The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
James Joyce · a novel in three parts · eighteen episodes · 264,348 words · first published in Paris, 1922 · read in the Project Gutenberg e-text #4300
Mode
Encyclopaedic novel as mock-epic; naturalism, interior monologue and parody held in one day
Mythos
Nostos and the search for the father; the usurped son, the descent to the dead, the wanderer home to a bed another man has used
Phase
One day in one city, from a tower stair in the morning to a bed at night
Presentation
Fiction; three parts and eighteen episodes, a new style for each episode after the ninth, among them a play script, a catechism and eight sentences without commas
Register
From the Latin of the Mass and alliterative Old English to pub talk, headlines, cliché and Molly’s unpunctuated night
Scale
One city, one day, three minds
Governing Proposition
A young man who has lost his mother and an advertising canvasser who has lost a son cross one city on one day, meet late, and part; a woman in bed has the last word, and it is yes. The wager of the novel is that one ordinary day of an ordinary man is the whole matter of epic, and that his decency, unheroic and mocked, is real and enough.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” The book opens on a Mass said over shaving water, “Introibo ad altare Dei”, and on a young man who looks coldly at it. Stephen Dedalus is haunted by his mother, who has come to him in a dream, “her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood”. He answers her in his head, “Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!”, and then, “No, mother! Let me be and let me live.” The first episode closes on one word, the son’s verdict on the man who has displaced him: “Usurper.”
Around these figures the book builds an architecture it never labels. There are three parts and eighteen episodes. The text marks only the parts and the breaks between episodes. The Homeric names are nowhere in it, and the word “Ulysses” appears in the narrative’s own voice only twice, both times for someone else. The book lengthens as it goes. The first nine episodes hold 28.2 per cent of its 264,348 words, the last nine 71.8, and the last four alone two words in five. Its middle word falls in the thirteenth episode, in Bloom’s thoughts after the fireworks: “Mouth made for that. Like Molly.”
Its first law is given early and quietly. In the first episode Stephen looks at the bay as “A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green.” The fourth turns back to the same morning and to a second man: “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” He walks back along Dorset street, and the same sentence falls on him: “A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.” Two minds in one city are under one cloud at one moment. Whatever the styles later do, the facts of the day will hold.
Movement II
Bloom canvasses advertisements, and his day is errands and a funeral. At Glasnevin he stands back from the grave, counting heads: “Twelve. I’m thirteen. No. The chap in the macintosh is thirteen.” Nobody knows the man, and the book never names him: “Where the deuce did he pop out of?” As the coffin goes down: “If we were all suddenly somebody else.” He thinks of the dead and of the other world, “I do not like that other world she wrote”, and turns to the living: “Warm beds: warm fullblooded life.” The descent to the dead ends in an appetite for life, not a prophecy.
At lunchtime the city itself passes before him like the dead: “Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on.” Houses change hands, pyramids stand in sand, and Bloom concludes, “No-one is anything.” “Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.” A glass of Burgundy brings back a day on Howth: “Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed.” The distance from that day to this one is four words, “Me. And me now.”, and then the flies again: “Stuck, the flies buzzed.” The book leaves the memory there until its last pages, where it returns from the other mouth.
In a pub in the afternoon he is asked what a nation is and answers plainly: “A nation is the same people living in the same place.” Asked his own nation by the citizen: “Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.” Then, flatly: “Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred.” Asked what is: “Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.” The episode mocks him for it, sends him off under a hurled biscuit tin, and then, in a parody of scripture, lifts him to the glory of the brightness “like a shot off a shovel.”
Movement III
From the seventh episode, something in the book that belongs to no character starts to arrange it. The newspaper office is broken up by sixty-three headlines. The city’s streets are cut into nineteen sections that cross one another and end with the viceregal cavalcade passing through the city. The next episode is preceded by an overture of sixty-two lines that opens “Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn” and ends with the word “Begin!” Its sentences shrink to a mean of five and a half words, as if the prose were being played rather than written.
