Ferrules of Engagement The Speech of Unheard Things in Ulysses

Ferrules of Engagement: The Speech of Unheard Things in "Ulysses"
Author(s): Elizabeth Inglesby

Source: Texas Studies in Literature and Language , FALL 2014, Vol. 56, No. 3 (FALL 2014),
pp. 292-325
Published by: University of Texas Press
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Ferrules of Engagement:
The Speech of Unheard Things
in Ulysses
Elizabeth Inglesby
Stephen Dedalus brings to Ulysses certain ideas associated with his early
attempts to become a creator: his pledge to "go to encounter for the mil-
lionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul
the uncreated conscience of my race" ( Portrait 275-76), for example, and
his youthful definition of artistic epiphany, which Joyce renovates consid-
erably in Ulysses. Stephen's attempts to "read the signatures of all things"
in Ulysses begin in "Telemachus" and continue in the "Proteus" episode,
showing some of the results of his efforts to progress as an artist: primar-
ily, his tendency, when encountering material reality, to forge - create and
simultaneously falsify - a text with which to encapsulate what he sees be-
fore him (37). He habitually cobbles together his own cursory observations
and fragments of others' words and ideologies. This proclivity, coupled
with his view of objects as pretexts for creating epiphanies out of the mun-
dane, demonstrates the solipsistic strain in Stephen that Joyce will counter
in the novel by using the very materials with which his young protagonist
imprisons his consciousness: objects and words.
The underexamined story in Ulysses is that of the minutiae that some-
times seem beneath the notice even of those who set out to examine trivia.
We might call this category of details the "throwaways," to borrow Joyce's
name in Ulysses for an amalgamation of horse, paper scrap, and prophet,
except that to do so suggests that they share the same prominent status as
"Elijah Throwaway," an entity who receives a fair amount of overt atten-
tion from both the narrative voices and Bloom. To find the deeper founda-
tions of the phenomenal world in Joyce, it is necessary to move beyond
examinations of items that Joyce presents as talismans, symbols, or ob-
jects that characters respond to with focused, conscious attention, such
as the kind Stephen employs when he seeks out an epiphany. Presences
so unobtrusive and incidental that they appear thoroughly dispensable
at first glance provide the bedrock for Joyce's creation, a crucial layer of
linguistic and material reality in which a blade of grass occupies the same
Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 56, No. 3, Fall 2014
© 2014 by the University of Texas Press
DOI: 10.7560 /TSLL56303

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The Speech of Unheard Things in Ulysses 293
moral, etymological, and physical universe as the giant, the budding ge-
nius, or the Everyman. Ordinary things, such as plants, furnishings, or
pieces of jewelry, "speak" in unexpected ways in Ulysses , allowing the
author to challenge traditional hierarchies of importance that have long
dominated discussions of humanity's place in the physical realm; these
items encourage a reconsideration of both the way in which we envision
our own significance among the props we habitually undervalue, disre-
gard, or misunderstand, and the power of language to create and reorder
that understanding.
Before Ulysses begins, Stephen is no stranger to the concept of trivia
as vital to the formulation of aesthetic theory. As he tells Cranly in Stephen
Hero , Stephen's concept of epiphany depends upon singling out details
and focusing upon them until they yield a vision that moves both object
and viewer beyond ordinary comprehension: "This triviality made him
think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies.
By an epiphany he meant 'a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in
the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind
itself' ... He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable
of an epiphany" (211). Stephen's early formulation of this process when
he applies it to objects, however, depends largely on an action that takes
place in the observer's mind: "Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the
gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact fo-
cus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in
this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty" (211).
Stephen's use of passive voice to describe what happens to the object em-
phasizes its helplessness as the subject's eye not only regards, but "gropes"
for it; his syntax demonstrates his belief in the primacy of the perceiving
subject, going so far as to make "focusing," rather than actually seeing, the
supreme act of any epiphany. As he continues to lecture Cranly, however,
he makes a grammatical and ideological leap that he can neither sustain
nor explain fully, as he ascribes a fleeting use of agency to his object:
The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself
and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates
the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the
mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind
recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing , a
definitely constituted entity. You see? . . . Now for the third quality.
For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a
figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it.
Claritas is quidditas. [Italicized in original] After the analysis which
discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically pos-
sible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment
which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral

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294 Elizabeth Inglesby
thing, then we recognise that it is an organised co

thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the par
the parts are adjusted to the special point, we rec
thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to u
of its appearance. The soul of the commonest ob
of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The
epiphany. (213)
In this explanation, Stephen makes a number of ass

his thinking about the relationship between subject
perhaps unwittingly admits a bias toward objects th
visual symmetry, a preference that would presuma
of things likely to capture the mind's attention. Th
with its geometric design and vaguely human-like
target for the appreciator of symmetrical unity or h
of Stephen's explanation underscores the importance
ticipant in seeing the object: "the object is in the stricte
a thing." The entity is "definitely constituted" in part b
Stephen's vocabulary then becomes murkier, as he
next phase of recognition, in which the beholder see
to a "special point." Adjusted by what or whom? Do
cur as an action within the perceiving eye, like focu
adjustment? Or is it a reorganizing or shifting move
itself, needing no further outside interference to bring
Stephen's theory sheds little light on these quest
tological, deciding that the object "is that thing whic
from passive to active voice, concluding that the it
"soul," and that "its whatness leaps to us from the v
ance." This last phrase adds a spiritual dimension to
as an attempt to create a balancing counterpart for t
he mentions earlier. The object suddenly takes on m
qualities as it seems to don garments: "vestment
seemed to be the object are now merely coverings f
the thing will have to emerge in order to actualize itsel
epiphany, the object is allowed one bold surge into a
Stephen quickly snatches authority back from it, re
to the eye of the beholder as the locus of the "seem
ceives. The last sentence offers a puzzling and unres
active voice, stating that the object has "achieved"
epiphany. Taken as a whole, however, this passage s
Stephen might just as easily have said that "the obj
any." Stephen has yet to confront this inherent disc
lation. It will take another novel and a greatly expan
Joyce to grapple more fully with the contradiction

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idea. The fact that the theory contains so many unsettled points of revolu-
tion illustrates the difficulties inherent in Joyce's consideration of objects
as anything more than convenient loci for organizing human thought and
emotion. As Joyce works in Ulysses to destabilize the notion of singular, co-
herent consciousness, however, he creates more opportunities to contem-
plate the nature and degree of the distance we work to maintain between
ourselves as subjects and everything outside of ourselves as objects.2
Fallacies of the Familiar
Joyce employs both Stephen and Bloom, as well as other voices with vary-
ing preoccupations, sensitivities, and limitations, in the service of explor-
ing the untold story of the world they inhabit, all the while demonstrating
that the active presence of characters does not render their environment
an inert stage upon which to play out their dramas or a tapestry woven
entirely of human design, hanging as a backdrop. The "Proteus" episode,
in which Stephen strolls along Sandymount Strand, opening and closing
his eyes, checking to see if the world disappears when he cannot see it,
and vowing to "read the signatures of all things," seems a logical place to
begin an examination of Joyce's thinking about the meaning of the mate-
rial, as it features a character with a keen interest in contemplating the
nature of physical reality. Stephen's objective, however, may point readers
in the wrong direction if they rely chiefly upon him to make legible the
mysterious qualities of the natural and synthetic phenomena he encoun-
ters. His desire to penetrate the veil that separates him from the things
he wishes to read should not be taken at face value. As Joyce reveals in
"Telemachus," Stephen's literacy, as it pertains to objects before him, is
both painfully self-referential and deeply informed by the books he has
devoured. He seems doomed to regurgitate quotations when faced with
the task of decoding unfamiliar or unwritten texts. His failure to read his
surroundings exposes what Joyce encourages us to recognize as deeply
entrenched human assumptions about objects: that they are inert and indif-
ferent, lifeless and uncomprehending. Ulysses offers opportunities to ques-
tion these assumptions, but Joyce's audience must move past Stephen's
readings in order to recognize that the inanimate world has its own narra-
tive - just as language itself in the novel has its own narrative, even while
characters are adopting both things and words for proprietary purposes.
Ulysses begins by giving Stephen ample opportunities to try out his
ideas about his material surroundings as he begins his day in contem-
plation of the visible. He immediately illustrates the problem of seeing
without cluttering his vision with multiple, often literary, associations or
giving in to narcissistic urges. "Telemachus" offers the first glimpse of a
young man whose thoughts never stray far from his miseries and fears
as he interprets them with the help of his knowledge of the philosophers

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and literary artists he admires. During his morning

Haines and Buck Mulligan, Stephen aches with mise
his mother and the guilt he feels at not having gra
that he pray with her. He also worries over his statu
misunderstood artist whom Buck cruelly teases and
mined to treat as an Irish curiosity. As he banters w
Stephen recalls bits of text he learned in school or c
ing Wilde and Swinburne. He begins to assemble
and from elements of the scene around him the nar
ing, self-imposed exile from the tower where he h
jects seem to stay in the background for him as shad
own anxieties.
In an act of authorial mimicry and playful mockery of Stephen's
dependence upon his education to help him comprehend reality, Joyce
briefly introduces in "Telemachus" a literary predecessor of his own, Walt
Whitman.3 Alluding to the poeťs democratic ideals concerning people,
objects, and natural phenomena, Joyce exposes, through highly indirect
means, the narrowness of Stephen's point of view. Whitman's "Song of
Myself" provides a model of expansive thinking that often treats nonhu-
man entities, such as plants, animals, tools, and household items, with a
respect and interest similar to that afforded the human multitudes that
people the poem. The irony of the title comes from the fact that one of its
main themes is the enfolding of the self with "multitudes" of other people,
things, and natural phenomena, so that it becomes nearly impossible to tell
where the self ends and the rest of the world begins. In order to "celebrate
self," Whitman celebrates the inherent fallacy of seeing himself as fun-
damentally divisible from the world at large, or from his audience: "For
every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" (Whitman 21). He
asks his reader, "Have you reckon'd the earth much?/ Have you practis'd
so long to learn to read?" (21-22) - a question that resonates with Joyce's
design for "Proteus," in which he will test Stephen's ability to find a way
of reading that does not obscure the text at hand by pasting over it with
other texts. Whitman's "uniform hieroglyphic," the "leaves of grass" that
form both the title of his famous volume of poetry and a central metaphor
of abundance, fertility, vitality, and vibrant stillness, combines with his
conviction that his status as a material creature among the phenomena, a
leaf among leaves, affords him limitless opportunities to try out different
modes of understanding:
To me all the converging objects of the universe

perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing
means.
... I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue

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cut with a burnt stick at night.

