In addition to the overlay of fictive underworlds created by
allusions to the epic poems of Homer,
Virgil, and Dante, Hades
also draws upon the quite realistic, this-worldly graveyard of
Shakespeare's Hamlet. The previous chapter has shown
that Bloom knows this work, well
enough even to quote from it, and in Hades
he thinks five or six times of the play's countless references
to dead bodies. Several of these thoughts have to do with
putting corpses into the ground, and the need to maintain a
sense of humor about the grim business.
Sitting in the carriage outside Dignam's house Bloom ponders
women's work of laying out men's corpses, a job performed "Huggermugger
in corners." This word, which the OED
traces back to the early 16th century, refers to secrecy or
concealment, and in Hamlet it is applied to the
attempt to conceal Polonius' death. After stabbing him, Hamlet
rudely drags his corpse offstage to hide it: "This man shall
set me packing; / I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room"
(3.4.211-12). Then, after Claudius gets him to say where he
stashed the body––"if you find him not within this
month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into
the lobby" (4.3.35-37)––the king too hides it, ordering that
it be buried secretly. He soon has reason to regret the shady
dealing, as he confesses to Gertrude: "we have done but
greenly / In hugger-mugger to inter him"
(4.5.83-84).
Bloom no doubt recalls these lines because the thought of
concealing bodies "in corners" confirms his sense of the human
need to hide the ugly fact of death: "Plant him and have done
with him. Like down a coalshoot." He is probably also tickled
by the comical sound of "huggermugger," so similar to "slipperslappers" in the
next sentence, because the entire chapter shows him responding
flippantly to funereal solemnity. Later, when he is walking
through the cemetery, he thinks of both the gruesomeness and
the comedy of burial, in successive paragraphs that recall the
graveyard scene in Hamlet.
The first of these paragraphs consists of Bloom's grisly
thoughts about decomposition:
I daresay the soil would be quite fat with
corpsemanure, bones, flesh, nails. Charnelhouses. Dreadful.
Turning green and pink decomposing. Rot quick in damp earth. The
lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy kind of
a cheesy. Then begin to get black, treacle oozing out of them.
Then dried up.
It is hard not to hear in this entire meditation, as Thornton
does in the sentence about "lean old ones" being tougher, an
echo of the gravedigger's answer to Hamlet's question, "How long
will a man lie i' th' earth ere he rot?" (5.1.163-64). It
depends, says the gravedigger: "we have many pocky corses, that
will scarce hold the laying in" (166-67). At the opposite
extreme from these pre-rotted corpses are the bodies of tanners,
which may last eight or nine years: "his hide is so tann'd with
his trade that 'a will keep out water a great while, and your
water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body" (170-72).
In the following paragraph Bloom thinks that despite all this
horror the caretaker comes to work with a smile:
He looks cheerful enough over it. Gives him a sense
of power seeing all the others go under first. Wonder how he
looks at life. Cracking his jokes too: warms the cockles of
his heart. The one about the bulletin. Spurgeon went to heaven
4 a.m. this morning. 11 p.m. (closing time). Not arrived yet.
Peter. The dead themselves the men anyhow would like to hear
an odd joke or the women to know what's in fashion. A juicy
pear or ladies' punch, hot, strong and sweet. Keep out the
damp. You must laugh sometimes so better do it that way.
Gravediggers in Hamlet. Shows the
profound knowledge of the human heart. Daren't joke
about the dead for two years at least.
Social mores may prescribe a respectful period of not joking
about the dead, but O'Connell jokes about heaven having closing
time like a pub before the holes are even filled. Bloom is quite
right to hear in this an echo of
Hamlet's gravediggers.
As they dig a hole for Ophelia the clever one jokes about
suicide ("he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not
his own life"), the nobility of gardeners and diggers (clearly
Adam "bore arms": "could he dig without arms?"), and the riddle
of who builds the strongest structures (the gravedigger: "the
houses he makes lasts till doomsday"). He gets the best comic
line of the scene when Hamlet asks about the grave he is
digging. What man is it for? No man. What woman? No woman. Then
for whom? "One that was a woman, sir, but, rest her soul, she's
dead" (135-36).
Hamlet does not yet know that Ophelia has drowned herself and is being
buried without full Christian rites, so the humor is quickly
followed by anguish. This may perhaps show the "profound
knowledge of the human heart" that Victorians supposed
Shakespeare to possess. It certainly does show his remarkable
ability to leaven tragedy with comedy. In Elsinore's graveyard
and at the gates of Macbeth's castle, "suffering takes place,"
as Auden writes in Musée des Beaux Arts, "While
someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along." Life goes on, and to the extent one can make
light of its insupportable griefs, one should. As Bloom says,
"You must laugh sometimes."