The arranger raises the prose and drops it in the same breath. The episode of music ends on an Irish patriot’s last words, broken by a passing tram and then by the body: “Let my epitaph be. Kraaaaaa.” The next line is “Pprrpffrrppffff.” Later, while a child is being born in the hospital, English prose is born again beside it. It begins in Latin litany, “Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.” It passes through alliterative Old English, “Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night’s oncoming”, and then through Bunyan, Sterne, Dickens and Carlyle. It breaks into slang as the child arrives.
Late in the day the styles turn to exhaustion and to cold. The cabman’s shelter is told in tired periphrasis, its sentences averaging nearly twenty-five words while half run fourteen or fewer, its clichés misplaced to a pattern. The homecoming becomes a catechism of about three hundred questions, with more long words to the thousand than any other episode. Sentence shape is the most variable thing in the book, from five and a half words in the music to eight closing sentences of up to nearly four and a half thousand words. Through every change the facts hold. The lemon soap bought in the fifth episode is still in Bloom’s pocket in the brothel, and every phantasm there is made of something the day has contained.
Movement IV
Stephen’s day is a quarrel with history. At the school he says it outright: “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Earlier, in his head, he has seen the end: “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame.” On the strand he asks the question the book will not answer: “What is that word known to all men?” Later he spins a theory of Shakespeare and fatherhood, “Paternity may be a legal fiction.” Asked “Do you believe your own theory?”, he answers in four words of narration: “No, Stephen said promptly.”
Circe gathers it all. The longest episode is a play for 269 speakers, and its stage directions are more than two-fifths of its words. In the brothel the dead mother rises, and Stephen asks her what he asked the sea: “Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.” She answers with prayer: “Prayer is allpowerful.” He answers, “Non serviam!”, cries “Nothung!” and smashes the chandelier with his ashplant. The stage direction completes the morning’s vision word for word: “Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.” The prophecy is fulfilled across eighteen hours and twenty-three thousand lines.
Afterwards Bloom stands over Stephen, who lies where he fell, and keeps watch. He looks down on the young man’s face: “Face reminds me of his poor mother.” Then against the dark wall appears the son Bloom lost: “a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand.” The child reads from right to left, kissing the page. Bloom calls to him without a sound: “Rudy!” A father who has lost a son stands over a son who has lost a mother, and neither knows what the other is to him. The day’s three persons now converge on one house.
Movement V
The homecoming is told in the coldest voice in the book, a catechism of questions and answers that belongs to no one. It sets the two men face to face in silence: “Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.” It reduces Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about him to their simplest form: “He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not.” It names Bloom without pity: “Assumed by any or known to none. Everyman or Noman.” The hero of the epic bears a name that is no one’s and everyone’s.
Bloom lies down in a bed another man has used, and the questions shorten: “Womb? Weary?” The answer is “He rests. He has travelled.” The answers dissolve into a litany of sailors, “Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer”, and the last question, “Where?”, is given no words at all. The voice that has measured water, stars and household accounts runs out at the threshold of sleep. What it has gathered is one ordinary day. It has not proved that day heroic. It has shown that the day holds everything an epic holds.
The last word goes to the woman in the bed. Molly’s episode is eight sentences and more than twenty-four thousand words, with two full stops and not one comma. Her night comes round to the day on Howth that Bloom remembered at lunch, now from her side: “first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth”. She remembers why she chose him, “because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is”. The book that began with a parody of the Mass ends in assent: “and yes I said yes I will Yes.” Under it Joyce set the places and years of the making: “Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921”.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged partly on Joyce’s English. Length is not a cost; the question is whether the parts are required. The scale is compelled: eighteen hours of one city, bound by refrains so exact that only 0.30 per cent of the words sit inside repeated ten-word runs, and every frequent repeat is deliberate, as with “What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat?” (Lotus Eaters, 5). The first nine episodes yield almost nothing to the subtractive test. What holds the axis at 8.8 is the second half: the Cyclops interpolations, the Bloomusalem pageant in Circe, the slang that ends Oxen and Ithaca’s longest inventories could each lose a third without losing a fact or a joke. Each parody is required; its length is not always.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: one ordinary day of an ordinary man is the whole matter of epic, and his decency, unheroic and mocked, is real and enough. Bloom states it once, flatly, in a pub: “Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women” (Cyclops, 12). Around it stand disclosures that hold: a nation is “the same people living in the same place” (Cyclops, 12), not a blood; the colonised mind is “a servant of two masters” (Telemachus, 1). Held from the top because part of what is disclosed is texture, the mind’s weather at full resolution, and because Stephen’s theses are performed and then retracted: “No, Stephen said promptly” (Scylla and Charybdis, 9).