... I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself
or be understood,
I see that elementary laws never apologize,
(I reckon that I behave no prouder than the level I
plant my house by, after all.)
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content. (404-15)
These lines may make Whitman's speaker sound as though he would be

pleased to play the role of an inanimate object, sitting placidly and mak-
ing no effort to justify or explain his existence, but the poem as a whole
suggests that he finds irresistible the urge to try to speak with a voice both
human and inhuman, to merge as completely as possible with the mate-
rial and articulate his sense of indivisibility from the long catalogue of
things both natural and synthetic that collectively form the sprawling self
in whom he revels.
Ulysses reveals a similar impulse to attempt to penetrate the silence
of the object-world and to write its voice into the novel, preserving all the
while an awareness of the impossibility of ever fully liberating this voice
from the very human language Joyce employs to try to capture it. Rather
than fighting this circumstance, he uses it to undermine Stephen's defini-
tion of epiphany, broadening its basis, reordering the primacy of the sub-
ject and object, and demonstrating the relatively puny scale of revelations
that depend on the precarious stability of ephemeral moments of human
mental focus. Against a faintly sketched, Whitmanesque framework, Joyce
suggests that Stephen hampers his own efforts to arrive at an authentic
understanding of his place in the universe precisely by focusing too ex-
clusively on the content - both original and borrowed - of his mind as the
mediator of reality. The references to Whitman's poem of inclusiveness act
as an underground epigraph for "Telemachus" and for the story of objects
throughout the novel: a buried plot that one might follow alongside the
more overt concerns of the characters. The poet's shadowy presence sug-
gests that some of Stephen's limitations, and more generally, humanity's
perceptual shortfalls, might be overcome in the long term by enlarging the
scope of regard to include more than just the obviously sentient, such as
the milkmaid that Stephen underpays or the dog he encounters later on the
strand. Ulysses suggests that we must also try to understand things as more
than just commodities, symbols, or mirrors of ourselves, for example.
Whitman's influence steals into the chapter through a combination of
direct quotation and visual cues, and helps to emphasize etymological and
empathetic connections between objects ostensibly on the sidelines of the
characters' actions. Joyce's method of introduction depends on subtlety;

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he quietly links seemingly disparate elements of the

ary allusion as a medium for bringing forward a p
sion of reality that people normally ignore. The co
this dimension hinge, in part, upon the proximity in
cavalier swipes at the grasses he encounters along t
and Stephen's belief that his ashplant is calling his
Stephen watches Buck dressing to leave the Martell
Joyce describes this action in a paragraph that anth
clothing and introduces Whitman directly into the text
completely whose particular mind is responsible for
And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie, [Bu

chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain
and rummaged in his trunk while he called for a
Agenbite of inwit. God, we'll simply have to dre
want puce gloves and green boots. Contradiction.
self? Very well then, I contradict myself. Mercu
black missile flew out of his talking hands. (16-17
The passage is a study in deliberate ambiguity. Buc

sible for personifying his clothes, as he is the one
ing them. The word "rebellious" would seem to belo
Joyce's later insertion, in the Paris text of 1922, of
Stephen's oft-repeated mantra, suggests that much
actually be Stephen's creation. The speaker or think
unclear. Is it Buck talking about the activity in whi
gaged, or is it Stephen, sardonically imagining himse
code of his aesthetic predecessors? The "contradictio
passage also remains unspecified, and the Whitman q
could conceivably come from either Stephen or Buc
share a proclivity for frustrating or contradicting t
ers. Critics disagree about the provenance of the qu
( Joyce's "Ulysses" 23) and Richard Ellmann ("Ulysses" o
example, credit Buck with uttering it, while Kevin Dett
of Postmodernism 19) attributes it to Stephen. The
tains up to four speakers: Buck, Stephen, Whitman
third-person voice that might be Stephen, Buck, or
tor. This confusion results in the Whitman reference b
no character in particular, but more generally to the ep
"Telemachus" appears to owe more to Whitman than
stance of direct quotation: section 33 of "Song of My
speaker contemplating having "walk'd the beach un
of the morning" and "hauling my boat down the s
the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead,/ W

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furiously at the hunter,/ . . . Walking the path worn in the grass and beat
through the leaves of the brush" (46-47). These images correspond with
the location, activities, conversational topics (Stephen has been complain-
ing that Haines talked of shooting a panther in his sleep), and even one of
the nicknames of Joyce's characters in "Telemachus."
The last line quoted above from section 33 of "Song of Myself" -
"Walking the path worn in the grass and beat through the leaves of the
brush" - proves to be particularly useful because it points directly to a
moment crucial to understanding the speech of unheard things in Ulysses.
While in the foreground the characters engage one another in conversa-
tions about art, religion, and politics, Joyce creates an understory of the
material world as it collides with callous and unthinking human behavior
and tries to make itself heard. After dressing, Buck, Haines, and Stephen,
carrying his ashplant, leave the tower for the shore. Stephen hears Buck
behind him, "club[bing] with his heavy bathtowel the leader shoots of
ferns or grasses," and addressing them as though they were on the attack:
"Down, sir. How dare you, sir?" (17). He chides the vegetation in much the
same tone as he has just scolded his clothing, continuing his simple, play-
ful personification and perhaps adding weight to Stephen's perception of
him as gratuitously violent and destructive. Joyce makes clear, though,
that Buck's gesture is directed not at Stephen, but at the "leader shoots" -
in the original manuscript, "upreared ferns or grasses" (1 7).5 Stephen's
thoughts, in line with his universalized sense of victimhood, stay reso-
lutely focused on himself, his weariness, and his ridiculous appearance:
"his own image in cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires" (18).
The moment ends with Buck, about to dive into the "fortyfoot hole, . . .
tugg[ing] swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell" (19). Buck apparently
considers the ashplant an extension of Stephen, and his good-bye to or
through it serves as a reminder of both its totemic status and its persistent
presence as a witness to human activity.
Joyce then sets the scene for the phenomenal to undercut the cere-
bral by using the inanimate to highlight the narrowness of the characters'
opinions about religious belief. He displays Stephen, in particular, as a
model of overinflated self-referentiality, deaf and blind to phenomena not
immediately participating in the drama of his suffering. As soon as Buck
is out of earshot, Haines baits Stephen with the topic of blasphemy, claim-
ing not to be a "believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from
nothing and miracles and a personal God." Stephen answers him: "There's
only one sense of the word, it seems to me" (19). In Stephen's conception
of faith, there is room for only one kind of unbelief: the kind of deliberate
turning away from irrational religious ideas and ritual that brings him
guilt when he thinks about how he demonstrated it at the deathbed of
his mother by refusing to pray (19). His unwitting role as the impercipi-
ent in Joyce's tale of the material becomes clearer when Haines moves to

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draw Stephen into further conversation. At this mom

walking stick, Joyce exposes his protagonist's inabilit
philosophical boundaries by revealing his lack of aw
owy world outside of himself and the human system
internalized. Haines continues:
- Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe or

you don't, isn't it? Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of a per-
sonal God. You don't stand for that, I suppose?
- You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible
example of free thought.
He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his
side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My
familiar, after me, calling Steeeeeeeeeeeephen. A wavering line along
the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. (20)
This moment is revealing not only because it uncovers crucial aspects of

Stephen's spiritual crisis, his tortured relationship with the abstract con-
cept of "free" thought and his unconscious comparison of himself with
a suffering Christ dragging his cross, but also because it marks one of
the first instances in which Joyce gives an object a noticeable speaking
voice. The ashplant, with its timely shriek, appears to Stephen to act in
fulfillment of his need for verbal response to his statement. Stephen un-
doubtedly feels that it does, as he refers to the stick as "my familiar," sub-
stituting, perhaps unwittingly, a supernatural relationship long associated
with witchcraft for Haines's idea of a "personal god." However, the nature
of the speaking object, the ferrule, and the way in which Stephen hears
and interprets its squeal allow Joyce both to expose Stephen's narcissistic
sensibilities and to write past them to get to the story of the object and the
implications that story holds for the rest of the material world in the novel.
Juxtaposed with Stephen's double-edged admission that he is a "hor-
rible example of a freethinker" is a demonstration for the audience of just
how firmly Stephen is shackled to his own miserable perspective. The fer-
rule of his ashplant scrapes the ground, and Stephen hears only his name.
The text, however, hears the voice of the object itself, and subtly connects
it with both Buck's attack on the grasses and ferns, moments before, and
with Whitman's vision of the grass as a symbol of our deep connection
with and ultimate indivisibility from other phenomena with which we
share the universe.6 Read from this angle, the ashplant's cry becomes a
shrill protest of the brusque self-absorption of its human counterparts and
of the violence visited upon the leader shoots moments before.
In the original manuscript, Joyce spelled "ferrule" with one "r" - a
mistake that necessitated a change to the Paris text of 1922. As he checked
the spelling, this correction afforded him an opportunity to think more

