Calling Sackville Street the heart of the metropolis is a metaphor, but coming where
it does in the text—just before clanking tramcars, creaking
mailcars, thudding barrels, thumping printingpresses—the
phrase insinuates a near equivalence between human bodies of
flesh and blood and civic bodies of wood, steel, and
electricity.
If human bodies can be understood as assemblages of
interrelated physical systems, then the interrelated physical
systems comprising the humming life of a city may perhaps be
understood as bodies as well. That analogy is implied by
Joyce's use of the word heart as the lead-in to a section
describing tramcars departing from the central dispatch station at
Nelson's pillar for far-flung termini around the
circumference of Dublin, and returning again to the center. In
Hades Bloom thinks of the heart as a pump moving
blood around the body; in death, "The circulation
stops." And when, at the end of Aeolus,
an electrical malfunction leaves inbound and outbound cars on
eight different tracks "all still, becalmed in short circuit,"
the circulation of the city stops.
After the initial look at the tramways, the episode glances
at other complex systems of transportation and communication:
the cars, trains, and boats required to move mail around
Ireland and England, and the casks required to move ale. Then
the reader's attention is directed to still another kind of
circulation: a major newspaper, whose offices are located
close to the tram dispatch center and the General Post Office.
We learn "HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT,"
and later the hissing paper feeds give the impression of an
animal trying to speak: "Sllt. The nethermost deck of the
first machine jogged forward its flyboard with sllt the first
batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the
way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to
speak. That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut.
Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt."
Joyce's schemas identify the
heart as the "organ" of the previous episode. Hades
makes frequent references to the heart as the proverbial seat
of the emotions, but it also returns repeatedly to the
scientific knowledge that the heart maintains life by pumping
oxygenated blood through the body. Martin Cunningham says that
Paddy Dignam died of a "Breakdown.... Heart." To Bloom, the
heart is essentially no different from a mechanical
contraption: "A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons
of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there
you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts,
livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else." Bloom's
thoughts in Aeolus about the owner of the newspaper
suggest an analogy: "But will he save the circulation?
Thumping. Thumping."
The thumping of the presses returns Bloom to his meditations
on organic dissolution. Mechanical and biological processes
combine in a vision of senseless pounding activity: "Thumping.
Thump. This morning the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam.
Machines. Smash a man to atoms if they got him caught. Rule
the world today. His machineries are pegging away too. Like
these, got out of hand: fermenting. Working away, tearing
away. And that old grey rat tearing to get in."
