Joyce's Visions

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2004 by Phillips, Brian

He clasped his hands between his knees and, satisfied, sent his vacant glance over their faces.

Mr Power asked:

-How is the concert tour getting on, Bloom?

-O, very well, Mr Bloom said. I hear great accounts of it. It's a good idea, you see . . .

-Are you going yourself?

-Well no, Mr Bloom said. In point of fact I have to go down to the county Clare on some private business. You see the idea is to tour the chief towns. What you lose on one you can make up on the other.

-Quite so, Martin Cunningham said. Mary Anderson is up there now. Have you good artists?

-Louis Werner is touring her, Mr Bloom said. O yes, we'll have all topnobbers. J. C. Doyle and John MacCormack I hope and. The best, in fact.

-And madame, Mr Power said smiling. Last but not least.

Mr Bloom unclasped his hands in a gesture of soft politeness and clasped them.

On the surface of this passage there is not much for the reader to catch hold of. We understand that the men are in the carriage, that Mr. Bloom looks out the window, sees Blazes Boylan's white straw hat, scrutinizes his fingernails. We follow the dialogue between Bloom, Mr. Power, and Martin Cunningham about the concert tour. But something is missing, because there is nothing for us to see. Saint Mark's, the railway bridge, the Queen's Theatre, the fountain bust, the men themselves, are merely ideas; they are spectral, nominal presences, entries in an intellectual register which only dimly corresponds to a vision of the world. Bloom, whose mental activity we follow closely, looks out on a scene the appearance of which we are left to infer from his thoughts: we do not see what he sees, we do not hear what he hears. As a result the life of the scene seems kept from us, as though it held us at arm's length. Something has eluded us, and though we have caught the outline of the events, there is nothing to reconcile our impression of arbitrariness: the scene seems merely a scattershot record of the pointless transitions of everyday life. Mr. Bloom looks down at his nails? Mr. Bloom has personal business in the County Clare? Well, why should we be made to learn it? There can be no dramatic interest in this, we conclude; this is not a coherent thing. We lay the book aside, feeling irritated at the pretense and waste of it, saying to ourselves that Joyce may have been a genius, but as Aldous Huxley observed, he must also have been one of the dullest writers ever to fondle a pen.

How different would this scene appear if we were able to see it clearly-if we had caught the tone of Mr. Power's voice, or the light in Mr. Bloom's eye? Can we use what we are given to imagine the scene that way? Let us consider the passage once more, with a more patient and, admittedly, a harder-staring eye. To begin with, if we had not been struggling to imagine something that would bring together all the competing data Joyce gives us, we might have noticed a hint, easily overlooked, merely the faintest of echoes from the beginning of the book: we have seen the name Boylan before. In Chapter 4, Mr. Bloom brings Molly her breakfast in bed, and with it her mail; among the letters there is one from someone called "Boylan," and Molly pointedly tells Bloom that Boylan is bringing over a new batch of songs for her this afternoon. Bloom wonders whether Boylan has wealth. From the fact that Mr. Power brings up Molly's singing tour immediately after seeing Boylan, it would seem that Boylan is the manager of the tour, and that this is common knowledge, at least among Bloom's acquaintances. So the chain of associations is not haphazard after all. Looking at the theater, Bloom thinks of Molly's performing career and remembers her appointment with Boylan: "He's coming in the afternoon. Her songs." When the men see Boylan in the street, Bloom is startled by the coincidence: "Just that moment I was thinking." And Mr. Power, remembering Boylan's association with Molly, leans forward to ask about the concert tour.