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 artice 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?