Read More

Comets have "almost infinite compressibility" in the sense that their spectacular tails are composed of tiny particles of dust and water vapor that the sun's intense radiation has boiled off a traveling ball of ice and rock. Also long are their "vast elliptical egressive and reentrant orbits," which in reentry take them to a point near the sun ("perihelion") and in egress to a point far away from it ("aphelion"). Only in close proximity to the sun do comets put on the wonderfully "hirsute" shows that awe human beings––Finnegans Wake calls them "creamtocustard cometshair" (475.15) and imagines "combing the comet's tail up right and shooting popguns at the stars" (65.10-11). When they return to the deep, dark, cold haunts of the outer planets, these iceballs "chancedrifting through our system" (FW 100.33-34) fade away into obscurity.

Comets are first introduced, inconspicuously, in Lestrygonians. As Bloom stands on the O'Connell bridge worrying that Boylan could give Molly a sexually communicable disease, he notes that the "Timeball on the ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time." This large ball on a pole in downtown Dublin dropped once every 24 hours, letting people on the quays know the exact time as communicated by wire from the Dunsink observatory. The details are serendipitously similar to those of a cosmic iceball that drops down into view at certain predictable times. Almost immediately after this, Bloom sees "A procession of whitesmocked men" moving slowly toward him––another vision of the comet, with its streaming white tail. As ever, Joyce's ingenuity here is astonishing: Hely's men predict the arrival of Halley's comet in 1910, as regular as a "Timeball" after its usual 75-76 year absence. Finnegans Wake documents Joyce's awareness of the fact: "like sixes and seventies as eversure as Halley's comet" (54.8).

The 9th section of Wandering Rocks shows that the linkage implied in Lestrygonians––Boylan visiting Molly, a comet visiting the earth––is not accidental. Lenehan and M'Coy see Bloom perusing books at a stall, prompting Lenehan to recall that "I was with him one day and he bought a book from an old one in Liffey street for two bob. There were fine plates in it worth double the money, the stars and the moon and comets with long tails. Astronomy it was about." Then, laughing, "I'll tell you a damn good one about comets' tails, he said. Come over in the sun." The story concerns a night when the Blooms shared a jaunting car with two others coming back from Glencree over the dark deserted summit of Featherbed Mountain, at "blue o'clock the morning" on "a gorgeous winter's night." On one side of the car Bloom was "pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot." On the other side Lenehan was lecherously "lost, so to speak, in the milky way" of Molly's breasts as the car's bumpy motion repeatedly threw them together.

The linkage between comets and sexual hankypanky in this scene involves yet another suggestive image. Molly that night was wearing a "boa" which Lenehan kept strategically adjusting around the curves of her body: "I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time. Know what I mean?" A boa is a long, light, feathery thing, quite comparable to a comet's tail, and it is wrapped around a warm body, like a comet snaking its way around the sun––as Joyce emphasizes by having Lenehan tell M'Coy to come over in the sun to hear about comets' tails. Readers may recall that Molly's attractive warmth is a regular feature of Bloom's erotic reveries.

Another such evocative image has appeared in the 5th section of Wandering Rocks when Boylan "drew a gold watch from his fob and held it at its chain's length." As in the Lestrygonians passage, the suggestions of this image are shaped by what comes immediately before and after. In the preceding sentence, the sandwichboardmen are again seen plodding along Grafton Street, this time through the windows of Thornton's shop. Three short sentences later, there is a reminder of Lenehan and the comets when Bloom is seen (via interpolation) looking at books on the cart in Merchant's Arch. The watch and chain––round head, long tail––clearly are intended to evoke comets, the phallus, Blazes Boylan, and an unhappy husband.

