Telephones were not rare in 1904 Dublin. The first ones had
arrived in 1880, and the following quarter century saw a
steady build-out of lines, including trunk lines linking the
city to Drogheda, Dundalk, Belfast, Derry, Mullingar,
Limerick, and Cork. But the device was still far from being an
omnipresent personal convenience. The three phones that Joyce
mentions are all in business offices, and the conversations
that he shows taking place on them consist mainly of
communicating utilitarian data: telephone numbers, prices to
be paid, times of the day, and so forth. Also heard often is
the universal 20th century phone greeting, "Hello." In a
moment of gentle comedy in Aeolus, Bloom's baffled
"Hello?" suggests that many people did not feel entirely
comfortable with this new appliance.
Newspapers would surely have been among the first businesses
to acquire Alexander Graham Bell's revolutionary invention. Aeolus
twice shows a phone ringing in the offices of the Freeman's
Journal and Evening Telegraph. In Wandering
Rocks several other businesses that one might expect to
have telephones––a fruit and flower shop dispatching baskets
all around Dublin, a business promoter arranging concerts and
fights, a hotel doing brisk business on the quays––are shown
to have this amenity. Blazes Boylan's request of the
shopgirl in Thornton's, "May I say a word
to your telephone, missy?," evidently is answered in the
affirmative, because two sections later, as his secretary Miss
Dunne sits in an office a few blocks away, a
telephone rings "rudely by her ear."
— Hello. Yes,
sir. No, sir. Yes, sir. I'll ring them up after five. Only
those two, sir, for Belfast and Liverpool. All right, sir.
Then I can go after six if you're not back. A quarter after.
Yes, sir. Twentyseven and six. I'll tell him. Yes: one, seven,
six.
She scribbled three figures on an
envelope.
— Mr Boylan! Hello! That
gentleman from Sport was in looking for you. Mr
Lenehan, yes. He said he'll be in the Ormond at four. No, sir.
Yes, sir. I'll ring them up after five.
The overheard conversation is a welter of numbers: I'll make
that call "after five," we have only "two" items of business
today, I'll leave work "after six," or "A quarter after" if you
insist, payment in the amount of "Twentyseven" shillings and
"six" pence, i.e. "one" pound "seven" shillings and "six" pence,
and by the way you have an appointment "at four," no I won't
forget to call "after five." An impression of tedious
impersonality prevails, but one may note also the convenience
provided by the telephone. A man who, like Boylan, has access to
one can impose some order on the peripatetic randomness of
moving about Dublin hoping to run into the right people. A
friend wishing to meet him later in the day at a particular
place can simply ring his office and leave a message.
To readers for whom cell phones have conquered space, time, and
human absence, Miss Dunne's brisk chatter sparkles with
recognizably modern efficiency. But telephones have always
brought with them also elements of confusion and frustration,
which in 1904 would have included holding a cone to one's ear,
bending over to shout into another cone, dealing with the
intermediary services of a switchboard operator, and struggling
to ignore the traces of other conversations leaking into the
line. For those who did not regularly use telephones––the vast
majority of the population––the experience must have been
daunting at times. The first time that "The telephone whirred"
in
Aeolus, some rapid-fire business is transacted by an
unknown person: "Twenty eight... No, twenty... Double four...
Yes." On the second occasion, Bloom takes the call and is heard
struggling to converse with some unknown person: "
— Hello?
Evening Telegraph here... Hello?... Who's
there?... Yes... Yes... Yes." His struggles with phone
etiquette, or the deficiencies of the service, or both, may
elicit sympathy as much as laughter.
As Vincent Van Wyk points out in a personal communication, the
awkwardness of Bloom's exchange is serendipitously reflected in
a scene from
Topsy Turvy, Mike Leigh's delightful comedy
about Gilbert and Sullivan and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
The film is set in 1885, when telephones were still quite new,
but it shows people using the phone for business only, as in
Joyce's novel, and transmitting messages in alphanumeric code to
thwart possible eavesdropping by operators. Such practices are
now ancient history, but the clip comically presents other
annoying aspects of the medium that may never entirely go away:
coming up with a phone number, hurling "Hello" into the void,
awkwardly identifying oneself, figuring out ways to begin and
end a conversation with a person whose face one cannot see. Near
the end of the clip, incidentally, readers of
Ulysses
will appreciate the reference to "
Italian hokypoky."
Joyce provides a mocking echo of Bloom's brief phone
conversation in Circe, when editor Myles Crawford
crams "a telephone receiver nozzle to his ear" and
barks, "Hello, seventyseven eightfour. Hello. Freeman’s
Urinal and Weekly Arsewipe here." The
novel also makes one mocking comment on the utility of the
device itself. In Hades the practical-minded Bloom
imagines an utterly impractical way of rescuing buried people
who are not
really dead: "They ought to have some law to pierce the
heart and make sure or an electric clock or a telephone in
the coffin and some kind of a canvas airhole. Flag of
distress." The black comedy of this scene can scarcely be
imagined. "Hello? Hello? Winifred? Um, yes, it's your dearly
departed mum here. Yes, um, about the burial this morning....
You see, it turns out that I'm not quite dead."
