imposed exile from Dublin. Surrounded by the graves of the silent dead in Hades, Bloom ponders how to keep the memory of the dead alive . . . Appropriate to a chapter introducing the themes of death and resurrection, Bloom's musings unwittingly comment on Joyce's effort to resurrect a living Dublin and all its voices out of the silence of the past with nothing more than the ghostly graveyard of memory and the silence of print" (Thomas, pp. 149-150).

"The recording (grammo) of the voice (phone), which thereby acoustically surmounts distance and also preserves a voice for the future, was still relatively new as a practical method and still had a sort of mysterious technical charm to it. With an idea of this fascination with new technology, Bloom imagines the still unusual situation his great-grandfather might have faced as he stood in front of some such new appliance, hoping the gramophone would impart some sort of vital information to future generations but becoming discouraged in the end. Every transmission of sound imparts some sort of impurity, due to the scratch of the needle on the record ('Kraahraark') or perhaps a flawed groove ('krpthsth'). The recording also had its own manner of expression, like the word 'Hello!,' which represents only the semblance of human contact; the usual recordings used phrases like 'awfullygladaseeagain.' The inconsistencies are grotesque. also, the gretgranfather could neither have hoped to see his listeners nor take any pleasure from this communication, since he was already dead" (Senn, pp. 233-234).

"Even in the graveyard there are possibilities for recirculation . . . giving Bloom the idea of putting gramophones and telephones in every grave" (McGee, p. 31).

McMichael speculates, "Joyce may have had moments in which he felt that what he was leaving us in Ulysses was no likelier to elicit the Other's yes than was poor old greatgrandfather's final garble" (McMichael, p. 23).

6.964-967. remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face.

"These memorial technologies are often presented in Hades in ways that emphasize their distortional power: Joyce insistently highlights the gap between the representational shade and the real it purports to memorialize" (Devlin, p. 72).

6.973. An obese grey rat

"The main significance of which I take to be the unnerving horror Bloom does not feel (and which some of his critics do)" (Goldberg, p. 279).

This parallels Stephen's thought of "the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats" [3.289] (Brivic, p. 92).

"In Ulysses the rat serves to constantly undercut the impression of relative prosperity in the Dublin of 1904 . . . Indeed the [Great] Famine, like Bloom's rat, had a decidedly levelling effect on the population of Ireland, destroying familes from within and without regardless of social class. And like that rat, the Famine surfaced again and again (albeit rhetorically) in the Dublin of 1904" (Lowe-Evans, p. 121).

When Bloom spies the obese grey rat, he thinks it "Got wind of Dignam" (6.993), one of several links between Dignam and the "images of exhumation" in Hades (Rickard, p. 58).

6.974-75. the grey alive

Bloom is alert to signs of life; the rat's vitality stands out against the backdrop of death. For Joyce, even an obese, grey rat becomes a "good hiding place" for metaphorical treasure.

Thoughts of the "obese gray rat" recur to Bloom in 7.83, 11.1036, and 15.1256-7.

6.974. an old stager: greatgrandfather

"That is, a veteran, a person of experience" (Gifford, p. 124).

Bloom imagines the rat as a reincarnation of a hypothetical greatgrandfather.

"A few moments earlier Bloom had suggested putting 'a gramophone in every grave . . . Put on poor old greatgrandfather . . ." The verbal repetition intentionally deflates Bloom's scheme; 'greatgrandfather' has disappeared into the digestive tract of a rat" (Henke, p. 112).

6.975. plinth

Block of stone serving as base to a column, pedestal, statue, etc. (OED).

6.977-78. Robert Emery. Robert . . . wasn't he?

Bloom will think of Robert Emmet's famous last words, "let no man write my epitaph . . . . " in 11.1275.

"The prophet Tiresias--whom Odysseus went to consult in Hades--says nothing to Bloom in his disguise as Robert Emmet. All that Bloom meets is death, the failure of a pump--death, death, and more death" (Burgess, p. 149).

"Robert Emery's name reminds Bloom of Robert Emmet (1778-1803), an Irish patriot who attempted to get Napoleon's assistance for an Irish uprising. He led an attempt to seize Dublin Castle in 1803, but the help Napoleon (and Emmet's Irish allies) had promised did not materialize. Robert Kee remarks (The Green Flag [New York, 1972-3, p. 164) that 'the plan itself was reasonable and practical, its execution lamentable to the point of farce.' The revolt disintegrated into a riot in the course of which 'Lord Kilwarden, the Lord Chief Justice . . . was savagely piked to death' (p. 167). After a month underground Emmet was captured (because, legend has it, he returned to bid his fiancee, Sara Curran, farewell). He was hanged and beheaded in a brutally botched public execution. His fame was enhanced by his 'last words' (see 11.1275n). But the mystery remains: how and why did this disastrous farce get transformed into one of the most potent Irish-hero myths? As Kee puts it: 'Why was it Robert Emmet's portrait above all others that was to go up along with the crucifix in countless small homes in Ireland for over a century and may even be seen there still? . . . The proximity of the crucifix may provide a clue. The success of the Emmet myth lay in the very need to ennoble failure. For tragic failure was to become part of Ireland's identity, something almost indistinguishable from "the cause" itself' (p. 169). The whereabouts of Emmet's remains are unknown. After execution he was buried in Bully's Acre near Kilmainham Hospital in Dublin. Rumors abound that his remains were secretly removed to either St. Michan's Church in Dublin or Prospect Cemetery, Glasnevin. Both places have uninscribed tombstones that are said to mark his grave. In 1903, at the centennial of Emmet's death, the United Irishman carried a number of stories about renewed attempts to locate his grave; but its whereabouts are still a matter of conjecture" (Gifford, p. 124).