But shape is not the only imagistic feature working quietly away within the text. Comets are hirsute, and so is Boylan. In Lestrygonians Nosey Flynn says, "O, by God, Blazes is a hairy chap." In Hades Jack Power spots him from the carriage "airing his quiff"––i.e., doffing his hat to expose his hair to the air. In Circe Bello says of Boylan, "He's no eunuch. A shock of red hair he has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush! Wait for nine months, my lad! Holy ginger, it's kicking and coughing up and down in her guts already!" This sentence pins a tail on Boylan, animalistically phallic but also comet-like, and it associates the shape with sexual potency.

Hairiness is innately bound up with sexuality, as Circe makes clear when the Nymph says that she and the stonecold pure goddesses that Bloom scrutinizd in the National Museum have "no hair there." Bloom's rejection of this asexual ideal associated with John Ruskin means that "a hairy chap" like Boylan is inhairently threatening. This fear surfaces soon afterward in Circe when Lenehan "officiously detaches a long hair from Blazes Boylan's coat shoulder." Not content to remark on head hairs, Lenehan proceeds to evoke ones farther down: "Ho! What do I here behold? Were you brushing the cobwebs off a few quims?" (Boylan, that is to say, has been putting dusty vaginas back in working order.)

Boylan also is associated with the heavens. Wandering Rocks notes his "skyblue tie" and his "socks with skyblue clocks," and when the carriage arrives at 7 Eccles Street in Sirens "Dandy tan shoe of dandy Boylan socks skyblue clocks came light to earth." As a comet approaches perihelion near earth, it lights up and becomes light, hairy, diaphanous. "Clocks" were designs embroidered on Victorian and Edwardian socks, but the clocklike regularity of comets in the sky surely is intended here.

The name "Boylan" suggests the sun's heat boiling away water vapor from a comet, and "Blazes" is no less evocative. Comets look like blazing fireworks, and the word can also mean "a broad white stripe running the length of a horse's face," or a similar rectangular "mark made on a tree by cutting the bark so as to mark a route." In Oxen of the Sun, a nebula-like apparition appears to draw on both sorts of meaning: "It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents of cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling, writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till, after a myriad metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes." This signifying apparition "looms, vast, over the house of Virgo"––Molly's birth sign.

Many people once detected evil omens in comets, as in Calpurnia's warning to Caesar: “When beggars die there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes” (Julius Caesar 2.2.30-31). Such fears were still alive when Halley's comet reappeared in 1910, prompting Sir Robert Ball, in an interview published on the front page of the 17 May 1910 Bismarck Daily Tribune, to "set at rest the fears of a grand catastrophe in the minds of those folks who have been led to believe the comet contains mischief-making potentialities." Responding to numerous letter-writers, Ball noted that "a rhinoceros in full charge would not fear collision with a cobweb, and the Earth need not fear collision with a comet. In 1861 we passed through the tail of a comet. No one knew anything about it at the time."

There is no reason to suppose that Joyce shared the popular superstition about comets being portents, but he certainly deployed it symbolically in his novel, using comet images to suggest that Bloom's sexual reign at Eccles Street may be coming to an end. The adulterer's blazing, boiling approach to the sun implies Bloom's displacement, as is emphasized in Ithaca when he imagines leaving home and wandering the earth in emotional and perhaps financial destitution. In one paragraph these thoughts of banishment are mapped onto the orbit of a comet as it leaves behind the heat and light of the sun and ventures to the cold edges of the known universe. But the logic of the metaphor implies that one day, "suncompelled," Bloom will return from his "selfcompelled" exile:

Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.

Having entertained the thought of such a triumphant return Bloom quickly dismisses it, reflecting that while space may be "reversible" time is not. (Nor is he likely to discover those great riches, or to find himself transformed into a violent avenger.) Nevertheless, this description of a "cometary orbit" does insinuate thoughts of reversal and cyclicality. Thoughts of falling to rise again preoccupied Joyce in the Wake, and there is no doubt that at the end of Ulysses he was already pondering them. After Bloom drops off into blackness at the end of Ithaca, Molly's huge looping orbits of thought distance her for a time from her husband but finally bring her back to him––on Howth, in the sunshine, savoring sexual pleasure.