Ulysses

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Ulysses

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904; published serially in The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, in book form in 1922.

SYNOPSIS

Ulysses follows the wanderings of Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged advertising salesman, and Stephen Dedalus, a young artist, as they cross and recross Dublin on a single summer day.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin. He was the eldest of 16 children born to Mary Jane Joyce and John Stanislaus Joyce. John Joyce worked first in business, then as a civil servant, establishing a tenuous middle-class economic position. This position steadily eroded during James’s youth, as his father often drank, neglected his affairs, and borrowed money. According to contemporaries, John Joyce was a jolly, bibulous, pugnacious good fellow, notorious in Dublin for his extravagance, biting wit, and monocle. His son James inherited some of his traits—an interest in Irish politics, a love of music, a lively sense of humor, a distrust of the clergy, and spendthrift habits. From age 6 to 9, James Joyce attended Clongowes Wood College, considered the best Jesuit school in Ireland; from 11 to 15, Belvedere College; and from 16 to 20, University College, Dublin. When Joyce was just 9, he wrote his first poem, a tribute to his father’s hero, Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the late-nineteenth-century Irish Home Rule movement. By 1902 several of Joyce’s college essays had been published, including “Ibsen’s New Drama” in The Fortnightly Review, a prominent English journal. His first book of poems, Chamber Music, was published in 1904. That same year, he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway working in Dublin as a chambermaid—the couple’s first walk together is memorialized by the date on which Ulysses is set. Later in 1904, the couple left Ireland, settling first in Trieste, Italy, then in Zurich, Switzerland (during World War I), and finally in Paris, France. They had two children, Giorgio and Lucia, and Joyce continued his writings. Early versions of three of the short stories that would comprise Dubliners appeared in 1904 in The Irish Homestead, edited by the Irish poet George Russell (A.E.). Though Dubliners was largely completed by 1905, Joyce did not find a publisher willing to print it until 1914. His autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (1916) was received coolly by the Irish reading public, but nonetheless contributed to his success by attracting the attention of respected literary figures, including the American poet and editor Ezra Pound, who, together with the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, helped Joyce secure patronage. Ulysses appeared in 1922 but was banned in the United States until 1933 and in the United Kingdom until 1936 Joyce’s final work, Finnegan’s Wake, appeared in 1939. He died in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 13, 1941, after an operation for a duodenal ulcer. Ulysses presents Joyce’s distinctive variety of an Irish novel through its cosmopolitan inclusive-ness, meanwhile lending a mythic dimension to the routines of middle-class life in 1904 Ireland.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Beleaguered Ireland

Since Ulysses makes reference to much of Irish history, a basic knowledge of that history’s major events and actors is instrumental in understanding the novel’s complexities. From its prehistory, Ireland has been subject to a series of invasions, incursions, and settlements by outsiders. Its legendary background includes mythic occupiers such as crude and earthy Firbolg, heroic Tuatha Da Danann, and the Milesians, free spirits and artists regarded as the ancestors of the Irish royal clans. The third century (ce.) marked the high point of the kingship of Tara, the “golden age” of heroic sovereigns who ruled “justly, peacefully, prosperously, and truthfully” (Connolly, p. 534). In the early fifth century, the British-born St. Patrick embarked on his mission to convert the Irish to Christianity.

Ireland was invaded in the ninth century by Norsemen and in the twelfth by the recent Norman conquerors of England. England would subsequently dominate Ireland largely through the Anglo-Irish nobility (descendants of Norman invaders, in contrast to native Irish). In 1155 the only Englishman to become Pope, Adrian VI, was reputed to have issued a Papal Bull (apparently fictitious) granting England’s king Henry II sovereignty over Ireland; Henry assumed full charge of an invasion of Ireland by his nobility in 1171-72. Not until the sixteenth century, however, did the English—under King Henry VII of the Tudor dynasty—begin the political and economic domination that would eventually reduce Ireland to the status of an impoverished English colony.

The early sixteenth century saw England’s King Henry VIII break with the Roman Catholic Church and inaugurate the Protestant Reformation in England. Henry himself became supreme head of the Church of England and sought to reform the church power structure in Ireland as well, but some Irish chiefs resisted his usurpation of their ancient prerogatives. Judging that the Irish would continue to revolt if unmonitored, Henry set out to completely replace the Catholic, Irish-speaking chieftain class with a Protestant administration that would be controlled from London. He established the Church of England in 1534—and its Irish branch, the Church of Ireland in 1536. A few years later, in 1541, Henry declared himself king of Ireland. Henceforth the Irish courts, churches, and landed estates would be governed directly by the English or their Anglo-Irish Protestant representatives. To enforce this new arrangement, the English Parliament passed a set of discriminatory codes that barred Catholics from all legal and government professions in Ireland, and that subjected the meetings and legislative drafts of the Irish Parliament to the control of the English king and council. The Irish did not suffer these indignities quietly. Their resistance led to a declaration of independence during the English Civil War (1642-51) that produced disastrous consequences. In 1649 England’s Oliver Cromwell mounted an invasion that thoroughly devastated Ireland; he and his relentless Puritan army massacred several thousand and confiscated all Irish lands. The rights of Catholics were further curtailed. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland was complete, leaving followers of the Church of England—only about one-tenth of the population—in control of land and political office. Through discriminatory penal laws, not only Catholics but also Presbyterians and Nonconformists would be deprived of civil rights in Ireland for more than a hundred years.