"The severed head was taken by the artist George Petrie, to make a death mask, and the body was coffined and buried in the public burying ground known as the Hospital Fields, though it was soon removed (pp. 352-53). Concerning its burial, Landreth says, 'Many places in Dublin claim the honor of holding Emmet's body: the graveyards of St. Michan's, St. Peter's and the vaults of St. Ann's. The quiet little burying-ground in the shadow of the church at Glasnevin, made famous by its association with Dean Swift, has a stone which is said to cover Emmet's body. But when investigations were made at these places about a hundred years after Emmet's death, nothing was found to confirm the rumors. In 1904 the vault of Dr. Trevor's family, in St. Paul's Church, King Street, Dublin, was opened. For a long time there had been a story that a headless body rested there. The Parish Registry had entries for only four bodies for this vault. The remains of five were found. One, enclosed in a thin penal shell, was the headless skeleton of a young man about Emmet's build' (p. 353). Bloom may be aware that during much of 1903 (the centennial of Emmet's death), the United Irishman had carried stories of the renewed attempts to locate Emmet's burial place" (Thornton, pp. 105-106).

6.982. meat gone bad

"As an atheist, Bloom has the bleak consolation of knowing that death is not an affront to any deeper belief in immortality, unlike those priests who oppose cremation since it involves the burning of a body that will be resurrected" (Kiberd, p. 989).

6.983. Voyages in China

"By 'Viator,' in Bloom's bookshelf (17.1379). The pseudonym Viator--'traveller'--was used by several travel writers at the turn of the century, but none of the standard-book catalogues lists this title by a Viator. One of the more prominent Viators was the Presbyterian missionary E. F. Chidell, and the missing Voyages in China might have been his, along with The Way-Farer: Ahica and National Regeneration (London, 1903) and Overland to Persia (London, 1906)" (Gifford, p. 124).

6.984. Cremation better.

"Minutius, the dead wife of Aeneas, was ceremonially burned (Aeneid, 6.212-235)" (Senn, p. 235).

6.984. Priests dead against it

"That is, against cremation because it implies a challenge to the doctrine that the flesh is to be resurrected on 'the last day' (Gifford, p. 124).

6.984. Devilling

"A 'devil' is a junior legal counselor who works for a barrister in the preparation of law cases; also the pun" (Gifford, p. 124).

6.985. Time of the plague. Quicklime fever pits.

"Bodies were burned or buried in pits with quicklime in an effort to forestall the contagion" (Gifford, p. 124).

6.986. Lethal chamber.

"Gas chamber for killing animals" (Senn, p. 235).

6.986. Ashes to ashes

From the English Book of Common Prayer, "Burial of the Dead. At the Grave": "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life."

"The Irish Book of Common Prayer is identical. Though the phrase 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' echoes several biblical passages (e.g., Genesis 18:27; Job 30:19; and Job 42:6), it apparently has no direct biblical source" (Thornton, p. 106).

6.987. Where is that . . . Eaten by birds

"After the Parsi custom of exposing the dead in towers. One of the books in Bloom's library contains an illustration of a Parsi tower: Frederick Deodati Thompson, In the Track the Sun: Diary of a Globe Trotter (London, 1893), p. 156" (Gifford, p. 125).

"The Towers of Silence, or Dakhmas, are the means of disposing of the dead in the Zoroastrian (Parsi) religion. The remains of the dead are taken into the Tower and left, and the flesh is soon devoured by vultures. Towers in large communities may have a constant attendance of birds" (Thornton, p. 106).

6.987. Parsee tower of silence

Parallels Stephen's "silent tower, entombing their blind bodies" [3.277] (Brivic, p. 92).

6.988. Drowning they say is the pleasantest

C.f., Stephen, "Seadeath, mildest of all deaths" (3.482).

In The Odyssey, Tiresias prophesies for Odysseus, "a seaborn death, soft as this hand of mist" (11:134-35; Fitzgerald, 201). However, it is not clear that this prophecy refers to drowning. In fact, Fagles' translation renders the prophecy in the exact opposite sense: "a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes" (11:154). It is a matter of scholarly debate as to whether Odysseus' death comes "from" the sea or "far from" the sea.

"The strong contrast with Stephen's fear of drowning is obvious: the best death for Bloom would be total submersion in the flux which is his comfort and Stephen's dread . . . There are strict limits to Bloom's powers of resurrection. He is (before meeting Stephen, at any rate) incapable of confronting his own personal traumas and of reemerging fully into the life around him" (Maddox, p. 57).

6.990-992. Wonder does the news go about . . . wouldn't be surprised.

Kiberd states that "this passage may have inspired Mairtin O Cadhain's Cre na Cille (1949), the greatest novel in the Irish language" (Kiberd, p. 989).

6.993-994. Saltwhite crumbling mush of corpse.

"Bloom's image approaches Stephen's thoughts about a drowned body: 'a swollen bundle . . . puffy face, saltwhite' (1.676-677): 'saltwhite' is similar to a Homeric epithet ('the winedark sea,' Odyssey, 1.78)" (Senn, p. 236).

6.995. The gates glimmered in the front

At the end of Book 6 of the Aeneid, Aeneas makes his way toward the exit from the accompanied by the Sibyl and the shade of his father, Anchises: "There are two gates of Sleep, one said to be of horn, whereby the true shades pass with ease, the other all white ivory agleam without a flaw, and yet false dreams are sent through this one by the ghosts to the upper world. Anchises now, his last instructions given, took son and Sibyl there and let them go by the Ivory Gate" (Aeneid, 893-99).