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deeply about the linguistic reverberations it brings to the episode. The

two words share a rich and interesting relationship, one well suited to
Joyce's purposes as he strives to call our attention to the smallest material
details of the novel. A "ferrule" is "a ring or cap of metal put round the
end of a stick, tube, etc., to strengthen it, or prevent splitting or wearing"
("ferrule, n."). The modern English word is derived from Latin and related to
ferrum and verrei , meaning iron and bracelets. "Ferule" is both an alternate
spelling of "ferrule" and a word referring, in its noun form, to "a genus of
plants, the giant fennel," "a plant or stalk of it" (akin to "festuca/' a blade
of grass or any of the genus of the parsley family), or "a rod" ("ferule, n.")
In its verb form, it means "to beat, strike with a ferule" ("ferule, v."). Sud-
denly, etymological and physical resonances between Stephen's supposed
"familiar" and the vegetation that takes a beating in this episode enable
us to recognize empathetic connections that Joyce draws between things
without the help or comprehension of characters.7
By handling these words as though they are objects with weighty ma-
terial presence and noticeable physiological similarities, or perhaps even
living creatures that share bloodlines, Joyce demonstrates the power that
they have to reorder the way in which his audience apprehends both char-
acter and what has traditionally been dismissed as mere scene setting or
stage props. Stephen, lost in his own thoughts, cannot make the connec-
tion, so the author challenges his audience to take up the slack by learning
to listen for the unexpected ways in which objects speak in the novel. Joyce
has restructured the definition of "epiphany" to reflect more emphatically
how things and the words we use to describe them control, to a great
extent, what we are able to focus on during a moment of realization or
clarity. If readers register it, this particular revelation concerning the la-
tent sensitivity or responsiveness of the inanimate happens almost entirely
through language that binds together images of violence, its victims, and
the mouthpiece that draws attention to them.8 Neither the seeing eye of
a character/ witness nor the thinking "I" of a character /interpreter takes
charge of "focusing" for us. Joyce's remodeled, underground epiphany
depends not, as Stephen has outlined, on seeing an object as "one integral
thing," but on picking up on the myriad subtle connections that link one
mode of being to others, an act that calls to mind the idea of metempsycho-
sis carried through the novel as a whole. The "soul" or "whatness" of these
speaking objects in "Telemachus" leaps toward the audience from several
directions at once, not primarily through one clearly identifiable organiz-
ing mind, but through finer filaments of continuity - literary, etymologi-
cal, physiological, ethical - embedded in the text. The use of one form of
"whatness" to illuminate another becomes one of the many methods that
Joyce employs to challenge the notion of the singular, coherent conscious-
ness confidently surveying its surroundings, certain that it has not missed
anything of importance. Just as actual objects must become words in order

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to exist in books, Ulysses makes words behave as m

objects to underscore the potential power that they
the vision of both the characters and the audience.
As the passage above comes to an end, Stephen plays a role in creating
the "wavering line along the path," but the novel offers the possibility that
the line belongs to the ashplant itself as much as to the young man drag-
ging it. As the ferrule leaves a signature in the dirt, Stephen again wants
to appropriate it. He thinks of how the others will trample over it later,
perhaps as a gesture of disregard for his potential as a writer, or an echo
of the way in which Buck has trampled his feelings by speaking callously
of May Dedalus's death. Despite Stephen's sense that the ashplant is an
extension of himself, it also emerges as an object capable, in one sense, of
speaking and writing its own version of the salient points of this scene. It
leaves its mark in the text, emphasizing, as it bears un-silent witness to
the behavior of its human counterparts, the extraordinary blindness of
those who claim to be phenomenal readers.9 In an echo of Stephen's fear of
neglect, Joyce acknowledges, with the ashplant's imperiled signature, the
possibility that he has buried the tale of the object-world so deeply within
the novel that it risks being trampled over by the more conventionally ar-
ticulated stories of the characters and the objects they single out for special
attention. In this way, the ashplant, momentarily a pen, also draws our at-
tention back to the interface of the physical and the cerebral encapsulated
in the act of writing a book.
Objects in the text that appear in tandem with Stephen stand a great
chance of being swept away by the waves of tormented, hypertextual
thought that accompany many of his attempts to encounter reality in all
its various forms.10 From the beginning of the novel, Joyce takes pains
to establish Stephen's unreliability as an observer of the material world.
First of all, his myopia, made worse than usual by his having lost his
glasses, makes seeing the phenomenal world a physical challenge for
Stephen, who attempts to compensate through thinking. As "Proteus"
opens grandiloquently with Stephen's announcement of his chosen topic
of contemplation, "Ineluctable modality of the visible, at least that if no
more, thought through my eyes," Joyce prepares to demonstrate that this
kind of "seeing" will be inadequate to the task of taking in all the rich-
ness of his surroundings, causing Stephen to continue to forge, rather than
read, the "signatures of all things" (37). His walk on the strand finds him
noticing "seaspawn and seawrack," among other items, but his "readings"
of the beach vegetation are heavily pasted over with romantically tinged
language that all but obscures their existence as actual plants:
Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly
and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering
water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night

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by night: lifted, flooded, and let fall. Lord, they are weary: and whis-
pered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves
waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniurias
patiens ingemiscit . [Italicized in original] To no end gathered. Vainly
then released, forth flowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary
too in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her
courts, she draws a toil of waters. (49)
In this attempt at crafting pathetic fallacy, Stephen cannot long maintain

the integrity of even a simple form of personification because he floods the
passage with so many references: to popular songs and the writings of St.
Ambrose and Dryden, for example.11 Though Stephen's thought process
begins with a moment of sympathetic contemplation of the gestures of the
underwater fronds, the weeds themselves are soon forgotten in Stephen's
haste to move from image to allusion, and it seems more important to him
to note that Saint Ambrose had an aesthetic experience similar to his than
to spend much time in careful observation himself of the natural phenom-
ena before him. He looks at the fronds in order to see not them, but their
literary correlates as his mind has already envisioned them.12 Abandoning
the image of "leaves awaiting their time" (another reminder of Whitman),
Stephen quickly scurries on to the next in his set of associations: a naked
woman from Dryden's MacFlecknoe . His ashplant, significantly, waits pre-
cariously nearby, poised to "float away" like Stephen's awareness of the
solidity of the things he sees before him and converts so readily to texts of
his own design ( Ulysses 49). His process of paring away the original object
of focus until it becomes purely a literary allusion stands in contrast to
the way in which Joyce manipulates allusions and verbal associations in
"Telemachus" in order to foreground, briefly, objects that the characters
customarily treat carelessly or misunderstand, like the leader shoots and
the ashplant. Joyce uses these items to illustrate the brittle illusion of hege-
mony his characters struggle to maintain over their material surroundings.
The story of the ashplant, with its vocal ferrule and its linguistic and
physiological cousins, continues throughout Ulysses , expanding an ety-
mological continuity into a multiform echo in the text as Joyce peppers
the novel with ferulaic variants: bracelets, grasses, fronds, sticks, canes,
umbrellas, and the like.13 Sometimes, they simply flash briefly as physical
elements of a scene or intrude upon the thoughts of the characters but still
fail to receive the full recognition of the mind that pictures them. Joyce
disperses them throughout the various episodes like shadowy messengers
to remind the audience of what it has earlier witnessed: callous human
attitudes and behavior toward the nonhuman, and blindness toward the
life of the inanimate world that can also indicate blindness to the suffer-
ing of the manifestly or officially sentient as well. Joyce scatters bracelets
throughout the text, for example, often giving them voices that resonate

154.59.124.94 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 07:41:55 UTC
with the voices of other objects, or timing their app

at moments when he wants to emphasize a failure o
understanding of the Other on the part of one of the c
In "Nestor," for example, Stephen unsympathe
"welloff" students and imagines their lust for seasid
springs to Stephen's mind is of "tittering bracelets"
girls "engaged in struggle" (24-25). Meeting his siste
conjures a memory of her listening to his tales of Paris
beck bracelet, Dan Kelly's token" (243). His thoughts
ship, and he is wracked with guilt. However, as she
into the "lank coils of seaweed" he earlier consigned
at the water's edge in "Proteus," Stephen's empathy
him. He thinks chiefly of self-preservation as he r
When the bracelets reappear in "Circe" on the limbs
they speak with the voices of "dull bells" (471), man
and echoing both the "Heigho!" of the harness bells
that Bloom regards empathetically in "Hades" (70
iron" bells of St. George's church that Stephen and B
and "Ithaca" (471, 704). The bracelets add their vo
things that speak in Ulysses with only a limited ch
or understood.
The ashplant itself reappears dozens of times in the novel, fulfilling
its role, as Stephen sees it, of faithful accessory to his wardrobe and occa-
sionally handy tool or weapon. It also participates in the text as a member
of a class of objects whom Joyce encourages us to view as independently
communicative, both vocally and gesturally.15 In subtle ways, Stephen's
walking stick, the canes gripped by the blind stripling and by the spec-
tre of Rudy, who appears at the end of "Circe," and even the ubiquitous
umbrellas of Ulysses - carried by various characters, used as a "sceptre"
(470) and a "marquee" (568) in "Circe," or cluttering Bloom's hallstand
four abreast (68) - speak of another dimension of the story of Ulysses . They
point, tap, clack, and squeal alongside the talkative characters, emphasiz-
ing what the human element in the novel misses, revealing ironies in its
disregard for the phenomenal world, and witnessing with their constant
presence to the multimodal possibilities for sentience or awareness, even
when they remain mute.
As Stephen makes his way through "Wandering Rocks," he carries
on a fragmented conversation with himself that touches on his earlier
concerns in "Proteus" about whether or not the world continues to exist
"without" him when he closes his eyes:
The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the
powerhouse urged Stephen to be on. Beingless beings. Stop! Throb
always without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing

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of. I between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they
swirl, I. Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow.
Shatter me you who can. Bawd and butcher, were the words. I say!
Not yet awhile. A look around
the handle of the ash clacking against his shoulder
Joyce encloses this moment of Stephen's contem

worlds - "real" and "ideal," after Richard Henry S
and "powerless to be born," after Matthew Arnold (G
276) - between two communications from the mater
ern bands and dynamos speak, and Stephen hears in th
"be on." He takes their urgings to mean that he shou
the street, but they seem also to suggest, successfully
"on" active contemplation of his earlier consideration
himself. His appraisal of machines as "beingless being
paradoxical and dismissive, as if finding an oxymoron
their essence constitutes a sufficient understanding o
Stephen's mind. As he ponders how to respond to be
two worlds, his sentences become choppier and synta
though revealing: "Between two roaring worlds where
ter them, one and both" makes "I" a towering, stick-
the chaos that engenders a sense of helplessness in t
the action that decisively destroys chaotic motion in
Stephen fears stunning himself as he thinks of takin
desire a resolution of the questions of the nature of r
throughout the book. "Shatter me you who can" is a
directed at any force that can demonstrate to him his
nomena he encounters and thinks about. In the next m
handle taps him on the shoulder, clacking against him
his challenge as he makes his way down the street.16
remains oblivious, distracted by a print in the window
Not until "Circe" does the ashplant get to become a
in the sentence above, an agent of the action foresha
syntax. When Stephen uses his ashplant to smash the
on the last leap of "time's living final flame" and th
(583), "one and both" shatter two dimensions hitherto
ing the realm of the material as separate from the et
and spiritual. After this climactic moment, Stephen
plant" (583), then complains of having "displaced" his
(589). Bloom - whom Molly calls "an old stick in the
(440) - picks up the ashplant and spends the rest of th
restore it to Stephen's reluctant grasp, a feat he is on
as "Circe" fades with the image of Rudy holding a "sl
"Eumaeus" begins with Bloom picking Stephen up, du

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attempting to bring him back in touch with the materia

Thereafter, images of the ashplant, with its iron ferr
counterparts, the grasses, sticks, and bracelets, conti
rative as a constituency with a voice intended for th
if not for that of the characters.
Joyce also uses Stephen's linguistic dexterity to i
physical and etymological signpost in Ulysses , one t
objects that speak in "Telemachus." In "Nestor," Step
puzzles his students with a joke that brings together
studying, history, with a Dublin landmark and a sugg
ality to be found at the seaside. Stephen asks:
Wait. You, Armstrong, Do you know anything abo

. . . - Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier.
. . . - Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy'
shoulder with the book, what is a pier.
- A pier, sir, Armstrong said. A thing out in the
waves. A kind of bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.
. . . - Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a
disappointed bridge. The words troubled their ga
In this exchange, which he imagines reenacting late

Haines, Stephen introduces the pier, or "disappointe
phor for disconnection - for a failure to communicat
of existence. This image generates Stephen's musings
real, and of the "actuality of the possible as possible"
he will unfurl more fully in "Proteus" as he attem
Aristotelian definitions of reality. He considers how
unfolded differently, thinking of all the potential m
that have been cut off from us because they have no
Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a bedlam's hand or Juli

knifed to death? They are not to be thought away
them and fettered they are lodged in the room of th
ties they have ousted. But can those have been po
they never were? Or was that the only possible which
Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brigh
a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. T
vast, candescent: form of forms. (25-26)
Stephen's instinctive tendency is to think of what

was not) as though it had material presence: a class o
"ousted," or removed, bodily, from the "room" in w

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in order to make way for what is.17 If so, where do the phenomena of pos-
sibility go when they are usurped by the "real/' or actual? Stephen cannot
hold for long in his mind the weighty image of potential; he reverts to
abstractions, such as "thought is the thought of thought" and "soul is the
form of forms," in order to sidestep the question of where the "soul" actu-
ally resides or what comprises it. He does not seem to want to consider the
possibility that if human bodies are the containers of the soul, then other
"bodies" might also be capable of possessing "spiritual" content. When he
reaches this impasse in his thoughts, it is as though he has come to the end
of a philosophical pier and stopped, seeing no way to progress further in
his inquiry into the actual and the possible. Interestingly, the last thought
that he has before coming up with his clever pier joke is of the sound of the
seaside girls' "bracelets tittering in the struggle" to fend off the aggressive
attention of the schoolboys in his class.
Gifford and Seidman note that Stephen's thoughts, after they lead from
"Pyrrhus" and "pier" to the more esoteric "possibilities" and the soul as a
"form," echo "another of Aristotle's distinctions, that between poetry and
history in The Poetics " (31). If Joyce, as Gifford and Seidman argue, is mak-
ing use of the philosopher's assertion that "the poet's function is to describe,
not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen" and
that "the distinction between historian and poet" is that "the one describes
the thing that has been and the other a kind of thing that might be," then
this particular way of envisioning the poet's (or novelist's) task helps to
illuminate one of the ways in which Joyce himself sees possibilities for rei-
magining the definition of the soul and its relationship to the material body.
Joyce considers not only what might have been, had humanity behaved dif-
ferently in the past, but what might be if people were to reconsider their
relationships with the physical world. In Ulysses , he sets out to furnish a
room with normally ousted possibilities of communion with the inanimate.
The room belongs not to Stephen, however, but to Bloom; Joyce waits until
"Ithaca" to make it materialize fully as a location in which recognition of the
object world as a peer becomes "a kind of thing that might be."
Stephen inaugurates Joyce's play upon "pier" and the homonym it
brings to mind, "peer," a linguistic connection the author will use to sug-
gest new ways of attempting to see beyond both the human and the in-
dividual point of view. It is Bloom, however, whom Joyce uses to model
potential ways of bridging the gap between ourselves and the objects
around us. In conjunction with Bloom's various attempts to pierce the veil
ostensibly separating him from the rest of the phenomenal world, Joyce
reveals, in Bloom's pierglass, an inanimate world that actively returns
the human gaze. In doing so, Joyce suggests the possibility that we might
move toward spanning the gulf between mind and matter by changing the
ways in which we regard the latter.

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A Reappointed Bridge: Bloom's Pierglass and the R

"That Other World"
Although Stephen has declared that vision, or "thought through my eyes,"

will enable him to see into the nature of reality, Joyce suggests that perhaps
his failure to listen to the voices of the phenomenal limits his comprehen-
sion of the material realm. Bloom, whose story begins in the fourth epi-
sode, at first seems to hold some promise of clarifying the flaws in vision
that Stephen has introduced, as the older man appears to be more inter-
ested in gaining knowledge through sensory experience than in finding
the literary correlative for what he observes. Yet Joyce uses Bloom not as a
corrective to Stephen's point of view, but as a different medium for further-
ing the narrative of the nonhuman. Bloom often nudges us toward con-
templation of the inanimate, even if his own thoughts about it frequently
remain underdeveloped. We are privy to Bloom's mental observations as
he navigates Dublin, tasting, smelling, and feeling it as well as looking at
and listening to it. If we depend upon Bloom to help make sense of Joyce's
treatment of matter, we encounter a man who appears more open than
Stephen to the possibility that things, like animals, may have intrin-
sic value beyond their usefulness to humanity, and may perhaps even
have knowledge, agency, or power, despite their silence and stillness. He
wonders what nonhuman entities, such as the hearse-pulling horses of
"Hades" or the items on his mantelpiece, might be capable of in the way
of thought or sensation and recognizes some of the barriers that conspire
to keep him from experiencing overt communion with them. Bloom keeps
alive a spirit of inquiry into their nature rather than always automatically
appropriating them for use as extensions or reflectors of the self.
Bloom's observations of the material world are colored by his fears
and desires, even if his thoughts are generally less literary than those of his
younger counterpart, Stephen. Bloom's underdetermined regard for the
phenomenal, however, functions as a more useful model for the process
of bringing to light the complexities inherent in any attempt to see be-
yond ourselves, particularly when we must rely heavily upon language
to express what we discover there. Bloom's sometimes bumbling efforts
to apprehend the nature of his physical surroundings, in many respects,
represent Joyce's recognition that no true articulation of what lies outside
the mind is possible; Bloom's imaginative, empathetic attempts to enlarge
the confines of his perspective, however, may reward him with some par-
tial truth concerning his place in the empirical realm and may deepen
his sense of the indivisibility of mind and the matter that comprises and
shapes it. Re-envisioning as a means of achieving some understanding gets
another trial once Bloom, with his sharper eyesight and less textually clut-
tered mind, enters the novel and begins to peer into the murky depths
of the world outside of himself. Through Bloom's interactions with his

