Scattered through the final paragraphs of Oxen of the Sun are thoughts about the "Closingtime" of Burke's pub, starting with a reference to the legal exception for "Bonafides" (people who have been traveling) and culminating in the bartender's announcement that it's "Time all." These comments periodically break into unrelated bits of conversation, first on the street and then in the pub, creating an effect much like one in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. 

As the medicals head for the pub, "hollering" down Holles Street, one says to a companion, "Bonafides. Where you slep las nigh?" Anticipating a short window for drinking, he jokes about taking advantage of a loophole in the laws that governed the operating hours of public houses. According to U.K. law, pubs were required to close at 11 PM on weekdays and stay closed all day on Sundays. But in Ireland a "bona-fide traveller" could be served later on weekdays, and even on Sundays. The thinking was that people who needed to be on the road all day might require nourishment (and, naturally, drink to accompany it) at odd hours. Such travelers were required to "prove" that they had come at least three miles from wherever they had slept the night before, and their journey "must not be for the purpose of obtaining drink."

In practice this exception, finally repealed in 1960, created gaping grey areas in the law. Did someone who bicycled three miles from his own home to a pub count as a bona fide or a mala fide traveler? And what balance would a pub owner strike between satisfying the demands of the law (by demanding proof of genuine travel) and increasing his revenue? "The Bona-Fide Traveller," a humorous piece published in The Lepracaun in November 1905, defined its subject biologically as "an animal which subsists chiefly on damp, which it travels long distances to obtain. It is frequently found in the suburbs on Sundays before two and after seven o'clock, when it goes in pursuit of its favourite moisture." The article also quotes an authority's legal definition: someone "who had a bona-fide thirst, wanted a bona-fide drink, and had the the bona-fide money to pay for it." In Joyce's story "Grace," Mr. Power and Mr. Cunningham, who work in Dublin Castle, speak about such a man, named Harford:

     ––Hm, said Mr Cunningham.
     When Mr Cunningham made that remark people were silent. It was known that the speaker had secret sources of information. In this case the monosyllable had a moral intention. Mr Harford sometimes formed one of a little detachment which left the city shortly after noon on Sunday with the purpose of arriving as soon as possible at some public-house on the outskirts of the city where its members duly qualified themselves as bona-fide travellers.

Such ambiguities, arguably legal but never "moral," are responsible for the question asked in Oxen, "Where you slep las nigh?" (Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner identify "slep" as "London dialect.")

According to Joyce's two schemas, Oxen takes place between 10 and 11 PM. A good part of that hour has already been spent in the common room of the maternity hospital, so time is short for drinking at the pub. As the men gather their number in the street and resolve to push on to "Burke's! Burke's!," they find that a straggler is holding them back: "No, no, Mulligan! Abaft there! Shove ahead. Keep a watch on the clock. Chuckingout time. Mullee! What's on you?" "Abaft" is a nautical term meaning "toward the stern" of a ship, so someone is hollering to someone else in the rear of the group, urging him to "Shove ahead." Mulligan appears to be happily lost in his usual spray of literary quotations and references, starting with Xenophon, moving on to a mocking parody of the Sermon on the Mount or a bawdy French song, or possibly both, and then to William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory. Into this timeless poetic cloud comes a sharp reminder that "Chuckingout time" is looming.

In the following paragraphs, as drinks are ordered in the pub, one man anxiously asks another for the time, explaining that his uncle has his watch, and the other happily obliges: "Avuncular's got my timepiece. Ten to. Obligated awful. Don't mention it." With ten minutes to drink and talk as volubly as possible, several paragraphs go by until the bartender's voice is heard: "Closingtime, gents. Eh?" At the end of that paragraph comes another call: "Time." Still another paragraph of talk follows, and then a definitive command: "Time all. There's eleven of them. Get ye gone. Forward, woozy wobblers!" Eleven bells have sounded, and the eleven drinkers are out on the street again.

At the end of part 2 of The Waste Land, Eliot creates a very similar scene. Two women talk in a pub as another voice repeatedly cuts across their conversation: "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME." Clearly one of these two great writers has been pilfering from the other. My money is on Eliot, the fellow who wrote that bad poets borrow but good poets steal.

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John Hunt 2024