Oxen of the Sun

Episode 14, "Oxen of the Sun," takes place from 10 to 11 PM. It shows a gaggle of young men carousing in the common room of the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street before walking down the street for drinks at a pub and then going their separate ways. This chapter proves even more difficult than Proteus, because the parodic writing that kept interrupting the narrator in Cyclops and then commandeered half of Nausicaa now reigns unchecked, overlaying the wild drunken talk of the young men with wildly proliferating narrative viewpoints. One strange voice after another grabs the microphone, simulating the historical evolution of English literary prose and also, allegedly, evoking the development of the human fetus from conception to birth. The Odyssey's story of divinely protected cattle enters in some of the voices' oracular affirmations of the Catholic command to procreate. All of these threads come together in a tapestry so densely disorienting that many people consider Oxen unintelligible or tiresome. It is neither. Its joy consists in almost, but not quite, liberating language from the mundane business of reporting events. A story is told, and quite precisely. But events emerge dimly through a blizzard of words, in a virtuoso demonstration of the many shapes that prose narration can take. Language itself becomes the star of the show.

In book 12, after surviving the passage between Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus tells his men, "Tiresias and Circe both insisted / we must avoid the island of the Sun, / the joy of mortals. They said dreadful danger / lurks there for us" (274-77, trans. Wilson). But the exhausted crew refuse to spend another night at sea. Odysseus gives way after extorting a promise not to kill any of the sheep or cattle sacred to Helios, the Sun God. After bad weather maroons them on the island, impending starvation compels the men to break their vow. When they finally manage to depart the island, Zeus destroys their ship with a thunderbolt. Everyone but Odysseus drowns.

This brief adventure gave Joyce the germ of an idea for a chapter. Oxen of the Sun begins with a pagan invocation of the sun-god ("bright one, light one"), asking for the blessing of children ("quickening and wombfruit"). Then two long and nearly untranslatable sentences praise "the bounty of increase" and human care in making it happen. Children are the sacred cows of this chapter, and the gods (or God) have an interest in seeing that men and women keep producing them. Various narrative voices, now and later in the chapter, praise the founding of obstretrics hospitals, censure people who make light of childbirth, condemn contraceptives and masturbation, and celebrate the arrival of a new human being on earth (Mina Purefoy's son, born near the end of the chapter after three days of hard labor).

In a March 1920 letter to his friend Frank Budgen Joyce wrote, "Am working hard at Oxen of the Sun, the idea being the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition." He went on to describe "a nine-parted episode without divisions" that begins with very ancient Latin and English prose styles and moves forward through medieval, Renaissance, 18th and 19th century styles before concluding in "a frightful jumble" of modern slang. This "progression," he said, would parallel "natural stages of development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evoluion in general." Anglo-Saxon alliterations would "give the sense of the hoofs of oxen," and symbolic correspondences would be revealed: "Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo. How's that for high?"

Like the schemas, this letter is both helpful and misleading. Probably no deception was intended. An artist's intentions can never completely account for what may emerge in the act of composition: plans become adjusted, new insights arise, things that seemed crucial turn out to be inessential. Joyce's notebooks show that he was indeed working on a "nine-parted" structure, but it is questionable whether the finished product displays it. The verbal chaos at the beginning can be seen as the unformed state before sperm and ovum unite, and the "frightful jumble" at the end as the afterbirth, but dividing the rest of the chapter into nine gestational months seems like an arbitrary business, more interesting to the writer than to the reader. And good luck finding analogues of blastocysts, neural tubes, tadpole-forms, or forebrain development in the chapter, much less a spermatic Bloom fertilizing Nurse Callan and producing Stephen. As with the supposed fuga per canonem in Sirens, which has led generations of critics on wild goose chases, Joyce here promised more than he could possibly deliver.

A historical progression of literary prose styles is far easier to discern—indeed, it is the principal effect that every reader will notice. But here too the finished product defies the neat categories of imitation implied in the letter to Budgen. Joyce found stylistic features of various English-language authors, as well as characteristic words and phrases, in an assortment of anthologies and critical studies. In many cases it seems clear to me that he also read the primary works themselves, in their entirety or at least in much larger measure than anthologies could provide. On notesheets he wrote down many of the materials he found in his reading, and he found ways to use many of those when it came time to write particular paragraphs of the chapter. But in the act of writing he gave himself an extraordinary amount of freedom. Far from composing slavishly imitative parodies, he let his prose develop according to its own laws.

The letter to Budgen points to one small example of this freedom: Anglo-Saxon alliteration recurs in several sections of the chapter not devoted to Anglo-Saxon style. Joyce singled out this one deviation from historical accuracy, but in fact such anachronisms abound. Effects associated with one period may continue to show up in later ones, or even arrive early in anticipation. Words and phrases lifted from one author may get used in the imitation of other. The more one compares paragraphs of Oxen with their possible sources, the more one gets the feeling that Joyce, after doing his homework, simply allowed himself to have fun. His ways of echoing source texts also vary widely. Some paragraphs brilliantly ape the originals. Others engage in loose, unmimetic burlesque. Still others meld diverse influences to create impressionistic suggestions of an era or genre. Occasionally the rules of the game are simply suspended: the survey of English begins (ostensibly, at least) with imitations of Latin writers, and the supposedly Anglo-Saxon prose gets its alliteration mainly from Anglo-Saxon verse.

Like Stephen in Scylla and Charybdis, Joyce here is more entertainer than scholar—and for anyone willing to undertake a mad cerebral dash through 1,500 years of changing prose styles, he is highly entertaining. With each new effort (usually starting at paragraph breaks, but not always), new ways of generating language bring with them new ways of presenting characters and conversation, new ways of understanding and judging human actions—a breathtakingly kaleidoscopic succession of perspectives. Experiencing all this variety, and struggling to see what the characters are doing from moment to moment, one may suspect that mimetic representation has been entirely abandoned. It hasn't. Things are actually happening, and a coherent story is being told, but parallax is taking on an entirely new kind of significance.