6.995. Back to the world again

"The hero has made a passage and returned, descended and reascended" (Bell, 86). "Toward the end of Hades, Bloom's thoughts focus on different gradations of illusion that are possible in art. His thoughts reflect the narrator's double focus, the manner in which it invites the reader both to become intimate with Bloom as a presence and to view him as the effect of the teller's language, even in the initial style" (Riquelme, p. 181).

"Bloom's actual journey so far has brought him slowly from the bed of potential feminine fertility to the cemetery, from contemplating bubs at the bed-side to contemplating maggots at the grave-side. Later, in the Sirens episode, there is to be a counter-balancing journey across Dublin, rapid and cocksure, made by Boylan to the bed which Bloom has vacated" (Blamires, p. 43).

"He pulls himself together as he moves towards the glimmering gates. These are no longer the gates of Dis; they might be the gates of what Stephen called the 'allwombing tomb'" (Ellman, Ulysses on the Liffey, p. 51).

6.996. Enough of this place.

"Bloom experiences the pull back to life, and will now move from cemetary to maternity hospital later in the day" (Kiberd, p. 989).

6.997. Mrs Sinico's funeral

"Emily Sinico's death by accident in 'A Painful Case,' Dubliners, is a near-suicide occasioned by her alcoholism, which was occasioned in turn by disappointment in love" (Gifford, p. 125).

Mrs. Sinico "was buried on 17 October of the previous year (17.1454)" (Senn, p. 237).

6.997. The love that kills

"Though the idea of a love that kills is quite common, there may be some echo here of the well-known lines in Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' (1898): 'Yet each man kills the thing he loves . . .' (stanza 7)" (Thornton, pp. 106-107).

See 3.451. Stephen refers to "Wilde's love that dare not speak its name."

"Bloom's father killed himself for love of his dead wife: another case of a living being fixating on the dead" (Kiberd, p. 989).

"Virag is not a unique instance of the love that kills: both Bloom and Stephen are haunted by their love of the dead. This is the most terrible opiate of all in Ulysses: the living are drugged by their allegiance to the dead. If Joyce's mythic vision has the archetypes of the past surviving into the present, his characters carry about with them their own ghosts from the past" (Maddox, p. 53).

6.998-1002. scraping up the earth at night . . . after death named hell

More reminders, as John Rickard notes (6.872, 6.816) that "the dead will not stay peacefully at rest . . . Appropriately, a number of these images of exhumation involve Paddy Dignam, who is buried in ther Hades episode but reappears in one form or another in Bloom's thoughts throughout the day" (Rickard, p. 58).

6.999. fresh buried females

"C.f. Stephen's thoughts, chapter three, and his riddle in chapter two" (Kiberd, p. 989).

6.1000-1001. I will appear to you after death.

"These threats of haunting simulacra are explicitly marked as visual assertions, as refusals of the deceased to accept their specular erasure. As returns of the repressed, ghosts can materialize in varying shades, some psychically dim and 'light' in their visual affects, others psychically intence and 'dark'" (Devlin, p. 74).

6. 1001-1002. There is another world after death named hell.

C. f., Dante: "There is a place in Hell called Malebolge" (Inferno, 18:1).

6.1002. that other world she wrote

I.e. Martha Clifford; see 5.241-59.

Bloom recalls Martha's typographical error for "word" (5.245) Bloom doesn't like "that other world" either, "but both he and the reader are often troubled with intrusive intimations of it which brush and flicker across their disturbed vision" (Adams, p. 104).

"Not even Odysseus or Falstaff enunciated the comic credo so forcefully as Joyce's hero . . . Bloom surely takes heart from his descent; he has gone down to the depths and returned with a touch of comic grace" (Bell, 86).
"Bloom overlooks the spiritual world because he is lost in the material world, while Stephen rejects the world for the word. And so Bloom gets a letter from Martha Clifford containing the misprint . . . and when Stephen asks the object of his spiritual desire for 'the word known to all men' [3.435], his ghostly mother answers contrarily, 'I pray for you in my other world' . . . . The subject of Ulysses is neither the word nor the world, but something between them, just as it is neither Bloom nor Stephen, but someone between them" (Brivic, p. 92).

6.1004. this innings

"A cricket inning, much more extended than one in baseball" (Gifford, p. 125).

6.1003-4. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds

Echoes Matthew 9:22: "Let the dead bury their dead."

6.1005. warm fullblooded life

"Bloom's message from death's domain is a renewed preoccupation with life as he emerges with a small, but for him, meaningful triumph, valiantly ready to resume the occupation of living . . . " (Bowen, p. 461).

"The key to [Bloom's] rebound and his opting for life is not to be found in any one attitude, but . . . in a number of atomistic assertions which gradually gain in strength. Only at the end of the chapter can Bloom say, fully and convincingly, 'They are not going to get me . . . fullblooded life'" (Maddox, p. 54).

"The larger pattern is recurrent and insistent in Ulysses. Whenever Bloom dwells on corruption he demands renewal. In Hades he despairs of corpses and returns to live bodies" (Seidel, p. 57).

"To analyze the full significance of this--especially of 'the love that kills'--would be to analyze the total meaning of the chapter itself, including the accumulating significance of woman as wife, widow, and mother; of unity and isolation in the family; of the sense of time and the conventionalities of death; of all those values, spiritual though not perhaps Christian, engaged and realized by Bloom himself; and including, finally, Menton's 'hate at first sight' and the silent, humble authority Bloom has assumed" (Goldberg, p. 280).