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surroundings, Joyce establishes that an inclusive viewpoint, one that

incorporates consideration of perspectives other than human ones, can
enlarge one's humanity and illuminate hitherto neglected aspects of the
material. Of the two protagonists, Bloom comes closer to achieving the
overall vision that Joyce champions in the novel, of a world teeming with
vitality and intelligent presence.
From the beginning of "Calypso," when we first encounter Bloom,
he is trying to communicate with the nonhuman, talking and listening
to his cat and attempting to guess at her desires and motivations. He de-
cides that animal powers of perception are underrated: "They call them
stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them.
She understands all she wants to" (55). 18 His interest extends beyond the
family pet, though, as he also contemplates in "Lotus-Eaters" the lives of
carriage horses:
He came nearer and heard a crunching of gilded oats, the gently

champing teeth. Their full buck eyes regarded him as he went by,
amid the sweet oaken reek of horsepiss. Their Eldorado. Poor jug-
ginses! Damn all they know or care about anything with their long
noses stuck in nosebags. Too full for words. Still they get their feed
alright and their doss. Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wag-
ging limp between their haunches. Might be happy all the same that
way. Good poor brutes they look. (77)
Bloom acknowledges, through his tentative language, that his ideas about
the inner lives of beasts are guesses at best, but guesses based on his ob-
servations of the visible, material circumstances of their lives. Although he
mentions "[t]heir Eldorado," as if to say that they have aspirations beyond
the simple satisfaction of their desire to eat, he seems to feel little urge to
turn the horses into metaphors for human suffering or to situate them in
the pantheon of famous horses of literature or art; instead, he tries, as best
he can, to approximate their perspective.
Bloom also considers the horses that pull the heavy wagons loaded
with coffins and granite for the grave markers, wondering whether they
have any sensitivity to the human sorrow that attends their occupation:
"Coffin now. Got here before us, dead as he is. Horse looking round at
it with his plume skeoways. Dull eye: collar tight on his neck, pressing
against a bloodvessel or something. Do they know what they cart out here
every day?" (101). Bloom tries to imagine what the horses experience in
their toil, right down to the pressure that the weight of their harnesses
exerts on their bodies, but he ultimately admits that he does not know the
extent of their knowledge of their own suffering or of ours. He leaves room
for the possibility that the animals' experience might be similar to our
own, rather than presuming to know what they can or cannot perceive.

154.59.124.94 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 07:41:55 UTC
310
Bloom's ope
registering s
clude vegetat
"Sensitive pla
He contempla
tions to anot
symbolic mea
hear. Or a po
probably ref
mance under
suggests that
language amo
munications t
Part of what
tient is his v
passing or tr
ous graveyar
does not draw
are capable of
Paddy Dignam
now. Mouth
pates a visit t
pull up here
tion. Elixir of
to separate c
terial body. B
personality,
to another:
Holy fields.
ing you coul
ground in a
ground mus
grass and ed
so it is. Oug
poppies gro
Botanic Gard
gives new lif
Changing ab
themselves.
The passage a
as a kind of
ficiently? ho

154.59.124.94 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 07:41:55 UTC
His practical side has led him to think of the hearts of the dead as "old
rusty pumps" "lying around" the graveyard like so many useless spare
machine parts (105), an image that resonates with Stephen's idea of ma-
chines as "beingless beings." Yet his notion that the "sleeping" bodies of
graveyard tenants make the best narcotics once they metamorphose into
poppies shows that he senses that character traits might adhere to "cells"
as they change forms.
At the center of the novel, in "Nausicca," we find Bloom walking
alone on the beach after his encounter with Gerty MacDowell, ruminating
on sexuality, suffering, and death, as he has done throughout the day. His
sympathies extend to a wide range of entities, allowing him to consider
the perspectives of and motivations driving bats, bees, birds, sailors at sea,
and lightship operators. He ponders metempsychosis once again, thinking
of grieving people turning into weeping willows, and even wonders, "Do
fish get seasick?" (379). When he looks down at the sand, objects strewn
along the shore arrest his attention and interrupt his reverie:
Mr. Bloom stopped and turned over a piece of paper on the strand. He
brought it near his eyes and peered. Letter? No. Can't read. Better go.
Better. I'm tired to move. Page of an old copybook. All those holes and
pebbles. Who could count them? Never know what you find. Bottle
with a story of a treasure in it thrown from a wreck. Parcels post. Chil-
dren always want to throw things in the sea. Trust? Bread cast on the
waters. What's this? Bit of stick. (381)
Readers may recognize this scene as a companion to or perhaps even

a parody of Stephen's attempt to "read" the "signatures of all things,
seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, blue-
silver, limits of the diaphane" (37). Unlike Stephen's, however, Bloom's
seaside confrontation with physical reality begins with an admission of
the difficulty of reading even those "texts" that have been written by hu-
man hands, in a language he ostensibly understands. As he stands "peer-
ing" at the items ranged before him, he faces not only his own fear of
personal obliteration, but also the near-inscrutability of the material realm,
which seems to contain messages that Bloom is uncertain how to interpret:
Mr. Bloom with his stick gently vexed the thick sand at his foot. Write
a message for her. Might remain. What?
I.
Some flatfoot tramp on it in the morning. Useless. Washed away. Tide

comes here a pool near her foot. Bend, see my face there, dark mirror,
breathe on it, stirs. All these rocks with lines and scars and letters. O,
those transparent! Besides, they don't know. What is the meaning of
that other world.

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AM. A.
No room. Let it go. (381)
The passage relays Bloom's fears and uncertainties about who or what he
is, symbolized by his unfinished sentence ostensibly addressed to Gerty,
scrawled in the sand, but abandoned as he finds that he has "no room"
to complete his declaration of selfhood. His expansive consideration of
so many perspectives and possible modes of being have left him unable,
perhaps, to reduce himself to a few succinct words. He is left wondering
about the meaning of "that other world," an echo of Martha Clifford's
dislike of Bloom's bawdy language, but also an invitation to consider
himself as part of a phenomenal world that is "large" and "contains mul-
titudes," as Whitman claimed of himself. Bloom's fear that anything he
writes will be erased reiterates Stephen's certainty that his friends will
trample the wavering line that his ashplant left on the path in the morn-
ing. Significantly, however, Bloom imagines that Gerty might still be able
to discern his face in the tidal pool, a "dark mirror" that may continue to
reflect his current sense of immersion in the sensory world. The image
he imagines there anticipates the moments in "Ithaca" when Bloom and
Stephen will see themselves reflected in one another's faces and Bloom will
gaze at objects reflected in his pierglass and feel a connection with them
beyond ownership.
Bloom's understanding that inert matter may house some form of
vitality also has interesting implications in "Circe," in which Bloom and
Stephen encounter the terror and wonder of speaking objects, such as a
button, a gasjet, soap, yews, and bracelets, to name a few. Though the
episode is often characterized as "hallucination" and treated as though
it represented a complete, irrational departure from conceivable reality,19
Joyce's translation, into English or near-English, of the voices of the inani-
mate may also be read as a less subtle version of the narrative that things
have voiced all along in the novel. In "Circe," Joyce asks us to imagine what
it would be like to be privy to the thoughts or perspectives of the things
around us, and demonstrates through a series of dizzying exchanges how
inadequate to the task of taking it all in the human mind would likely be.
The episode seems to ask how much "response-ability" the characters are
capable of summoning when faced with a version of reality in which all
things are potentially sentient, watching and judging human behavior.
Reading the episode as an external expression of conscience - Bloom's
guilt or shame over the secrets, lusts, and other failings he harbors, or per-
haps Stephen's remorse for his uncharitable behavior toward his friends
and family - is a commonplace of "Circe" criticism, and plenty of evidence
may be found to support such interpretations. Joyce's inclusion of speak-
ing inanimate objects in the moral arena of the chapter, however, compii-

154.59.124.94 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 07:41:55 UTC
cates such interpretations by introducing things that appear to have the

same, or nearly the same, status as the characters to whom Bloom and
Stephen feel bound to answer for their "sins." Some of these objects, such
as the Nymph from the picture in Bloom's bedroom, or Bella Cohen's fan,
are closely associated with both a particular character and a certain part of
his or her psyche. This association, however, does not make talking inani-
mate items into mere hallucinations. Instead, the vocal presence of these
more "familiar" objects simply helps to reveal the power of narcissism to
influence what we choose to focus on in our environments.
Things that seemingly possess human qualities or seem to reflect
our images back to us, like the nymph, receive more sustained attention
from the characters than objects whose utterances are more cryptic, such
as the gasjet that exclaims "Pooah! Pfuiiiiii!" (510), the bicycle bells that
warn Bloom to "Haltyaltyaltyall" (435), or the sandstrewer's gong that
cries out "Bang Bang Bia Bäk Blud Bugg Boo" (435).20 When the Nymph
initially approaches Bloom, she appears to have been summoned by his
weeping confession: "My will power! Memory! I have sinned! I have suff
. . ." (544). She "descends" from her "oaken frame," speaking "kindly" to
him, but also betraying her origins as a picture from Photo Bits by quoting
advertisements from the magazine (545). At first, she seems likely to be
purely a product of his imagination, as she tells him frankly of what she
has "seen in that chamber," his bedroom; she hints that she has witnessed
scenes of lust and depravity that make her blush as she recalls them, and
his responses corroborate her recollections. Bloom is by turns apologetic
and full of excuses for his behavior. However, when she suddenly dons a
nun's white habit and tells Bloom, "No more desire . . . Only the ethereal"
(552), he resists, telling her "coldly," "You have broken the spell. The last
straw. If there were only the ethereal where would you all be, postulants
and novices?" (553). His response represents his unwillingness to see all
that is transpiring before him as simply a figment of his mind, or a bodiless
transaction between her image and his own memories of what the nymph
might have witnessed. Bloom's button, though it has only one line, "Bip!"
(552), as it snaps off of his trousers, plays a role in breaking the "spell" of
"Circe" that Bloom feels he has been under during most of the episode.
Like Stephen's ashplant in "Telemachus," the button speaks up as if to as-
sert the primacy of the actual over the ethereal, helping Bloom to stand up
to the nymph, who exits the scene with "her plaster cracking" in mockery
of her refusal to acknowledge her materiality.
Other objects, such as the waterfall (547, 549, 552) and the church bells
(471) seem to have only a distant connection with any specific person.
Therefore, they can more easily dodge categorization as the products,
or familiars, of any particular character's mind. Although the characters
hear them elsewhere in Ulysses , the bells are linked most closely with the

