Hades and a Short Walk Through the City of the Dead
This is a grim read for a Friday morning but at least it is a chapter with more elements in a reasonably straight forward manner. Straight forward for Ulysses that is, but still there is no real problem discerning the narrative – I’m almost beginning to enjoy it!
Before I forget, there are lines occasionally which seem to echo previous words, spoken or thought, but for the first time reader it’s sometimes difficult to locate and divine the meaning of the repetition, or if it even occurred at all. So before I wade through the facts and try to put them in proper order – could anyone tell me anything about the line “I do not like that other world she wrote”. It occurs at the end of Hades but I seem to recall it from an earlier chapter. It might only be my imagination but it’s not the only occurrence. The language and structure seem to lend a strange sense of synchronicity to my reading. Odd ideas and occasional words leap from the outside world and into my reading and vice versa reminding me of the struggle I made through Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum where random words align to sinister purpose.
Anyhow, here we begin with a funeral cortège, and into the same carriage hop Stephen Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, Simon Power and Leopold Bloom – markedly coming up the rear. Our two main protagonists finally meet then though seem not to be particularly close – merely acquaintances perhaps. I’ve no idea what happens later except that it involves these two somehow. The struggle here for me is to connect all the people. Who is speaking to whom is getting easier to discern, but about what may be getting harder! For me this is the central difficulty – nothing and no-one is plainly described. We are expected to join the dots without any numbers to aid us apparently. While difficult I suppose, it’s not impossible! Bloom points out a figure (or two) – “Your son and heir”? I don’t follow precisely who is meant by that remark unless I take it literally (Stephen has a son?), but it prompts Stephen into a fairly angry response regarding Mulligan: “I’ll tickle his catastrophe” – a quality phrase I may take as one of my own in future! But Stephen has a son?! I imagined him a young bachelor for some reason. Another of the difficulties of being so far in and forming assumptions that turn out to be either flawed or just wrong!
At the funeral itself, which seems ungodly quick, Bloom meditates further on the nature and qualities of the dead and of death. This leads to some fairly amusing flights of fancy as he imagines the different possibilities of burial available – how would you bury someone in the air! As in the end so is it in the beginning – and Bloom does not allow his musings on death to prevent his mind from wandering on the beginnings of life also. Sex and death make for uncomfortable bedfellows, but I find these musings perfectly natural and acceptable – it’s how I think at funerals. Blasphemous I know – but it must surely be common to us all.
Despite the name Hades and all the talk and morbid thoughts there is a remarkable humour running through the chapter. There is an amusing anecdote about the mistaken identity of a statue on a tomb and earlier Bloom himself attempts to recount a funny story the point of which escapes me but it has something I suspect to do with Jewishness and money and so may be at his own expense in some way.
The death of Bloom’s son Rudy is close by again, but now is revealed also the suicide of Leopold’s father. Simon Power puts his foot in it and is joined by Stephen both remarking that suicide is that most unforgivable of sins. Martin Cunningham tries to cover in some way for their combined lack of tact, he being the only one ‘in the know’. We also learn that Cunningham’s wife is a drunk as Leopold silently thanks him (I think).
We get a lot of names in this chapter and I feel the urge to write them down – just in case they become important: Ritchie Goulding, Ignatius Gallaher, Paddy Leonard, Ben Dollard, probably not – maybe Corny Kelleher, Ned Lambert, Mr. Hynes, John Henry Menton, John O’Connell, Tom Kernan, Blazes Boylan – certainly. Maybe some of them but equally maybe none of them will be revealed later on, but although Hades was a long chapter (seemed long on a Friday morning anyway) it was one of the more entertaining chapters and leaves me keen for more.
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Tags: funeral, Hades, Paddy Dignam, Umberto Eco
