Early in Hades, seeing "caps and hats lifted by
passers" outside the funeral carriages in gestures of
"Respect," Simon Dedalus lauds the old ways: "That's a fine
old custom, he said. I am glad to see it has not died out."
This Irish custom of paying respects to the dead, even when
they are total strangers, is bound up with another old and
endangered tradition. Later in the death chapter Bloom
approvingly remarks that in Milan horse-drawn carriages are
being replaced by electric trams. Cunningham notes that this
would avoid the horror of funeral carriages overturning on
city pavements, but Dedalus and Power recoil from the
suggestion, deeming it "A poor lookout." Like other
conventions of Victorian and Edwardian mourning––wrapping
clothes, wreaths, and houses in crape, hiring mutes to
perform at funerals, dressing in black for many
months after a death––funeral processions were a way of making
grieving communal. They invited public acknowledgement of
private loss.
The tradition of the funeral cortège is very ancient, dating
back at least to the time of the Roman empire. In the late
19th century and the early years of the 20th, hearses bearing
the deceased and carriages carrying mourners were commonly
drawn by horses, but new mechanized modes of transport were
quickly making this practice obsolete. Automobiles were first
used in an American funeral procession in 1909. Several years
later Lyle Abbot, the automobile editor of the Arizona
Republican, coined the term "motorcade," and where the
tradition survives today it usually involves these strings of
cars. But automobiles were rare in 1904 (only one appears in
all the pages of Ulysses), while many North American
and European cities had streetcar systems. Mexico City and
Milan introduced dedicated funeral trams in the
1880s—horse-drawn at first, it seems, but soon electric—and by
the end of the century many large cities had followed suit.
Although Dubliners were justifiably proud of their new electric tram system,
their city was behind the times on this count.
As the funeral procession picks its way through a herd of
lowing cattle Bloom says, "I can't make out why the corporation doesn't run
a tramline from the parkgate to the quays.... All those
animals could be taken in trucks down to the boats." Martin
Cunningham agrees: "Instead of blocking up the
thoroughfare.... Quite right. They ought to." But when Bloom
volunteers a similar idea––"to have municipal funeral trams
like they have in Milan, you know. Run the line out to the
cemetery gates and have special trams, hearse and carriage
and all"––his proposal is derided for giving strangers
no opportunity to pay respects to the dead. Cunningham,
however, recalls a time when a hearse overturned at Dunphy's Corner, spilling
a corpse onto the roadway. Such incidents continue to happen.
In 2008 a hearse bearing the remains of Caroline Thompson
through the streets of Ipswich, England performed an evasive
maneuver and hit a bollard. Two of the four horses bolted, the
carriage slammed into automobiles and overturned, the horses
ran away in terror, and the coffin slid onto the street.
Glossing "That's a fine old custom," Slote,
Mamigonian, and Turner remark: "The custom is that a funeral
procession will take a route through the centre of the city,
thereby giving many a chance to salute the hearse as it
passes, by lifting their caps or hats." In a personal
communication, Senan Molony objects to this reading, observing
that Simon must be referring to doffed hats rather than to
funeral processions. He is certainly correct about the
referent: what other grammatical sense could "That" have,
coming from someone inside one of the carriages? Nevertheless,
there is good reason to associate the funeral procession with
the doffed hats as Slote's annotation does. The two customs
were intimately linked, and modern efficiency and anonymity
were threatening them both. (Both have since "died out,"
as Simon fears may happen.)
The drawing and the photograph at the end of this note show
that when great public figures like Charles Stewart Parnell
and Michael Collins died, their remains were carried to the
Glasnevin cemetery through the heart of the Hibernian
metropolis––both scenes are set on lower O'Connell
Street––so that crowds of onlookers could pay their
respects. There is good reason to suppose that lesser
personages received similar honorific treatment and that the
route of Paddy Dignam's procession has not been determined
solely by geography. Slote and his collaborators quote from Dublin
Explorations and Reflections, a book published
anonymously in Dublin in 1917: "All day, and particularly on
Saturdays and Sundays, the long processions wind up Sackville
Street on their way to Glasnevin. Whether it is more people
die in Dublin than in other cities, or simply that they die
more expensively and with more pomp, I have no idea. But I
have never before in my life been in a town where hearses and
coffins and mourning coaches were so much in evidence."
