Whoever is writing Eumaeus does not understand the elementary principle that prose narration, unlike oral story-telling, allows for and demands revision. The episode begins with a flood of chatty paragraphs that closely follow the flow of Bloom's thinking and speech, a conversational approach that becomes problematic when the narrator realizes that he has communicated something unclearly or inaccurately. Rather than go back and fix the flawed sentences in camera (i.e., off-camera!), he corrects himself in real time, just as a person speaking aloud would do. There is something ludicrously and endearingly inept about these self-corrections. Like Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the author is writing in free indirect style that very closely approximates the protagonist's states of mind. But he is an embryonic novelist, handicapped by excessive regard for Bloom and ignorance of the conventions of narration.

In the episode's third paragraph the narration conveys Bloom's relief that Corny Kelleher showed up in Nighttown when he did––otherwise Stephen "might have been a candidate for the accident ward or, failing that, the bridewell and an appearance in the court next day before Mr Tobias or, he being the solicitor rather, old Wall, he meant to say, or Mahony which simply spelt ruin for a chap when it got bruited about." Would Tobias have tried the case, or would it have been Wall or Mahony? Matthew Tobias was a prosecuting solicitor for the Dublin police rather than a magistrate, and Thomas Wall and Daniel Mahony were divisional magistrates, so the correction is justified. So too, arguably, is its presence in the text, since the prose tacks so near to Bloom's own voice––as emphasized by the phrase "he meant to say"––that it feels almost like a snippet of conversation. But Bloom's speech in fact is being paraphrased here, not quoted. Shouldn't the narrator, whether omniscient or not, edit out Bloom's momentary and completely irrelevant lapse of memory?

If this is a sin, it is a venial one. Several paragraphs later, however, the failure to rethink and rewrite results in egregious narrative malpractice. When Stephen goes to talk to Corley, leaving Bloom standing apart, the narrative recounts how Corley got the nickname Lord John. His paternal grandfather, the story goes, married a woman whose maiden name was Talbot, and she, rumor has it, "descended from the house of the lords Talbot de Malahide." But this ancestor was a member of the "house" only in a sardonically punning sense: "her mother or aunt or some relative, a woman, as the tale went, of extreme beauty, had enjoyed the distinction of being in service in the washkitchen." The class difference explains the ironic joke in "Lord John," but how would a servant have acquired the Talbot surname, and how would a female have passed it down to her descendants? The narrator becomes so mired in details (what kind of blood relation it was, the woman's beauty, which duties she performed) that he loses sight of the essential genealogical questions.

This failure to marshall relevant facts before writing proves merely tedious for a reader, but what happens next is hilarious. After the narrator very formally concludes his account ("This therefore was the reason why the still comparatively young though dissolute man who now addressed Stephen was spoken of by some with facetious proclivities as Lord John Corley"), he begins a new paragraph devoted to Corley's tale of woe. But after five sentences on the new topic it suddenly occurs to him that he has not explained the source of the Talbot name: "No, it was the daughter of the mother in the washkitchen that was fostersister to the heir of the house or else they were connected through the mother in some way, both occurrences happening at the same time if the whole thing wasn't a complete fabrication from start to finish." Closer now to the promised explanation but still not quite in possession of it, the narrative begs the same question as before: if you can't manage to recall something even half-coherently, why bother to mention it at all? Worse, the new theme of Corley's poverty has been sidetracked. It absurdly returns in one brief sentence after the digression wraps up: "Anyhow he was all in."

It is easy to imagine Bloom saying "No, it was the daughter of the mother in the washkitchen," but these passages do not come close to representing his speech or even his thoughts. While Stephen and Corley are talking and the latter's nickname is being explicated, Bloom is some distance away, and later the narrator makes clear that he does not know who Corley is: "He threw an odd eye at the same time now and then at Stephen's anything but immaculately attired interlocutor as if he had seen that nobleman somewhere or other though where he was not in a position to truthfully state nor had he the remotest idea when." The word "nobleman" creates an impression that Bloom is privy to the Talbot speculations, but this may be yet another instance of ineptitude on the narrator's part. However much he may have in common with Bloom the character, he alone is responsible for writing bad fiction.

No other passages in Eumaeus match the comic brilliance of this one, but the botching of revisions continues in matters as small as the control of pronouns. When Stephen leaves Corley and rejoins Bloom, the narrator notes the occurrence, remarks that Bloom has seen Stephen giving Corley money, and then quotes what Stephen says: "Alluding to the encounter he said, laughingly, Stephen, that is: / — He is down on his luck." Corraling the reference of stray pronouns is a chore that afflicts anyone who attempts sentences of moderate complexity, but the remedy is simple: read what you have written, ask whether someone who does not know what you mean would readily understand you, and change unintentionally ambiguous pronouns to nouns. Here there is ambiguity because the previous sentence has described Bloom observing the exchange of money. Revision––if one is willing to revise––demands nothing more complicated than replacing "he" with "Stephen." The narrator does not do this. Nor does he leave the pronoun ambiguous, as in Molly's monologue. What he does do is more awkward than either.

As the images posted here may suggest, Joyce was a ferocious reviser, altering Ulysses at every stage from manuscript to typescript to print. (Maurice Darantière, who saw the novel into print in Dijon, must have been driven nearly insane by the countless changes that the Irish writer made until the last possible minute.) The Eumaeus narrator's difficulty with even the simplest fundamentals of this art offers one measure of the height of Olympian irony from which his puerile fiction is being regarded.

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John Hunt 2024