Edge of the paper
Edge
of the paper
In Brief
After Simon Dedalus curtly asks Bloom not to read out Dan
Dawson's speech from his copy of the Freeman's Journal,
Bloom sits looking "down the edge of the paper, scanning the
deaths," which are clearly as relevant to the theme of Hades
as the speech, which will be read aloud in Aeolus, is
to that episode. The Freeman listed births, marriages,
deaths, and "In Memoriam" notices in the leftmost column of
page 1. All the sentences of this paragraph, and perhaps also
the four lines of verse following it, present things that
Bloom is seeing on the left edge of his newspaper.
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Joyce's list is fictional, but it preserves the alphabetical order followed in the newspaper: "Callan, Coleman, Dignam, Fawcett, Lowry, Naumann, Peake... Sexton, Urbright." Bloom briefly interrupts his scanning of names to ask himself whether he knew one person besides Dignam: "Peake, what Peake is that? is it the chap was in Crosbie and Alleyne's? no." These three names take readers back to "Counterparts," in Dubliners, where Farrington's boss Mr. Alleyne "directed the affairs of Crosbie & Alleyne." The 1904 Thom's lists a solicitor named C. W. Alleyne at 24 Dame Street without mentioning any Crosbie, but in the story he seems to be a kind of absent senior partner: "Let me tell you that if the contract is not copied before this evening I'll lay the matter before Mr Crosbie.... Do you hear me now?" The story also mentions a Peake: "He could remember the way in which Mr Alleyne had hounded little Peake out of the office in order to make room for his own nephew." But Bloom decides that, "no," it is not this Peake who has died.
After looking for names of people he might know, Bloom takes
in details that family members have thought fit to include in
their obituaries: "Inked characters fast fading on the frayed
breaking paper. Thanks to the Little Flower. Sadly missed. To
the inexpressible grief of his. Aged 88 after a long and
tedious illness." "Little Flower" refers to Thérèse of
Lisieux (1873-97), a pious young Carmelite nun who was known
as The Little Flower of Jesus. Long before being beatified in
1923 and canonized in 1925 she inspired a hugely popular
devotional movement, and Slote notes that "She was a typical
recipient of gratitude in the Thanksgiving section of the Freeman's
Journal and other Irish papers." The Freeman did
not publish such a section until 1910, but obituaries may well
have offered such thanks to Teresa, who treated death as a
blessing: Gifford notes her promise that "After my death I
will let fall a shower of roses."
Below the deaths, the Freeman had a section titled
"In Memoriam" where family members could remember loved ones
who had died in the recent past, whether a month earlier, a
year, or longer. Bloom takes in one entry: "Month's mind:
Quinlan. On whose soul Sweet Jesus have mercy." The month's
mind was a requiem mass conducted one month after a death,
praying for the salvation of the deceased's soul. In Memoriam
sections of papers often printed brief inspirational poems to
the same purpose, expressing hope that the loved one was now
in a better place. Bloom may be reading such a poem off the
front page of the Freeman, but given his fondness for
thinking of himself as Henry Flower it could also
be that he is improvising a poorly metered imitation of these
cheap lyrics:
It is now a month since dear Henry fled
To his home up above in the sky
While his family weeps and mourns his loss
Hoping some day to meet him on high.
Amid all the sentimental dreck of the Irish newspaper death business it seems worth noting the realistic human element in Joyce's narrative. People do scan the daily obituaries––more religiously the older they get––to see if anyone they know has died. They do make efforts to keep their memories of loved ones alive. And they do wonder how people will think of them when it is their turn to go.