Irish resistance

Not surprisingly, England’s oppression led to the beginning of the modern Irish independence movement. Patriotic opposition in the Irish Parliament, spearheaded by Henry Flood and Henry Grattan, resulted in the moderate reforms of 1782, which included limited Irish self-government. During this period some minor disabilities suffered by Catholics in Ireland were abolished, but this slight relaxation of English control only intensified the Irish desire for self-rule. At the end of the eighteenth century, when the English were distracted by the French Revolution, the Irish saw an opportunity to advance their cause. In 1791, hoping to unite Protestants and Catholics in the movement for an independent constitutional republic, Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-98) and others formed the Society of United Irishmen. Tone’s movement sought sweeping parliamentary reform, universal suffrage, and full Catholic emancipation. By 1795 the United Irishmen had adopted a revolutionary stance, and actively sought assistance from France against England. After unsuccessful attempts by the French to invade and wrest control of Ireland, Tone led the United Irishmen in a series of abortive uprisings. The uprisings, staged in 1798, were brutally suppressed by the English. Afterwards, to centralize more legislative power in English hands, British Prime Minister William Pitt engineered the union of the British and Irish Parliaments. The Act of Union, which took effect January 1, 1801, dissolved the 500-year Old Irish Parliament and merged the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland into the United Kingdom. To patriots such as Flood and Grattan, the Act of Union signaled the end of the Irish nation. A failed rebellion led by Robert Emmet in 1803 was the last protest of the United Irishmen. Early in the nineteenth century, Irish Catholic politician Daniel O’Connell (“The Liberator”), using both legal and illegal means, led a lengthy and arduous nationalistic movement that resulted in the British Parliament’s voting for Catholic emancipation in 1829. O’Connell organized immense meetings at which as many as 250,000 Irishmen gathered in support of his agenda. Their emancipation consisted of the repeal of the final anti-Catholic measures. O’Connell tried but failed to repeal the Act of Union.

British political domination had enormous social effects. Probably the most significant historical event for nineteenth-century Ireland was The Great Famine (1845-49). Prompted by a potato blight that destroyed the staple of a large portion of the Irish population, the famine led to widespread starvation and death. British rule, both in previously confining Ireland to an agrarian economy and in failing to act to alleviate immediate conditions, aggravated the suffering enormously. In three years, the population of Ireland fell by 1.5 million (due to death and emigration). Some who remained rebelled once more, again without success. The British military promptly suppressed the Young Ireland uprising (1848) mounted during the Great Famine, as well as the subsequent Fenian revolt (1867). Fenianism (named after Fianna, the legendary band of Irish warriors led by Finn McCool) was a revolutionary movement that arose in the last third of the nineteenth century. At the heart of the movement was a secret society of Irish nationalists who espoused a radical republican ideology that rejected any connection with the British crown. Around the same time, other political movements, fearing renewed famine, saw land-reform as the crucial element in efforts to undermine England’s political control. The Home Rule League, founded in 1870 by Isaac Butt, and the Irish Land League, Michael Davitt’s 1879 organization, thought the chief means to Irish political autonomy rested in fair rents, secure tenant tenure, and the free sale of tenant’s interest, with the ultimate purpose of transforming the tenant farmers into owners of their holdings.

Meanwhile, newly elected Anglo-Irish Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell was seeking to work a Home Rule bill through the British Parliament. By the early 1880s Parnell had galvanized the predominantly poor Catholic population of Ireland into a nationalist movement, and he took the British Parliament hostage by using the single voting block of the Irish Party as a means of obstruction and filibuster, thus forcing the Irish Question to the center stage of English politics. Parnell negotiated with British Prime Minister William Gladstone for a form of Irish Home Rule that would grant Ireland limited domestic powers. But in 1882, two prominent British officials, Lord Frederick Cavendish, chief secretary for Ireland, and his undersecretary, Mr. Burke, were murdered in Phoenix Park, Dublin, by an Irish revolutionary group, the “Invincibles.” The resulting political violence undermined Parnell’s campaign, and a Home Rule bill introduced in parliament in 1886 was defeated. When Parnell became embroiled in a divorce case in 1889, and revelations of his decade-long liaison with Kitty O’Shea became public, he fell from power, dying in 1891. The devastation to the cause of Irish nationalism by Parnell’s ruin was overwhelming: the country’s political party was hopelessly divided into Parnellite and anti-Parnellite factions, with Ireland’s Catholic Church siding against Parnell and the Parnellite factions accusing the Church of caving in to the interests of the British. Parnell,’s supporters in the Church, meanwhile, accused him of putting his own interests before the interests of his party. The bitter factionalism that Parnell’s fall caused among Irish nationalists, sometimes even within families, receives memorable treatment in Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, as the Dedalus family’s Christmas dinner turns into a rancorous argument over Parnell’s “betrayal.” Parnell, the fallen hero, also haunts Ulysses, as memories of the Irish patriot recur repeatedly both to Bloom and Dedalus. In the end, constitutional home-rule for Ireland never materialized under Gladstone, and Irish nationalist ambitions were frustrated for the next 20 years.

Nationalism and the Irish Literary Revival

As the Irish Party in parliament fell into disarray with the disgrace of Parnell, the energy behind the movement for national independence began to express itself culturally rather than politically. In 1893, Gaelic scholar Douglas Hyde founded the Gaelic League, a nationalist organization of Roman Catholics and Protestants dedicated to preserving and extending Irish language (Gaelic) and culture. That same year Hyde delivered an address to the Irish Literary Society on “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland.” He intended not simply to rid Ireland of English lawmakers; Hyde wished to rid it as well of all traces of English cultural imperialism, a force that by the end of the nineteenth century had gone far toward obliterating Gaelic and many Irish customs and folkways. To this end, he and other like-minded nationalist scholars established institutions such as the School for Irish Learning, which opened in 1903 and offered classes in Irish history, folklore, dance, and, of course, the Gaelic language. Cultural-defense organizations also developed at this time, such as D. P. Moran’s Irish Ireland campaign, which sought to exclude all Protestant influence from Irish nationalism, and the Gaelic Athletic Association, which promoted the revival of Irish sports such as hurling—something of a cross between lacrosse and field hockey. These groups urged nationalists and non-nationalists alike to stop imitating the English and assert respect for Irish culture.

The most enduring assertion of Irish cultural nationalism was the Irish literary renaissance, a movement of poets, prose writers, and playwrights, who, between about 1890 and 1914, sought inspiration in Irish mythology, folklore, and popular culture. The domination of the movement by Irish writers from middle-and upper-class Protestant backgrounds, such as W. B. Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Lady Augusta Gregory, and its preoccupation with using Gaelic material as the basis of a revitalized Irish literature in English, has encouraged the alternative label “Anglo-Irish revival.” Hyde’s book A Literary History of Ireland (1899) was among the most influential works of the revival, introducing many Irish people to an indigenous Irish literary tradition that they were not even aware they possessed.

