Stopped short
Stopped
short
In Brief
In Nausicaa Bloom finds that his pocket watch, which he consulted in Lestrygonians, has stopped––and has stopped just about when Blazes Boylan showed up at his house during the Sirens hour. He winds the watch, cannot get it to work, and reflects on the strange coincidence. These events return in Oxen of the Sun when someone in the pub sees Bloom "Winding of his ticker" and recalls the refrain of an American song on the subject: "Stopped short never to go again when the old."
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When Cissy Caffrey comes across the beach to ask Bloom "what was the right time," he is seen "taking out his watch, listening to it and looking up and clearing his throat and he said he was very sorry his watch was stopped but he thought it must be after eight because the sun was set." A little later Gerty "could see the gentleman winding his watch and listening to the works and she swung her leg more in and out in time. It was getting darker but he could see and he was looking all the time that he was winding the watch or whatever he was doing to it and then he put it back and put his hands back into his pockets." When the narrative enters Bloom's consciousness later in the chapter he thinks, "Funny my watch stopped at half past four." It is odd because the timing coincides with Boylan's arrival at 7 Eccles Street: "Very strange about my watch. Wristwatches are always going wrong. Wonder is there any magnetic influence between the person because that was about the time he."This is the kind of cheap coincidence that would get
beginning writers hooted out of workshops, but Joyce, lover of
little coincidences, chose to put it in his fiction. One
reason may have been his knowledge of the song by American
songwriter Henry Clay Work (1832-84), which tells of a
grandfather clock that was bought on the day the singer's
grandfather was born and "stopped short never to go again
when the old man died." Instead of magnetism, the song
accounts for the connection anthropomorphically by describing
the devotion that bound man and clock to one another. The
clock was a faithful servant: "it wasted no time and had but
one desire / At the close of each week to be wound. / And it
kept in its place, not a frown upon its face, / And its hands
never hung by its side."
Joyce does not attribute any sentiments to Bloom's watch, but he does endow inanimate objects with life in Aeolus and Circe, so the allusion to the song may suggest some uncanny sympathy between man and machine. On the other hand, the song may simply be calling attention to the comical nature of Bloom's obsession with his pocket watch. In Lestrygonians he consults it in Davy Byrne's before deciding what to drink: "What will I take now? He drew his watch. Let me see now. Shandygaff?" Nosey Flynn is watching, and later points out the peculiar behavior to the proprietor: "Didn't you see him look at his watch? Ah, you weren't there. If you ask him to have a drink first thing he does he outs with the watch to see what he ought to imbibe. Declare to God he does."
1884 photograph of Henry C. Work. Source: Wikimedia Commons.