Wandering Rocks

Read More

The first nine chapters of Ulysses were stunningly avant-garde in 1922 and remain challenging today, but after readers get used to the newness of what Joyce called the "initial style" of his novel they can at least count on it continuing. That rug is pulled out from under them in the last nine chapters, which embark on a kaleidoscopic succession of viewpoints and styles, changing the rules of narration each time. Chapter 10, the first real departure from normalcy, takes some cues from chapter 7, the first apparent one. Aeolus violates the procedure of focusing intensely on either Stephen (chapters 1-3 and 9) or Bloom (chapters 4-6 and 8). It begins with an impersonal survey of Dublin's central business district, and it makes the book's protagonists seem no more important than anyone else. Language proliferates for its own sake, obeying obscure rhetorical precepts, and the story is broken up into sections announced by newspaper-like headlines.

But all of these innovations have an ephemeral quality, like fog that burns away on closer inspection. Stephen and Bloom both have productive goals in mind, unlike the other men seen idly whiling away time in the newspaper office. The artful linguistic effects of the prose amount to little more than insignificant puffs of sound which the chapter analogizes to unruly winds. And Joyce added the newspaper-like sections late in the process of composing the chapter, imposing what may seem like a radically new structure on a narrative whose sense would not really be different if the headlines were removed.

The changes in Wandering Rocks feel more substantial. Instead of photographing just a block or two of Sackville Street, the narrative pans out to look at much of Dublin, assembling a collective portrait from vignettes snapped in many different locations. Stephen and Bloom become just two of many figures crawling over the surface of the city, and for perhaps the first time in the novel making sense of the physical locations of streets and buildings seems as pressing a concern for readers as making sense of the psychological conditions of people.  The nineteen sections are truly discontinuous stories, though they interlock in many ways––as seems appropriate to a busy urban center humming on a weekday afternoon. The language is less showily artificial than that of Aeolus, but it is cunning, introducing ambiguities and coincidental connections that complicate readers' responses just as the interpolations do.

After the intense literariness and braininess of episode 9, where writers in a library listen to an account of Shakespeare's dramatic genius that offers keys to understanding Ulysses itself, books play a marginal role in Wandering Rocks. Both Stephen and Bloom peruse them at bookstalls, Haines is happy to have found his copy of Douglas Hyde's poems, and Dilly Dedalus is guiltily thrilled to have purchased a French primer. But these are small moments, devoid of much intellectual interest and outweighed by a world of people going about their daily business: eating food, procuring it, seeing others, being seen, helping others, not helping them, working, pretending to work, looking for ways to obtain money, dodging creditors, questioning life, cursing it, consuming alcohol, playing chess, betting on horses, running a business, and so on.

The relative indifference to literature extends to the Homeric analogues that structure Ulysses. While those intertextual conversations seem more substantial in some chapters than in others, only this one dares to make something of nothing. In book 12 of the Odyssey Circe tells Odysseus that he can either risk the channel between Scylla and Charybdis or attempt a passage that has only been survived once:

The blessed gods call these the Wandering Rocks.
No birds can fly through safe, not even doves,
who bring ambrosia to Zeus. One dove
is always lost in that sheer gulf of stone
and Zeus must send another to restore
the number of the flock. No human ship
has ever passed there. When one tries to enter,
the waves and raging gusts of fire engulf
ship timbers and the bodies of the men.
Only the famous Argo sailed through there
returning from the visit with Aeetes.        (Wilson)

These terrors are usually identified as the Symplegades, two rocks in the Bosporus strait that were said to crash against one another. (The name is compounded from words meaning "to dash together.") Odysseus decides to risk Scylla and Charybdis rather than follow Jason through this gauntlet, and the poem never visits the Wandering Rocks.

But Joyce wanted to evoke the voyage that Homer merely alludes to. In the schema that he gave to Valery Larbaud late in 1921, and subsequently to several other men, he noted that the River Liffey plays the part of the "Bosporus," the Viceroy is the "European Bank" of that strait, Father Conmee is the "Asiatic Bank," and the Symplegades are "Groups of Citizens." And indeed the Liffey plays a central role in the episode. After starting in the northern parts of Dublin in sections 1-4, most of the remaining sections take place on the quays or near them, jumping back and forth between the north and south banks. (Define "near" as "within three blocks" and twelve of the fifteen sections qualify. Broaden the swath only a little and all of them do.)

The other schema, given to Carlo Linati in 1920, identifies the Persons of the chapter as "Objects, Places, Forces, Ulysses," the Sense as "The Hostile Environment," the Art as "Mechanics," and the Technic as "Labyrinth moving between two banks." In that prior schema Joyce also listed the Organ as "Blood" (a stream in which things crash against each other). Among several examples of Symbol he named "Christ and Caesar," suggesting that Conmee's long journey in section 1 and the viceroy's long journey in section 19 are meant to evoke structures of Church and State that bracket the human being's journey through life.

§ These symbolic suggestions are worth attending to, but before readers can do much with them they must first make sense of where the chapter is locating them, and when. In Proteus Stephen mused that he was walking in "A very short space of time through very short times of space." It is easy to imagine this gnomic sentence triggering the composition of Wandering Rocks. The chapter charts the paths traced by numerous pedestrians (as well as a few people riding in vehicles), and it also appears to track the passage of time involved in those journeys, meticulously connecting the two in an intricate spatiotemporal matrix.

