Where? ⬤

In the Rosenbach manuscript, Joyce wrote at the end of Ithaca, "La réponse à la dernière demande est un point"—the answer to the final question is a point. This may sound absurd, but in French, the language of the printers whom Joyce was addressing, point can refer to a period or full stop. He wanted the typesetters to place this common symbol after the question "Where?" as an answer to it. On successive proofs he specified that the point should be "bien visible"—clearly visible—and then that "le point doit être plus visible," the point must be more visible. Perhaps because the typesetters could find no good way of fulfilling his request with the characters in their trays, what he got in the first edition was a clearly visible black square.

Some later editions have further frustrated the author's intent by omitting the mark entirely, and even those that print it do not agree on how large it should be. The Random House editions from 1934 to 1961 and the final Odyssey Press edition of 1939 employ a big bold blot that is slightly less tall than a standard capital letter in the text. Some people have thought this too big. Among them, apparently, is Hans Walter Gabler, whose Critical Edition of 1984 featured a much smaller period. In his critical review, "Errors of Execution in the 1984 Ulysses," Studies in the Novel 22 (Summer 1990): 243-49, John Kidd objected, sensibly pointing out that what the Gabler team supplied is "far smaller than even the intermediate dot Joyce had insisted should be made more visible" (248). In his Corrected Text of 1986 Gabler made the dot a bit larger, but even this revised version offers (ahem!) a pointed alternative to the aesthetically satisfying large dot of the earlier editions.

If the proper size of the black dot is uncertain, the significance that Joyce intended for it to convey is more so. Many equivalents have been proposed, but before jumping into any of them readers may want to ask how the text prompts such speculations. A simple but productive starting point is to recognize that the question "Where?" in the last paragraph is nothing new: the previous six paragraphs have all pursued a line of interrogation that could broadly be called geographical or spatial. First, the narrative asks about the "directions" in which the Bloom's two bodies are lying in bed. Then it addresses those bodies' inertial states of "rest or motion"—relatively stationary, but absolutely swinging through interplanetary space in huge swift arcs. Next it analyzes the bodies' "postures": how their parts are arranged on the bed. Finally it observes that Bloom is "Weary" because "He has travelled" throughout Dublin during the day and now (in a variation on the earlier "rest or motion") "He rests." There is also a suggestion of returning to the "Womb."

The womb is certainly a place, but no one can return to it after birth—though the picture of Bloom as "the childman weary, the manchild in the womb" suggests that he would like to do so. This detail of the third and fourth paragraphs is followed, in the fifth, by another place that no one can physically access. As Bloom starts to drift off to sleep his mind reels through a childish series of sound associations prompted by "Sinbad the Sailor," suggesting that his day's Odyssean journey is giving way to a nighttime journey into fantastical Arabian places. In the sixth paragraph the strange question "When?" makes even time a kind of place. "Going to dark bed" (a properly spatial kind of movement) takes Bloom into "the night of the bed," and at the end of the sentence Sinbad's (Darkinbad's) voyage into darkness seems to be followed by the Sailor's (Brightdayler's) journey into the new day. It is quite late, and earlier in the chapter Bloom has recalled once staying up all night and seeing the sun rise. His sleepy, half-comprehensible thoughts here suggest that he is looking past his voyage into the darkness with anticipations of June 17.

These six sections of Ithaca all address travel: around Dublin, back home, into bed, into the womb, into a fantasized Arabia, into the next day. The chapter's final question, then, is merely a culmination of the six that come before it. If the answer to the question is a black dot, then it too must be a place, at least in the loose sense that the Womb, Sinbad, and June 17 are places to which the mind can travel. What is this place? One interpretation seems obvious: Bloom is traveling into the black unknown of sleep. That he embarks on the journey accompanied by Sinbad and his alliterative companions says something about the places he may visit in his dreams. The posture that he adopts as he drifts off—"the childman weary, the manchild in the womb"—also suggests that loss of consciousness is somehow taking him back to origins—to childhood and thence to that place from which all life journeys begin.

