The presence of an allusion begins to dawn when one examines
the contexts of the two departures. Virgil leads Dante through
Hell and Purgatory only to hand him off to another authority
who will guide him through Heaven. Walking with Virgil and
Statius in the Earthly Paradise (Eden) atop the purgatorial
mountain, Dante witnesses a magnificent procession that ends
with a chariot drawn by a griffin. Angelic heralds announce
the Christ-like arrival of a woman in the car, dressed in a
green mantle and red dress, showered with lilies, sun-like in
brilliance. Although he cannot clearly see her, Dante knows
her to be Beatrice. Thunderstruck, he turns to Virgil like a
frightened child running to its mother, to tell him how
powerfully the old flame of love has seized him. But Virgil is
not there. In a manner that is not represented and for reasons
that are not explained, he has silently left his charge to
return to Limbo. Dante is left to face Beatrice's stern
reproaches alone.
Joyce's passage in no way emphasizes what is probably its
most revealing single correspondence with this scene, the
setting. Dante loses Virgil in the garden of Eden. Where is
Bloom when Stephen leaves him? In his garden....
Similarly inconspicuous but undeniably present is the third
figure in Dante's scene. No woman is standing before Bloom
when Stephen leaves, but only a little earlier Bloom has
directed his attention (as Dante tries to do with Virgil) to
"the mystery of an invisible attractive person, his wife
Marion (Molly) Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a
lamp." Molly is lying in bed upstairs with a paraffin lamp
burning. Her "splendid" association with light, her position
above Bloom on the second floor, and the scorn that she feels
for his sexual insufficiency all ally her with Beatrice. Later
in Ithaca, after Bloom gets into bed with his wife, he
contemplates "The upcast reflection of a lamp and shade, an
inconstant series of concentric circles of varying gradations
of light and shadow," recalling the vision of God in circles of
light to which Beatrice gives Dante access in Paradiso.
In The Shaping Imagination Mary Reynolds does not
notice these structural similarities, but she does find a
clear allusion: "In the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses,
Joyce reverses Dante's pattern, for it is Stephen who leaves
Bloom. Dante sometimes makes such reversals of Virgil, and it
is clear that Joyce has deliberately constructed a parallel to
the farewell scene in Purgatorio 30" (37). In defense
of her argument she notes that "On the naturalistic level of
the narrative Virgil may be said to be in 'interstellar
space'" because "He does not go back the way he came. He must
leave the Mountaintop and return to Limbo by some magical
route, perhaps the route of the Heavenly Messenger of Inferno
9:81, and he is certainly alone" (38). This may be so. It is
no less true that Dante is standing beneath the stars through
whose orbits Beatrice will conduct him upwards to God, and he,
not Virgil, corresponds to Bloom in this analogy. Bloom stands
deserted beneath stars that have held Dantean resonances in
Joyce's text from the moment he exited the house with Stephen
and beheld a "heaventree."
Solitude is linked to the starry heavens in both texts.
Reynolds also comments (36, 38) on the musical effect of the
long "o" vowels in Joyce's prose. These are indeed
striking, and they are amplified by other sounds ("oo," "ow")
produced far back in the mouth: "Alone, what did Bloom
feel? / The cold of interstellar space, thousands
of degrees below freezing point or the absolute
zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Reaumur."
These haunting sounds, Reynolds observes, recall the mournful
"o" sounds with which Dante laments the loss of his poetic
father at 30.49-51: "Ma Virgilio n'avea lasciati
scemi / di sé, Virgilio dolcissimo
patre, / Virgilio a cui per mia salute die'mi"
(in my translation, "But Virgil had left us bereft of himself,
Virgil the sweetest father, Virgil to whom I gave myself for
my salvation"). Joyce's echoing of these lines goes even
further than Reynolds notes. The triune repetition of
"Virgilio," with its long "o," returns also in two questions:
"Alone, what did Bloom hear?" and "Alone, what did
Bloom feel?"
Joyce adapted enough details from the Purgatorio for
one to say that he staged a kind of reenactment: when Bloom
stands in the garden bereft of his new friend and preparing to
meet his scornfully adulterous wife, he is like Dante bereft
of Virgil and turning to meet the accusations of Beatrice. But
the modernist author also made the scene his own. Molly is no
vehicle of disembodied revelation, and Bloom's loneliness is
hopeless in a way that Dante's is not. Stephen's departure
makes him feel "the cold of interstellar space,"
reflecting not only his intellectual conviction that the
universe is vastly unconcerned with human suffering but also
his emotional association of happiness with simple animal warmth. At the end
of Hades he has thought, in a most un-Dantean way,
"Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their
maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm
beds: warm fullblooded life."
As Stephen walks away down the alley, Bloom thinks of all the
people who accompanied him on his morning trip from Sandymount
to the Glasnevin cemetery. Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, and
the rest are all "in bed," but the final person on the list,
Paddy Dignam, is "in the grave." This somber note is still
sounding in his thoughts after Stephen is gone:
Of what did bellchime and handtouch and footstep and
lonechill remind him?
Of companions now in various manners in different places
defunct: Percy Apjohn (killed in action, Modder River),
Philip Gilligan (phthisis, Jervis Street hospital), Matthew
F. Kane (accidental drowning, Dublin Bay), Philip Moisel
(pyemia, Heytesbury street), Michael Hart (phthisis, Mater
Misericordiae hospital), Patrick Dignam (apoplexy,
Sandymount).
A lifetime's worth of losses inform this new experience of
solitude, renewing Bloom's long familiarity with "lonechill."