154.59.124.94 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 07:41:55 UTC
bracelets who share their utterance of "Heigho! Hei

cry going up from both bell and bracelets steers us
objects in "Telemachus," who call to the reader and
characters. Joyce includes such items as if to ask w
would feel we owed to such seemingly tangential ob
ability to communicate their thoughts to us in lang
readily understand. In Nighttown, these talking thi
come "peers" with potential claims on characters' con
mere props or inert possessions of their human cou
enabling inanimate objects to speak for the first time, t
play in "Circe" briefly make their voices more insist
gible to the characters and the audience. The episode
tempt to smash a barrier similar to the idea of the "f
actors from the audience in a dramatic performance
however, the fourth wall is the barrier between cha
perhaps even costumes): despite the outlandish qu
Joyce demands that we recognize the profound ways
places impinge upon consciousness, and the ways
property that all things possess in "Circe," makes th
In "Ithaca," Joyce pulls us back from the theatri
der to allow us to take stock of the impact they ha
and Stephen's understanding of their relationships
Bloom returns to the relative quiet and calm of his
nied by Stephen, who stays for conversation but de
night. Just before he leaves, Stephen and Bloom sh
that Joyce links with the story of the inanimate world
telling. One is a moment in which Stephen and Bloom
of St. George's church ringing as they are shaking ha
night. The narrative voice asks, "What echoes of tha
and each heard?" The text answers, "By Stephen: Lilia
circumdet. lubilantium te virginum. Chorus excipiat. [Ita
Bloom: Heigho , Heigho , Heigho , Heigho " [Italicized in
offers the audience a reminder not only of Stephen's
and Bloom's compassion for the carriage horses who
heard earlier in the day, but also of the bracelets that r
and their relationship with the ferrule, or mouthpie
plant. As in "Telemachus," Stephen hears thoughts:
resembling bell sounds, but rather, the text that mi
Bloom, at least, hears the voice that Joyce gives to br
if it carries personal associations for him.
The other post-"Circe" connection that Joyce crea
Bloom, and the world of objects occurs when both ch
each contemplating the other in both mirrors of th

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theirhisnothis fellowfaces" (702). The significance of their gazing at one

another appears to reside in the narrator's choice of possessive adjectives
to reveal what they see in each other's faces: commonality in "their"; and
individuality and recognition of separation in "hisnothis," or perhaps, if
we read the word fragment as "his - no, this," a cryptic acknowledgment
of similarity of features that doubles the sense of their connection as "fel-
lowfaces." 21 The moment of "reciprocal" recognition between two obvi-
ously sentient and intelligent beings acts as a precedent for Bloom's next
encounter with a mirror, in which his confrontation with the objects on his
mantel "mirrors," in some revealing ways, the moment with Stephen.22
When Bloom reenters his house after Stephen's departure, he stumbles
over the newly rearranged furniture that Molly has moved, or that Boylan
has moved for her during their afternoon together. Bloom's collision with
the "walnut sideboard (a projecting angle of which had momentarily ar-
rested his ingress)" (705) brings his focus sharply to the material things
that occupy the room. He notices two pieces of furniture in particular:
One: a squat stuffed easy chair with stout arms extended and back
slanted to the rere, which, repelled in recoil, had then upturned an
irregular fringe of a rectangular rug and now displayed on its amply
upholstered seat a centralised diffusing and diminishing discoloura-
tion. The other, a slender splayfoot chair of glossy cane curves, placed
directly opposite the former, its frame from top to seat and from seat
to base being varnished dark brown, its seat being a bright circle of
white plaited rush. (706)
The two chairs, with their attitudes and attributes reminiscent of physi-
cal qualities of Molly and Boylan, seem clearly intended as anthropomor-
phized symbols of the betrayal that has taken place in the house earlier that
day. The language of the passage self-consciously alludes to the topic that
Bloom has obsessively dwelt upon and avoided all day, and thus manages
to suggest that Bloom's encounter with the chairs as chairs has been eclipsed
by his vision of them as representative of his unfaithful wife and her lover.
Yet moments later, Bloom disengages from his wounded feelings long
enough to consider other items in the room - even things reflected in mir-
rors - without turning them wholly into symbols or reflections of his own
sorrow or jealousy. Characteristically, Joyce leads us toward this vision
with a play on words: the similarity of "pier" and "peer" expands into
a play of ideas about the existence of a spiritual dimension in the mate-
rial universe. Bloom, peering into the glass, is able to regard himself as an
object among objects, a feat that Joyce suggests through his use of a "gilt-
bordered pierglass" as a lens through which Bloom can view himself and
even his wedding presents with equanimity:23

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What homothetic objects, other than the candlest

mantelpiece?
A timepiece of striated Connemara marble, stopp
4:46 a.m. on the 21 March 1896, matrimonial gift
a dwarf tree of glacial arborescence under a tran
matrimonial gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle: an e
rimonial gift of Alderman John Hooper.
What interchanges of looks took place between th
and Bloom?
In the mirror of the gilt-bordered pierglass the undecorated back of
the dwarf tree regarded the upright back of the embalmed owl. Before
the mirror the matrimonial gift of Alderman John Hooper with clear
melancholy wise bright motionless compassionate gaze regarded
Bloom while Bloom with obscure tranquil profound motionless com-
passionated gaze regarded the matrimonial gift of Luke and Caroline
Doyle. (707)
The exchange of looks taking place between Bloom and two of the
wedding gifts, the dwarf tree and the embalmed owl, ties together, in one
small moment, several threads of a theme running throughout Ulysses :
the extension of sympathies and consideration toward beings - animals,
plants, and inanimate objects that we are unaccustomed to including fully
in our sphere of concern - as a means of exploring another realm of the
"possible," or as Aristotle might put it, "what might be."24 Joyce shows
the embalmed owl (reminiscent of both the corpses in the cemetery and
the animals that Bloom has studied during the day) returning to Bloom,
with its wise and melancholy gaze, some of the compassion he has shown
for others. The exchange is not a simple mirror reflection, however, but
a transfer of the compassion of the owl's gaze from Bloom (whose gaze
is, more passively, "compassionated" by this encounter, a reminder of
Stephen's "epiphanised" ballast clock) to the dwarf tree (reminiscent of
the disregarded plant life in the novel, like the "leader shoots"), which in
turn looks at the back of the owl, completing a circle of regard that sug-
gests mutuality, rather than difference, among the gazing objects. Bloom
sees his "peers" in the objects reflected in the glass as clearly as he has seen
a "fellowface" in Stephen. The metaphor of the "disappointed bridge" that
fails to connect two worlds dissolves once Joyce reshapes it into the pier-
glass, in which the pier, meeting its own reflection, completes itself in the
glass as a bridge between consciousness and the concrete.
A "Hubbub of Phenomenon": Unearthing the Buried Voices of Ulysses
Examples of objects asserting themselves separately from characters serve

as Joyce's attempts to picture a world in which such activity could be

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occurring constantly, just beyond the periphery of our awareness. He asks

us to consider what epistemological adjustments would be necessary in
order to accommodate such a realization, and how it would alter our con-
ceptions of the human place in the material world. The goal of such at-
tempts is to sift through the layers of a complex and indivisible matrix of
mental activity and material presence, turning objects over to expose the
potential richness of their existence.
Joyce recognizes the interdependency of our minds, our surround-
ings, and the language we use to describe the world we register and ex-
perience. He demonstrates the reciprocity of this arrangement through a
variety of forms of animation involving allusion, linguistic continuities
between entities, the use of one object's voice as a reinforcement for an-
other, and repetition and evolution of the appearance of certain kinds of
objects over the course of the novel. Ulysses reminds us that we cannot
see without the presence of the seen, a world of overwhelming and of-
ten indecipherable complexity, and that we cannot describe what we see
without relying upon the organizing forces of a language larger and more
powerful than any individual self. Given our inescapable reliance upon
this material and linguistic matrix, Joyce envisions moving beyond view-
ing objects as props in our drama in order to demonstrate that the histori-
cally hierarchical relationship between the human and the nonhuman is
largely a construction of language, as it transforms sense data into the raw
material of philosophy. The novel breaks new ground by encapsulating
a world in which all elements can potentially command equal attention.
Though objects may seem to "speak" most obstreperously in "Circe," they
are never completely silent anywhere in Joyce's world.
The narrative of the material and the menial in Ulysses is a long,
fragmented, and partially obscured one that depends heavily on the
recurrence of certain kinds of objects and the connections that language
establishes between them to help it surface. This story is not the kind that
leaps out at the person experiencing Ulysses for the first time, but rather,
one that comes to light through a process akin to archeology, in which
the reader must attempt to draw conclusions about Joyce's regard for the
material based upon a large catalogue of objects that often appear, as do
artifacts lying in the soil, without interpreters to offer ready explanations
for their significance. The muffled voices of these items do, however, find
ways to make themselves heard in the text, as Joyce consistently offers
his audience opportunities to experience them that are not necessarily
available or apparent to the characters. Ultimately, Joyce's concept of the
function of trivial detail diverges considerably from Stephen's early ex-
planation of the "epiphanised" object as the special creature of individual
human consciousness. The author's reworked definition of epiphany ap-
pears to be far more complex and subtle, moving beyond simply display-
ing objects that seem ripe for his characters' particular regard. The author

