Eumaeus

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The Roman numeral III preceding the text of Eumaeus indicates that the novel has reached the concluding section that Joyce called the nostos ("homecoming"), after Homer's word for Odysseus' return to the island of Ithaca. In the Odyssey this begins in books 13-16. Odysseus comes ashore but does not go directly to his palace––an exceedingly dangerous place for him. Instead, Athena transforms him into an old beggar and sends him to the house of one of his slaves, the loyal swineherd Eumaeus, who gives the beggar a warmly hospitable welcome. Odysseus reciprocates by telling false stories about himself, as he has done with Athena too before learning who she is. Athena directs Telemachus to return to Ithaca, warns him about the ambush that the suitors have laid for him, and tells him to visit the swineherd's hut. There he meets the old beggar, whom Athena soon changes back to a man in his prime. Odysseus reveals his identity to his son, Telemachus throws his arms about him, both men weep loudly, and then they plot the deaths of more than one hundred men.

Most of the action of Eumaeus takes place in a building fully as humble as the swineherd's home: an all-night, alcohol-free cabman's shelter run by a grizzled old keeper. If Bloom seems disguised in this place, it is only in the sense that no one would mistake him for Odysseus. Instead of a wary old warrior, readers of the chapter encounter a kind of well-meaning schlemiel, chattily laboring to engage the brilliant Stephen in intellectual conversation and offering him the sage benefit of his adult experience––impertinences answered by long silences and brusque brush-offs. Stephen has been smashed into near-insentience by alcohol and by a British soldier's fist, and he shows no eagerness to be rescued by the bourgeois busybody jabbering in his face, no matter how "Samaritan" his intentions. Only in the last few pages of Eumaeus, as the two men leave the shelter and start walking toward Eccles Street, does something like camaraderie seem to be developing between them.

If Bloom is no Odysseus, the chapter suggests, then perhaps a truer analogue can be found in a talkative seaman in the shelter who says his name is D. B. Murphy. Murphy has come to Dublin earlier in the day aboard a commercial three-master. He says that he comes from a town near Cork and has "my own true wife I haven't seen for seven years now, sailing about," plus a son who must, he figures, be "about eighteen" by now. He appears to be the same "onelegged sailor" who was seen begging in Wandering Rocks, and he continually tells false stories of himself. All of these details seem calculated to make Murphy an Odysseus. Has he come to Dublin incognito, like the Greek hero who arrives in a remote part of Ithaca and acts the part of a beggar, and will he soon be going down to Cork to rejoin his wife?

Nothing comes of these expectations. Murphy's stories are palpably false, and Bloom, who tries to expose their falsity, thinks that the man will likely be heading to a Dublin flophouse rather than to Cork. Rather than becoming important in the novel, Murphy dwindles into a kind of False Sighting of a Greek Hero. Joyce staged such a scene once before, in Dubliners. The boy who narrates "An Encounter" walks the wharves with his companion and watches "the discharging of the graceful threemaster which we had observed from the other quay." He is looking for the green eyes that medieval legends attributed to Odysseus but is disappointed: "I came back and examined the foreign sailors to see had any of them green eyes for I had some confused notion.... The sailors' eyes were blue and grey and even black. The only sailor whose eyes could have been called green was a tall man who amused the crowd on the quay by calling out cheerfully every time the planks fell: / –– All right! All right!"

Despite these dead ends, the chapter insists on the relevance of the Homeric story. It begins with a circuitous approach to a humble building, and its pages are studded with references to other stories of sea travels, other maritime disasters, other absences from home, other momentous returns. Bloom thinks of "travelling to London by long sea," overcoming his "landlubber" status. Naval mishaps like the sinking of the Titanic recall the many ship sinkings on the Homeric hero's trip back from Troy. Literary tales of leaving home and returning (Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Tennyson's Enoch Arden, John Keegan's Caoc O'Leary) underline the question of what Odysseus will find when he comes back. The death of Charles Stewart Parnell spawns questions similar to those asked of Homer's hero: has he really died, or will he return to rescue Ireland from its bondage? Parnell's adultery likewise evokes the similarity between Bloom and Odysseus, two men whose wives are being stolen. None of these incidental allusions change the direction of Joyce's story, but all of them invite readers to find the proper way to frame it.

§ Perhaps the greatest challenge of epic expectations is posed by the chapter's spectacularly inept writing. The narrative commits a dazzling array of stylistic blunders. Clichés are not avoided but sought out. Things that could be said simply are conveyed in fancy elaborate phrases. Subject-verb-object constructions are inverted in attempts to sound grand. Modifiers are misplaced. When thoughts and expressions are revised, the original forms are left in the text as if it were being spoken rather than written. Digressions are pursued so far into subordinate clauses that the syntax of the main clauses becomes lost. Foreign words are sprinkled everywhere, with italics to indicate their exotic provenance, but far from being recherché they are usually long-assimilated staples of English vocabulary. Attempts at wit fall flat, and efforts to innovate on common expressions result in nonsense. Homely little bits of slang, ad jingles, and other kinds of ordinary English break into the pretentiously high-toned cadences as if the writer has momentarily forgotten to strive for eloquence.

Stephen calls Shakespeare "a lord of language," and Joyce is no less. In Oxen of the Sun he demonstrates that he can do anything with English prose. Why then would he choose to write this badly? An answer commonly made to this question (someone proposed it in the early ears of Joyce criticism, and it has been dully repeated ever since) is that the chapter's style is "tired." The exhausted prose, it is said, reflects the fact it has been a very long day, culminating in the grueling experiences of Circe. But there is nothing tired about the prose of Eumaeus. On the contrary, it is energetically, longwindedly, pretentiously, ambitiously bad. Every sentence feels labored and formal, with a show-offy claim to eloquence and cleverness that is not characteristic of exhaustion.

