The map of it all
The
map of it all
In Brief
In Penelope Molly recalls a concert "over a year ago"
in which she participated "on account of father being in the
army and my singing the
absentminded beggar and wearing a brooch for Lord
Roberts when I had the map of it all." This was no doubt
a fundraising event for troops fighting in the second Boer
War, a cause dear to Molly because her father was a career soldier
in the British army. Lord Roberts commanded the British forces
in South Africa for one year (January-December 1900), so it
makes sense that Molly wore a brooch bearing his image in the
concert. Roberts remained very popular after handing the reins
over to Lord Kitchener, and such brooches were commonplace in
the UK. Fundraisers were still being conducted in 1903. But
"the map of it all" is obscure. A 50-year string of commentary
has implausibly interpreted these words as referring to
Molly's face, or Lord Roberts', but a correspondent has
recently advanced a much more sensible explanation: Molly once
owned a handkerchief which displayed a map of South Africa.
Read More
In a personal communication, Vincent Van Wyk has called my
attention to the existence of these handkerchiefs. For nearly
three years Britain was fighting a war of imperial conquest in
an unfamiliar land on the other side of the globe. Newspapers
sometimes printed maps to help their readers make geographical
sense of the war, but 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 in huge numbers and raised
enormous sums for support of the troops.
Van Wyk's literal reading of "the map of it all" is much more persuasive than a commonly repeated figurative one. In The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom (1977), John Henry Raleigh writes that Molly's phrase "is an oblique reference, I believe, to the common saying that someone has the map of Ireland written all over his, or her, face. This constitutes the only reference in the book to the fact that she looks Irish as well as Spanish-Jewish" (182). In the second edition of Ulysses Annotated (1988), Don Gifford repeats Raleigh's reading: "That is, she has the map of Ireland all over her face: colloquial for 'it's obvious that she is Irish'." Sam Slote too (2012) affirms this sense of the phrase, but he applies it to Lord Roberts, who was born in India to Anglo-Irish parents: "He has the map of Ireland written all over his face: 'he is unmistakably Irish'."
None of these three commentators shows how the figurative
meaning might mesh with a coherent understanding of Molly's
thought and syntax, but when one attempts to do so its
limitations become evident. 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: 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
Spanish and Jewish, and with the temporal limitation of only once
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 all these problems by assuming that "I had the
map of it all" refers not to Molly but to Lord Roberts,
and there seems to be some logic to his choice: an Irish
audience supporting Irish troops might well respond favorably
to a British general who looked Irish. But in addition to the
tense problem of "had," this reading runs roughshod over the
grammatical subject of the clause. "I" normally refers to
oneself, doesn't it? How could "I had" possibly mean "Lord
Roberts had"?


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