Joyce maintained an ambivalent relation to the Irish literary renaissance and Irish nationalism in general. On the one hand, as an avowed socialist, he supported the cause of Irish independence and welcomed the revival of Irish letters. On the other hand, he always asserted a catholic and cosmopolitan sensibility in his works, an inclusive European attitude.

The rise of the social sciences

Joyce drew upon the voluminous research of nineteenth-century social science in constructing a mythic and heroic background for the otherwise rather unspectacular actions of Bloom and Dedalus in Ulysses. In particular, the emerging fields of modem anthropology, comparative mythology, sociology of religion, and psychology offered Joyce a fertile harvest of ideas for his “mythical method,” as T. S. Eliot called it (Eliot in Gray, p. 228).

Popular interest in anthropology had been stimulated in the late nineteenth century by studies of contemporary preliterate cultures, such as that of American Indian peoples and Australian aborigines, and by the disinterment of dead civilizations, such as that of Minoan Crete (begun in 1898 by Sir Arthur Evans) and Troy (by Heinrich Schliemann from 1876-85). In addition, works such as J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890, reissued in 12 volumes, 1907-15) put religion itself in a new light. The Golden Bough surveyed spiritual beliefs and practices worldwide, with special emphasis on myths of regeneration (like those that inform the reveries of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses). Such writings suggested that, however much religions might claim to differ, their sacred narratives, dogmas, and practices conformed to a few simple motifs and patterns found all over the world, and that highly developed theologies were rooted in ideas associated with primitive magic.

As important as the British advances in anthropology was the work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim, whose book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915) was published while Joyce was writing Ulysses. Durkheim’s pioneering works of the 1890s had helped broaden and transform the sociological study of law, economics, linguistics, ethnology, and art history not only in France but throughout Europe. His religious theories, which caused considerable controversy, may have appealed to Joyce for the emphasis they give to the communal function of religion.

Parallel to the advances in anthropology were those of psychology. Modern psychology, especially as it was developing at the turn of the twentieth century around the Viennese school of Sigmund Freud, was throwing new light upon the influence of unconscious mental processes in human thought and behavior. Freud’s studies offered intriguing explanations of dreams, slips of the tongue and pen, processes of verbal association, jokes, forgetting, and many other ingredients of psychology, all of which play a part in Joyce’s novel. Joyce is known to have read and discussed Freud’s work as early as 1911, and to have been intrigued particularly by slips of the tongue (Davison, p. 129). Of special importance for Ulysses were studies by a student of Freud, Otto Rank, whose work on hero myths, the incest motif in literature, and the trauma of birth all contribute to ideas at work in the novel. Joyce would later have personal contact with another student of Freud, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung; in 1934, Jung treated Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, for the mental illness that darkened the happiness of Joyce’s later years, when he had finally achieved a measure of fame and financial security.

Joyce’s trademark stream-of-consciousness narrative style, which he claimed to have borrowed from the minor French novelist Valéry Larbaud, might owe something to associationist theories of psychology, particularly to those of the German physiological psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. However these factors may have influenced him, Joyce himself drew a connection between Ulysses and contemporary psychology in his description of what the novel achieved: “I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks” and how all this activity affects “what you Freudians call the subconscious” (Joyce in Ellmann, p. 524).

The Novel in Focus

Plot overview

The characters and events in Ulysses parallel in an ingenious and frequently subtle manner the Odyssey of Homer, the ancient Greek epic and touchstone of the Western literary canon. Almost every detail of Homer’s epic, which features Odysseus, a hero who journeys home from the Trojan War to recover his house and kingdom, can be found echoed or transformed in Joyce’s novel, often to comic effect. Joyce’s Ulysses is divided into three large sections that roughly correspond to the traditional divisions of the Odyssey. Homer’s epic begins with the “Telemachia,” which recounts the effort of Odysseus’s son Telemachus to find his father and defend the honor of his mother, Penelope. The middle books of the Odyssey describe the many adventures of Odysseus and his men, and the concluding books, called the “Nostos,” or homecoming, describe Odysseus’s ultimate return and reestablishment of his rule in Ithaca, his island homeland. The 18 chapters of Joyce’s modern epic Ulysses—the title comes from the Latin name for Odysseus—mirror Homer’s three-part scheme: Chapters 1 through 3 comprise a Telemachia, with Stephan Dedalus, the youthful poet and protagonist of Joyce’s earlier novel A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, corresponding to Telemachus. Chapters 4 through 15 of Ulysses mostly detail the adventures of Leopold Bloom, an Irish-Jewish Odysseus and a partial projection of Joyce’s own middle-aged self. Chapters 16 through 18 form the Nostos of the novel, as Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus all converge at the Bloom’s home at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin. Not only is Homer’s large three-part division reproduced in Ulysses, but each chapter of Joyce’s novel corresponds to an episode in Homer’s Odyssey, according to a schema for the novel that Joyce circulated among friends. The correspondences, however, are often disguised.

Plot summary

What follows is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the basic plot line of the novel, prefaced by their Homeric equivalents in brackets. Readers should be aware, however, that Ulysses is intentionally designed to thwart simple summaries.

1. [Telemachus] : The first episode takes place about 8 a.m. in the Martello Tower at Sandy-cove, a coastal suburb of Dublin, where Joyce lived for a short time in the spring of 1904. The squat tower was one of 15 battlements built in 1804, when a French invasion of Britain was threatened. The chapter introduces Stephen Dedalus, a self-styled poet and schoolteacher, who has recently returned from Paris on the news of his mother’s

THREE CHAPTERS FROM JOYCE’S ORIGINAL SCHEMA FOR ULYSSES

As the chart below shows, joyce assigned a complex system of correspondences to his labyrinthine novo!. Not only does each chapter correspond to a scene from Homer’s Odyssey, but most chapters also have an associated bodily organ (e.g., the ear for the musical Sirens chapter), art (in the broad sense, as in the art of medicine), symbol, and technique. While some of these correspondences hardly seem apparent, and some are clearly far more significant than others, the chartexhibits the painstaking attention to minute detail characteristic of Joyce’s writing.