Score: 9.4 / 10
The height reaches the ceiling. The frequency is held down by design, because the method is deflation. The rises are real: “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame” (Nestor, 2), fulfilled to the word in Circe; the mother’s ghost; the strand, “These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here” (Proteus, 3); Rudy at the wall; “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit” (Ithaca, 17); Molly’s last page. Each is undercut, often within the page. Sirens ends on an Irish patriot’s last words broken by a fart, “Pprrpffrrppffff.” (Sirens, 11). Long stretches of Eumaeus and Ithaca are built not to rise.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, and never named: no Homeric title appears anywhere in the text. Yet the skeleton bears the weight. The son is displaced in the tower, “Usurper.” (Telemachus, 1); there is a descent to the dead at Glasnevin; a one-eyed nationalist hurls a biscuit tin at the departing hero (Cyclops, 12); the brothel is Circe’s sty; the husband comes home to a bed another man has used. The particular stays particular. Bloom is an advertising canvasser with a potato in his pocket, and he is “Everyman or Noman” (Ithaca, 17). Elijah, Moses, the Wandering Jew and Hamlet’s father are stacked on it. Held off the top because many correspondences need a key from outside the text.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The inheritance is plain: Flaubert’s realism, Homer, the encyclopaedic ambition of Dante and Rabelais, and Joyce’s own Portrait, whose Stephen walks back in diminished. The departure is total: an epic of one advertising canvasser’s day; after Scylla and Charybdis a new style for every episode, so the second half has no stable narrator; interior monologue carried to 24,085 words and two full stops; defecation, masturbation and menstruation printed as matter of fact. The stake was paid in full. The Little Review serial was seized and its editors convicted in 1921 over Nausicaa. English printers refused the book, a Paris bookshop published it, customs burned copies, and the United States barred it until 1933.
Score: 9.8 / 10
Put one style in place of eighteen and the book can no longer say that a single day is lived in many registers. Sirens opens with a 62-line overture that ends “Begin!” (Sirens, 11) and shrinks its sentences to a mean of 5.5 words. The press speaks in 63 headlines; simultaneity becomes nineteen crosscut sections in Wandering Rocks; Oxen grows English prose from Latin litany to slang as a child is born. Hallucination becomes a play for 269 speakers, the impersonal cosmos a catechism of about 309 questions, Molly eight sentences. Held below the top by forms laid on rather than grown: the Cyclops interpolations repeat one device, and Eumaeus enacts tedium at a length that partly becomes it.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: a century of re-examination that has not run dry, from Larbaud’s lecture of 1921 and Gilbert’s study of 1930, which published the schema, through Budgen, Ellmann and Gifford’s annotations, to Gabler’s edition of 1984 and the dispute it began. The text earns the record by planting questions it never closes: the man in the macintosh, fifteen mentions and no name, “Where the deuce did he pop out of?” (Hades, 6); the word known to all men, asked in Proteus and again of a dead mother in Circe; Throwaway; the U.p. postcard, thirteen times and never explained. Formal depth matches: the parallax Bloom cannot define is the book’s method, one day seen from eighteen angles.
Score: 9.8 / 10
The book reorganised what a novel could be. Interior monologue became a main narrative instrument rather than an episode. The single day became a total form. Style itself became the variable, and Eliot named a mythical method from it. Intrinsic force alone stands at the same figure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is documented and immediate, not delayed, through Eliot’s essay of 1923, Mrs Dalloway (1925), Faulkner, Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Dos Passos, Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Nabokov, Burgess, Pynchon and Gaddis. It reaches outside literature as well. The Woolsey decision of 1933 changed American obscenity law in its name, and Bloomsday is kept every year.