"On the primitive level of sense experience, [Bloom] is working toward an ethic of love, compassion, and charity. Bloom delights in social contract, and he intuitively believes that salvation might be found through the physical and spiritual 'warmth' of other human beings. He is beginning to articulate the philosophy of caritas that he later will preach in Cyclops and will embrace in Ithaca, along with equanimity" (Henke, p. 114).

6.1006. Martin Cuningham emerged . . .talking gravely.

"I think we are meant to admire Bloom’s capacity to rouse himself . . . from a morbidity that other Dubliners are prone to, a morbidity indicated by the description of Martin Cunningham . . . While Cunninham and the other Dubliners are ‘grave,’ Bloom is able to rebound and assert a joyful aptitude" (Sicari, p. 60).

6.1007. Solicitor

A legal practitioner properly qualified to deal with conveyancing, draw up wills, etc. (OED).

6.1007. Menton, John Henry

Menton is "representative of the best in Ireland . . . one of Dublin's . . . important public officials" (Sultan, p. 100).

6.1008. affidavits.

Sworn statements in writing.

6.1010. Tantalus glasses

"The OED defines a tantalus as a stand containing cut-glass decanters which, though apparently free, cannot be removed until the grooved bar which engages the stoppers is raised" (Thornton, p. 107).

"Tantalus, mythical king of Lydia, was one of those whom Ulysses saw in torment during his trip to Hades (The Odyssey, book XI). Tantalus' punishment for his various sins against the gods was that, though he stood chin deep in water, he was tortured by thirst, for whenever he tried to drink, the water fled him. Also, the trees around him were filled with fruit, but when he reached for it, the wind tossed the boughs away" (Thornton, p. 107).

6.1010. Got his rag out

Slang for got annoyed, mad, or angry.

6.1011-12. Sailed inside him . . . the bias

"A player scores in bowls by placing a ball closer to the target-ball, or 'jack,' than his opponent does. Apparently Bloom put an accidental twist on the ball that made it curve ('the bias') inside Menton's, though Menton's ball blocked straight balls from the jack" (Gifford, p. 125).

"Ironic, too, if Menton managed to 'get inside' Bloom as a lover of Molly" (Kiberd, p. 989).

"Bloom won the goodwill of Mary Tweedy from his rivals in a game" of chance or skill. "The great Ajax rode with Odysseus under the Trojan command in a battle for the weapons of Achilles. Odysseus won thanks to unfair intervention by the goddess Athena" (Senn, p. 237).

6.1013. lilac-tree, laughing

Cf, 14:1362, 17:467, 18:1311, other glimpses of Mathew Dillon's party at Roundtown.

6.1013. Floey Dillon

Married daughter of Mat Dillon.

6.1015. dinge

"A dent" (DHE, 91).

6.1016-1018. Excuse me, sir . . . Your hat is a little crushed.

"Good intentions and petty humiliations set the pattern of [Bloom's] behavior" (Levin, 113).

Groden observes "Bloom's tendency to correct other people and to lecture them" (Groden, p. 173).

Bloom "deliberately tries to woo Menton's favor by sniveling . . . one is repelled by such sycophancy. . . If a helpless little dog is kicked, one pities it; but if a man makes himself a helpless little dog and gets kicked, one can only scorn him" (O'Brien, p. 122).

One might more justly read this as Bloom's matter-of-fact attempt to let bygones be bygones.

"Bloom means to be helpful here but could stand accused of lacking tact. The trilby hat of the 1890s was in semiotic terms a symbol of male authority, giving men extra height. Women in that decade began to wear them . . . as a challenge to that order. The dented hat . . . later became a symbol of crushed male authority. Bloom . . . would normally keep his reservations to himself; but relaxing, perhaps, after a period of long strain, he doesn't. He speaks aloud what ten minutes earlier would have been contained at the level of thought, with disastrous results" (Kiberd, pp. 989-990).

"Menton is a possible former lover of Molly. Hence Bloom's comment may be interpreted as covert aggression based on the desire for revenge" (Kiberd, p. 990).

"Bloom has the desire to set everything right, to improve everything, although he is hardly ever successful. Ulysses . . . takes this characteristic and constantly reexamines it, complementing it, looking at it from different angles, and approaching it in different ways" (Senn, pp. 237-238).

6.1025. John Henry Menton jerked his head down in acknowledgment

"Toward the end of Book 11 of The Odyssey (11:541ff.), Odysseus encounters the shades of several of his former comrades in arms, including Ajax, who refuses to speak to Odysseus because he is still 'burning' (angry) over the fact that in the contest over who was to bear Achilles' arms after his death (i.e., who was to be the leading hero of the Greeks), the Lady Thetis (Achilles' mother) and Athena awarded the honor to Odysseus. Ajax then, according to 'The Little Iliad,' 'becomes mad and destroys the herd of the Achaeans and kills himself' (trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica [London, 1914], p. 509)" (Gifford, p. 125).

6.1026. Thank you, he said shortly.

"Odysseus tries to reconcile with Ajax in the underworld, but Ajax refuses to part with his long-standing resentment: 'Only the soul of Ajax . . . stands in front of the victory I had gained over him . . . . But he gives me no answer, only goes after other souls' (Odyssey, 11.570)" (Senn, p. 238).

"Menton's 'thank you' anticipates later moments in the book, such as Parnell's reported thanks to Bloom, who handed his hat back to him in a jostling crowd, or Stephen's response to similar help from Bloom" (Kiberd, p. 990).

For an instance of "history repeating itself with a difference," see 16.1523-5.

6.1027. chapfallen

With chap or jaw hanging down. Dejected, dispirited, crest-fallen (OED). Hamlet uses this term at the grave of Ophelia, V.1.