Title		Hour	Scene	Bodily organ	Art	Symbol	Technique
10.	Wandering Rocks	3 P.M.	streets	blood	mechanics	citizens	labyrinth
11.	Sirens	4 P.M.	concert room	ear	music	barmaids	Fuga per canonem
12.	Cyclops	5 P.M.	tavern	muscle	politics	Fenian	gigantism
(Adapted from Gilbert, pp. 227, 240, 258)

terminal illness. He has been living in the tower with his erstwhile friend, Buck Mulligan, a medical student. Stephen still wears a black mourning suit for his mother, though it has been months since her funeral; his refusal to pray at his mother’s deathbed in spite of her pleading will torment him throughout the day. Stephen and Mulligan are joined at breakfast by Haines, an Oxford acquaintance and guest of Mulligan, who has recently also been living in the tower. Haines is a wealthy English tourist in Ireland doing research for a book on Irish folk sayings. He condescendingly speaks to the old Irishwoman who delivers the men their morning milk, addressing her in Gaelic, a language she does not know. At the end of the chapter, shortly before swimming in the nearby ocean, Mulligan gets Stephen to give him the key to the tower.

2. [Nestor]: Events of the chapter are based on Joyce’s experiences as a teacher at Clifton School in Dalkey in 1904. Stephen queries his students about the ancient battle of Asculum (279 b.c.)—which occasioned the phrase “Pyrrhic victory”—and hears a declamation of Milton’s elegy “Lycidas.” Later he is paid his monthly wages by Mr. Deasy, the aged and opinionated headmaster. Deasy lectures the polite Stephen on financial responsibility, meanwhile expressing Anglo-Irish loyalty and anti-Semitism. Before he departs, Stephen agrees to help get Deasy’s letter about foot-and-mouth disease published.

3. [Proteus]: Having left the school, Stephen wanders along the seacoast at Sandymount Strand while waiting to meet Mulligan for lunch (Stephen later joins the men from the newspaper office instead). His mind wanders over his considerable store of abstruse learning, as well as events in his life thus far. Philosophical and theological matters mingle with Irish history, his childhood artistic ambitions, his unproductive time in Paris, his estranged relations with his family, his lack of a woman’s love, and his complex bond with Mulligan, who both fears him and lords it over him, much like the “usurpers” of Odysseus’s household in the Greek epic. On the beach, he sees two midwives, the corpse of a drowned dog, and a gypsy couple with their dog; the gypsy woman inspires him to scribble a line of verse (on a torn-off end of Deasy’s letter), which he subsequently abandons on the beach. At the end of the chapter, he urinates and leaves his dried snot on a rock.

4. [Calypso]: Leopold Bloom is introduced in this chapter, the events of which take place at about 8 a.m. at 7 Eccles Street, the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom. (The fourth, fifth and sixth chapters roughly recapitulate the times of the first, second and third chapters.) The uxorious Bloom prepares breakfast for his wife, affectionately feeds the cat, goes to the butcher shop for a kidney (forgetting to take his latch key), has a bowel movement, and performs a host of other trivial domestic labors. Meanwhile, his mind wanders from half-informed scientific speculations to visions of an exotic Orient, the body of the maidservant in front of him at the butcher’s, and the past and present situation of the Jews and their homeland. Molly remains in bed during the entire chapter, clearly accustomed to Bloom’s service; she queries her husband about a term—“metempsychosis”—in a book he has obtained for her from a library and with characteristic frankness complains that “there’s nothing smutty” in the novel (Joyce, Ulysses, 4.355). The Blooms receive mail from their daughter Milly, who works away from home and has just celebrated her fifteenth birthday; Molly also gets a letter from Blazes Boylan, an advertising man (like Bloom) and an impresario, whose arrangements for Molly’s impending concert tour involve his coming to the Blooms’ house later that day. At the end of the chapter, Bloom expresses sympathy for his dead acquaintance, Paddy Dignam, whose funeral he is about to attend.

5. [Lotus Eaters]: Awaiting Dignam’s funeral, Bloom strolls about central Dublin; he takes the opportunity to check, at a post office distant from his home, for mail from a woman, Martha Clifford, with whom he has initiated a correspondence under the pseudonym Henry Flower. After being distracted by an encounter with an acquaintance, Bloom reads Martha’s letter, to which she has pinned a flower, which appeals to Bloom’s somewhat masochistic sexuality. After watching the end of a mass at a Catholic church, Bloom orders a refill of Molly’s lotion and a bar of lemon soap at a nearby druggist. Shortly before entering a public bath, where he contemplates masturbating while rereading Martha’s letter, he encounters another acquaintance, Bantam Lyons. In order to get rid of Lyons, who wants to know the odds on the English Ascot horse race later that day, Bloom hands him his newspaper. At the end of the chapter, Bloom lies floating in the bath, his penis “a languid floating flower” (Ulysses, 5.571-72).

6. [Hades]: Bloom attends the funeral of Paddy Dignam in the company of several Dubliners, including Simon Dedalus, Stephen’s father. The chapter resembles a descent into the realm of the dead, including images that recall Odysseus’s encounter with the underworld in Book 11 of the Greek epic. En route to the funeral, the carriage passes Stephen (on his way to Sandymount), whom Bloom notices; Blazes Boylan, whom Bloom refuses to recognize; and a Jew, the occasion of mild anti-Semitic remarks from Bloom’s companions. The conversation during the ride reveals Bloom’s outsider status. He attempts to ingratiate himself to these men but his thoughts—and occasionally his speech—reflect his divergence from typical Irish sentiments. Bloom thinks of Digram’s red nose as evidence of alcoholism, the real reason of his death, while he openly asserts that the declared reason, heart attack, is the best way to go: quick, with little suffering. The sentiment contradicts Catholic doctrine, which requires time to receive sacramental forgiveness for sins before death. Though the episode reminds Bloom of the two deaths closest to him—his father’s (a suicide) and his son Rudy’s (after 11 days)—Bloom is able to joke, sing, and approach death from the perspective of a commonsensible agnostic. The graveyard contains the remains of the Irish nationalists O’Connell and Parnell as well as Stephen’s mother. At the end of the chapter, Bloom watches a large rat crawl into a grave site and imagines—without any faintness of heart—its meal of decaying flesh. His mind then returns from the realm of the dead; re-engaging life, he thinks of Molly.