Score: 9.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated for a century. The book has been in print and in translation since 1922 and outlived bans that could have ended it. But few surfaces are fixed as hard to their moment. It is one Dublin date, 16 June 1904, and it is made of that date: the Gold Cup and Throwaway, the General Slocum fire, Dignam’s insurance policy, Plumtree’s Potted Meat, Parnell’s ghost, tram routes, shop names and the ad copy of a vanished city. Whole pages need annotation to be read. The book has outlived the colonial city it mapped, which clears the gate with room. But a hundred years is not seven hundred, and the topical load still costs something.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Joyce’s own English. The command starts at the word: 29,785 distinct words, 16,240 of them used once; compounds that compress a perception, “The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.” (Telemachus, 1); cadence, “A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.” (Calypso, 4). It extends to the whole: each episode’s sentence length and vocabulary are set where its matter needs them, from a mean of 5.5 words to 24.8. Oxen walks English prose from Old English alliteration, “Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night’s oncoming” (Oxen of the Sun, 14), to Bunyan, Sterne, Dickens and Carlyle. Short of the ceiling only where the controlled failures of Eumaeus and the densest pastiche fail on the reader too.
Score: 9.8 / 10
The most distant elements are Telemachus’ naturalist morning and Circe’s hallucination, or Ithaca’s catechism and Penelope’s flood: the widest range on this desk. One law holds across them. Whatever the style, the day’s facts persist. The cloud over the sun is seen by Stephen (Telemachus, 1) and by Bloom (Calypso, 4) at the same moment. The lemon soap bought in Lotus Eaters is still in Bloom’s pocket in Circe. Every phantasm there is made of what the day has contained: Rudy, the potato, Plumtree, the macintosh. The tension is the arranger. From Aeolus on, an intelligence belonging to no character imposes forms the realist law does not explain. It holds as a second law, not a proved one.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Every order is present, and one day in one city holds them all: consciousness, in three interiors fully rendered; the family, in Bloom, Molly, Milly and the dead Rudy, and the hungry Dedalus daughters, “She is drowning. Agenbite.” (Wandering Rocks, 10); labour, in canvassing, the newspaper’s machines and the undertakers’ trade; the state, in the empire, the viceregal cavalcade and the citizen; history, “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (Nestor, 2); the sacred, in the parodied Mass, Elijah and the funeral; the natural order, in the sea, the stars and the body. They are integrated, not listed. The sacred is the weaker order, present more as parody and residue than as one the book inhabits.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.5 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier V — Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve, The Bottomless Well, Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 9.8, with The Encompassed at 9.7. A departure from the novel paid for in seizure and ban, a century of re-examination that has not run dry, an immediate redirection of fiction, and Joyce’s own English commanded from the word to the episode.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.8, held by the second half’s parodic length. Each parody is required, but the Cyclops interpolations, the Circe pageants, the slang that ends Oxen and the longest Ithaca inventories run past the point they make. Below the rest also, The Sublime at 8.9. That is the method, not a failure of it: the height reaches the ceiling, and the book undercuts it by design.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.8, The Living Form at 9.6, The Inner Law at 9.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.8, Pressure on Tradition at 9.8, The Archetypal Deep at 9.5, The Unconcealment at 9.4 and The Imperishable at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis falls below 8.8, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.7. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a full reading of Ulysses in the Project Gutenberg e-text #4300, which does not name its source edition — three parts, eighteen episodes, 264,348 words. The episode names are the conventional ones; the e-text marks only the parts and the breaks between episodes. Edition question · one passage in Scylla and Charybdis may be a reading first printed in Gabler’s edition of 1984 and absent from the 1922 printing; if so, the e-text is not a pure 1922 text. Nothing on this page quotes that passage or rests on it.