Pilgrim's Progress uses simple personified
abstractions to tell the story of an everyman named Christian
who, with "a book in his hand" (the Bible) and "a great burden
upon his back" (sin), attempts to journey from his home in
"the City of Destruction" (this world) to "the Celestial City"
(the other one). Encouraged by a man called Evangelist to get
there via "the wicket-gate" ("narrow is the gate," Matthew
7.13-14), Christian's resolution is tested by two characters
called Obstinate and Pliable. He convinces Pliable to go with
him in search of Paradise, but the two sink into the Slough of
Despond and Pliable, freeing himself, deserts Christian there.
Helped by Help, Christian journeys on, only to find his course
diverted again by Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who tells him that his
problems can be solved by Mr. Legality and his son Civility.
Evangelist reveals these three secularists to be frauds and
shows him the way to the wicket gate, where Goodwill (Jesus)
takes charge of his life and sets him on the "straight and
narrow" King's Highway.
Christian's finding his way to the path of righteousness is
only the beginning of a long story, but this brief summary of
early events will suffice to give a sense of Bunyan's
technique, and the beginning of the story is perhaps
particularly relevant to Joyce's portrayal of men deceived by
the false goods of worldy life. After Young Boasthard (the
blasphemous Stephen) blanches at the sound of a thunderclap
(the voice of God), Mr. Cautious Calmer (Bloom) solicitously
tries to assure him that it was nothing but "a natural
phenomenon." But Boasthard cannot be so easily comforted,
because he has "a spike named Bitterness" (hatred of the
Catholic church) in his heart. Could he not have found "the
bottle Holiness" (pious belief) again, as in his youth? No,
because Grace (divine intervention) is not there to show him
the way.
This presentation of the contest between worldly and divine
goods is entertaining, but the parody becomes truly delightful
when the narrative introduces "a certain whore of an
eyepleasing exterior whose name, she said, is Bird-in-the-Hand."
She has called out to Boasthard, "Ho, you pretty man, turn
aside hither and I will show you a brave place, and she lay
at him so flatteringly that she had him in her grot
which is named Two-in-the-Bush or, by some learned,
Carnal Concupiscence." Joyce found the proverb in The
Pilgrim's Progress: "Passion will have all now this
year, that is to say, in this world; so are the men of this
world, they must have all their good things now, they cannot
stay till next year, that is until the next world, for their
portion of good. That proverb, 'A bird in the hand is worth
two in the bush', is of more authority with them than
are all the Divine testimonies of the good of the world to
come." The come-hither language was prompted by several
sentences in Bunyan's work. A character called Wanton flatters
Faithful, one of Christian's companions, and "lay at [him]
hard to turn aside with her, promising...all manner of
content" (75). Demas, a character seen standing next to
a silver mine, says to Christian and a companion, "Ho, turn
aside hither and I will show you a thing" (75). Faithful
calls someone "a very pretty man."
All the men in the commons room know Bird-in-the-Hand and
have found her arguments so persuasive that they have come to
think of "Believe-on-Me" as "nought else but notion."
The expression for Christian faith is used more than once in Pilgrim's
Progress: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and
thou shalt be saved"; "he told me he was the mighty God, and
did what he did, and died the death also, not for himself, but
for me; to whom his doings, and the worthiness of them, should
be imputed, if I believed on him." So does the
expression for disbelief: "I knew not that you had aught
else but notion. Besides, to tell you all the truth, I
have heard of you, that you are a man whose religion lies in
talk." Joyce's revelers dismiss not only the existence of God
but also notions of sexual propriety. They do not fear "that
foul plague Allpox" because "Preservative had given them a
stout shield of oxengut." The name of this condom is
Killchild, and it promises them that they will take no harm
from Offspring. Here too Joyce may have taken inspiration from
Bunyan: "taking the shield of faith, wherewith
ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked"
(75).