Bloom will continue to think, chapfallen, about what he might have said to Menton to improve the situation (7.171-3).

"As it began with an epiphany of Bloom's normal relation to his 'friends,' the chapter ends with an epiphany of that which Bloom's second class status represents--the unjust rejection of him by Catholic Ireland, of which he supposes himself a part" (Sultan, p. 100).

6.1028. laying down the law

"Like the judge Minos, who sentenced the dead (Odyssey, 11.570)" (Senn, p. 238).

6.1029. sappyhead

Foolish person (OED).

6.1031. Oyster eyes

"John Henry Menton, with 'oyster eyes,' is one of the city's living dead. He gazes backward to the time years ago when he took a 'rooted dislike' to Bloom over a petty bowling game . . . Menton is immersed in his own grave: he has become enslaved to the grudge he bears and to a spiritual breakdown of the heart" (Henke, p. 114).

Senn notes that the phrase is repeated in 10.1230: "winebig oyster eyes" (Senn, p. 238).

Also, see note 6.313.

6.1031-1032. dawns on him

"At the end of Hades, Bloom emerges from the Stygian darkness to ascend through the gates to a kind of new birth, which is substantiated by the imagery of starting and of delivery at the beginning of the seventh chapter" (Ellmann, p. 53).

"What [Bloom] finds there, though scarcely agreeable, neither harrows nor inspires him in any personal or intimate way" (Adams, p. 91).

"Still, it's undeniably a test of moral courage that he has passed, and the more impressive because . . . he is haunted throughout the chapter by an amazing assortment of ghosts, spooks, and hobgoblin doppelgangers" (Adams, p. 99).

In Hades, Bloom "passes (partly by pluck, partly by luck, and perhaps partly by sheer insensitivity) a psychic test of sufficient seriousness to put him on the way toward equipoise with the Stephen Dedalus of Proteus " (Adams, p. 114).

"The pattern of descent and reascent, that jocoserious sine curve, not only recalls the lost but revives the living. In Hades Bloom descends into the gloom and returns, enabled by the experience" (Bell, p. 84).

"Thus Bloom imagines a petty kind of revenge, unconsciously parodying Christian morality" (O'Brien, p. 123).

6.1032. Get the pull over him

Procure an obligation. "Bloom, forever shrewd, knows the outsider's art of building up favors owing to himself" (Kiberd, p. 990).

One example of many ways that "Bloom points the way to a renewal–of sorts–for us all, to the possibility of new life in an impoverished world" (Levitt, p. 47).

6.1033. How grand we are this morning!

"Joyce momentarily opens the imagined world of his book to include us, as . . . with 'How grand we are this morning!' (The exclamation point in the Gabler edition emphasizes the exhilaration of Bloom and his creator.) The 'we' includes the narrative presence--who is enjoying his tour de force of equating Bloom's mood with the traditional descent into hell as he progresses through the cemetery while at Paddy Dignam's funeral. But the 'we' also includes the reader who has accompanied Bloom on his depressing journey, and learned to share Bloom's kindly, humane way of reading life in contrast to Stephen's" (Schwarz, p. 62).

"[Menton's] haughtiness is the haughtiness of dead Ajax in The Odyssey. At the same time, the genuinely dead--Daniel O'Connell and Parnell--join the Greek fellowship as Heracles and Agamemnon" (Burgess, p. 148).

"Bloom's confrontation with death in Hades is prolonged and honest, but when he leaves the cemetary he is calm, even--after his encounter with Menton--perky. The key to his rebound and his opting for life is not to be found in any one attitude, but . . . in a number of atomistic assertions which gain gradually in strength" (Maddox, p. 54).

GENERAL COMMENTS AND APPROACHES TO HADES

Homeric Correspondences

In Book XI of The Odyssey, Ulysses and his men leave Circe's island of Aeaea and, aided by a steady wind sent by the goddess, sail to the underworld so that Ulysses might speak with Tiresias, the blind prophet. When he reaches the spot Circe had described, Odysseus offers a herd of sheep as sacrifice to all the dead, and vows to slaughter his best ram for Tiresias upon returning home. As the blood sinks into the earth, a host of shades, still bearing the final wounds they had incurred in life, rises out of the earth, terrifying Odysseus with their "unearthly cries" (XI.48).

The first shade to approach Odysseus is Elpenor, who had fallen drunkenly to his death from Circe's roof, and whose body remains, unburied, in the enchantress's house. Odysseus marvels that the dead Elpenor, traveling "on foot," has arrived in Hades ahead of the hero's ship. Elpenor then begs Odysseus to return to Aeaea and give him a proper burial as soon as he leaves the underworld. Odysseus promises to do so. Tiresias then emerges and drinks the sacrificial blood. Thus fortified, he warns Odysseus that his voyage home will be a difficult one, as Poseidon is "still enraged because [Odysseus] blinded the Cyclops, his dear son" (XI.115-16). Odysseus and his men will, however, arrive home safely if they refrain from violating the cattle of Helios, the sun god. Tiresias concludes his prophesy by telling Odysseus he will have a "gentle, painless death" (XI.154).

Odysseus' mother Anticleia then comes forth and drinks the blood, telling her astonished son that she died from longing for him. Odysseus vainly tries three times to embrace his mother, but laments that "three times she fluttered through my fingers, sifting away like a shadow, dissolving like a dream" (XI.236-37). A procession of women follows Anticleia, and Odysseus speaks with them individually, allowing them one at a time to drink the sacrificial blood. After Persephone calls the women away, Agamemnon appears. Trying but failing to embrace Odysseus, he mournfully tells his friend of the "wretched, ignominious death" (XI.466) he suffered at the hands of his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover.

