The Columbia History of the British Novel

snows, then no other mortal / man beside could stand up against Odysseus' (Book 3). Here is a Homeric portrait of the artist. Linguistic power is political power (Joyce's Irish «homerole» or home rule) so crucial for the writer who lives by mocking all the mockers in his own land.

In Ulysses the artistic rivalry plot centers on Stephen and Mulligan in a section of the narrative Joyce labeled the Telemachia: 'He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his,' says Stephen of Mulligan very early in the day. In the larger scope of the action involving Stephen during the day, Dedalus is betrayed and abandoned by supposed friends who turn out be be dedicated rivals. He ends up at the home of Leopold Bloom, but he is still leery when he leaves the Blooms' flat in the early morning hours of the next day.

A rivalry plot even more central to Ulysses occurs between Leopold Bloom and Blazes Boylan, Molly Bloom's afternoon lover on June 16, 1904. Readers must come to grips with the implicit contest between Bloom and Boylan because it controls the psyche of the book. In the Odyssey, the faithful Penelope fends off Odysseus's many rivals; in Ulysses, Molly admits Bloom's single nemesis into her bed. Odysseus slays his wife's suitors; Bloom does nothing. But in a more important -781- sense, he transcends his rival by sheer strength of character, a revenge more amenable to Joyce, a pacifist by nature. Much can be said and thought concerning the immense range of narrative themes and techniques registered in Ulysses, but the final question is the most important: how does Leopold Bloom manage to return to his own bed satisfied at the end of the day?

Bloom's actions in regard to Molly reflect much of Joyce's own sense, in his long relationship with Nora Barnacle, that a challenge to complacency heightens desire. This is his great subject. Joyce suggested to Frank Budgen that at one very important level Bloom engineers his wife's relation with Blazes Boylan so that he can, at least imaginatively, energize his own dulled sexual energies. He is, in Joyce's words, the mari complaisant. The same theme echoes in Joyce's life. As Nora Barnacle told Budgen: 'Jim wants me to go with other men so that he will have something to write about.' Bloom, of course, represses his wife's affair in Ulysses; he prefers to think of Boylan as totally self-motivated. But readers of the day's action have centered attention in the last decade on actions in Ulysses that are not clearly revealed in the minute-byminute chronicle of the day, on things left out rather than put in. Among the things left out is Bloom's far greater knowledge of the impending events of the day than the narrative has him let on.

The reader can gain better access to Bloom's motives by paying close attention to what he tells us only elliptically. For example, Bloom knows exactly when Boylan plans to arrive at his home, around four in the afternoon (though Boylan shows up late), and when Molly plans for him to leave, around six in the early evening. But Bloom is playing a delicate hand. He plans to stay out well beyond the time he knows Boylan will be gone, primarily to give himself and Molly time to contemplate the range of reactions to the day's events.

'Who's getting it up?' is the question that haunts Bloom during the day in reference to Molly's impending singing tour arranged by Boylan. The real direction of the question is obvious, but the answer is less clear. Bloom's description for the tour obliquely expresses his best hopes for Molly's adulterous liaison during the Lotuseaters episode: 'Part shares and part profits.' Perhaps Bloom even actively or by collusive hints conspired with Boylan in the way he seems to conspire with Stephen Dedalus in regard to Molly when he shows the young man his wife's photograph. After all, one of the sources for Bloom's first name is Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who specialized, among other things, in -782- contracting with his wife to find additional lovers to stimulate their relationship.

One strange character late in the day at the cabman's shelter actually hints at something mentioned by no one else in the narrative, either because he made it up or because it is one of the day's deeper secrets. In a conversation with Stephen Dedalus about the mysterious Bloom lingering in the background, the reprobate Corley says: 'Who's that with you? I saw him a few times in the Bleeding Horse in Camden street with Boylan, the billsticker.' This remark occurs in an episode where everyone is spinning out yarns, and, as is the case for other Dubliners, Corley may associate Bloom with Boylan merely because of general gossip about Molly. On the other hand, Bloom may not reveal everything to the reader about his actions and his motives.

Only in the Circe episode, where the mental lives of the characters are trashed by the dramatic narration that exposes them, does the text reveal what may be on Bloom's mind all along: in 'five public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered males.' For the most part, Bloom feels the need to be mentally careful about his thoughts of Molly's plans with Boylan partly because he wants to control what he, Bloom, hopes to get out of that meeting-something very private and subtle. Rage, unbridled jealousy, and humiliation are not on his emotional menu.

