Walking with Bloom to the cabman's shelter, Stephen is
"taciturn and, not to put too fine a point on it, not yet
perfectly sober." But he does occasionally utter a few words,
starting with a mental association reported in A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man: "Stephen thought to think
of Ibsen, associated with Baird's the stonecutter's in his
mind somehow in Talbot place." Bloom hears Stephen offer this
association as the two men are walking on Store
Street, quite close to where the business stood. The
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was a literary hero for the
young Joyce, ranked higher than Shakespeare in his estimation.
Early in part 5 of A Portrait, Stephen begins one of
his daily walks to the university from his home on the
northeastern edge of the city:
His morning walk had begun, and he foreknew that as
he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the
cloistral silverveined prose of Newman, that as he walked
along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of
the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido
Cavalcanti and smile, that as he went by Baird's stonecutting
works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through
him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty....
D. G. Baird and J. Paul Todd ran a business of "engineers and
founders" at 20-25 Talbot Place, just off of Store Street. The
fact that Stephen thinks inexactly of Baird's as a
"stonecutter's" can perhaps be explained by the fact that he
is indulging in imaginative reveries about literature,
dissolving something as crude as the "sloblands of Fairview"
into the "silverveined prose of Newman." Dublin's gritty
scenes are less real than his prized books, so the nature of
the business may not concern him much.
But there may be a little more to it. His anticipation that "the
spirit of Ibsen will blow through him like a keen wind"
suggests that he is thinking of one particular Ibsen play, When
We Dead Awaken (1899). In a long and admiring review
essay that the young Joyce wrote about this play, "Ibsen's New
Drama" (1900), he says of the young wife Maja that "Her
airy freshness is as a breath of keen air. The sense of
free, almost flamboyant, life, which is her chief note,
counterbalances the austerity of Irene and the dullness of
Rubek" (Critical Writings, 65). Arnold Rubek, the
husband in this unhappy December-May marriage, is a sculptor,
so Stephen may be poetically associating the "stonecutter's"
business with Rubek's art.
In Ulysses, though, the link that Stephen "somehow"
draws between Ibsen and Baird's makes no sense at all to
Bloom. And when he speaks, later in Eumaeus, of "the
eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature"—an
idea which the young Joyce developed in another 1900 essay
inspired by Ibsen—Bloom feels "a bit out of his sublunary
depth."
