[My re-read and blog is winding down. My final posts will be very brief, not because I’m not enjoying the novel and writing about it, but because summer is nearly over and I have taken way longer to do this than I had planned. My fall teaching assignment starts next week, and I have to wrap this up. So, my lasts post will be more like open-ended ideas for consideration. I hope to do better next summer! I am already thinking about topics of focus.]
In Oxen of the Sun, stylistically, Joyce takes us through this really amazing rebirth of language. The episode starts with some sort of primitive language and moves through Latin, old and middle-english, chivalric language, as sort of King James Bible-esque liturgical tongue, and ends with “normal English” and a cockney-like slang.
We have seen Bloom’s male gaze and a definite focus on sex leading up to this episode, and here, it seems, it’s time to pay the piper. It’s all about pregnancy. Bloom is a the maternity hospital to see about Mina Purefoy, who, after three days of difficult labor, is about to finally have her child. Bloom is very worried about her and about the baby. The whole thing makes him very uncomfortable, as he remembers Molly’s pregnancy that lead to Rudy’s birth and subsequent death eleven days later.
Bloom meets up with Buck Mulligan and his crew, and, of course, Stephen Dedalus. There is a kind of rebirth of purpose here, as Bloom takes a fatherly interest in Stephen and notices the way his “friends” slight him. He decides to keep an eye on his “new son.”
One of the more interesting things that struck me about this episode, from a feminist perspective, was the male insertion into women’s health. As in current politics, men in this episode spend an inordinate amount of time discussing their views of childbirth and reproduction. At one point, they are sitting around a table (a sort of makeshift Round Table with medical supplies and instruments all around it) talking about abortion:
For they were right witty scholars. And he heard their aresouns each gen other as touching birth and righteousness, young Madden maintaining that put such case it were hard the wife to die (for so it had fallen out a matter of some year agone with a woman of Eblana in Horne’s house that now was trespassed out of this world and the self night next before her death all leeches and pothecaries had taken counsel of her case). And they said farther she should live because in the beginning, they said, the woman should bring forth in pain and wherefore they that were of this imagination affirmed how young Madden had said truth for he had conscience to let her die. And not few and of these was young Lynch were in doubt that the world was now right evil governed as it was never other howbeit the mean people believed it otherwise but the law nor his judges did provide no remedy. A redress God grant. This was scant said but all cried with one acclaim nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife should live and the babe to die. In colour whereof they waxed hot upon that head what with argument and what for their drinking but the franklin Lenehan was prompt each when to pour them ale so that at the least way mirth might not lack. Then young Madden showed all the whole affair and said how that she was dead and how for holy religion sake by rede of palmer and bedesman and for a vow he had made to Saint Ultan of Arbraccan her goodman husband would not let her death whereby they were all wondrous grieved. To whom young Stephen had these words following: Murmur, sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent now glorify their Maker, the one in limbo gloom, the other in purgefire. But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we. Then said Dixon junior to Punch Costello wist he what ends. But he had overmuch drunken and the best word he could have of him was that he would ever dishonest a woman whoso she were or wife or maid or leman if it so fortuned him to be delivered of his spleen of lustihead. Whereat Crotthers of Alba Longa sang young Malachi’s praise of that beast the unicorn how once in the millennium he cometh by his horn, the other all this while, pricked forward with their jibes wherewith they did malice him, witnessing all and several by saint Foutinus his engines that he was able to do any manner of thing that lay in man to do. Thereat laughed they all right jocundly only young Stephen and sir Leopold which never durst laugh too open by reason of a strange humour which he would not bewray and also for that he rued for her that bare whoso she might be or wheresoever. Then spake young Stephen orgulous of mother Church that would cast him out of her bosom, of law of canons, of Lilith, patron of abortions, of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness or by potency of vampires mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius saith, by the influence of the occident or by the reek of moonflower or an she lie with a woman which her man has but lain with, effectu secuto, or peradventure in her bath according to the opinions of Averroes and Moses Maimonides. He said also how at the end of the second month a human soul was infused and how in all our holy mother foldeth ever souls for God’s greater glory whereas that earthly mother which was but a dam to bear beastly should die by canon for so saith he that holdeth the fisherman’s seal, even that blessed Peter on which rock was holy church for all ages founded. All they bachelors then asked of sir Leopold would he in like case so jeopard her person as risk life to save life. A wariness of mind he would answer as fitted all and, laying hand to jaw, he said dissembling, as his wont was, that as it was informed him, who had ever loved the art of physic as might a layman, and agreeing also with his experience of so seldomseen an accident it was good for that mother Church belike at one blow had birth and death pence and in such sort deliverly he scaped their questions. That is truth, pardy, said Dixon, and, or I err, a pregnant word. Which hearing young Stephen was a marvellous glad man and he averred that he who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord for he was of a wild manner when he was drunken and that he was now in that taking it appeared eftsoons.
Bloom had the good sense not to answer their question.
Politics and pregnancy/birth/abortion aside, this chapter really is a sort of rebirth for Bloom. It’s as if, in the maternity hospital, he was given a new son to father in Stephen.
Reading James Joyce 