Ulysses Update - Episode 14 - Oxen of the Sun

November 27, 2008

OK, so this is section that broke my back the first time I “read” (and the depth of my engagement that time demands the scare quotes) Ulysses, and it very nearly did so again this time. With this section the usefulness of the annotations hit an all-time high. The stylistic changes of the prose– the progression from early- to late-style English– are obvious, but the specifics of those styles largely alluded to me. As I have them noted from the annotations, the sequence is writing in the style of:

Early Roman (”Arval”) incantation
Romans Sallust and Tacitus (in the mode of literal translation)
Medieval Latin prose chronicles (in the mode of literal translation)
Angle-Saxon e.g. Aelfric
Middle English, ala Everyman
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (John of Burgundy or John with the Beard)
Thomas Malory e.g. Morte d’Arthur
Elizabethan prose chronicles
John Bunyan e.g. Pligrim’s Progress
17th century diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys
Daniel Defoe
Jonathan Swift e.g. A Tale of a Tub
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele e.g. essays in the Tatler and the Spectator
Laurence Sterne e.g. Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
Oliver Goldsmith
Edmund Burke (and possibly Dr. Johnson and the earl of Chesterfield)
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Junius
Edward Gibbon
Horace Walpole e.g. The Caste of Otranto
Charles Lamb
Thomas De Quincey e.g. The English Mail Coach
Walter Savage Landor e.g. Imaginary Conversations
Thomas Babington Macaulay
T. H. Huxley
Charles Dickens e.g. David Copperfield
Walter Pater e.g. The Child in the House
John Ruskin
Thomas Carlyle
Dialect, slang (Joyce described it in a letter as “a frightful jumble of pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel”)

The changes in style were easy to spot, but the only specifics I guessed while reading were Lamb, Huxley and Dickens. I had a good idea about Ruskin, but couldn’t come up with the name on my own.

I’m not so sure what the point of this stylistic progression is. The basic topic of the chapter is birth, though as the different styles of the writers are affected, each goes off on a tangent that would be suitable to them: Huxley makes a scientific examination, Lamb and Dickens paint sentimental portraits, etc. I suppose the progression of the language from the earliest, stilted literal translation to the chaotic human musical of contemporary slang and dialect is itself a kind of conception and birth of language.

In The Odyssey this is the episode in which Ulysses remaining men disobey his orders and feast on oxen belonging to the Sun god Helios, an act for which all but Ulysses– who is asleep when it happens– are slain by Zeus. There is recurring cattle imagery in this section of Ulysses (including the news that the diseased cattle referred to by Deasy in his letter and discussion with Stephen earlier, are going to be slaughtered and Buck’s story of eating the meat of unborn cattle), but the more important symbolic parallel is sacrilege. As Ulysses’ men perform a sacrilegious act in killing and eating the cattle, so does the crowd gathered at the hospital– including Bloom and Stephen Dedalus– speak in a sacrilegious manner about conception, pregnancy and birth. The isolation and torment of both Leopold and Stephen are made obvious here– neither fit well with the conversation, both are frustrated by thoughts of their sometime nemeses, Molly and Buck Mulligan.

By the end of the section, Bloom clearly feels some kinship with fellow outsider Stephen and explicitly attempts to rescue him from the boorish group, but Stephen is drunk and doesn’t respond to his overtures. The occasion of Mina Purefoy’s birth has become an occasion for crossed connections: Bloom thinking of his lost son and developing an attachment to Stephen while Stephen is drunk with both spirits and thoughts of his lost mother… a role Bloom can never satisfactorily take on.

Various tidbits throughout the chapter were interesting enough to underline because of the language and/or the discrete sentiment, such as the prose inspired by the possibly opium-inspired De Quincey:

“Twilight phantoms are they, yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They fade, sad phantoms: all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa.”

which is made all the more skin-crawling by the associated annotation, which describe the upupa, “or hoopoe” as:

“…a bird that lives on the flesh of corpses and lines its nest with human excrement.”

Interestingly in the same section Joyce presages, though in a different way, a modern scientific phrase, the “cold interstellar wind.”

Elsewhere, Joyce notes, continuing the thread of Theosophy, that:

“It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.”

Only to change-up abruptly into Huxley-style scientific description that leads to a most direct form of determinism:

“It is interesting because, as he pertinently remarks, we are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways.

[...]

An ingenious suggestion is that thrown out by Mr V. Lynch (Bacc. Arith.) that both natality and mortality, as well as all other phenomena of evolution, tidal movements, lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general, everything, in fine, in nature’s vast workshop from the extinction of some remote sun to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which beautify our public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet unascertained.”

Until the section finally ends with a slang-filled, minstrel-style call to spiritual awakening after a chapter filled largely with profane conjecture:

“Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J Christ Dowie, that’s my name, that’s yanked to glory most half this planet from Frisco beach to Vladivostok. The Deity aint no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that He’s on the square and a corking fine business proposition. He’s the grandest thing yet and don’t you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus. You’ll need to rise precious early you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God. Pflaaaap! Not half. He’s got a coughmixture with a punch in it for you, my friend, in his back pocket. Just you try it on.”

Tags Tags: james joyce, oxen of the sun, reading, ulysses