Hello?

In Brief

Telephones were not rare in 1904 Dublin. The first ones had arrived in 1880, and the following quarter century saw a steady build-out of lines, including trunk lines linking the city to Drogheda, Dundalk, Belfast, Derry, Mullingar, Limerick, and Cork. But the device was still far from being an omnipresent personal convenience. The three phones that Joyce mentions are all in business offices, and the conversations that he shows taking place on them consist mainly of communicating utilitarian data: telephone numbers, prices to be paid, times of the day, and so forth. Also heard often is the universal 20th century phone greeting, "Hello." In a moment of gentle comedy in Aeolus, Bloom's baffled "Hello?" suggests that many people did not feel entirely comfortable with this new appliance.

Newspapers would surely have been among the first businesses to acquire Alexander Graham Bell's revolutionary invention. Aeolus twice shows a phone ringing in the offices of the Freeman's Journal and Evening Telegraph. In Wandering Rocks several other businesses that one might expect to have telephones––a fruit and flower shop dispatching baskets all around Dublin, a business promoter arranging concerts and fights, a hotel doing brisk business on the quays––are shown to have this amenity. Blazes Boylan's request of the shopgirl in Thornton's, "May I say a word to your telephone, missy?," evidently is answered in the affirmative, because two sections later, as his secretary Miss Dunne sits in an office a few blocks away, a telephone rings "rudely by her ear."

     — Hello. Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir. I'll ring them up after five. Only those two, sir, for Belfast and Liverpool. All right, sir. Then I can go after six if you're not back. A quarter after. Yes, sir. Twentyseven and six. I'll tell him. Yes: one, seven, six.
     She scribbled three figures on an envelope.
     — Mr Boylan! Hello! That gentleman from Sport was in looking for you. Mr Lenehan, yes. He said he'll be in the Ormond at four. No, sir. Yes, sir. I'll ring them up after five.

The overheard conversation is a welter of numbers: I'll make that call "after five," we have only "two" items of business today, I'll leave work "after six," or "A quarter after" if you insist, payment in the amount of "Twentyseven" shillings and "six" pence, i.e. "one" pound "seven" shillings and "six" pence, and by the way you have an appointment "at four," no I won't forget to call "after five." An impression of tedious impersonality prevails, but one may note also the convenience provided by the telephone. A man who, like Boylan, has access to one can impose some order on the peripatetic randomness of moving about Dublin hoping to run into the right people. A friend wishing to meet him later in the day at a particular place can simply ring his office and leave a message.

To readers for whom cell phones have conquered space, time, and human absence, Miss Dunne's brisk chatter sparkles with recognizably modern efficiency. But telephones have always brought with them also elements of confusion and frustration, which in 1904 would have included holding a cone to one's ear, bending over to shout into another cone, dealing with the intermediary services of a switchboard operator, and struggling to ignore the traces of other conversations leaking into the line. For those who did not regularly use telephones––the vast majority of the population––the experience must have been daunting at times. The first time that "The telephone whirred" in Aeolus, some rapid-fire business is transacted by an unknown person: "Twenty eight... No, twenty... Double four... Yes." On the second occasion, Bloom takes the call and is heard struggling to converse with some unknown person: "— Hello? Evening Telegraph here... Hello?... Who's there?... Yes... Yes... Yes." His struggles with phone etiquette, or the deficiencies of the service, or both, may elicit sympathy as much as laughter.

As Vincent Van Wyk points out in a personal communication, the awkwardness of Bloom's exchange is serendipitously reflected in a scene from Topsy Turvy, Mike Leigh's delightful comedy about Gilbert and Sullivan and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. The film is set in 1885, when telephones were still quite new, but it shows people using the phone for business only, as in Joyce's novel, and transmitting messages in alphanumeric code to thwart possible eavesdropping by operators. Such practices are now ancient history, but the clip comically presents other annoying aspects of the medium that may never entirely go away: coming up with a phone number, hurling "Hello" into the void, awkwardly identifying oneself, figuring out ways to begin and end a conversation with a person whose face one cannot see. Near the end of the clip, incidentally, readers of Ulysses will appreciate the reference to "Italian hokypoky."

Joyce provides a mocking echo of Bloom's brief phone conversation in Circe, when editor Myles Crawford crams "a telephone receiver nozzle to his ear" and barks, "Hello, seventyseven eightfour. Hello. Freeman’s Urinal and Weekly Arsewipe here." The novel also makes one mocking comment on the utility of the device itself. In Hades the practical-minded Bloom imagines an utterly impractical way of rescuing buried people who are not really dead: "They ought to have some law to pierce the heart and make sure or an electric clock or a telephone in the coffin and some kind of a canvas airhole. Flag of distress." The black comedy of this scene can scarcely be imagined. "Hello? Hello? Winifred? Um, yes, it's your dearly departed mum here. Yes, um, about the burial this morning.... You see, it turns out that I'm not quite dead."

John Hunt 2024

Hello?

In Brief

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