Bloom is an Odysseus who has returned home to his Ithaca, and
at the end of his day the narrative says, "He rests. He has
travelled." It then poses a question: "With?" The
answer is Sinbad (or Sindbad), an 8th or 9th century Arabian
hero whose seven voyages unquestionably owe much to those of
Homer's hero. (The Odyssey was translated into Arabic
by the 8th century, and the story of Polyphemos is retold in
Sinbad's third voyage.) Sinbad thus joins Rip Van Winkle,
Enoch Arden, the Wandering Jew,
and a small host of fellow travelers who function as
additional symbolic analogues for Bloom's Odyssean mental
adventures.
The presence of Tinbad and Whinbad in the Christmas pantomime
has evidently also prompted Bloom to transpose Sinbad's story
into his beloved register of nursery
rhyme, where silly verbal resemblances can drive a story
forward and people can become fancifully identified with their
occupations (Tinbad the Tailor, Jinbad the Jailer, Whinbad the
Whaler, Ninbad the Nailer, Binbad the Bailer, Pinbad the
Pailer, Minbad the Mailer, Hinbad the Hailer, Rinbad the
Railer). It is perhaps not too great a stretch to hear in
these phrases all the occupations that Bloom has encountered
people practicing in the course of his day, or remembered
himself practicing in earlier years, or imagined himself
practicing in a different life. (In Circe Bloom's
adventures of June 16 are cast as a similar-sounding series of
hagiographic attributes: "Kidney of Bloom, pray for us. /
Flower of the bath, pray for us. / Mentor of Menton, pray for
us. / Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us. . . .")
And then comes the final paragraph of the episode, when,
asking itself the strange question "When?," the
narrative locates Bloom on a temporal slide into
unconsciousness: "Going to dark bed there was a square
round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the
bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the
Brightdayler." The bed to which Bloom is going becomes
the site of a bewildering host of associations, as if his mind
is speeding up rather than slowing down. The bed is dark,
anticipating the black extinction of consciousness expressed
in the large black dot at the end of the chapter. And before
any egg appears, we learn that it is "square round," a
paradoxical figure that evokes the mathematical challenge
referred to earlier in Ithaca as "the quadrature of
the circle."
Why should Bloom be thinking such a thought at this moment?
Given the temporal element ("Going to dark bed"), it seems
reasonable to hear an echo of the end of the Paradiso,
where Dante uses the famous mathematical challenge to
characterize his last moment of ordinary human consciousness
before the flash of mystical enlightenment. Staring into
the divine abyss, he describes his struggle to understand the
mystery of Incarnation:
Like the geometer who fully applies himself
to square the circle and, for all his thought,
cannot discover the principle he lacks,
such was I at that strange new sight.
I tried to see how the image fit the circle
and how it found its where in it.
(33.133-37)
Dante writes that he would have failed to comprehend an
essentially transcendental entity (like God, the circle's
constitutive principle of π has now been shown to be such an
entity) "had not my mind been struck by a bolt / of lightning
that granted what I asked" (141-42). After his mind's
fruitless efforts at logical comprehension, a mystical vision
sweeps him up into the Love moving the sun and the other stars
and concludes the epic poem. If this allusion lurks within
Bloom's phrase "square round," it serves to characterize
Bloom's coming entry into the realm of sleep and dream, which
waking intelligence cannot comprehend.
The roc's egg participates in these mysteries, but it carries
multiple associations of its own. In the Sinbad stories, the
roc is an enormous raptor, powerful enough to carry elephants
and huge snakes to its nest to feed its young. In his second
voyage Sinbad hitches a ride on a roc to the valley of diamonds, and then
he tricks one into carrying him back to its nest. On another
voyage, the fifth, his crew spots an immense roc's egg, breaks
it open, and eats the chick, bringing destruction down
upon themselves from the avian parents much as Homer's men do
when they kill the cattle of the sun god.
Joyce may still be injecting echoes of the Commedia
into Bloom's thoughts here: Dante's pilgrim gets his first
taste of mystical rapture in canto 9 of Purgatorio
when, in a dream, an eagle carries him Ganymede-like into the
sphere of fire, filling him with terror. But the roc also has
powerful associations with Sinbad's great topic, the
acquisition of wealth. (He tells his tales to a poor man, also
named Sinbad, who wants to know why some people enjoy great
riches while others must endure poverty.) Getting to the
valley of diamonds by roc, and thence to a roc's nest, has
enriched the hero with a trove of gems.
It seems highly likely not only that this part of the Sinbad
story would appeal to the money-conscious Bloom, but also that
he would think of it at bedtime. Earlier in Ithaca, he
has contemplated various fantastic schemes for getting rich,
one of them involving finding "an antique dynastical ring"
that has been "dropped by an eagle in flight." The
narrative asks why Bloom should think of such outlandish
ideas. Answer: he has found that happily fantasizing about
wealth before going to bed helps him to sleep well.
All of these speculations about Bloom's thought processes in
his last moments of consciousness seem tenuous, and the chains
of association become yet more slender at the end of the final
sentence. Why does the roc become an "auk," a group of
diving Atlantic sea-birds in the alcid family? Certainly not
because of size: even the extinct (ca. 1852) great auk stood
no higher than about 3 feet (1 meter). As with the
nursery-rhyme variations on Sinbad, the link may be purely
linguistic, one "oc" sound childishly engendering another. As
for "Darkinbad the Brightdayler," Adams supposes there
may be a "subtle reference to Max Müller's theory that
Odysseus was originally a sun-god" (Surface and Symbol,
81).
But as Adams goes on to cogently observe, at some point such
serious investigations should be cut off, because "the
going-to-bed litany is a piece of inspired stupidity, like
Charles Bovary's famous hat, containing layer after layer of
meaninglessness—an unfathomable depth of mental void. Relaxing
its hold on external reality, and on its own thought
processes, the mind is shown drifting off into a mechanical
word-cuddling, and so into complete darkness. The more we
project conscious intellectual meaning into the process, the
less it serves its overt purpose. Like a Rorschach-blot, the
passage will absorb anything we want to put into it, but there
is a point at which our insertions, by expressing 'us' all too
richly, frustrate the ends of the novel" (82).
This caveat serves a valuable purpose. Bloom's muddy
half-thoughts are certainly more than a little stupid, as are
those of every human being drifting off to sleep. But readers
can also benefit from the hindsight of knowing something of
the book that Joyce wrote next. Finnegans Wake, the
ultimate Rorschach blot, suggests that in sleep thousands of
suggestive threads of meaning become tied together in patterns
that do not respect the laws of daylight logic but are easily
as complex as waking thoughts. Could Joyce already have been
thinking of his book of the dark when he finished Ithaca?
A note full of tendentious suppositions may as well conclude
with one more: amid the list of Sinbad's alliterative cousins
is one, "Finbad the Failer," whose name richly evokes
the next defeated conqueror on Joyce's horizon.