More soldiers follow: Achilles, Patroclus, Antilochus, and Ajax, the last of whom still refuses to speak with Odysseus, having lost the competition for Achilles' armor. Odysseus tries to reconcile with his friend, but Ajax refuses the gesture and remains silent. He then sees Minos, Orion, Tityus, Tantalus, and the wretched Sisyphus, forced eternally to push a boulder up a hill that it eternally rolls down. Lastly, he sees Heracles, who tells Odysseus that he too visited the kingdom of the dead when he was alive; his twelfth and final task was to capture Cerberus, watchdog of Hades, and bring him to earth. A horde of shades then swarms around Odysseus who, "panicked now" (XI.725) and fearing for his life, runs back to his ship, and to the land of the living.

Specific Homeric Correspondences

the four rivers of Hades [Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, Pyriphlegethon] : the Dodder, the Grand and Royal Canals, and the Liffey;

Sisyphus: Martin Cunningham;

Cerberus [the two- or three-headed dog that fawns on new arrivals in Hades but that also prevents their escape]: Father Coffey;

Hades, the god who rules the underworld: Caretaker [John O'Connell];

Hercules: Daniel O'Connell;

Elpenor: Dignam;

Agamemnon: Parnell;

Ajax: Menton.

Virgilian Correspondences

Aeneas' visit to the underworld is recounted in Book VI of the Aeneid. Upon arrival at Cumae, Aeneas and his crew go immediately to the temple that Daedalus had constructed for Apollo after escaping Minos' tyranny. Aeneas's closest friend, "the faithful Achates," goes before Aeneas and the rest of the crew, returning with the Sibyl, a high priestess through whom Apollo speaks. Possessed by the god, the Sibyl instructs Aeneas to offer a prayer to Phoebus quickly, lest he be denied entrance to the world below. She tells him also to find the bough from Juno's sacred golden tree, and to lay to rest his unburied friend.

Aeneas discovers moments later that this "friend" is Misenus, who has died at the hands of Triton, whom he challenged to a musical competition. After performing Misenus' funeral rites and finding the golden bough, Aeneas enters a cavern, emitting "deathly exhalations" (VI.241-42), that leads to the underworld. The Sibyl leads him through a passage filled with the shades of countless and terrifying monsters toward Charon, boatman of Hades.

A horde of souls comes "streaming to the banks" (VI.309), pleading to be ferried over the river. The Sibyl explains that these are the souls of unburied men, doomed to wander aimlessly for one hundred years before they may rest in Hades, unless they are given proper burials. Aeneas meets Palinurus, who recounts the story of his death at the hands of savages on the shores of Italy. Palinurus asks Aeneas to try to find his body and to bury him, or to take him across the river with him, but the Sibyl assures Palinurus that "neighboring folk in cities up and down the coast" (VI.377-78) shall bury him and build on that site a sacrificial temple.

Charon, placated by the golden bough, leads the two to the opposite shore, where the three-headed dog Cerberus growls at them. The Sibyl tosses him a biscuit made of "honey and drugged meal" (VI.427), and she and Aeneas enter as the dog nods drowsily. The two walk past the cries of infant souls to the Fields of Mourning, where Aeneas meets Dido, whom he had abandoned and who refuses to speak with him, despite his tearful apologies. As Aeneas speaks with the shade of his friend Deiphobus, the path diverges; to the left lies Tartarus, and to the right, Elysium. The Sibyl describes the horrid punishments of Tartarus, and then, going "faster" (VI.630), she and Aeneas enter through the right hand gate, "to places of delight . . . . /Where souls take ease amid the Blessed Groves" (VI.639-40).

Aeneas finds his father Anchises and tries, like Odysseus with his mother, "three times/ To throw his arms around his father's neck," but "Three times the shade untouched slipped through his hands, /Weightless as wind and fugitive as a dream" (VI.703-6). Anchises shows Aeneas the souls of his future sons, soon to be bathed in the Lethe and reincarnated, telling his son both "of glory in the years to come" and "of wars that he must fight" (VI.885-86). Anchises then leads Aeneas and the Sibyl through one of the two gates of Sleep, the ivory gate of false dreams, and Aeneas returns to his ship and crew.

Critical Comments on Joyce's Classical Correspondences

In Hades, Odysseus learns his fate and that of his companions. The chapter is "particularly rich" in Homeric and Virgilian parallels (Adams, p. 95).

Hades "contains the most elaborate Homeric scaffolding: in the Linati scheme of the episode, for instance, the list of Homeric ‘persons’ for whom Joyce created modern equivalents is the longest in the entire outline" (Devlin, p. 85).

"A strongly Homeric flavour is provided by the Hades episode, which incorporates allusions to the four rivers of Hades and to Elpenor, analogue for the deceased Patrick Dignam" (Wright, p. 108).

"The Homeric parallel is worked out at considerable length in this chapter, but it is no mere game. It lends a kind of sempiternal dignity to the naturalism of the cemetery scene: it binds together sundry broodings on death" (Burgess, p. 148).

Gilbert remarks that the Homeric allusions in Hades are "more easily recognizable, nearer the surface, than the symbolic recalls in other episodes. This comparative directness of allusion may be ascribed to the near affinity of the ancient and modern narratives, each of which records a visit to the abode of the dead--the domain of Hades, Glasnevin cemetery" (Gilbert, p. 167).

"The importance of the [Homeric] parallel in Hades lies in the comic disparity between the tragic grandeur of the Greek underworld, where fallen heroes glide in and out with ghostly solemnity, and this Dublin cemetery, where Joyce makes sport of Irish funereal rhetoric and ritual" (O'Brien, p. 125).

