Like the tongue-twister featured in Singin' in the Rain
("Moses supposes his toeses are roses, but Moses supposes
erroneously"), some answers to the riddle were simply silly.
In Weep Some More, by musicologist Sigmund Spaeth,
Thornton found two of these nonsense answers in different
versions of Where Was Moses When the Light Went Out?,
a popular song which dated back at least as far as 1878, 26
years before Bloom's revelation. According to one version,
Moses was "Down the cellar, eating sauerkraut." The other
"implied that Moses had suffered the inferior extremity of his
shirt to escape from its confinement"—i.e., he was "Down in
the cellar with his shirt tail out."
Given Bloom's fondness for songs, ad jingles, and
nursery-style rhymes, his head may well have become infected
with such catchy pop-culture nonsense. But locating a couple
of these rhymes as Thornton does—and Gifford and Slote follow
his lead—sheds no light whatsoever on the Ithaca passage.
The relevant idea, implied by both verses putting Moses in the
cellar, is that he was in the dark. This straightforward
answer to the riddle is not nonsensical, but it is mildly
absurd: it embodies the "Duh!" (or Homeric "D'oh!") principle
of realizing the obvious.
In a personal communication, Doug Pope observes that Joyce
might have known of a literary precedent for Bloom's answer:
the same solution is mentioned in The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, first published in the UK in 1884. In
chapter 17, when Huck appears at the front door of a family's
cabin in the dead of night, they cautiously take him in,
ascertain that he is not a member of the murderous Shepherdson
clan with whom they are feuding, and entrust him to the
keeping of their son Buck, who "looked about as old as
me—thirteen or fourteen or along there." Buck takes Huck
upstairs to his room, gives him some clothes, brags about some
small creatures he caught in the woods yesterday, "and he
asked me where Moses was when the candle went out." Huck
is flummoxed by the riddle, though his presence in a
candle-lit cabin in the woods might well have suggested an
answer, and Buck encourages him: “But you can guess, can’t
you?” Finally, Buck supplies the answer himself: “Why, he was
in the dark! That’s where he was!”
Riddles like this, stock in trade for 13-year-old boys,
deliver a stupidly literal answer that seems head-slappingly
obvious only in retrospect. Bloom is much older, and he has
discovered the answer himself, but since his Eureka! moment
comes only after 30 years of on-again, off-again pondering, he
appears to no better advantage than the uncharacteristically
slow-witted Huck. Joyce's allusion to the American novel, if
such it is (and "candle" is convincingly specific!),
shows him playfully making Bloom the victim of a joke.
But in some other variants of Where Was Moses When the
Light Went Out?, the same implied answer, "in the dark,"
assumed more suggestive meanings. Instead of asking a boy to
solve a riddle, the version whose lyrics are reproduced at the
top of this note exploited his terrors and excited his early
adolescent desires. In this song Moses is the singer's
"christian name," and he recalls how a "nurse girl" who puts
him to bed at night used to terrify him by narrating stories
"of ghosts and goblins in a very awful way," then putting out
the light and asking him where Moses was when the light went
out. The poor boy would lie awake for hours after this
sadistic manipulation. Eventually, though, he gets his own
back: the nurse is fired, and after hearing that she has
married a man named Moses Muggins he finds her in the street
two days after the wedding and "innocently" asks her where
Moses was when the light went out.
His sly revenge births further sexual innuendo 20 years later
when a train on which he is riding enters a pitch-black
tunnel, prompting a young woman sitting near him to ask where
Moses was when the light went out. The song does not say
whether she asks this question knowing what trains entering
dark tunnels could symbolize, but its description of her as
"lively" suggests that she does. As for the young man, hearing
the Moses riddle again revives his cherished sadomasochistic
memory of the servant girl. As they emerge from the tunnel he
says to this new woman, "As you've waken'd up old memories
you're the girl I'd like to wed." Singing the song years in
the future, he says that he did marry the girl and they have
produced six fine sons, who, when their father puts out the
light at bedtime, sing, Where was Moses when the light went
out?
If Joyce wanted his readers to call to mind some such version
of the Victorian-era song, then Bloom's imagination of a Jew
(his favorite Jew) finding himself in the dark brings with it
an air of dread spiked with sexual excitement. These emotions
are by no means irrelevant to Bloom's situation as he stands
in his parlor, getting up the nerve to crawl into bed with the
woman who has deliberately subjected him to sexual humiliation
on June 16. Is he a candle whose wick has been snuffed? Or is
he being called to plunge back into the dark tunnel? Penelope
will show that Molly is thinking both thoughts, and looking
for Bloom to decide which version of the story will come to
pass.
Both the parlor song and Twain's story feature a young man
placed in a position of awkward ignorance and challenged to
find his way out. It is possible to hold both in mind while
reading the Q & A in Ithaca. Like Huck, Bloom has
set himself the task of solving a riddle, and the answer is
revealed by his present situation: he has just turned out the
light. But the blackness in which he is standing also evokes
perils, as it does for the terrified boy in the song. Alarmed
by the possibility that his marriage may be coming to an end,
and keenly aware of his sexual connection to Molly, Bloom
inherits both the boy-man's fears and his glimpses of sexual
maturity. The allusion suggests that he may yet triumph over
his ghosts and goblins by acting the part of a man. A silly
song suggests the possibility of something heroic in him:
overcoming sexual self-doubt.
