Some phrases present the horse as very much a fleshly animal:
"a fourwalker, a hipshaker, a blackbuttocker, a taildangler, a
headhanger," "a good poor brute," "a big nervous foolish
noodly kind of a horse." But some odd word choices also seem
to remove this recognizable animal entirely from what Stephen
in Scylla and Charybdis calls "the whatness of
allhorse." The first is Bloom's admonition to Stephen, "Our
lives are in peril tonight. Beware of the steamroller."
Some of the street-sweeping machines of this time did carry
large bristled rollers, and perhaps some of them had steam
engines, but there is nothing remotely steam-powered about
this one. Probably Bloom's warning emphasizes the size and
power of the apparition he comes upon in the dark, unable to
quite make it out (steamrollers were invented in the 1860s).
But the fanciful comparison distinctly overstates the case and
injects a mechanical element of steam-power that his senses
could hardly be registering.
Two sentences later Bloom gets a good look at the animal
"quite near so that it seemed new, a different grouping
of bones and even flesh." Again, the characterization
seems excessive. Bloom may be seeing the horse in a new way,
or even seeing clearly for the first time that it is a horse,
but that freshness of perception would hardly make it
new. Indeed, as a "headhanger" it seems old and tired. But
later in the same paragraph, Bloom's thoughts do provide a
context for seeing the animal as a different grouping of bones
and flesh: "But even a dog, he reflected, take that mongrel in
Barney Kiernan's, of the same size, would be a holy horror
to face. But it was no animal's fault in particular if he
was built that way like the camel, ship of the desert,
distilling grapes into potheen in his hump."
So a principle of metamorphosis is at work. Struck by the
great size of the animal looming up in the dark, Bloom
imagines it as being somewhat like a towering camel. But the
phrase "ship of the desert" complicates this picture. It is a
cliché, certainly, in a chapter chockablock full of clichés,
and Bloom's repetition of the tired commonplace might be
dismissed as simply a reflexive mental action. In the context
of fantastic substitutions, however, it threatens to take the
morphing horse out of the animal kingdom altogether. And, sure
enough, three sentences later the narrative voice of the
chapter affirms Bloom's inconvenient
comparison-within-a-comparison: "These timely reflections
anent the brutes of the field occupied his mind somewhat
distracted from Stephen's words while the ship of the
street was manoeuvring and Stephen went on about the
highly interesting old..."
Not only has the horse now been narratively authorized as a
ship, but it is "manoeuvring" through the avenue, like troops
on campaign or warships in formation. Individual sentient
beings are sometimes said to perform such an action ("She had
mastered the delicate maneuver"), but one would hardly expect
a poor horse to do so outside of the dressage ring. Looking
back to a sentence just before the remark about the
steamroller, one can see that this is not the first
inappropriate verb that has been applied to the horse: "By the
chains the horse slowly swerved to turn." Has anyone
ever seen a horse swerve? The word is usually applied to
vehicles, and in this case the vehicle would seem to be large
and unwieldy, like a Boeing 747 initiating a turn—or like an
immense passenger liner trying to avoid an iceberg.
In an unpublished paper presented to the summer 2019 Trieste
Joyce School, Senan Molony argues that echoes of the 1912
sinking of the Titanic pervade Eumaeus, and
that many of those echoes sound in this passage. Titanic
was "steam"-powered, and it plowed through ocean "rollers." It
was brand, spanking "new," celebrating its maiden voyage from
the U.K. to the U.S., and that passage proved to be a "holy
horror." The ship was named for the horrible giants that
assaulted the holy citadel of the Greek gods, and the iceberg
with which it crossed paths caused unfathomable horror by
ripping gaping holes in six of its watertight compartments.
(The vessel was designed to withstand rupture of three.)
Two more details catch Molony's attention: "The horse having
reached the end of his tether, so to speak, halted and,
rearing high a proud feathering tail, added his quota by
letting fall on the floor, which the brush would soon brush up
and polish, three smoking globes of turds. Slowly three times,
one after another, from a full crupper, he mired." If the
horse somehow predicts the Titanic, then its turds are
the ship's lifeboats, dropping away from the doomed vessel.
The second, closely related, detail is the location of the
ship's sinking: "Beresford Place," at the rear of the
Custom House. In addition to the man for whom this broad
avenue was actually named—John Beresford, a Wide Streets
Commissioner—Molony detects allusions to several individuals
relevant to the actions being described: "In 1887 an Admiral
Charles Beresford chaired a House of Commons Select
Committee on Saving Life at Sea. His committee recommended
'that all sea-going passenger ships should be compelled by law
to carry such boats, and other life-saving apparatus, as would
in the aggregate best provide for the safety of all on board
in moderate weather.' A quarter of a century later, in 1912,
the same Admiral Lord Beresford, now an MP, is back, and being
widely quoted about lifeboat provision on board the Titanic."
Another Beresford was involved in the same battle of
regulatory oversight: in 1872, "a Francis Beresford MP
tabled an amendment to legislation proposing that
'certificates should not be granted to passenger ships unless
they are provided with lifeboats and deck rafts sufficient to
save all on board in case of disaster or shipwreck.'"
Neither of these men is explicitly named in Ulysses,
so perhaps their connection with the scandalously inadequate
number of lifeboats aboard the Titanic can be
dismissed as coincidence. But yet another Beresford does make
an appearance in Cyclops: "Sir John Beresford,
of earlier date, a Royal Navy disciplinarian who is
denounced by the Citizen for giving miscreant sailors the
lash. Remarkably, his middle name is ‘Poo.’ Sir John Poo
Beresford. And here’s a horse doing a poo in Beresford Place…"
Why, one may ask, would Joyce have attached an individual's
name to the savage discipline of the British navy if he had
not been planning to make something of that name in a later
chapter?
If Molony's reading of all these strange details is not too
ingenious (and no one who studies the works of James Joyce
should be too quick to level that charge!), then one
wonders not only at the deliberate anachronism of Joyce's
symbolism, but also at how he compares the lowering of the Titanic's
lifeboats to the defecations of a horse. The first puzzle may
perhaps be resolved by invoking an ambitious device of
literary realism that Joyce borrowed
from Dante. The second perhaps lends itself to cruder
analysis. Noting that the stunning wreck of the great vessel
provoked heated public debate among Joseph Conrad, Arthur
Conan Doyle, and George Bernard Shaw, Molony sees subversive
scatalogical humor at play. "In making poo of the great iconic
event of April 1912," he speculates, Joyce comments on these
"high-profile literary spats on the cause and meaning of
the Titanic disaster, and the response it should
provoke." They "can only have fascinated the author of Ulysses as
he watched established luminaries in an unedifying slugfest. .
. . All this, Joyce proclaims, will pass—and in the horse’s
case, will pass literally. It is withering, steaming
criticism."