A somewhat more persuasive hypothesis has been offered by Gerald Bruns (Critical Essays, 365 ff.) and seconded by Karen Lawrence (The Odyssey of Style, 168 ff.): that this chapter adopts the language of a kind of collective consciousness, recycling banal phrases that circulate through an entire society. There is probably some truth to this interpretation, but it does not address the issue of point of view––why this narrator speaks in this way about these particular characters. The narrator's view of Bloom, in particular, seems to demand some kind of characterization.

I have always felt that this is the kind of prose that Leopold Bloom might produce were he to try putting pen to paper. At every instant the narrative looks over Bloom's shoulder, seeing things from his point of view, approving of his opinions and his choices, and flattering him. If this relatively uneducated, unlettered, and unsophisticated man tried to join the ranks of the literati, he might well recycle such banal clichés, aim for such overdone effects, and commit such unwitting blunders. My response to the qualities of the prose is largely intuitive, but it finds support in one clear indication of authorial design: Bloom daydreamed of becoming a writer while reading Philip Beaufoy's story in Calypso, and in Eumaeus he indulges the fantasy again, thinking of Beaufoy as he imagines writing something like "My Experiences, let us say, in a Cabman's Shelter."

Bloom cannot actually be writing the chapter––for one thing, the narrative presents details of Stephen's thoughts that he could not possibly know. But Joyce could well be pushing his accustomed practice of free indirect style to an extreme, much as he did with Gerty MacDowell in Nausicaa. Having written in a variety of parodic and imitative styles in the three chapters starting with Cyclops, it is perfectly conceivable that Joyce would now adopt the point of view of his own protagonist.

Despite the clownish ineptitude, there is heroism in this––the kind of impulse that drives David Copperfield to "be the hero of my own life." Joyce invites his readers to mock it: Leopold Bloom a writer? But the intimation that his protagonist might hold himself in high enough regard to write the story of his own life does develop the Odyssean analogy. When he finally has some real conversation with Stephen, Bloom begins to feel that "Though they didn't see eye to eye in everything, a certain analogy there somehow was, as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the one train of thought." By the end of the chapter readers start to have the same impression. After so many seeming dead ends, Eumaeus sends its protagonists off into the night in some approximation of the father-son unity in Homer's poem, ready to tackle the intellectual problems of existence in Bloom's kitchen and back yard. The narrator's valorization of Bloom is validated.

Holding this view, I am happy to find myself agreeing with one of Joyce's most discerning critics, Hugh Kenner. With marvelous ambiguity Kenner calls the chapter's prose style "perfectly awful" (Ulysses, 129)––a virtuosic performance of terrible writing. Then he ventures an explanation: "This is to be entrapped inside a novel with Leopold Bloom in possession of the pen. It is Hamlet taken in hand by Polonius.... Tired it is not: Joyce was never more awake than when he misaligned all those thousands of clichés. As for 'boring', not a word of it would bore Bloom, who even fancies himself writing all of it" (130). Kenner compares the technique to what Joyce has already done with Stephen Dedalus: "So completely is the style of Eumaeus Bloom's that when he speaks in the episode he speaks its very idiom: no one else does. The artist may be forgiven if, allowing his own voice and the narrative idiom to coalesce, he awards the elegant lines to himself and permits his supporting cast to grunt barbarisms; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was not otherwise configured" (130).

It is true, Kenner acknowledges, that the chapter does not sound like Bloom's interior monologue or his quoted speech, but there is nothing remarkable about that: "no man writes as he speaks or thinks, but more formally, and generally in longer sentences, and with elegant variations" (130). This is Bloom not as he is but as he would like to present himself, and Kenner observes that the self-flattering narration reflects the situation in which Bloom finds himself. "He deserves the privilege. This is his finest hour" (130). After "a long dismal day" of snubs and insults Bloom has snagged "a genuine poet-professor whom he is about to take home," and with Stephen so morosely silent he can fill the conversational void, taking center stage. The narrative, in other words, approximates the feelings of liberation and authority that Bloom is at last enjoying on June 16.

At the risk of belaboring the point, I will quote from another scholar persuaded by Kenner's reading. In The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses (2022), Patrick Hastings suggests that "rather than condemning Eumaeus as stilted, overornamented prose with garbled syntax and imprecise diction, we might instead consider the episode's use of Bloom's own literary style (flawed as it may be) as Joyce's ultimate celebration of Bloom himself (flawed as he may be). By ceding such control to Mr. Bloom, Eumaeus represents 'the book's most profound tribute to its hero' [Kenner, Joyce's Voices, 38]. With this gesture in mind, the episode's flabby sentences and cringeworthy clichés become endearing à la Bloom himself. The episode's inferior style, though, is also a demonstration of Joyce's extreme facility with language. Just as it takes a very good piano player to play a song really poorly––you have to know the exact wrong notes to play to make it sound truly awful––it takes an immensely talented writer to intentionally write this badly" (205-6). Amen to every point.

Eumaeus is an odd duck––an ugly duckling quacking its way from the brilliant madness of Circe to the crystalline splendors of Ithaca. It often seems to wander about with no purpose at all, much less an epic one, but Joyce's artifice is neither incoherent nor inconsequential. Raising and dashing Homeric hopes left and right, it finally gives Bloom some heroic agency and fulfills the novel's narrative purpose of bringing its two protagonists together in intellectual sympathy.