The Roman numeral III preceding the text of Eumaeus
indicates that the novel has reached the concluding
section that Joyce called the nostos
("homecoming"), after Homer's word for Odysseus' return to the
island of Ithaca. In the Odyssey this begins in books
13-16. Odysseus comes ashore but does not go directly to his
palace––an exceedingly dangerous place for him. Instead,
Athena transforms him into an old beggar and sends him to the
house of one of his slaves, the loyal swineherd Eumaeus, who
gives the beggar a warmly hospitable welcome. Odysseus
reciprocates by telling false stories about himself, as he has
done with Athena too before learning who she is. Athena
directs Telemachus to return to Ithaca, warns him about the
ambush that the suitors have laid for him, and tells him to
visit the swineherd's hut. There he meets the old beggar, whom
Athena soon changes back to a man in his prime. Odysseus
reveals his identity to his son, Telemachus throws his arms
about him, both men weep loudly, and then they plot the deaths
of more than one hundred men.
Most of the action of Eumaeus takes place in a
building fully as humble as the swineherd's home: an
all-night, alcohol-free cabman's shelter run by a
grizzled old keeper. If Bloom seems disguised in this place,
it is only in the sense that no one would mistake him for
Odysseus. Instead of a wary old warrior, readers of the
chapter encounter a kind of well-meaning schlemiel, chattily
laboring to engage the brilliant Stephen in intellectual
conversation and offering him the sage benefit of his adult
experience––impertinences answered by long silences and
brusque brush-offs. Stephen has been smashed into
near-insentience by alcohol and by a British soldier's fist,
and he shows no eagerness to be rescued by the bourgeois
busybody jabbering in his face, no matter how "Samaritan" his
intentions. Only in the last few pages of Eumaeus, as
the two men leave the shelter and start walking toward Eccles
Street, does something like camaraderie seem to be developing
between them.
If Bloom is no Odysseus, the chapter suggests, then perhaps a
truer analogue can be found in a talkative seaman in the
shelter who says his name is D. B. Murphy. Murphy has come to
Dublin earlier in the day aboard a commercial three-master. He
says that he comes from a town near Cork and has "my own true
wife I haven't seen for seven years now, sailing about," plus
a son who must, he figures, be "about eighteen" by now. He
appears to be the same "onelegged sailor" who was seen begging
in Wandering Rocks, and he continually tells false
stories of himself. All of these details seem calculated to
make Murphy an Odysseus. Has he come to Dublin incognito, like
the Greek hero who arrives in a remote part of Ithaca and acts
the part of a beggar, and will he soon be going down to Cork
to rejoin his wife?
Nothing comes of these expectations. Murphy's stories are
palpably false, and Bloom, who tries to expose their falsity,
thinks that the man will likely be heading to a Dublin
flophouse rather than to Cork. Rather than becoming important
in the novel, Murphy dwindles into a kind of False Sighting of
a Greek Hero. Joyce staged such a scene once before, in Dubliners.
The boy who narrates "An Encounter" walks the wharves with his
companion and watches "the discharging of the graceful
threemaster which we had observed from the other quay." He is
looking for the green eyes that medieval legends attributed to
Odysseus but is disappointed: "I came back and examined the
foreign sailors to see had any of them green eyes for I had
some confused notion.... The sailors' eyes were blue and grey
and even black. The only sailor whose eyes could have been
called green was a tall man who amused the crowd on the quay
by calling out cheerfully every time the planks fell: / –– All
right! All right!"