The dot can certainly be visualized as the black hole in a woman's belly, and Joyce seems also to be inviting his readers to connect it to the "roc's auk's egg" of the penultimate paragraph. Eggs implant themselves in wombs to bring forth new life, but Molly's womb has never been fertilized since the untimely death of the couple's infant child. The novel asks whether the turmoil surrounding the affair with Boylan (he has left her "big with seed") might bring about salutary change in this sterile sexual relationship, and the beginning of the next chapter shows Molly thinking about Bloom's changed behavior: "Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs." One may note here not only the insistent return to eggs but also a reprise of the motif of day following night. Concerns from the end of Ithaca, funneled through the black dot, carry over to the beginning of Penelope.

Wombs and eggs infuse interpersonal, sexual concerns into Bloom's experience of going to sleep. Another textual detail points to more purely intellectual registers of experience. Calling the roc's egg "square round" recalls the thought of geometers squaring the circle that occurs to Dante in the final lines of the Divine Comedy as he gazes up into the capacious "circlings" of the triune godhead. The simile characterizes Dante's rational attempts to make sense of the frustratingly transcendent mystery of how God can be incarnate. Like the geometers, Dante fails to make rational sense of the Incarnation and the Trinity, but then he finds rationality and selfhood extinguished in a blaze of mystical insight that grants what he has sought: access to the source of all being, the mind of God.

The "Where?" of Ithaca, by contrast, is the mind of a human being leaving the daylight world and entering the state of sleep. In an inversion typical of Joyce's Dantean allusions, medieval religiosity gives way to modern secularity, and light-flooded circles become a dark one. Sleep does, however, bear some resemblance to mystical vision, because it temporarily obliterates selfhood and reason: thinking strangely morphs into dreaming, and consciousness is lost only to be reborn at waking. Read this way, the black dot suggests both shrinking and expansion. As a mere point, printed just large enough to be different from other full stops, it suggests the contraction of consciousness, like the shrinking circle of light on the screen when the TVs of the 1950s and 60s were turned off. Made larger, it looks like a hole bored through the page, a tunnel to something on the opposite side of normal perception.

Bloom's incoherent half-dreaming thoughts of Sinbad and the roc's egg flow into the black dot like water down a drainhole, to reappear god knows where. For him this is the end of the story, but for Joyce it was only the beginning. By mapping the Dantean trope of transcending rationality onto the landscape of sleep he began the process of writing Finnegans Wake. The two half-crazy swirling Sinbad sentences feel like anticipations of Joyce's final work, and "Finbad the Failer" feels like a nickname for HCE.

These thoughts are my own, but versions of many of them have occurred to many other people . In an article that surveys some of the ways in which Joyce critics have responded to the strange symbol—"The Full Stop at the end of Ithaca: Thirteen Ways—and Then Some—of Looking at a Black Dot," Joyce Studies Annual 7 (Summer 1996): 125-44—Austin Briggs takes up the idea of the dot as a hole in the text. Quoting from The Robber Bride, where Margaret Atwood reflects that the period after "The End" suggests "A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else," Briggs observes that the full stop in written texts has sometimes been termed a punctus or a "prick": a puncture mark, more an aperture than a stop, a portal of discovery for readers to gaze through (128). Robert Martin Adams, he notes, saw the dot at the end of Ithaca as a "black hole" through which Joyce's mind passed and "it is never a daylight mind again" (128). Adams too was thinking of Finnegans Wake.

Texts that enlarge the large dot evoke this alternate reality, but others eliminate it entirely, and Briggs notes that there is a kind of logic to this choice too: "The geometer's point has a definite position but no shape or size or extension. How boldly the mark is inscribed on Joyce's page may therefore be in a sense irrelevant, for all geometric points are equally no-size" (135).

Early on, the article observes that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake perpetually raise "the distinction between the visible and the audible text" (126). Both novels demand to be read aloud, but how does one bring a black dot to life? Anthony Burgess and Richard Madtes suppose that it could be performed as a snoring sound, the snores of the somnolent Bloom silencing once and for all the mynah-bird rational loquacity of Ithaca's narrator. Many critics have responded more abstractly to the visual implications of the symbol. C. H. Peake and Harold Baker suppose, in slightly different ways, that narration, grammar, and language itself are falling asleep, dissolving into mere ink on a page. Others have intuited a sense of conclusion similar to the sense of conclusion at the end of a sentence, but grander. In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver in early October 1921, Joyce wrote that "Ithaca is in reality the end as Penelope has no beginning, middle or end." In this framework, the outsized period may signal the true end of the novel, its "emphatic stop" to male consciousness succeeded by "the virtually non-stop 'female monologue'" of the final chapter (129). (By that logic, Briggs cogently observes, there probably should not be a period after Molly's final "Yes," the ending left unpunctuated just as in Finnegans Wake.)

