Stuart Gilbert
(1930) heard in this section "an anticipation of an early Church
style which is in advance of its context in the episode" (279).
It would be interesting to know his basis for making that claim.
Weldon Thornton (1968), in sharp contrast, heard an allusion to
the prologue of
Everyman, which would mean that Joyce
was jumping
ahead of the historical context, going
directly from the late 10th century to the late 15th. Robert
Janusko (1983) was persuaded by Thornton's identification. Don
Gifford (1988) agrees that the first paragraph echoes the play's
prologue, but he characterizes the entire section, quite
unspecifically, as "Middle English prose." Declan Kiberd (1992)
appears to believe that the influence of the play continues
through both paragraphs, and Jeri Johnson (1993) makes that
claim explicitly. Sam Slote (2012), who like Thornton does not
attempt to characterize the styles of the chapter, does agree
that the first sentence alludes to
Everyman.
Like other morality plays,
Everyman uses personified
abstractions to represent its protagonist's struggle for
spiritual wellbeing. Summoned to appear before God and make an
account of his life (the play's full title is
The Somonyng
of Everyman), Everyman tries to convince Fellowship,
Kindred, Cousin, and Goods to accompany him, but they all
refuse. Good Deeds feels too weak to join him, but she
introduces him to her sister Knowledge and he goes with her to
see Confession, after which Good Deeds feels strong enough to
make the journey. At the end of the play, Everyman climbs into
his grave with Good Deeds, dies, and ascends to heaven, the
lesson being that your good deeds, justified by God's grace, are
all that you can take with you.
The play apparently was performed often in the decades following
its composition, and a modern stage adaptation with a female
lead was performed in the U.K. and the U.S. from 1901 to 1918.
Two films based on the adaptation were released in 1913 and
1914. Joyce might well have heard of one or another of these
recent enactments. He would not have encountered any excerpts
from the script in Saintsbury's or Peacock's anthologies of
English prose, because it consists entirely of verse lines, but
he does seem to have perused the text of the play. The allusion
that Thornton detected occurs in the Messenger's prologue:
Man, in the beginning,
Look well, and take good heed to the ending,
Be you never so gay.
You think sin in the beginning full sweet,
Which in the end causeth the soul to weep,
When the body lieth in clay.
Here shall you see how fellowship and jollity,
Both strength, pleasure, and beauty,
Will fade from thee as a flower in May.
For ye shall hear how our Heaven-King
Calleth Everyman to a general reckoning.
Joyce's echo of these lines ("Therefore, everyman,
look to
that last end that is thy death") seems to be prompted by
the fact that Bloom and nurse Callan have been talking in the
previous paragraph about an unexpected death. Bloom's black
clothes have made the nurse fear some "sorrow," but she learns
that no one dear to him has died. His cheerful inquiry about
Doctor O'Hare, however, produces the news that this "young" man
has died of cancer. Callan, who is pious, prays for "God the
Allruthful to have his dear soul in his undeathliness," and the
two stand "sorrowing one with another." The hope that God will
save the dead man's soul triggers a new section of narrative
keyed to the lines from
Everyman.
The one-sentence opening paragraph then abandons the play's
idiom and echoes biblical language: "the dust that gripeth on
every
man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his
mother's womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for to go
as he came." Chapter 14 of the Book of Job begins, "
Man
that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of
trouble. / He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he
fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not" (1-2). Earlier, Job
has said, "
Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked
shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath
taken away" (1:21). Was Gilbert perhaps thinking of these
well-known verses being used in medieval homiletic writing when
he argued that the passage was written in an "early Church
style"? There is no way of knowing, but clearly the image of man
born of a woman exerts a much stronger influence on the
following paragraph than does anything in
Everyman.
Bloom is now "
the man" who has come into the hospital,
and Callan is "
the nursingwoman." He asks her not about
Mrs. Purefoy but about "
the woman that lay there in
childbed.
The nursingwoman answered him and said that
that
woman was in throes now full three days." She says that
"she had seen many
births of women but never was none so
hard as was
that woman's birth," and "
The man
hearkened to her words for he felt with wonder
women's woe
in the travail that they have of motherhood." Until some reader
discovers a medieval text that recurs to these two words with
comparable regularity, Joyce's second paragraph should probably
be regarded as a riff on verses from the Book of Job, perhaps in
the style of a real or imagined medieval sermon. Gifford's
"Middle English prose" is frustratingly generic, but his
instincts seem keener than those of Janusko, Kiberd, and
Johnson, for whom the fact that
Everyman is written in
verse never even registers as a problem.
This section echoes Middle English vocabulary much more
sparingly than the previous one echoed Old English. Only one
word needs glossing: "
unneth" recalls the Middle English
uneathe or
unethe = difficult, not easy. This
word derived from an Old English one,
uneaþe, and the
second paragraph contains several such echoes of the past.
Bloom's asking "how it fared with the woman" may possibly be
heard as a reprise of the previous section's echoes of "faring"
in
Ælfric's life of St. Cuthbert.
There are also several instances of alliteration in something
like the Anglo-Saxon manner. The most striking ones come near
the end: it is said that Bloom "
felt with wonder women's woe,"
and when he marvels that the attractive young nurse is still a
"handmaid" (i.e., not married) nine years after he first met her
in the hospital, the judgmental narrative harps on her sterile
menstruations: "Nine twelve bloodflows
chiding her childless."
(Joyce's letter to Frank Budgen mentions these periodic returns
to Anglo-Saxon alliteration.)
It is also worth noting that this section recapitulates the
false-start quality of the previous one. There, two sentences
powerfully reminiscent of Old
English verse relapsed into a Latinate style, before
settling into five paragraphs of Anglo-Saxon prose in which an
alliterative poem plays only a thematic role. Here, the action
begins with half a sentence reminiscent of a late medieval
verse play, before settling into a paragraph that sounds like
the (earlier?) Middle English prose that Joyce's historical model
might lead one to expect. Joyce evidently had some fun
painting outside the chronological and generic outlines of his
design. He also clearly enjoyed letting new narrative settings
express themselves in new styles. Bloom's arrival at the
hospital after wandering about all day calls for The
Wanderer, even if it is not in prose. His sad
talk with nurse Callan about a young doctor's death calls for
Everyman, even if its dating is too late. His entrance
into a common-room filled with wildly dunken talk and laughter
will likewise call for some fantastic
medieval travel stories.