Closesteaming kitchen
Closesteaming kitchen
In Brief
Section 4 is one of two parts of Wandering Rocks
whose location cannot be known with certainty, but it appears
to be 7 St. Peter's Terrace (now called St. Peter's Road) in
the northwest suburb of Cabra where the Joyce family was
living in 1904. It takes place in "the closesteaming kitchen"
of the Dedalus home, where Stephen's sisters Katey and Boody
have recently returned from school, and where their older
sister Maggy is stirring pots on the stove. A fourth sister,
Dilly, has "Gone to meet father," Maggy says. No fewer than
three interpolations in this brief section jump to other parts
of the city, one of them Dillon's auction house where
Simon Dedalus has apparently gone to raise money by selling
family possessions. By simple narrative succession rather than
interpolation the section also looks back to the moment when
the onelegged
sailor "swung himself violently forward past Katey and
Boody Dedalus," and to "Mrs M'Guinness," the
pawnbroker greeted on Mountjoy Square by Father Conmee.
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It quickly becomes clear that the kitchen is a place not of
gustatory richness but of desperate poverty. One of Maggy's
two pots holds shirts which she is boiling clean. Boody's
question "Did you put in the books?" momentarily makes a
reader wonder whether one of the pots may hold paper pulp, but
she is asking about Maggy's visit to Mrs. M'Guinness's
pawnshop, and Maggy answers, "They wouldn't give anything on
them." Boody's "Bad cess to her big face!" represents an acid
rebuttal to Father Conmee's serenely complacent reflections on
the pawnbroker's "queenly mien."
The section also glances more directly at the priest via
interpolation, though now Joyce adds a new trick to his
repertoire: "Father Conmee walked through Clongowes fields,
his thinsocked ankles tickled by stubble." This is
actually two jump-cuts in one. It goes back to the end of
section 1, where Conmee was seen walking along the Malahide
Road past hedges and fields of cabbages. There, his thoughts
went back to his time as the rector of Clongowes Wood College
in County Kildare: "His thinsocked ankles were tickled by the
stubble of Clongowes field. He walked there, reading in the
evening, and heard the cries of the boys' lines at their play,
young cries in the quiet evening. He was their rector: his
reign was mild."
The linkage here is not to any sentences immediately before
or after the interpolation, but rather to the girls' thoughts
about another father who is serenely removed from suffering
and struggle––their own. A second interpolation makes the link
explicit: "The lacquey rang his bell. / — Barang!"
In section 11, this employee of the auction house repeatedly
rings his bell to announce a sale as Dilly doggedly tries to
get her father to hand over some of the money he has obtained.
Boody's bitter joke, "Our father who art not in heaven," will
be echoed in section 11 when Simon delivers his own version of
her crack about an indifferent God: "— I'm going to show
you a little trick, Mr Dedalus said. I'll leave you all where
Jesus left the jews."
Joyce has inserted still more ties between the two sections.
When Boody angrily asks whether there is anything at all to
eat, Maggy tells her that the other pot holds pea soup
charitably donated to the family by "Sister Mary Patrick." As
Dilly pesters her father outside the auction rooms, Simon
says, "Was it the little nuns taught you to be so saucy?" (His
word "saucy" echoes the "Peasoup" in the kitchen.) And: "The
little nuns! Nice little things! O, sure they wouldn't do
anything! O, sure they wouldn't really! Is it little sister
Monica!"
A final interpolation also looks south toward the river: "A
skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode lightly
down the Liffey, under Loopline bridge, shooting the rapids
where water chafed around the bridgepiers, sailing eastward
past hulls and anchorchains, between the Customhouse old
dock and George's quay." This crumpled piece of paper
enters three different sections of Wandering Rocks via
interpolation, appearing next in section 12, but it floats
free of narrative involvement, never taking readers to a
section where it will be developed as part of a larger
context. Clearly it has some connection to Leopold Bloom, who
in Lestrygonians crumples a throwaway announcing
Elijah's arrival and throws it into the river, and whose
departure from Barney Kiernan's pub in Cyclops is
compared to Elijah's ascent to heaven. In the present context
it seems to comment ironically on the false promises of
salvation offered by two distant fathers, Conmee and Dedalus,
comparing them to a father who is not maddeningly distant.
In James Joyce's Dublin Clive Hart remarks that "The
Joyce/Dedalus family is notable for being uncentred. Katey and
Boody Dedalus have walked home from school via Eccles Street,
Berkeley Road, North Circular Road, Cabra Road. The location
of their school, left equally vague, may be at The Sisters of
Charity Convent/Convent National Schools, 76 Upper Gardiner
Street, close to Conmee's presbytery at St Francis Xavier's
Church. The girls' walk home from there would then take
them through Eccles Street, where they are seen by Molly at
3:15" (48). The Cabra address, which according to Hart they
would reach about 10 minutes later, represents rock
bottom––the last in a dismal series of more than a dozen
progressively less respectable houses occupied by the Joyces
during their patriarch's spectacular descent into poverty.
This is the house in which John Joyce's longsuffering wife
died––represented fictionally in Telemachus when
Stephen recalls the family vigil at his mother's bedside.
Richard Ellmann observes that "The disarray that had marked
the Joyce household since their move from Blackrock to Dublin
a dozen years before, changed to near-chaos after May Joyce’s
death. The house was in disrepair, the banister broken, the
furniture mostly pawned or sold; a few scrawny chickens
scrabbled at the back for food. John Joyce took out another
mortgage for £65 on November 3, 1903, and knew that this would
be the last and that nothing was left of the nine hundred
pounds he had obtained a year before by commuting his pension.
The house was to drop away from him in 1905. When the new
mortgage money moved from his hands to those of the Dublin
publicans, he sold the piano, a desperate act for a musical
man and one which roused James to fury when he came home to
discover it” (143).
The Cabra house also represents the end of this chapter's
exploration of sites on the northern perimeter of Dublin. All
future sections will take place farther south, closer to the
river.