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provides sites in the text where a kind of epiphany can

of Ulysses , yet often understates these opportunities to
they seem to be, in their nascent state, more possibilitie
full encounter with the text. However, the presence o
no matter how quietly, of a living world beyond the
consciousness is fundamental to Joyce's expansive vis
potentially limitless framework for conveying not on
ence, but also the material matrix in which all existen
University ofMontevallo
Montevallo, Alabama
NOTES
1. Bill Brown takes the process that Stephen is attempting to elucidate in a differ-
ent direction in his discussion of the way in which objects confound their observ-
ers, achieving "thingness" when "they stop working for us" and slip out of the
roles normally assigned to them as possessions or commodities ("Thing Theory"
4). Lisa Flueťs "Stupidity Tries: Objects, Things, and James Joyce's 'Clay'" refer-
ences Brown's assertion and credits him with "identifying] literary criticism with
the responsibility to retell the history of the material world as a kind of upward
mobility story; literature chronicles how objects abandon their alienated, reduc-
tive identifications with function, value, and commodity status and 'attain' the
status of things. In addition, literature chronicles how modernity routinely works
to impede this narrative of advancement" (206). These ideas bolster my sense that
Joyce deliberately creates independent roles in Ulysses for things that are signifi-
cant apart from their associations with characters.
2. Critics such as Robert Spoo, Patrick McGee, Hugh Kenner, and Richard
Ellmann, to name a few, have devoted considerable attention to the different ap-
proaches that Stephen, Bloom, and various other characters take to reading their
surroundings. They point out, for example, that Stephen experiences the world
with less bodily gusto and more self-conscious philosophical and literary over-
lay than Bloom does, and that the novel offers a multiplicity of angles from which
to view any character or situation that it encompasses. Much of the critical focus,
however, remains on the characters themselves, rather than the actual objects they
encounter. A few notable exceptions occur in the work of Garry Leonard, Jennifer
Wicke, and Thomas Richards, all of whom tackle one important aspect of the
empirically commonplace, studying the role that objects as commodities play in
Ulysses. Along with John Gordon, whose Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back
also addresses the way in which Joyce crafts the material world of the novel, these
critics stay resolutely fixed on the primacy of character consciousness as both the
arbiter of encounters with the phenomenal and the genesis of the multiplicity of
styles in the novel. Others, such as Steven Connor, focus more narrowly on the
talking objects in "Circe," as these things are particularly difficult to dismiss once
Joyce gives them the ability to speak English or near-English. He breaks the choru
of voices of the inanimate that fill "Circe" into categories of ventriloquy, which he

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designates as "more appropriate than hallucination to name the dominant tech-

nique of the chapter" (101). That these voices are, ultimately, extensions of the
characters' psyches, however, remains an underlying assumption of Connor's ar-
gument as well that of Douglas Mao, who makes a similar assessment of Joyce in
a chapter on Wyndham Lewis in Solid Objects. Connor begins by entertaining the
idea that Joyce wants us to be alert to the possibility that objects, not just char-
acters, have a narrative to express: "Up to the beginning of 'Circe,' there have
been a number of hints in Ulysses about the desirability of a language enlarged to
include the non-linguistic world of nature or matter, not just as a symbol, but in
self-announcing utterance" (93). He cites the example of Stephen urinating into the
ocean while giving "words to the sounds of [the] rushing and sucking of the sea,"
and concludes that "it is important at this moment that Stephen learns to surren-
der himself to voices outside himself, learns not just to write the world, but also to
'read the signatures of all things'" (93). His next comment, however, sweeps aside
the idea of surrender to "outside" voices, taking the argument back toward a view
of the inanimate world as a collection of inert forms waiting for a character to come
along to enliven them with his imagination: "Stephen animates the world of nature
by giving it voice, breathing its breath, in a blending of utterance that parallels
and is enacted through the mingling of human with marine saline substance" (94).
Mao seems to agree: "Taking their cue from Flaubert, James and Joyce cram their
fictions with solid objects, but since these objects come explicitly mediated through
particular consciousnesses, the total effect of their works (themselves insufficiently
firm of outline) will be to undermine the solidity of the perceived world as surely
as Pater's Heraclitean paroxysms undo our chances of capturing that which melts
before us, or Russell's form of attending to the wallpaper promotes its demateri-
alization" (107). What Mao overlooks in Joyce, however, is that the novelist offers
us multiple views, over the course of multiple episodes, of many of the objects he
includes in Ulysses. Joyce, thereby, often precludes the problem of displaying a
given object as little more than the "product" of a "particular consciousness." He
also finds ways to allow objects to speak for themselves, without depending upon
human voices to convey their utterances to the audience.
3. Sustained critical attention to Whitman's presence in Ulysses seems surpris-
ingly sparse, though the poet receives at least a brief mention as one of Joyce's
literary influences in many of the works I consulted while writing this essay.
Donald Summerhayes examines Joyce's allusions to Whitman in "Joyce's Ulysses
and Whitman's 'Self': A Query," an eight-page article published in Wisconsin
Studies in Contemporary Literature in 1963; Richard Ellmann, in a discussion of
Joyce's treatment of Aristotelian idealism and materialism in the novel, asserts that
"[t]he law of contradiction, which, Stephen declares, underlies all Aristotle's psy-
chology, and which in turn underlies the first three episodes of Ulysses , prevents
'man' and 'not-man' from being the same thing. On the basis of such distinctions
the non-subjective, external world can be built up in unchangeable thereness.
Mulligan's lumping together of human and animal, of Irishism and Irish syco-
phancy, of cruelty and kindness, are failures to acknowledge the law of contradic-
tion. As he says, quoting Whitman: 'Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict
myself'" ("Ulysses" on the Liffey 17). This reading of Whitman's lines provides a
justification for their appearance in the text at this moment, and also underscores

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Stephen's blindness to the dynamism of the external wo

subjective and unchangeable. Buck, in violating the "laws
Stephen "follows faithfully enough in the first three epis
to echo Whitman's tendency to lump together all sorts of
and landscapes in order to express the contradictory "mu
self. Buck's rough way of treating his clothes, Stephen, an
"club[s] with his heavy bathtowel" ( Ulysses 17) makes at l
their potential or actual sentience. James Maddox also br
to Whitman in both "Telemachus" and "Scylla and Chary
and the Assault upon Character 111), and Richard Finneran
between Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rockin
tic phrase, "The word known to all men," which appears
Ulysses ("That word known to all men' in Ulysses : A Rec
4. The poet enters the matrix of allusion and observati
and his influence lingers throughout Joyce's tale of the p
nating particularly in images of grass, reeds, fronds, and st
liberally throughout Ulysses , beginning with their unusu
5. The change, in the Paris text of 1922, from a passiv
reared," to the more dynamic and forceful "leader shoots,
feisty connotations, represents Joyce's desire to increase,
throughout the novel that the nonhuman world, even wh
rather than utterly inert or lifeless.
6. Whitman's famous image from "Song of Myself" of th
uncut hair of graves" suggests that his fondness for this s
from its clear connection to significant sites of human m
usefulness as a symbol of the ordinary, small-scale, ubiqu
easily dismiss as the stuff of "background." Whitman calls
ing, 'Tenderly I will use you, curling grass," acknowledg
sprout shows there really is no death" (25), and asking the
anything, how can I say anything?" (67). Joyce adapts this
for the minute and mundane to suggest that there really is
pable of finding a voice, even if willing auditors are harde
7. Sara Crangle, in her insightful discussion of the role o
Ulysses ("Stephen's Handles"), points out that Stephen see
of authority"; a "spirit or demon in association with a h
"[imbued] with a spectral eternality"; a "sword"; and "a
livers [him] from incertitude, as well as a harbinger of de
from its association with him in particular (62). She also
implicit power prompts Buck to tug at it in a gesture of far
suggests the possibility that the ashplant may have som
own. This idea finds support earlier in the article when Cr
increasingly [prioritizes] the machinations and experience
over those of the mental one" and that "tactile, sensual
dence over theoretical grappling" (52), though she stops s
powers, if any, the ashplant has independent of its conne
also affirms that Bloom's approach to the phenomenal wor
from Stephen's: "Bloom insists upon miring himself in ta
ther certain nor transcendent; in this, he forms an ideal c