"Of all the critical clichés inspired by Ulysses, none is more persistent than the belief that this is a novel whose characters and events are derived from a unique amalgam of myths and that its central myth is provided by the Odyssey of Homer" (Levitt, p. 34). "Noting both the parallels to Gilbert-Gorman and the omissions . . . [scrutinizing] all the names and events listed on one or the other or on both of the charts, I could not help but notice that many of the alleged parallels did not, in practice, have very much to do with the novel that I was reading. Linkages which at first seemed clearcut–as presented on the charts–proved on closer reading not so convincing at all . . . the Odyssey is really no more than the scaffolding for Ulysses, and only when it is removed can the glories of the new structure shine forth. . . ." (Levitt, pp. 30, 32).

Joycean Geograpy

"In Hades, like it or not, we are in that other world, the most renowned of 'other worlds.' Paddy Dignam's funeral procession makes the first sweep of the day through Dublin from Sandymount to the Glasnevin cemetery in the extreme northwest of the city . . . All northwest movement is elegiac" (Seidel, pp. 156-157).

Here Joyce "plots the funeral route carefully across Dublin. The coach in which Bloom, Martin Cunningham, Simon Dedalus, and John Powers ride begins its course along Irishtown road paralleling the strand, and passes Stephen Dedalus crossing Watery lane at around 11:00 A.M. Turning from Irishtown road, the coach proceeds northwest to Ringsend road, crosses the Dodder River bridge, crosses the Grand Canal bridge, runs along Great Brunswick street until bearing north in the heart of the Hibernian metropolis at Sackville (O'Connell) street, crosses the Liffey, turns northwest on Berkeley road, catching a glimpse of Bloom's Eccles street and the Mater death ward, turns again on the North Circular road, crosses the Royal Canal, and finally arrives at the cemetery on Finglas road. The procession reaches Hades by crossing the four rivers under Lake Avernus, listed in the Gilbert-Gorman schema as the rivers and canals of Dublin. In mythological parlance, these rivers are connected to Oceanus at the world's edge. The movement across and towards Dublin's northwest boundary is every citizen's ultimate journey. Dublin's surface, at once the Peloponnese, the Mediterranean, and Ithaca, is now a version of the other world. Even Sackville street has a "Dead side"--its west side, significantly--which Irishmen, in an earlier time, avoided because English soldiers traditionally held to the west side of the street" (Seidel, pp. 158-159).

"In Hades, the turn toward the east, toward life, comes late in the episode" (Seidel, p. 161).

The direction of the funeral cortege cuts "north-west across the city to reverse the viceregal cavalcade's gesture in Wandering Rocks, south-east across the city" (Kenner, 1980, pp. 26-27).

"Yet Joyce’s city is not all of Dublin. As we follow lower-middle-class rate salesman Leopold Bloom and fallen, almost classless, would-be writer Stephen Dedalus on their wanderings through then beautiful Dublin (aesthetes both, they seem not to notice the beauty), we perceive that theirs is only a part of Georgian Dublin. The city which Joyce has preserved for us . . . is essentially a lower-middle-class city, inbred, decaying, unaware that this will be the last generation in this part of Ireland for the Empire which built this capital and kept hostage its people. There is no hint of any of this in Ulysses. It is not as social historian that we read Joyce" (Levitt, p. 264).

Joycean Arrangment: Comparisons among Hades and other episodes

Hades and Proteus are each "a quest for information--from Proteus and Tiresias respectively" (Sultan, p. 103).

" . . . scrupulous attention to humanlife as it exists in space and time must end in death, so Hades functions as the counterpart to Proteus and as the end–the funeral, if you will–of the purely nvelistic part of Ulysses" (Sicari, p. 58).

"Because this chapter parallels Proteus, Joyce establishes a subtle counterpoint" (Ellmann, p. 47). Ellmann elaborates patterns which "animate the two triads with which Ulysses begins" (Ellmann, p. 53). For example, in Hades "Bloom reminds us, as Stephen had reminded us earlier, that in the midst of life we are in death" (Ellmann, p. 55).

"While Stephen is at the beach, around eleven a.m., Bloom is at Glasnevin cemetery for Paddy Dignam's funeral, so that the young man confronts the symbol of birth at the same time that the older one encounters those of death" (Brivic, p. 91).

Hades, of course, is episode 6. Joyce would have read Augustine's reminder, "We should not underestimate the significance of number, since in many passages of sacred scripture numbers have meaning for the conscientious interpreter." Late in life, commenting on the effects of his Jesuitical training, Joyce remarked, "I have learned to arrange things so that they are easy to survey and judge."

"It's arguable that every third chapter in Ulysses is a particularly strong, rich, or vivid one . . . Hades stands out from its immediate neighbours (Calypso and Lotus Eaters on one side, Aeolus and Lestrygonians on the other) as darker and more lyrical in its feeling, more structured and less desultory in its action" (Adams, p. 114).

Bloom's first three episodes move "from his relative solitude in Calypso to his occasional meeting with acquaintances in Lotus Eaters, and finally to his 'public' self in Hades, where he finds himself among unfriendly Dubliners who themselves usurp a great deal of the narrator's time and attention and where, for the first time since he entered the book, he moves out of the narrator's range of perception . . . In this second grouping of the opening episodes, the first three move progressively inward; then the second three move out again" (Groden, p. 31).

Hades is also the mirror image of Lotus Eaters in that "death itself is a powerful opiate" (Maddox, p. 52).