Despite these dead ends, the chapter insists on the relevance
of the Homeric story. It begins with a circuitous
approach to a humble building, and its pages are studded
with references to other stories of sea travels, other
maritime disasters, other absences from home, other momentous
returns. Bloom thinks of "travelling to London by long sea,"
overcoming his "landlubber" status. Naval mishaps like the sinking
of the Titanic recall the many ship sinkings on the
Homeric hero's trip back from Troy. Literary tales of leaving
home and returning (Washington Irving's Rip
Van Winkle, Tennyson's Enoch Arden, John
Keegan's Caoc O'Leary)
underline the question of what Odysseus will find when he
comes back. The death of Charles Stewart Parnell spawns
questions similar to those asked of Homer's hero: has he
really died, or will he return to rescue Ireland from its
bondage? Parnell's adultery likewise evokes the similarity
between Bloom and Odysseus, two men whose wives are being
stolen. None of these incidental allusions change the
direction of Joyce's story, but all of them invite readers to
find the proper way to frame it.
§ Perhaps
the greatest challenge of epic expectations is posed by the
chapter's spectacularly inept writing. The narrative commits a
dazzling array of stylistic blunders. Clichés are not avoided
but sought out. Things that could be said simply are conveyed
in fancy elaborate phrases. Subject-verb-object constructions
are inverted in attempts to sound grand. Modifiers are
misplaced. When thoughts and expressions are revised, the
original forms are left in the text as if it were being spoken
rather than written. Digressions are pursued so far into
subordinate clauses that the syntax of the main clauses
becomes lost. Foreign words are sprinkled everywhere, with
italics to indicate their exotic provenance, but far from
being recherché they are usually long-assimilated staples of
English vocabulary. Attempts at wit fall flat, and efforts to
innovate on common expressions result in nonsense. Homely
little bits of slang, ad jingles, and other kinds of ordinary
English break into the pretentiously high-toned cadences as if
the writer has momentarily forgotten to strive for eloquence.
Stephen calls Shakespeare "a lord of language," and Joyce is
no less. In Oxen of the Sun he demonstrates that he
can do anything with English prose. Why then would he choose
to write this badly? An answer commonly made to this question
(someone proposed it in the early ears of Joyce criticism, and
it has been dully repeated ever since) is that the chapter's
style is "tired." The exhausted prose, it is said, reflects
the fact it has been a very long day, culminating in the
grueling experiences of Circe. But there is nothing
tired about the prose of Eumaeus. On the contrary, it
is energetically, longwindedly, pretentiously, ambitiously
bad. Every sentence feels labored and formal, with a show-offy
claim to eloquence and cleverness that is not characteristic
of exhaustion.
A somewhat more persuasive hypothesis has been offered by
Gerald Bruns (Critical Essays, 365 ff.) and seconded by
Karen Lawrence (The Odyssey of Style, 168 ff.): that
this chapter adopts the language of a kind of collective
consciousness, recycling banal phrases that circulate through
an entire society. There is probably some truth to this
interpretation, but it does not address the issue of point of
view––why this narrator speaks in this way about these
particular characters. The narrator's view of Bloom, in
particular, seems to demand some kind of characterization.
I have always felt that this is the kind of prose that
Leopold Bloom might produce were he to try putting pen to
paper. At every instant the narrative looks over Bloom's
shoulder, seeing things from his point of view, approving of
his opinions and his choices, and flattering him. If this
relatively uneducated, unlettered, and unsophisticated man
tried to join the ranks of the literati, he might well recycle
such banal clichés, aim for such overdone effects, and commit
such unwitting blunders. My response to the qualities of the
prose is largely intuitive, but it finds support in one clear
indication of authorial design: Bloom daydreamed of becoming a
writer while reading Philip Beaufoy's story in Calypso,
and in Eumaeus he indulges the fantasy again,
thinking of Beaufoy as he imagines writing something like "My
Experiences, let us say, in a Cabman's Shelter."
Bloom cannot actually be writing the chapter––for one thing,
the narrative presents details of Stephen's thoughts that he
could not possibly know. But Joyce could well be pushing his
accustomed practice of free indirect style to an
extreme, much as he did with Gerty MacDowell in Nausicaa.
Having written in a variety of parodic and imitative styles in
the three chapters starting with Cyclops, it is
perfectly conceivable that Joyce would now adopt the
point of view of his own protagonist.