7. [Aeolus]: In this chapter, the book adopts a single timeline, in which Bloom and Stephen cross paths until they ultimately meet (chapter 14). The chapter begins at the office of the Freeman’s Journal, where Bloom works as an advertising salesman. Anxious to renew an ad for Alexander Keyes (a tea, wine, and spirit merchant), Bloom applies to the newspaper’s foreman, who agrees to the arrangement if Keyes renews for three months. This sets Bloom—the only Irishman in the chapter engaged in productive activity—off to the newspaper office of the Evening Telegraph, where he asks the editor, Myles Crawford, if he can phone Keyes. Bloom then goes out to meet Keyes. At the end of the chapter, Bloom returns to the Telegraph’s offices, where an irritable Crawford is leading a group of Irishmen out to drink. Included are an unsuccessful lawyer, a questionable “professor,” the drunken Crawford, and the leech Lenehan (who, like many minor characters in Ulysses, first appears in Joyce’s Dubliners). The group also includes Stephen Dedalus, who enters the Teiegraph’s office just after Bloom leaves to meet Keyes. Stephen, who has delivered Deasy’s letter, listens willingly to the talk, mostly of past glories and lost causes. He offers his own Dublin story, “The Parable of the Plums,” which is at odds with the empty and windy rhetoric of other characters. The chapter is stylistically notable for its newspaper-like headline; actually parodies of headlines, they introduce sections of the action, to which they sometimes seem only remotely relevant.

8. [Lestrygonians] : Bloom eats. In the course of further wanderings about Dublin—with the later meeting between Boylan and his wife feeding on his mind—he is handed a flyer, feeds some seagulls, pities the ragged Dilly Dedalus (Stephen’s little sister), meets an old flame (Josie Breen), initially stops for lunch at a hotel but is put off by the swinish manners of the diners, helps a blind boy cross the street, and finally has a glass of wine and a cheese sandwich at Davy Byrne’s. Bloom’s hunger tends to darken his thoughts; he thinks nostalgically about his past, his mind flitting to apparently happier days with Molly, and to his lost son, Rudy. He also muses on the unhappy condition of many Irishwomen, something he attributes to Catholic doctrine, and the tendency of the Irish to forsake their leaders, such as Parnell. At the end of the chapter, Bloom manages to avoid a direct confrontation with Boylan by quickly ducking into the Dublin National Museum.

9. [Scylla and Charybdis]: Stephen presents his interpretation of Shakespeare, in the office of the National Library of Dublin, which was intended for Haines, the English tourist-researcher. Since Haines fails to appear, Stephen must perform for some local Dublin intellectuals: the author A.E. (pseudonym of the poet George Russell)—who leaves soon after Stephen begins—the librarians Thomas Lyster, Richard Best, and John Eglinton (pseudonym of essayist William Magee). Later Mulligan joins the group. Meanwhile, Bloom lurks in the background, seeking a copy of a previous ad for Keyes. Though the chapter alludes to a wide variety of Shakespearean interpretations, Stephen’s is highly personal: Shakespeare’s life is everywhere in his art. In particular, Shakespeare identified with dispossessed and cuckolded Hamlet the father (rather than Hamlet the son). Stephen presents his evidence in seemingly haphazard fashion, according to the whims of his skeptical listeners. At the end of the seemingly inconclusive performance, Bloom leaves the library, passing between Stephen and Mulligan, that is, between the whirlpool of idealism and the rock of materialism. Stephen apparently takes little notice.

10. [Wandering Rocks]: As one of two omnibus chapters in Ulysses (the other being 15), this segment is a miniature of the whole. Nearly all the characters in Ulysses appear in the chapter’s 19 subsections, each moving simultaneously and relatively to the others throughout a time-space nexus of the city, carefully plotted by Joyce. The three chief characters of the novel—Molly, Bloom, and Stephen—are reduced to the level of all other Dubliners. In this chapter, we learn the opinions of others in the novel about the main characters: Lenehan credits Bloom with having a touch of the artist in him; Mulligan views Stephen’s artistic aspirations with disdainful skepticism. Here we also learn the date of the book, June 16, 1904, and have the single glimpse into Boylan’s mind: “A young pullet,” he thinks, looking at a serving girl’s cleavage (Ulysses, 10.327). A montage of Dublin moments and characters, the chapter begins with the walk of Father Conmee and ends with a procession of the (English) viceroy of Dublin, which is a secular counterpart to Father Conmee’s introductory walk.

11. [Sirens]: Set in the Ormond Hotel, where first Boylan stops on his way to visit Molly, and then Bloom writes back to Martha while eating another meal, this chapter is an elaborate verbal imitation of a musical composition. The chapter uses stylistic techniques such as tonal contrasts, rhythmic variations, contrapuntal phrases, percussives, and Wagnerian leitmotifs. Some 58 different musical themes are laid out in the opening, which is often described as an introductory enunciation of the musical motifs, and marks the most substantial departure from conventional narrative form thus far in the novel. Boylan and Molly’s sexual encounter—at the Bloom’s home—is indirectly suggested by activities in the Ormond’s bar, including Bloom’s vicarious enjoyment of the song sung by Simon Dedalus and other “sirens.” Leaving the hotel, Bloom adds his contribution to the musical chapter—his farting covered by the passing streetcar’s noise.

