Map of it all

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Lord Roberts commanded the British forces in South Africa for one year, from January to December 1900. He remained very popular after handing the reins over to Lord Kitchener, so it makes sense that Molly would have worn "a brooch" bearing his image in a patriotic concert. The pin with the general's image shown here was one of many sold in the UK. The song that Molly sang, "the absentminded beggar," was a collaborative effort between Rudyard Kipling (words) and Sir Arthur Sullivan (music) designed to raise money for veterans and their families. But "the map of it all" is obscure. A 50-year string of commentary has interpreted these words as referring either to Molly's face or to that Lord Roberts. There is a much more plausible explanation: Molly once owned a handkerchief which displayed a map of South Africa.

In a personal communication, Vincent Van Wyk has called my attention to the existence of these handkerchiefs. For nearly three years Britain fought a war of imperial conquest in an unfamiliar land on the other side of the globe, and newspapers sometimes printed maps to help their readers make geographical sense of what they were reading. Some enterprising manufacturers also reproduced maps of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State on pocket handkerchiefs which people could buy and carry about. The handkerchiefs were produced and sold in great numbers.

None of these commentators makes any effort to explain how the figurative meaning might mesh with a coherent understanding of Molly's thought and syntax. When one attempts to do so its limitations become obvious. Why would Molly think that she looked Irish, and why would she recall one occasion "when" she "had" it? People normally think of others having a certain ethnic look, not themselves, and if she thinks she had the look of the Irish when she sang at the concert, does that mean she has since lost it? Still another implausibility is that, as Raleigh admits, this would be the only time in the novel when Molly is said to appear distinctively Irish: a Spanish Jew, she has a dark complexion that makes her look exotic. The difficulties continue. Does Molly remember looking Irish at the time of the concert because she thinks it somehow advantaged her? Even among relatives of the Irishmen fighting in the British army in South Africa, it is hard to imagine how an Irish-looking singer on the stage would make them support English aggression more enthusiastically.

But perhaps Raleigh supposes that the phrase connects not with the preceding words but with what comes after: "I had the map of it all and Poldy not Irish enough was it him managed it this time I wouldnt put it past him." Construed in this way, Molly is jumping from thoughts of South Africa to the issue of being hired for concerts: Bloom has trouble getting gigs for her because he doesn't look Irish enough, but she had the map of it all.... This reading too is hard to square with the fact that Molly looks exotically dark, and with the temporal limitation of only at one time having had the look. Even more importantly, though, her Irish appearance seems irrelevant to landing gigs, because Molly never once thinks of finagling concert appearances herself. In the male-dominated concert world of turn-of-the-century Dublin (vividly represented in "A Mother," and Kathleen Kearney has popped into her thoughts only seconds before), she leaves that to people like her husband and Blazes Boylan.

Slote avoids these problems by assuming that "I had the map of it all" refers not to Molly but to Lord Roberts, and his reading has one advantage: an Irish audience supporting Irish troops might well respond favorably to a British general who looked Irish. But in addition to the tense problem (did he subsequently lose the look?), the grammar of the sentence makes this reading completely absurd. The grammatical subject is "I." How could "I had the map of it all" possibly mean that Lord Roberts had it?