Ulysses

by James Joyce

Through the open window of the church the fragrant incense was wafted and with it the fragrant names of her who was conceived without stain of original sin, spiritual vessel, pray for us, honourable vessel, pray for us, vessel of singular devotion, pray for us, mystical rose.

Wonderful eyes they were, superbly expressive, but could you trust them?

His dark eyes fixed themselves on her again drinking in her every contour, literally worshipping at her shrine. If ever there was undisguised admiration in a man’s passionate gaze it was there plain to be seen on that man’s face. It is for you, Gertrude MacDowell, and you know it.

She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely! O so soft, sweet, soft! Then all melted away dewily in the grey air: all was silent. Ah!

Long day I’ve had. Martha, the bath, funeral, house of keys, museum with those goddesses, Dedalus’ song. Then that bawler in Barney Kiernan’s.

Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.

Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his mother’s womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for to go as he came.

And sir Leopold that was the goodliest guest that ever sat in scholars’ hall and that was the meekest man and the kindest that ever laid husbandly hand under hen and that was the very truest knight of the world one that ever did minion service to lady gentle pledged him courtly in the cup.

To whom young Stephen had these words following, Murmur, sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent now glorify their Maker, the one in limbo gloom, the other in purge fire. But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he said, our lust is brief.

Know all men, he said, time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions. What means this? Desire’s wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time.

Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters to the university of Oxtail nor breathed there ever that man to whom mankind was more beholden.

But the word of Mr Costello was an unwelcome language for him for he nauseated the wretch that seemed to him a cropeared creature of a misshapen gibbosity born out of wedlock and thrust like a crookback teethed and feet first into the world, which the dint of the surgeon’s pliers in his skull lent indeed a colour to, so as it put him in thought of that missing link of creation’s chain desiderated by the late ingenious Mr Darwin.

But Malachias’ tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up the scene before them. The secret panel beside the chimney slid back and in the recess appeared . . . Haines! Which of us did not feel his flesh creep? He had a portfolio full of Celtic literature in one hand, in the other a phial marked Poison. Surprise, horror, loathing were depicted on all faces while he eyed them with a ghastly grin. I anticipated some such reception, he began with an eldritch laugh, for which, it seems, history is to blame. Yes, it is true. I am the murderer of Samuel Childs. And how I am punished! The inferno has no terrors for me.

His soul is far away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.

The man of science like the man in the street has to face hardheaded facts that cannot be blinked and explain them as best he can.

Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How saith Zarathusthra? Deine Kuh Trübsal melkest Du. Nun trinkst Du die süsse Milch des Euters. See! It displodes for thee in abundance. Drink, man, an udderful! Mother’s milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk too of those burgeoning stars overhead, rutilant in thin rainvapour, punch milk, such as those rioters will quaff in their guzzlingden, milk of madness, the honeymilk of Canaan’s land.

We are considerably out of pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw of Rheims, who has not even been to a university. BLOOM (Indistinctly.) University of life. Bad art.

BLOOM (Forlornly.) I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to . . . (Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong hairgrowth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity, nude, white, still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring.)

(Sneers.) Crybabby! Crocodile tears! (Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, sobs, his face to the earth. The passing bell is heard.

(He sighs.) ’Twas ever thus. Frailty, thy name is marriage. THE NYMPH (Her fingers in her ears.) And words. They are not in my dictionary. BLOOM You understood them? THE YEWS Ssh.

BLOOM (Gently.) Give me back that potato, will you? ZOE Forfeits, a fine thing and a superfine thing. BLOOM (With feeling.) It is nothing, but still a relic of poor mamma. ZOE Give a thing and take it back God’ll ask you where is that You’ll say you don’t know God’ll send you down below. BLOOM There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it. STEPHEN To have or not to have, that is the question.

THE MOTHER (Comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of wetted ashes.) All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men in the world. You too. Time will come.

STEPHEN (Choking with fright, remorse and horror.) They said I killed you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny. THE MOTHER (A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth.) You sang that song to me. Love’s bitter mystery. STEPHEN (Eagerly.) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men. THE MOTHER Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the strangers? Prayer is all powerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the Ursuline manual, and forty days’ indulgence. Repent, Stephen.

Speak, you! Are you struck dumb? You are the link between nations and generations. Speak, woman, sacred lifegiver.

STEPHEN (Groans.) Who? Black panther vampire. (He sighs and stretches himself, then murmurs thickly with prolonged vowels.) Who . . . drive . . . Fergus now. And pierce . . . wood’s woven shade? . . . (He turns on his left side, sighing, doubling himself together.) BLOOM Poetry. Well educated. Pity. (He bends again and undoes the buttons of Stephen’s waistcoat.) To breathe.

Most of all he commented adversely on the desertion of Stephen by all his pubhunting confrères but one, a most glaring piece of ratting on the part of his brother medicos under all the circs. —And that one was Judas, said Stephen, who up to then had said nothing whatsoever of any kind.

—Half-a-crown, Stephen responded. I daresay he needs it to sleep somewhere. —Needs, Mr Bloom ejaculated, professing not the least surprise at the intelligence, I can quite credit the assertion and I guarantee he invariably does. Everyone according to his needs and everyone according to his deeds. But talking about things in general, where, added he with a smile, will you sleep yourself?