Despite the clownish ineptitude, there is heroism in
this––the kind of impulse that drives David Copperfield to "be
the hero of my own life." Joyce invites his readers to mock
it: Leopold Bloom a writer? But the
intimation that his protagonist might hold himself in high
enough regard to write the story of his own life does develop
the Odyssean analogy. When he finally has some real
conversation with Stephen, Bloom begins to feel that "Though
they didn't see eye to eye in everything, a certain analogy
there somehow was, as if both their minds were travelling, so
to speak, in the one train of thought." By the end of the
chapter readers start to have the same impression. After so
many seeming dead ends, Eumaeus sends its protagonists
off into the night in some approximation of the father-son
unity in Homer's poem, ready to tackle the intellectual
problems of existence in Bloom's kitchen and back
yard. The narrator's valorization of Bloom is validated.
Holding this view, I am happy to find myself agreeing with
one of Joyce's most discerning critics, Hugh Kenner. With
marvelous ambiguity Kenner calls the chapter's prose style
"perfectly awful" (Ulysses, 129)––a virtuosic
performance of terrible writing. Then he ventures an
explanation: "This is to be entrapped inside a novel with
Leopold Bloom in possession of the pen. It is Hamlet
taken in hand by Polonius.... Tired it is not: Joyce was never
more awake than when he misaligned all those thousands of
clichés. As for 'boring', not a word of it would bore Bloom,
who even fancies himself writing all of it" (130). Kenner
compares the technique to what Joyce has already done with
Stephen Dedalus: "So completely is the style of Eumaeus
Bloom's that when he speaks in the episode he speaks its very
idiom: no one else does. The artist may be forgiven if,
allowing his own voice and the narrative idiom to coalesce, he
awards the elegant lines to himself and permits his supporting
cast to grunt barbarisms; A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man was not otherwise configured" (130).
It is true, Kenner acknowledges, that the chapter does not
sound like Bloom's interior monologue or his quoted speech,
but there is nothing remarkable about that: "no man writes as
he speaks or thinks, but more formally, and generally in
longer sentences, and with elegant variations" (130). This is
Bloom not as he is but as he would like to present himself,
and Kenner observes that the self-flattering narration
reflects the situation in which Bloom finds himself. "He
deserves the privilege. This is his finest hour" (130). After
"a long dismal day" of snubs and insults Bloom has snagged "a
genuine poet-professor whom he is about to take home," and
with Stephen so morosely silent he can fill the conversational
void, taking center stage. The narrative, in other words,
approximates the feelings of liberation and authority that
Bloom is at last enjoying on June 16.
At the risk of belaboring the point, I will quote from
another scholar persuaded by Kenner's reading. In The
Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses (2022), Patrick Hastings
suggests that "rather than condemning Eumaeus as
stilted, overornamented prose with garbled syntax and
imprecise diction, we might instead consider the episode's use
of Bloom's own literary style (flawed as it may be) as Joyce's
ultimate celebration of Bloom himself (flawed as he may be).
By ceding such control to Mr. Bloom, Eumaeus
represents 'the book's most profound tribute to its hero'
[Kenner, Joyce's Voices, 38]. With this gesture in
mind, the episode's flabby sentences and cringeworthy clichés
become endearing à la Bloom himself. The episode's inferior
style, though, is also a demonstration of Joyce's extreme
facility with language. Just as it takes a very good piano
player to play a song really poorly––you have to know the
exact wrong notes to play to make it sound truly awful––it
takes an immensely talented writer to intentionally write this
badly" (205-6). Amen to every point.
Eumaeus is an odd duck––an ugly duckling quacking
its way from the brilliant madness of Circe to the
crystalline splendors of Ithaca. It often seems to
wander about with no purpose at all, much less an epic one,
but Joyce's artifice is neither incoherent nor
inconsequential. Raising and dashing Homeric hopes left and
right, it finally gives Bloom some heroic agency and fulfills
the novel's narrative purpose of bringing its two protagonists
together in intellectual sympathy.