In James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Frank Budgen wrote that "Joyce wrote the Wandering Rocks with a map of Dublin before him on which were traced in red ink the paths of the Earl of Dudley and Father Conmee. He calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city.... While working on Wandering Rocks Joyce bought at Franz Karl Weber's on the Bahnhofstrasse a game called 'Labyrinth', which he played every evening for a time with his daughter Lucia. As a result of winning or losing at the game he was enabled to catalogue six main errors of judgment into which one might fall in choosing a right, left or centre way out of the maze" (122-23). Readers of the chapter must play a similar game in most sections.

The critic who has done most to chart the dizzyingly complex calculations involved is Clive Hart, notably in an essay on Wandering Rocks published in 1974 in James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays, then in 1975 and 1976 with Leo Knuth in A Topographical Guide to Ulysses, and finally in 2004 with Ian Gunn in James Joyce's Dublin: A Topographical Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses, which also incorporates insights offered by Harald Beck and Leo Knuth. My notes on the chapter's nineteen sections draw on the work of Hart and his collaborators and sometimes reproduce parts of their maps. I frequently elaborate on his insights, infrequently take issue with him, and occasionally note work that he has done for which there is no place in my notes.

Most of the places represented in Wandering Rocks can be certainly and precisely identified, and even the ones that cannot (the Dedalus home, the Dedalus girls' school, Miss Dunne's office, Lynam's bookmaking operation, Bloom's bookshop) can be inferred with some confidence. I repeat what Hart and others have discovered on these questions, but I reproduce only a little of what he says about the walking paths of characters before or after their appearances in this chapter. Readers who want to know more about this should look for a copy of James Joyce's Dublin.

On matters of time, too, I refer to Hart's work selectively. In his 1974 essay and in his 2004 book he published an ambitious chart of times which, taking a cue from Joyce calculating "to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance," attempts to identify exactly when most of the chapter's actions take place. The schemas identify the hour as 3-4 PM, the chapter starts with Father Conmee consulting his watch at 2:55, and a passage in Penelope reveals that the Dedalus girls pass Molly's house at 3:15, but these teasing details are the only ones that Joyce gives his readers. (The teasing is quite real. He shows characters consulting watches or clocks three more times but does not document what they learn.) Hart's response was to identify all the paths and walk them repeatedly at reasonable paces, measuring the times, averaging the results, and correlating actions in different sections. I admire his scrupulousness but I do not understand all the principles by which he correlated disparate actions, and I question how valuable his elaborate chart may actually be for making sense of the chapter as one reads.

My notes explore some other questions about time. As a general principle, Joyce creates an impression of forward temporal progression from section to section by showing successive actions performed in them, whether in the main blocks of text or in interpolations. (In sections 3-4, for example, we see Katey and Boody on the sidewalk and then at their home. Similar examples can be found in 1-3-16, 3-9, 5-7, 6-17-19, and 9-10.) The arrow of time does not always move neatly forward, however. Section 2 occurs at a moment that must be earlier than the end of section 1. Another general principle, articulated by Hart and repeated by many other scholars, is that the interpolations show temporal simultaneity across spatial distance. But, again, there are exceptions. Interpolations in sections 9 and 10 show things happening around the Four Courts building that seem to correlate to actions represented in section 19, but in fact both of them are happening a bit earlier. Here the principle of moving forward in time from section to section is preserved, but the principle of interpolations marking simultaneous occurrences is not.

Joyce also challenges his readers by thwarting the expectations he creates about interpolations. Some sections contain as many as three or four, while several (6, 17, 18, 19) lack them entirely. Some sections (2, 5, 9) contain sentences that at first glance may appear to be interpolations but really are not, or are not merely so. Some contain interpolations (the bike race in 11, the crumpled paper floating down the Liffey in 4, 12, and 16) that do not refer to any action represented by continuous narrative in another section. One (in section 5) jumps not only to an earlier section (1) but to a still earlier action that the principal character there remembers. The first and third interpolations about the throwaway show it floating "eastward," but the second shows it moving cryptically "westward," a little after another interpolation in section 12 shows Denis Breen moving in the opposite direction from when he was last seen. Readers must constantly be alert to such tricks, which are a good reminder that for all his maniacal love of systematic order Joyce was never content to reduce things to a system. Artistic freedom invariably prevails.

In his 1974 essay, Hart notes another kind of devious patterning: the thematic burden of the interpolations, which not only play with space and time but also imply similarities or differences with the people represented in the surrounding section. Usually suggestive indications of linkage can be found, Hart suggests, in sentences immediately before or after the interpolation. Pursuing these, he reproduces each interpolation of the chapter along with some nearby text and identifies what he sees as linking elements. In three cases he admits that he has come up empty, but his honesty about those rare exceptions only strengthens his overall claim. I pursue these leads, often adding further observations to the brief comments that Hart makes.

I follow Hart's lead also in noting instances of still another kind of patterning that Joyce worked into this chapter: misleading linguistic constructions. Its first words, "The superior, the very reverend John Conmee," refer to the priest's title (a noun) but manage to suggest adjectivally that he regards himself as one of the elite (which he does). When he thinks that Mrs. M'Guinness has a "fine carriage," he refers to her manner of holding herself but a reader may suppose (not unreasonably, given the tenor of the priest's thoughts) that she owns a grand vehicle. In much the same way that readers of this chapter must continually struggle to understand where in Dublin they are, with whom, at what time, and why bits of unrelated action keep flashing into their field of view, simply making sense of words and phrases can require keen navigational skills.