On several occasions during the day of Ulysses Bloom counts it his extraordinary ill fortune that the man who is about to cuckold him crosses his path. Again, there are two ways to look at this: either Bloom is just unlucky or Boylan's presence is a hint that Bloom has, in a way, arranged for him. To think about the action of the novel this way changes a number of things. Bloom at the level of the day's events has done what Shakespeare and Joyce have done at the level of the literary work's execution. They all have created adultery plots from rivalry plots to stimulate the hero to action or self-assertion. As Stephen puts it of Shakespeare's trials with Anne Hathaway, 'Et exaltabuntur cornua iusti' (and the horns of the just shall be exalted). The best face to put upon it is that Bloom seeks from Molly's afternoon tryst a stimulus for his marriage because he recognizes that Molly's sexual stimulation is key to his own. One of Joyce's notesheet entries for the novel puts it starkly in reference to Boylan and a possible lover for Bloom, one Josie Breen: 'LB couldn't adulter so gets BB to do it… Cdn't he go & fuck Mrs. Breen?' — 783-

What makes this reading of Ulysses compelling is that it centers the rivalry-adultery plot where Joyce sensed it belonged, with the 'warring of heartshaker with housebreaker,' as Finnegans Wake puts it. Joyce developed similar notions much more stridently for his one play, Exiles, written during a break from his intense work on Ulysses. The play works out of themes of sexual jealousy and sexual giving almost as a lend-lease program. Joyce prepared speculative notes for the play that are applicable to the adultery plot of Ulysses: 'Bertha, to understand the chastity of her nature, must first lose it in adultery.' In the play, Richard tells his young son that the only way to truly possess something is to give it away, because 'it is yours for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always.' Possessive jealousy in Exiles turns 'into an erotic impulse,' more a release than a trauma. As Joyce writes of the action, Richard 'seems to feel the thrill of adultery vicariously and to possess a bound woman Bertha through the organ of his friend.' In the play, Richard says outright, 'I longed to be betrayed by you and by her-in the dark, in the night-secretly, meanly, craftily. By you, my best friend, and by her. I longed for that passionately and ignobly, to be dishonored for ever in love and in lust.'

The physical act spoken about in Exiles is performed in Ulysses. Bloom hints at it in his comment to Stephen about Parnell at the cabman's shelter that adultery is 'a case for the two parties themselves unless it ensued that the legitimate husband happened to be a party to it.' Molly, too, senses that the Boylan rendezvous is not strictly her own affair, describing Bloom as 'trying to make a whore of me,' and understanding that 'hed never have the courage with a married woman thats why he wants me and Boylan… ' Molly's adultery releases what is more important to Bloom than the act itself, a flood of memories on her part that makes Molly in a way inviolable and renewable. Bloom had earlier considered the results of the day's actions and even pondered the possibility of another child in Sirens: 'Too late now. Or if not? If not? If still?' The reconnection to Bloom is one way to read the famous series of affirmations at the end of Ulysses that seem to draw Bloom all the way from Molly's first lover on Gibraltar to his own marriage proposal on Howth Head: 'And I thought as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.'

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Ulysses ends in the marriage bed. Given the amount of Joyce's fiction that actually takes place in bed, from the conclusion of the short story 'The Dead' to the end of Ulysses and to much of Finnegans Wake, it is revealing that his portmanteau word for the units of language, the alphabet, is 'allaphbed.' Allaphbed talk reveals all the permutations of the family romance, all the rivalries between generations, all the secrets of the most intimate habits of the race, the greatest and most perverse pleasures, the traumas, trials, and, ultimately, the tremendous satisfactions of human and marital love. Everything worth thinking about and living for is expressed by Joyce in 'the lingo gasped between the kicksheets.' Bed is life and death.

The relation between the linguistic unit and the bed as the source and symbol of bourgeois desire is played out to the full in Finnegans Wake. Joyce's last narrative, which he finished in 1939 two years before his death, is not an easy book, though serious readers would be mistaken to assume that it is altogether different from Ulysses. In Finnegans Wake Joyce puts the horizontal plot of the Odyssey-wandering and return-on a vertical axis-rise and fall.