12. [Cyclops]: The meaner aspects of Dublin life are exposed in this segment, which is narrated by a Dublin barfly. In Barney Kiernan’s pub we encounter a number of male Dubliners, including “the citizen,” an ultranationalist member of the Gaelic League. The lot of them are somewhat the worse for drinking. Bloom is there to meet with Martin Cunningham about financial support for Paddy Dignam’s family. The chapter contrasts Bloom to the citizen, his polar opposite. Bloom is humane and nonviolent, preaching the Judeo-Christian doctrine of love, while the citizen is a xenophobic Fenian committed to savage attacks upon the English and against all but the most chauvinistic Irish patriots. Personal attacks on Bloom reach a climax when the patrons of the pub, misinformed by Bantam Lyons into thinking that the “Jew,” Bloom, has won money betting on “Throwaway” (the winner of the Ascot Race), resent his not treating them to drinks. The episode ends with the citizen’s shouting anti-Semitic abuse, hurling a biscuit tin at Bloom (recalling the Cyclops who hurls boulders at Odysseus in the Odyssey), and setting his mangy dog after him. Bloom, hustled into a passing car by Cunningham, is stylistically transformed into “Oben Bloom Elijah amid clouds of angels,” a reference to the Hebrew prophet Elijah, carried skyward, says the Bible, in a chariot of fire (Ulysses, 12.1916-17).

13. [Nausica]: After visiting Dignam’s widow, the generous Bloom strolls along Sandy-mount Strand, stopping, as evening falls, to sit on the same rocks where Stephen had rested earlier that morning. Bloom is biding his time, deliberately postponing his return home. Also on the beach is Gerty MacDowell, a young lower-middle-class woman. The first half of the chapter, presented from Gerty’s perspective in a sentimentalized ladies-magazine style, details her troubled home life and romanticizing attitudes. As she recognizes that Bloom’s gaze—from a distance—is focused upon her, her not unper-ceptive fantasy about him becomes increasingly sexual. At the end of her narrative, she deliberately exposes her undergarments to the surreptitiously masturbating Bloom and walks away limping (she is lame). The second half of the chapter shifts to Bloom’s post-orgasmic reflections, largely about women. Though he is grateful for Gerty’s participation in his sexual release (and recognizes that she also enjoyed herself), his mind returns again and again to Molly. He muses about the events of the day, acknowledging the fait acccompli of his wife’s adultery and the cyclical nature of one’s existence. After finding the scrap of paper left by Stephen, whose writing he cannot decipher, Bloom futilely attempts to write a message in the sand for Gerty, which he then erases. At the end of the chapter, he falls asleep on the rocks.

14. [Oxen of the Sun]: Bloom next proceeds to the Holies Street Maternity Hospital to check on an acquaintance, Mina Purefoy, in her third day of labor. He joins a group of medical students and acquaintances—including Stephen, Lenehan and Stephen’s college friend from A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Lynch, who engage in coarse and irreverent conversation in the hospital’s cafeteria. Topics include procreation, pregnancy, contraception, venereal disease, and birth, as well as Irish history and politics. Bloom largely remains silent, but observes Stephen with paternal solicitude, inwardly concerned about the young man’s increasing drunkenness. He reflects upon his own sexual life, his relationship to Molly and Milly, and his dead son Rudy. During the episode, Mulligan arrives, Haines makes a brief appearance, and Mrs. Purefoy gives birth to a son. Eventually the group decamps to a pub; Stephen and Lynch then head to Nighttown, Dublin’s brothel district. In accord with the theme of birth and development, the chapter is narrated in a historical range of English literary styles (especially those used by Anglo-Irish writers), from Latinate beginnings to modern Dublin slang and journalese.

15. [Circe]: Bloom follows Stephen to Night-town, and in a phantasmagoria of literary modernism—in which soap bars talk, dead and imaginary characters walk the streets, and Bloom changes sex and bears a child—he encounters the now thoroughly drunken Stephen at Bella Cohen’s brothel. The chapter is presented in drama form, but is akin to a psychodrama, animated by apparitions and hallucinations. Almost every previous element of Ulysses, including the most seemingly trivial, is here recapitulated, often in a surreal manner, and it is difficult to separate reality from illusion. Bloom has guilt-ridden sexual fantasies, which include his ambivalent response to Molly’s adultery, as well as images of his personal empowerment and humiliation. These fantasies externalize Bloom’s conscious and unconscious feelings. At the climax of the chapter, Stephen, in terror at an alcohol-induced vision of his dead mother, smashes a lampshade and rushes from the brothel. Bloom placates Bella Cohen, pays for the lamp, and follows Stephen—by now abandoned by Lynch—to the street. There he finds Stephen confronted by two drunken English soldiers. Despite Bloom’s efforts to defuse the situation, Stephen ultimately provokes one soldier into knocking him down. Though the police arrive, Bloom manages to prevent the unconscious Stephen from being arrested. As the chapter ends, Bloom, attempting to revive Stephen, has a vision of an 11-year-old Rudy.

16. [Eumaeus]: Bloom and Stephen travel a short distance to a cabman’s shelter, where Bloom buys Stephen some coffee and a bun. The two exhausted Irishmen—it is now past midnight—share desultory remarks, often amusing in the deadpan style of the chapter. Bloom does most of the talking—Stephen is still recovering from the soldier’s attack and the effect of drinking all day. Topics include Stephen’s careless behavior, Irish politics (specifically Parnell and the Phoenix Park murders), and writing as a profession. Bloom is polite, discreet and solicitous; Stephen is curt and brusque. Both men are mystified by a sailor, W. B. Murphy, who has been entertaining those in the shelter with his stories, and who claims, without evidence, to know Simon Dedalus. After showing Molly’s portrait to an apparently uncomprehending Stephen, Bloom, who is now plotting to have Stephen tutor his wife in Italian, suggests that Stephen follow him home. Taking his arm, Bloom escorts him out. On the way to Eccles Street, they discuss their shared love of music. 17. [Ithaca]: Bloom and Stephen continue their walk to 7 Eccles Street. Upon their arrival, Bloom finds that he has forgotten to take the latch key. He resourcefully climbs down into the area railing, lets himself in through the kitchen, and admits Stephen through the front door. Bloom then serves Stephen cocoa in the kitchen, and the two men continue their conversation. Though Stephen politely refuses Bloom’s offer to spend the night, both men tentatively agree that Stephen should give Molly Italian lessons, and she give him vocal lessons. They also plan to undertake further conversations. Bloom returns the money that he has held for Stephen since the Nighttown excursion, and both men exit through the back garden. They contemplate the early morning sky and urinate together. Stephen leaves as the nearby church bells ring the 2 a.m. hour. Reentering the house, Bloom, bumping his head against the sideboard, recognizes that the front-room furniture has been rearranged. He straightens up and proceeds to bed, where he encounters further evidence (food crumbs, the imprint of a human form) of Boylan’s earlier presence. Reflecting philosophically on his wife’s adultery, he kisses her rear end, which arouses him sexually. She awakes and questions him about his day. He gives her an abbreviated account and then falls asleep, his head at her feet, as is his wont. The chapter’s rigidly objective, question-and-answer catechismal style offers a great deal of apparently true information about the three main characters. Included is the fact that the Blooms have not had complete “carnal intercourse” for more than ten years, following the death of Rudy, as well as a host of other seemingly unimportant issues (including the route of the water Bloom draws to make the cocoa, from reservoir to faucet) (Ulysses, 17.2280-84).