In his Ulysses Annotated Don Gifford offers a particularly ambitious but also tenuous version of the view that the black dot serves as a mark of formal conclusion. Gifford argues that the dramatically large capital letters that the editors of the 1934 Random House text gave to the initial words of the novel's three sections—"Stately," "Mr," and "Preparatory"—suggest the Subject, Middle, and Predicate of a medieval syllogism (as well as the names of the three protagonists, Stephen, Molly, and Poldy). The large period at the end of Ithaca, then, is equivalent to the QED that declares a proof to have been completed. Although some people commenting on the novel still refer to this claim, it has fallen into general disrepute, not least because there is no evidence that the large capital letters were Joyce's idea. (One may also note, in passing, that in an interpretation of this sort the dot has ceased to function in any way as an answer to the question "Where?")

Some critics, while acknowledging that an outsized period may convey a sense of conclusion, go so far as to read it ironically. Karen Lawrence, Briggs notes, regards it as a mere "parody of closure" (130), and indeed Joyce's fictions do regularly subvert such expectations. Briggs observes that "The 'pointless' stories of Dubliners do not 'end' as stories were once expected to, and one, 'Counterparts,' stops in mid-sentence. Writing to Harriet Shaw Weaver in 1917, Joyce directed that the words 'The End' be deleted from a new edition of A Portrait underway" (130). Finnegans Wake, of course, makes beginnings and endings indistinguishable.

In his article Briggs surveys a bewildering variety of other critical interpretations of the black dot: it is Molly's anus, or a "hole" suggesting equally anus or vagina, or a "period" in the menstrual sense, or the head of a nail, or the contraction of a comet, or the earth seen from distant space, or the "pinprick" that is a star, or an astronomical black hole, or Bloom's triumphant squaring of the circle, or Bloom's nothingness, or "the now, the here" of Bloom's life before the novel plunges into the timelessness and everywhereness of Molly's monologue, or an isolated point transcending time and space, or an egglike encapsulation of the infinite possibilities held within a single moment, or the womb of time from which a new day will emerge, or the daybreak itself (the French pointe du jour). Some of these readings contradict others and some are less helpful to baffled readers than others , but their sheer number may serve as a warning not to expect a single, clear, universally agreed-upon significance in the symbol.

Here once again there are intimations of Finnegans Wake, with its innumerable meanings. Periodically quoting from it, Briggs suggests how strongly Joyce's interest in the period or full stop carried over into the later novel: "Finishthere. Punct" (17.23); "Fillstup" (20.13); "false step" (210.26); "Fools top" (222.23); "Fool step" (370.13); "Fill stap" (595.32); "fullstoppers and semicolonials" (152.16). The idea of the punctuation mark is most richly addressed in the chapter (1.5) devoted to ALP's letter—a figure for literature itself. Periods or full stops were not used in many ancient manuscripts, and the Letter has been written in this manner, flowing on from word to endless word like Molly's monologue. However, it has apparently been pierced by the tines of a fork, producing four kinds of punctuation marks:

it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort. Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively.... (123.31-124.5).

Joyce is having a lot of fun here (as the four "paper wounds" are translated, one can almost hear the text crying out not to be stabbed any more), but, as the language of verso, recto, and "university sense" suggests, he also seems to be conducting a paleographical investigation. In the 3rd century BCE, Aristophanes of Byzantium developed an influential system of punctuation in which a hypostigme or dot placed low on the line of characters signaled a brief pause, as a comma does, a dot at the vertical midpoint of the characters called for a longer pause as semicolons do now, and a dot high on the line indicated what would eventually come to be called a period or full stop. Low dot? Stop! Middle dot? Please stop! High dot? O do please stop! Perhaps some later grammarian added a fourth symbol?