Nowhere in her book does Reynolds note the most compelling
reason to suppose that Joyce is alluding to the lines from Purgatorio,
which is contextual: both passages involve the younger man's
response to a violent environmental disturbance. Stephen's
loud and licentious verbal pyrotechnics are followed by a huge
thunderclap, which makes him turn instantly pale, "and his
pitch that was before so haught uplift was now of a sudden
quite plucked down and his heart shook within the cage of his
breast as he tasted the rumour of that storm." Long after
leaving the Catholic church Joyce continued to hear in thunder
the voice of an angry God, and he gives Stephen the same fear
that "the god self was angered for his hellprate and paganry."
He tries to laugh it off, joking that "old Nobodaddy was in
his cups," but others can see that "this was only to dye his
desperation as cowed he crouched in Horne's hall." Bloom
attempts to allay his terror by telling Stephen that "it was
no other thing but a hubbub noise that he heard, the discharge
of fluid from the thunderhead, look you, having taken place,
and all of the order of a natural phenomenon."
Similarly, in Purgatorio 20 an earthquake terrifies
Dante: "I felt the mountain tremble / as though it might
collapse, and a chill, / like the chill of death, subdued
me.... Then there rose up a great cry all around us" (127-33).
Neither he nor Virgil knows what to make of it, but cantos 8
and 9 have shown that fear is an inappropriate response on
this mountain that restores human innocence. After Virgil
tells Dante not to be afraid the two men hear "Gloria in
excelsis Deo" in the souls' cries and stand "stock still
and in suspense, / like the shepherds who first heard that
song" (136-40). In Dante's exacting symbolic craft this
allusion suggests that Christ is somehow coming to earth to
liberate mankind from sin. The prediction is fulfilled a few
lines later when a shade joins Dante and Virgil on their path
around the mountain, much as "Christ, / just risen from the
cave that was His sepulcher, / revealed himself to two He
walked with on the road" to Emmaus (21.7-9). It is Statius,
just released from his long purgatorial confinement, and he
tells them that the mountain "trembles when a soul feels it is
pure, / ready to rise, to set out on its ascent, / and next
there follows that great cry" (58-60). Virgil was right, then,
to say that there was nothing to fear, though he could not
have said why.
Readers who find the allusion to Dante credible may
nevertheless wonder why Joyce bothered to put it in his text.
Virgil is a non-Christian guide who shows Dante the Christian
realities of Hell and Purgatory. Bloom is a non-Christian
guide who urges Stephen not to view the storm through a
religious lens. Does Joyce mean for the contrast to show one
freethinker leading another astray? This seems unlikely,
though the narrative of Oxen does urge such a view,
adopting the voice of John Bunyan: "But was young Boasthard's
fear vanquished by Calmer's words? No, for he had in his bosom
a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done
away.... But could he not have endeavoured to have found again
as in his youth the bottle Holiness that then he lived withal?
Indeed not for Grace was not there to find that bottle. Heard
he then in that clap the voice of the god Bringforth or, what
Calmer said, a hubbub of Phenomenon?" This narrative voice,
and other theocratic ones in Oxen, can hardly
represent Joyce's own views, for he too was, in Stephen's
words, "a horrible example of free thought."
Oppositely, one could argue that Joyce meant for the contrast
between the two guides to show the superiority of secular
thinking: non-Christian Bloom interprets thunder through sound
scientific principles rather than the fanciful and savagely
judgmental medieval theology that non-Christian Virgil has to
defend. Such an approach would better suit the irreverent
logic of Ulysses, but it seems tendentious. The end of
Eumaeus and the beginning of Ithaca feature
Stephen and Bloom as independent intellectual agents exploring
areas of agreement and disagreement, discussing "sirens,
enemies of man's reason," valuing free thought: "Both
indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity
of heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many
orthodox religious, national, social and ethical doctrines."
But if Dante's story enters the text of Oxen only as
an example of how not to interpret thunder, then the allusion
is not very tightly focused. Joyce usually brings passages
into intertextual dialogue by means of highly specific
analogues, but Virgil has nothing to say about the shaking of
the mountain.
These opposed readings both assume that the central point of
the comparison is to somehow decide the conflict between
religious and secular reasoning. That conflict is certainly
the focus of the narrative in Oxen, but it need not be
the primary reason for echoing Purgatorio 20. Bloom's
effort to correct Stephen's mistaken understanding is a very
Virgilian undertaking, but so is his generous sympathy, and
here the two passages are more exactly analogous. Bloom tries
to comfort Stephen's fear without understanding the life
experience that has produced it: a man of little faith, he has
never been terrorized by Irish Catholic threats of eternal
damnation. Similarly, Virgil tries to comfort Dante's fear
without understanding what has caused the earthquake or the
great revivalist shout. In Hell Virgil can confidently say
things like "Have no fear while I'm your guide" because he
knows the place well and is divinely commissioned to command
its inhabitants—though even there his confidence is sometimes
misplaced. In Purgatory he can only offer vague reassurances
about things that he understands poorly. But his parental
impulse to protect, console, and guide Dante remains as
important as ever.
Bloom feels exactly these impulses toward Stephen, and his
effort to console him in a moment of existential crisis
distinguishes him from all the drunken young men at the table.
While they can only applaud Stephen's clever blasphemies or
mockingly reprove them, Bloom responds to his fear
sympathetically and attempts to allay it. A rational
secularist moving through a world shaped by Christian belief,
he takes religion seriously enough to appreciate its
consolations and costs for human beings, just as the
rationalist Virgil does.
Oxen of the Sun only hints at resemblances between
Bloom and Virgil, just as it only hints at the possibility of
friendship between Bloom and Stephen (another such hint comes
several pages earlier when Bloom's witty disparagement of the
Catholic church makes Stephen "a marvellous glad man"). The
two men merely share a stage in this chapter and the next,
interacting very little, but in Eumaeus and Ithaca
they meet, spend time together, and converse. In those
chapters the analogy with Virgil and Dante is strengthened by
a succession of increasingly explicit allusions to things that
happen in Inferno and Purgatorio: the leftward
turns though Hell, its collapsed bridge, the growing mental integration of the two
protagonists, the interview with Ulysses, the vision of the stars after
emerging from Hell, the image of
Virgil as a lantern-bearer and the echo of Psalm 113,
and finally the terrible pathos of parting in the garden.
These later allusions establish beyond any doubt that Joyce
intended for his protagonists to reenact aspects of Dante's
story.