18. [Penelope]: The final chapter of Ulysses is the 20,000-word, eight-paragraph, wholly un-punctuated stream-of-consciousness monologue of Molly Bloom, the earthy frankness of which shocked many of Joyce’s readers. Almost all of the action of the episode is mental, involving Molly’s reflections upon and memories of the day, Dublin, its inhabitants, and her former life. She does, however, urinate, menstruate, and perhaps masturbate. Also she is conscious of the time—she hears the church bells strike 4 a.m.—and the presence of her sleeping husband. Her thoughts range from her rather lonely youth in Gibraltar, where she grew up without a mother or close friends her own age, to her children, Milly and the dead Rudy. Although she mentions several possible lovers and fantasizes about Stephen, her recent sexual intercourse with Blazes Boylan is perhaps her first affair since she has been married. Always her thoughts return to Bloom. Her monologue—and the book—ends with her sensual recollection of the day he proposed marriage: “and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then I asked him with my eyes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes” (Ulysses, 18.1604-09).

JEWS IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRELAND

Ulysses’s Leopold Bloom exhibits an assimilationist regponse to Dublin life, which was fairly common among Irish lews at this time. Though Jewish law calls for circumcision, he has not been circumcised. On the other hand, he has received the Catholic sacrament of baptism three times. Bloom’s ethnic identity is a complex one. In fact, the history of the lews generally in Ireland is a complex story of exile and assimilation. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Dublin lewish population was decimated due to pressures to emigrate, convert, or otherwise assimilate, reducing the small population of 40 families to two. As naturalization laws began to ease in the mid-nineteenth century, Jews were allowed a relative amount of religious and cultural freedom: Jewish marriages were given legal status; proscription from holding public office was eliminated; and dress codes were relaxed and finally eliminated. Due to new laws, Jewish refugees and émigrés, fleeing from pogroms and political oppression in Eastern Europe and Russia, began arriving in the Ute nineteenth century. By 1901, Jews in Dublin numbered 3,000, but they were still denied access to many public and private institutions, such as Trinity College, and anti-Semitism remained prevalent. When an anti-Semitic outburst took place in Limerick, Ireland, to 1904, the nationalist Arthur Griffith defended the anti-Semitic remarks of the priest Father Creagh. In a front-page column of the Uniteti Irishman, the Catholic priest had warned against the “usurious toils” of the lews, naming them as an “economic evil” in Ireland (Creagli in Manganello, p. 131-33). Such realities account for the frequent presence of anti-Semites in Ulysses.

Joyce’s reservations about Irish nationalism

The Cyclops chapter of Ulysses offers perhaps Joyce’s most pointed critique of Irish nationalism, especially of the movement’s racist and chauvinistic tendencies. In “Cyclops,” a group of pub denizens—including one character called “the citizen”—perfectly embody the racist strain in extreme Irish nationalism. The slogan of these ultranationalists was “Ireland for the Irish,” meaning for the Irish Catholics, to the exclusion of Jews, Protestants, Italian immigrants, and so forth. The citizen and others in the pub insult Bloom, behind his back as well as to his face, asking, “Is he a jew or a gentile or a holy Roman or a swaddler or what the hell is he?” (Ulysses, 12.1631-32). “Saint Patrick would want to land again at Ballykinlar and convert us, says the citizen, after allowing things like that to contaminate our shores” (Ulysses, 12.1671-72). As Bloom departs, the citizen shouts after him, “Three cheers for Israel!” (Ulysses, 12.1791). Bloom’s reply—“Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God”—inflames the citizen further: “By Jesus, says the citizen, I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox there” (Ulysses, 12.1804-05. 12.1811-12). Hurling the tin at Bloom but missing, the citizen sets his dog after Bloom. This portrait exhibits the blind rage and invincible ignorance of ferocious Irish nationalism. Joyce responded to the political and cultural conflicts of his country largely through his art, asserting Irish independence by means of claims that ran counter to the dominant nationalist ideology. Instead of an Ireland made up of “pure” Gaels from a single race, Ulysses presents an Ireland made up of Greeks, Jews, Spaniards, and Italians, all of whom are still specifically and locally Irish. Instead of a literary tradition focused on Irish literature to the exclusion of the English and European traditions, Ulysses incorporates the entire corpus of the Western canon while simultaneously questioning its dominant hierarchies. Joyce felt the nationalist revival was “educating the people of Ireland on the old pap of racial hatred” (Joyce in Manganiello, p. 127). While certainly not all Irish nationalists were racist, Joyce found the ideology of the extremists no less stifling or conservative than the repressive church-rule of Catholicism or than British imperialism, all of which he felt were paralyzing the country and from which he moved to the Continent to escape. Although Joyce considered himself a na-tionalist— tionalist—if one did not insist on the Irish language—he thought the way to save Ireland was to make the country international, heterodox, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan, rather than isolationist, exclusionary, reactionary, and feudalistic, as nationalists like the citizen in Ulysses sought to do. Joyce created a rich fusion in his art between European, Irish, and English literary traditions, and he filled the Dublin of Ulysses with the lower-middle-class character types among whom he was raised. The novel evokes a city of secondhand clothes, recruiting posters, and pubs, along with the constant colonial presence of police, soldiers, and English officials. The novel also shows the numerous foreign-born inhabitants of Dublin, whom Joyce portrays as Irishmen and Irishwomen as genuine as any others. Ulysses is literature hardly typical of the Irish Literary Revival, but it shows that Joyce remained heavily invested in the fate of Ireland.