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more academic desire to grasp all continually results in a very dead certainty, from
his earliest interests in names and nouns to his recurrent exploration of epiphanies
and epiphanic theory" (65).
8. Sheldon Brivic, in The Veil of Signs , points out that in Joyce, "the reality of
words is seen when they are seen changing. They alternate between the clearness
we grasp and the unclearness we slip into so that their 'band and disband' revolves
into and out of consciousness . . . most of the looping of signification involving
Joyce's characters connects them to other characters to whom they are not speak-
ing, to inanimate objects, to ideas, and to something outside their known, con-
scious worlds" (2-3). In the case of the ferrule, the link between it and the plants
that Buck has been thrashing happens with scarcely any relationship to charac-
ter at all. The "changing language" is almost entirely responsible for creating
the connection.
9. The blind stripling, "Penrose," with his tapping cane, will resurface through-
out Ulysses as a reminder of this failure of vision among some of the sighted mem-
bers of Joyce's cast.
10. Patrick McGee argues, in Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce's "Ulysses,"
that Stephen's use of texts is a way of "constructing] a disguise" in the form
of a "classical subject from which his discourse seems to originate," and that
"Stephen does not perceive the world unmediated, for the living subject is
grounded in the dead - those other subjects, those texts, which feed into Stephen's
discourse, which read Stephen even as he reads the world . . . Stephen does not
read passively; he writes in an act that subordinates the speaking subject to its
process, its work" (18). McGee's position helps to underscore the extent to which
Stephen's "readings" of the "signatures of all things" are for him primarily ex-
ercises in defining himself as a subject rather than seeing the objects he reads as
separate entities, or even "texts" themselves.
11. An interesting irony resides in the line from St. Ambrose's Commentary on
Romans , which notes, "For we know that the whole creation groaneth and
travaileth in pain together until now"; this line implies a kinship in suffering
among all the components of creation, and fosters the idea of a rough equality
among them (qtd. in Gifford and Seidman 64).
12. Hugh Kenner reads this passage as an example of the way in which, in
"Proteus," "all melts into Stephen's mind and into words. There is no coupling of
name to thing; there is, rather, a swerving approximation of two experiences, one
sensual, one textual, as of hyperbola and asymptote"; to the sensual experience,
however, Kenner gives short shrift. He writes that "[t]hings have voices also" in
the passage, but neglects to elucidate them further except to say that the "fine
Latin cadence" of Ambrose's words" "says what [leaves and waves] try to say,"
(40) a conclusion that simply reinforces the idea that "things," in fact, do not "have
voices also."
13. Joyce even included a "St. Ferréol" in the list of saints he added to "Cyclops"
in the Paris text. The New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia mentions St. Ferréol of Uzés,
who died in 581. Fr. Landelin Robling, Order of Saint Benedict, asserts that "the
rule of St. Ferréol, written in the sixth century, regards transcription as the equiva-
lent of manual labor since it charges that the monk 'who does not turn up the earth
with the plow ought to write the parchment with his fingers.'" JewishEncyclopedia
.com reports that "Ferréol, Bishop of Uzès, converted [the Jews] by living in familiar

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intercourse with them. Having been severely rebuked for

Ferréol ordered the Jews of his diocese to meet in the Church
preached to them a baptismal sermon. Some Jews abjured t
the others to remain in the city, and expelled them from
vance to Ulysses , other than the resonance of his name with
ashplant, lies in the conversation that Bloom and Stephen
which Bloom reassures Stephen that "literary labour" is "
that Stephen is "entitled to recoup [himself] and comman
St. Ferréol may also remind the reader of Bloom's status
who nevertheless wanders the city, feeling, at times, like a
entity - particularly after facing the Citizen in "Cyclops."
14. The "bracelet of bright hair about the bone" in John
offers an interesting counterpart to Joyce's use of bracele
cognitive failure on the part of his characters. Donne's spe
"device" for uniting lovers in death and explains that it "m
make their souls, at the last busy day, / Meet at this grave,
( Selected Poetry 122). Donne's speaker wonders whether or
grave will understand the bracelet as an object that unifies
on the other hand, uses bracelets to set up echoes in the te
to underscore his characters' inability to unify resonances
and sights, a task he expects the reader to perform.
15. Stephen discusses the universality of a language
(432), but without specific reference to his ashplant as a spe
16. Joyce added this detail to the Paris text of 1922.
17. Stephen's thought process resonates with Woolf 's
Lighthouse and Jacob's Room , to raise the specter of an empt
paradoxically, contains limitless epistemological fodder. T
describes holds, essentially, an emptiness as well, becau
houses never came to pass.
18. Bloom later revisits this idea after encountering the
"Lestrygonians"; he realizes that many people treat the blin
stupid, too, or not fully human. This realization causes him
ing attitudes toward those who are lacking in certain facult
"blindness" of the sighted when faced with uncommon mo
as reading Braille or navigating by sense of smell and hea
things they can learn to do. Read with their fingers. Tune
prised when they have any brains. Why we think a deform
back clever if he says something we might say. Of course
more . . . Poor fellow! Quite a boy. Terrible. Really terrible.
have, not seeing? Life a dream for him. Where is the justice
(181-82). Bloom's observations underscore some of the limit
thinking that get in the way of a more nuanced considerat
other beings. For more on Bloom and the stripling, see '"O,
Senses, Sympathy, and an Intimate Aesthetics in Ulysses ,"
19. Daniel Ferrer refers to "Circe" as "both a magic lant
tasies whose function is to consolidate the Self, by conceali
its flaws, without ever mingling with it, and an infernal m

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identities and shatters reality" (130). The episode can also function, however, as
a way of bringing elements of the reality that lies outside the human mind into
dialogue with one another and the "Self" that Ferrer implies would like to avoid
having full contact with reality. Hugh Kenner asserts that "the 'hallucinations' ex-
ist almost wholly for us. We, if not Bloom, see many strange things in this long
episode, though it is not always clear what we may be seeing because the style is
misleadingly homogenous" ( Ulysses 121). If we have been reading all along with
an eye for the active voice and participation of the phenomenal in the narrative, the
hallucinatory effect engendered by the presence of talking objects, at least, might
not seem so extreme in "Circe."
20. Joyce reiterates this distinction in "Ithaca," when Bloom receives "consola-
tion" from the "candour, nudity, pose, tranquility, youth, grace, sex, counsel of a
statue erect in the centre of the table, an image of Narcissus purchased by auction
from P. A. Wren, 9 Bachelor's Walk" (710).
21. Marilyn French, in Book as World: James Joyce's "Ulysses," explains the differ-
ing sounds that Bloom and Stephen hear in the bells as Joyce's way of establish-
ing that they have "returned to their own modes of perception, into their own
flesh" after "reaching separate but consubstantial unity" by contemplating each
other's faces (230-31). She asserts that "most of the points on which the two men
make contact are comically trivial" and that "the significance of these moments of
rapport is not something we can estimate," but decides that these encounters in
"Ithaca" demonstrate an "underlying unity of mankind" established in "Circe" by
"show[ing] us two very different human beings warily and tentatively perceiving
that unity and interrelatedness" (232). Joyce also uses the encounter, however, to
bring back into focus the voices of things that we have heard elsewhere and to
underscore their echoing presence even as the text ostensibly follows the actions
of the characters.
22. The mirroring encounter between the older and younger man also recalls a
moment from "Nestor" in which Stephen, while helping Sargent with his sums,
ruminates on "Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and move-
ment, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a dark-
ness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend." Stephen
then recognizes in Sargent his own younger self, "these sloping shoulders, this
gracelessness" (28).
23. This moment, which culminates in the "equanimity" Bloom feels, near the
end of "Ithaca," toward his wife's infidelity (731-33), shares the "pier /peer" con-
nection with one of his earlier ruminations on promiscuity, in which he thinks of the
pier with lamps, summer evening, band,

Those girls , those girls , / Those lovely seaside girls
Milly too. Young kisses, the first. Far away now past. Mrs. Marion. Read-
ing lying back now, counting the strands of her hair, smiling, braiding. A
soft qualm regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will happen, yes.
Prevent. Useless: can't move. Girl's sweet light lips. Will happen, too. (67)
This reverie makes Bloom think of himself, Boylan, Milly, and Molly as "peers"
in the arena of sexual desire. Bloom recognizes that all of them will feel and act

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upon lustful urges, and to struggle against desire or com

dominance in the sexual game is "useless." Their need fo
all of them across moral and physical boundaries. These
Bloom with Stephen, who thinks of the "twittering bracelet
noted above.
24. Note that Joyce excludes the clock from this exchange of regard. Perhaps it is too
redolent of Stephen's theory of epiphany from Stephen Hero , in which the Ballast Of-
fice clock must depend upon Stephen to decide whether or not it has "epiphanised."
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Ferrules of Engagement The Speech of Unheard Things in Ulysses

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Ferrules of Engagement: The Speech of Unheard Things in "Ulysses"

Author(s): Elizabeth Inglesby

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43280226

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thing, then we recognise that it is an organised co

In this explanation, Stephen makes a number of ass

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Fallacies of the Familiar

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and literary artists he admires. During his morning

To me all the converging objects of the universe

... I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue

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cut with a burnt stick at night.

These lines may make Whitman's speaker sound as though he would be

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he quietly links seemingly disparate elements of the

And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie, [Bu

The passage is a study in deliberate ambiguity. Buc

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draw Stephen into further conversation. At this mom

- Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe or

This moment is revealing not only because it uncovers crucial aspects of

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deeply about the linguistic reverberations it brings to the episode. The

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to exist in books, Ulysses makes words behave as m

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In this attempt at crafting pathetic fallacy, Stephen cannot long maintain

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with the voices of other objects, or timing their app

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the handle of the ash clacking against his shoulder

Joyce encloses this moment of Stephen's contem

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attempting to bring him back in touch with the materia

Wait. You, Armstrong, Do you know anything abo

In this exchange, which he imagines reenacting late

Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a bedlam's hand or Juli

Stephen's instinctive tendency is to think of what

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A Reappointed Bridge: Bloom's Pierglass and the R

Although Stephen has declared that vision, or "thought through my eyes,"

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surroundings, Joyce establishes that an inclusive viewpoint, one that

He came nearer and heard a crunching of gilded oats, the gently

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Readers may recognize this scene as a companion to or perhaps even

Some flatfoot tramp on it in the morning. Useless. Washed away. Tide

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No room. Let it go. (381)

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cates such interpretations by introducing things that appear to have the

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bracelets who share their utterance of "Heigho! Hei

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theirhisnothis fellowfaces" (702). The significance of their gazing at one

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What homothetic objects, other than the candlest