With the mention of contraception, the Bunyan section comes
to the jocoserious proposition that informs every mention of
divinity in Oxen of the Sun: God demands procreation.
He wants human beings to value fertility and to direct every
sexual impulse toward the sanctioned production of more human
beings. Mr. Cautious Calmer and all the other men were
deceived about the thunderclap, "for that was the voice of the
god that was in a very grievous rage that he
would presently lift his arm and spill their souls
for their abuses and their spillings done by them
contrariwise to his word which forth to bring brenningly
biddeth." All of them are spilling their seed upon the
ground, like Onan in Genesis, rather than bringing forth
children. Several of the words and phrases here are taken
directly from The Pilgrim's Progress: "at which he
fell into a grievous rage, and told them that, seeing
they had disobeyed his counsel, it should be worse with them
than if they had never been born"; "prepare thyself to die;
for I swear by my infernal den, that thou shalt go no further;
here will I spill thy soul"; "the men being patient,
and not rendering railing for railing, but contrariwise,
blessing, and good words for bad, and kindness for injuries
done."
(The sentence's close, however––"to bring brenningly
biddeth"–– sounds like a return to the Anglo-Saxon
alliterations of an earlier section, and it uses a
Middle English variant of "burn," bren, that was
obsolete by Bunyan's time. Joyce here closes his section of
17th century prose with a reprise of the Anglo-Saxon theme,
just as does at the end of the Malory section.)
Throughout the chapter it remains difficult to know how to
respond to purportedly divine pronouncements like those
expressed in this final sentence. They are, in part, a mocking
representation of the oppressive sexual teachings of
the Catholic church, as surely as Joyce's prose is an
uproariously funny send-up of Bunyan's Christian allegory. But
the mockery and the uproarious fun bump up against the
undeniable solemnity and worth of childbirth, just as the
young medical students' laughter bumps up against the
propriety of respecting Mrs. Purefoy's suffering rather than
adding to it. In a March 1920 letter to Frank Budgen Joyce
wrote that he was "Working hard at Oxen of the Sun,
the idea being the crime committed against fecundity by
sterilizing the act of coition." Whatever the tone implicit in
the various narrative voices that advance this idea, and
whatever the nuanced critical responses that readers may have
to them, it is clear that the chapter never deviates from this
plan.
Most of my examples of Joyce borrowing Bunyan's words can be
found in Robert Janusko's The Sources and Structures of
James Joyce's Oxen. Janusko notices yet one more such
instance in the description of the thunderclap that
immediately precedes the Bunyan section. That paragraph begins
onomatopoeically, "A black crack of noise in the street
here, alack, bawled back," showing the influence of a
passage in The Pilgrim's Progress in which a man says
that he has dreamed of the Last Judgment: "This night, as I
was in my sleep, I dreamed, and behold the heavens grew exceeding
black; also it thundered and lightened in most fearful
wise, that it put me into an agony. So I looked up in my dream
and saw the clouds rack at an unusual rate, upon which
I heard a great sound of a trumpet and saw also a man sit upon
a cloud, attended with the thousands of heaven.... I also
sought to hide myself, but I could not, for the man that sat
upon the cloud still kept his eye upon me; my sins also came
into my mind, and my conscience did accuse me on every side"
(75). Not only Joyce's "ack" sounds, but also his conceit of
an angry God pronouncing judgment on human transgressions
through the terrible voice of the thunder, came ready-made
from this source.
Janusko wisely observes that the sense of offended
righteousness that Joyce takes from Bunyan "was the voice of
God thundering at the vices and snares of the Commonwealth and
Restoration" (14). He notes that Joyce also took the Q&A
format of this section from Bunyan, and he suggests that
"Bunyan's hero is, like Stephen, a man on a quest. Christian
has renounced home and family to search for the Celestial
City, Stephen to become an artist. Along the way, both are
subject to trials and temptations and both find consolations
and safeguards" (75).