Sources

It is no overstatement to say that Joyce marshals the entire Western intellectual heritage as material for Ulysses. The seemingly limitless range of his learning makes an account of the novel’s sources a daunting prospect. Nevertheless, an immense volume of literary-critical scholarship has accumulated around Ulysses during the twentieth century, helping illuminate many of Joyce’s sources, some of great obscurity, others of extreme ephemerality. Still others remain unknown. The present sketch can only suggest the rich allusiveness of Joyce’s epic. Along with the Greco-Roman literary and mythological tradition, which provides the novel its title and general framework, Joyce drew heavily on Judeo-Christian literature, particularly the Bible—there are 65 quotations from the Gospel of Matthew—and on the Roman Catholic liturgical and sacramental tradition. Nearly 150 Catholic saints are mentioned in the text, together with numerous references to Church ritual. Irish mythology also figures prominently in the novel, particularly The Book of Invasions, a popular medieval fable about the early settlement of Ireland. Norse, Germanic, and Hindu mythology play significant roles in Ulysses as well. The most conspicuous of Joyce’s philosophical and theological sources can be grouped chronologically. Among the ancient sources are Homer, the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and the theologian St. Augustine. Medieval influences of greatest note are the poet Dante and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. Joyce’s modern sources include the philosophers Giambattista Vico, Giordano Bruno, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. On the subject of literary influences on Joyce much ink has been spilled and many library shelves filled. It would take far less room to list the English-language authors who are not among Joyce’s sources than those who are. Of central importance is Shakespeare and perhaps the decisive near-contemporary influences are, in Britain, Walter Pater and John Henry Newman, and, on the Continent, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and Gabriele D’Annunzio. As the Oxen of the Sun chapter suggests, Joyce owed a debt, which he paid in full, to every age of English literature. Music as well provided an array of sources. Joyce had a good tenor singing voice, according to his contemporaries, and his great love of music, both sacred and secular, is evident in the novel’s nearly 200 songs. His ear was furthermore attuned to the musicality of language—hence the 50 nursery and street rhymes that are found in Ulysses—and he spoke Italian as smoothly as English, flawless French, fluent German, knew some 12 other tongues including Lapp, and numerous dialects. Finally, not least among Joyce’s sources are the many people he knew in Dublin who served as models for characters in the novel. For example, Stephen’s father, Simon Dedalus, is based on Joyce’s own father; Molly on Joyce’s wife, Nora; and the citizen on Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association and a rabid Irish nationalist.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

Nationalism revisited

While Joyce was writing Ulysses, continental Europe and Ireland were each in a state of military and social upheaval. World War I was decimating the Great Powers, while Ireland’s slow progress toward Home Rule exploded in the Easter Uprising of 1916 and the guerrilla warfare campaign that followed. Joyce had complex reactions to both events. Like Leopold Bloom, Joyce supported Sinn Fein leader Arthur Griffith’s nationalist policy of passive resistance, a strategy of parliamentary obstruction that seemed to Joyce appropriately forceful but nonviolent. When he learned of the 1916 Easter Uprising, in which a small number of Irish nationalists—1200 at the largest count—seized the national post office, raided Dublin Castle, dynamited the British armory, and held out for almost a week—his first reaction was a patriotic Erin go braght (Ireland forever!). But as the death toll mounted and the British began shelling Dublin, the pacifistic Joyce felt that the rebels were needlessly wasting lives. Although he sympathized with the cause of Irish independence, he felt that violence would not solve anything for Ireland. It seemed to Joyce that his figure of the rabid nationalist, the citizen from the Cyclops chapter, had finally been unleashed on Ireland, hurling bombs rather than biscuit tins.

Reception

From the first, responses to Ulysses typically tended toward extremes of either praise or condemnation. The book was at first judged legally obscene and banned in Ireland, England, and the United States. Of the second printing of 2,000 copies, 500 were burned in New York by the U.S. Post Office, and the English customs authorities confiscated and destroyed 499 copies of the third edition of 500 copies. But wherever Ulysses was banned, it was smuggled in; bowdlerized, pirated, and forged editions soon appeared in the United States. Early reactions ranged from the Irish poet A.E.’s “greatest fiction of the twentieth century” to the English poet Alfred Noyes’s “It is simply the foulest book that has ever found its way into print” (A.E. and Noyes in Kunitz, p. 737). The Dublin Review declared, “A great Jesuit-trained talent has gone over malignantly and mockingly to the powers of evil” (Dublin Review in Kunitz, p. 737). Edmund Gosse wrote that Ulysses was a “cynical appeal to sheer indecency” (Gosse in Ellmann, p. 528). More complimentary, Virginia Woolf singled out Joyce as the most original and important of the younger writers on the scene, despite what she considered the narrowness of his focus and—it is the complaint voiced most often by the first readers of Ulysses—the “emphases laid, perhaps didactically, upon indecency” (Woolf, pp. 154-56). On the other hand, the American novelist Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to fellow novelist Sherwood Anderson, exclaimed that “Joyce has written a most goddamn wonderful book,” and the European literary avant-garde generally agreed (Hemingway in Ellmann, p. 529). Though banned in Ireland, the novel earned approval from a few Irish writers living in England. Yeats recognized something specifically Irish in the work, an “Irish cruelty and an Irish strength,” and George Bernard Shaw saw the “hideously real” Dublin that he had left 20 years before (Yeats and Shaw in Ellmann, pp. 507, 531).

Recent critics have looked closely at Joyce’s investment in specifically Irish political and social issues, a dimension previously minimized. By the end of the twentieth century, the judgment of A.E. seems to have proven accurate, for Joyce is generally regarded as the century’s defining novelist. Joyce once said of Ulysses, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I mean, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality” (Joyce in Ellmann, p. 535). However mocking Joyce’s attitude may have been, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, all signs indicate that his wish for immortality will be fulfilled.

—James Caufield