Mr Bloom, availing himself of the right of free speech, he having just a bowing acquaintance with the language in dispute though, to be sure, rather in a quandary over voglio, remarked to his protégé in an audible tone of voice, apropos of the battle royal in the street which was still raging fast and furious: —A beautiful language. I mean for singing purposes. Why do you not write your poetry in that language? Bella Poetria! it is so melodious and full. Belladonna voglio. Stephen, who was trying his dead best to yawn, if he could, suffering from dead lassitude generally, replied: —To fill the ear of a cow elephant. They were haggling over money.

—In this country people sell much more than she ever had and do a roaring trade. Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to buy the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap.

Skin-the-Goat, assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to grind, was airing his grievances in a forcible-feeble philippic anent the natural resources of Ireland, or something of that sort, which he described in his lengthy dissertation as the richest country bar none on the face of God’s earth, far and away superior to England, with coal in large quantities, six million pounds’ worth of pork exported every year, ten millions between butter and eggs, and all the riches drained out of it by England levying taxes on the poor people that paid through the nose always, and gobbling up the best meat in the market, and a lot more surplus steam in the same vein. Their conversation accordingly became general and all agreed that that was a fact.

inflicted fatal injuries on his adored one as a result of an alternative postnuptial liaison by plunging his knife into her until it just struck him that Fitz, nicknamed Skin-the-Goat, merely drove the car for the actual perpetrators of the outrage and so was not, if he was reliably informed, actually party to the ambush which, in point of fact, was the plea some legal luminary saved his skin on.

Nettled not a little by L. Boom (as it incorrectly stated) and the line of bitched type, but tickled to death simultaneously by C. P. M‘Coy and Stephen Dedalus, B. A., who were conspicuous, needless to say, by their total absence (to say nothing of M‘Intosh), L. Boom pointed it out to his companion B. A., engaged in stifling another yawn, half nervousness, not forgetting the usual crop of nonsensical howlers of misprints.

Nevertheless, he sat tight, just viewing the slightly soiled photo creased by opulent curves, none the worse for wear, however, and looked away thoughtfully with the intention of not further increasing the other’s possible embarrassment while gauging her symmetry of heaving embonpoint. In fact, the slight soiling was only an added charm, like the case of linen slightly soiled, good as new, much better, in fact, with the starch out.

—Some time yesterday, Stephen said. —Yesterday, exclaimed Bloom till he remembered it was already tomorrow, Friday. Ah, you mean it’s after twelve! —The day before yesterday, Stephen said, improving on himself. Literally astounded at this piece of intelligence, Bloom reflected. Though they didn’t see eye to eye in everything, a certain analogy there somehow was, as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the one train of thought. At

To cut a long story short Bloom, grasping the situation, was the first to rise to his feet so as not to outstay their welcome having first and foremost, being as good as his word that he would foot the bill for the occasion, taken the wise precaution to unobtrusively motion to mine host as a parting shot a scarcely perceptible sign when the others were not looking to the effect that the amount due was forthcoming, making a grand total of fourpence (the amount he deposited unobtrusively in four coppers, literally the last of the Mohicans) he having previously spotted on the printed pricelist for all who ran to read opposite to him in unmistakable figures, coffee 2d., confectionery do., and honestly well worth twice the money once in a way, as Wetherup used to remark.

Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions to experience? Both were sensitive to artistic impressions musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admitted the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual magnetism.

Why was he doubly irritated? Because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded himself twice not to forget. What were then the alternatives before the, premeditatedly (respectively) and inadvertently, keyless couple? To enter or not to enter. To knock or not to knock.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: g...

You are mine. The world is mine.

Did either openly allude to their racial difference? Neither. What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen? He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not.

Where were the several members of the company which with Bloom that day at the bidding of that peal had travelled from Sandymount in the south to Glasnevin in the north? Martin Cunningham (in bed), Jack Power (in bed), Simon Dedalus (in bed), Tom Kernan (in bed), Ned Lambert (in bed), Joe Hynes (in bed), John Henry Menton (in bed), Bernard Corrigan (in bed), Patsy Dignam (in bed), Paddy Dignam (in the grave).

Alone, what did Bloom feel? The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn.

Why mutable (aliorelative)? From infancy to maturity he had resembled his maternal procreatrix. From maturity to senility he would increasingly resemble his paternal creator.

What other objects relative to Rudolph Bloom (born Virag) were in the 2nd drawer? An indistinct daguerreotype of Rudolph Virag and his father Leopold Virag executed in the year 1852 in the portrait atelier of their (respectively) 1st and 2nd cousin, Stefan Virag of Szesfehervar, Hungary. An ancient hagadah book in which a pair of hornrimmed convex spectacles inserted marked the passage of thanksgiving in the ritual prayers for Pessach (Passover): a photocard of the Queen’s Hotel, Ennis, proprietor, Rudolph Bloom: an envelope addressed To my Dear Son Leopold.

What imperfections in a perfect day did Bloom, walking, silently, successively, enumerate? A provisional failure to obtain renewal of an advertisement, to obtain a certain quantity of tea from Thomas Kernan (agent for Pulbrook, Robertson and Co, 5 Dame street, Dublin, and 2 Mincing lane, London, E.C.), to certify the presence or absence of posterior rectal orifice in the case of Hellenic female divinities, to obtain admission (gratuitous or paid) to the performance of Leah by Mrs Bandman Palmer at the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49, South King street.

What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter? New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed.

If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone, whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.

What retribution, if any? Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by combat, no. Divorce, not now.

Then? He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.

The visible signs of postsatisfaction? A silent contemplation: a tentative velation: a gradual abasement: a solicitous aversion: a proximate erection. What followed this silent action? Somnolent invocation, less somnolent recognition, incipient excitation, catechetical interrogation.