"Ironically, the languid, suspended flower [at the end of Lotus Eaters] points the way to Hades: the funeral, the cemetery. The transformation of the body into a symbol, a signifier, in the womb of warmth, is also a descent into the tomb" (McGee, p. 30).

"The transition from the preceding chapter's concluding image couldn't be neater: from womb to tomb, from pots to the potting of the dead. The function of the pots of Hades is mainly to seal things off. The action begins in a box on wheels and moves to a coffin, and throughout is full of enclosures and acts of enclosing" (Gordon, p. 53).

The two episodes "split up the unitary self in Calypso. Lotus Eaters singles out and exaggerates the balmy, paradisiacal visions of the East which Bloom imagined in Calypso. Hades tempts him to submit to the countervailing, wasteland vision" (Maddox, p. 54).

Seidel stresses several links between Hades and Circe, to elaborate "the process of cyclic renewal" (Seidel, p. 217).

Riquelme also stresses "the close connection" between Hades and Circe (Riquelme, p. 235).

"The Circe episode was conflated by some early critics (cf. Gilbert, 320) with Hades in part no doubt because it is a ghost story . . . Joyce has bifurcated the hero's descent to the otherworld, representing the primary encounter with the dead in Hades and reserving the testing and spiritual crisis of the hero for Circe" (Tymoczko, p. 201).

"The highly subtle anatomy of the human condition that begins in these [early] chapters lays the groundwork for what will follow. In Lotus Eaters and Hades, in Lestrygonians, and to some extent in Aeolus, we are primed almost without our awareness toward sympathy with the human race. So when humanness is attacked and finally abandoned, we draw support and sympathy not just for the humanity of Bloom and Stephen, but from the picture of life that is shown in these early chapters" (French, p. 92).

"This visit to Hades also brings stories of Dubliners to mind. Like them, it is an epiphany, showing Dublin forth and up. . . . however, this chapter differs from those stories in being centered in an outsider's experience. The connection of lotus-eating and Hades is logical. We pass by an easy transition from corpus to corpse and from Plumtree's Potted Meat to Paddy Dignam in his coffin. 'A corpse is meat gone bad,' thinks Mr. Bloom" (Tindall, p. 159).

"It becomes obvious as we read past the opening sections that the stream of consciousness techniques must not be understood as providing some final reality in which we can centre the text but, as Joyce told Gilbert, the bridge across which he could march his troops; the troops in question being so many different discourses. Indeed, we can read Ulysses from Telemachus to Hades as a demonstration of subjectivity, as a pattern of languages constantly appropriating new discourses and losing others" (MacCabe, p. 117).

"The pattern of revival that begins to enforce itself in Proteus gathers momentum and power in Hades.. . . Bloom's capacity for recuperation [is] a comic trait that is most rigorously tested and forcefully affirmed in Hades. . . As Bloom moves from the 'womb' at the end of Lotus Eaters to the 'tomb' of Hades, his mood oscillates markedly. In this episode the hero confronts a challenge to his instinctive acceptance of flux, the body, the stream of life. Intractable realities associated with tragedy and satire figure prominently and balance comic optimism: decay vs. sensuality, termination vs. continuity, despair vs. hope, death vs. life, distance vs. connection, loss vs. return. Joyce typically views things as provisional contraries, but ultimately suggests that clear-cut dichotomies are much more closely connected than previously assumed . . . It is a severe test from which Bloom emerges a bit steeled or (in keeping with the organ of the episode) heartened" (Bell, p. 81).

Hades takes "care not to pre-empt the sinister, violent, and macabre tones that will be needed at the end of the book. Hades is preparation and amplification, perhaps initiation; it is not climax" (Adams, p. 92).

Themes and Narrative Techniques in Hades

"The real contrast comes with Hades where Bloom's voice, though still dominant, is supplemented by dialogue. Here his humor becomes distinctly morbid and his voice increasingly subjective. The public and private rhythms are boldly juxtaposed and the narrator once more stands above the scene registering the action and moving out into the world so that other characters can comment on Bloom. Thus for the first time [Joyce] introduces a secondary dramatic dimension" (Hayman, p. 80).

"I believe that there is no narration in Ulysses except in those areas clearly marked ‘narration’ (as in Cyclops, for instance . . . The Joyce of Ulysses is never himself a narrator, never speaking in his own voice, not in judgment, not even descriptively. We must not confuse his characters’ occasional narration with his" (Levitt, pp. 154, 158).

"Joyce’s omniscient presentation often involves authorial descrption of what the character is immediately experiencing but does not articulate . . . These early episodes, then, involve a voice distinguishable from that of the characters; that voice provides not only exposition, but an account of the characters’ thoughts and feelings; and it involves qualitative and evaluative terms that cannot be ascribed to the characters. It has, that is, the hallmarks of authorialomniscience" (Thornton, pp. 49-50).

"The central, interrelated themes of the chapter--the cycle of life and death (and the role of womankind in both), the forms of death, the state of Ireland, the universal isolation of the individual--ramify into almost all the details" (Goldberg, p. 272).

"The structure of the chapter is basically a development of moral awareness--Bloom's in the first instance, ours in the last . . . [Bloom develops from] very largely a passive reflector of the casual passing scene . . . [to] a reflector more conscious, more alert . . . He penetrates further into the given object and focuses perceptions of value [and] registers the significance" (Goldberg, pp. 274-275).

"Hades deserves special attention as the last of the episodes of Ulysses given over almost completely to naturalistic depiction of the events of the novel, and as such it is fitting that it revolve around the theme of death, which is the limit of naturalism and sothe limit of the novel as genre" (Sicari, p. 58).

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