Ithaca ends with anticipations of Joyce's final book,
Finnegans Wake, by showing Bloom drifting off to sleep
and thinking rambling
thoughts. Penelope extends the prolepsis
by showing Molly hovering somewhere between sleep and waking,
fusing present experience with memories of the past, seemingly
thinking outside the bounds of time. Formal linguistic
patterning enforces the resemblance. The Wake is
written as a closed loop, ending with a word, "the," that is
no end at all but rather an article introducing the novel's
first word, "riverrun." Penelope achieves a slightly
different effect through repetition of its opening word.
One name for this in rhetorical theory is epanalepsis
(a "taking again"), which Gideon O. Burton defines as
"Repetition of the same word or clause after intervening
matter. More strictly, repetition at the end of a line,
phrase, or clause of the word or words that occurred at the
beginning of the same line, phrase, or clause" (Silva
Rhetoricae, at rhetoric.byu.edu). Of the four examples
that Burton gives, one seems particularly comparable to what
Joyce does in Penelope: "In times like these, it is
helpful to remember that there have always been times like
these" (Paul Harvey). The phrase in this sentence is not
simply repeated; its repetition carries a new spirit that
changes one's understanding of the initial utterance. Molly's
"yes" does something similar across the span of 24, 076
intervening words.
That a reader can hear this distance-defying effect
owes not only to the abstract influence of re-reading and
analysis but also to the 90 other appearances of the word
"yes" in the chapter, which condition one to listen for its
concluding reappearance. This gentle percussive signifier in
Molly's monologue, which swells to a pounding heartbeat in the
last page or so of text, could probably be named by several
rhetorical terms. In addition to epanalepsis there is conduplicatio
("doubling"), the repetition of a key word in successive
phrases, clauses, or sentences to impart emphasis, amplify
thought, or express emotion, and epinome ("tarrying"),
which has been variously defined as "the frequent repetition
of a phrase or question," "dwelling on a point," or
"persistent repetition of the same plea in much the same
words." The terms are, of course, less important than
recognition of the effects that such insistent repetition can
bring about.
Penelope maps a movement from Molly’s conversation
with herself, marked by introspective suspicion, to an
intimate exchange with her husband, marked by mutual
understanding. "Yes" is pivotal to both these internal and
external conversations. The chapter begins with an unspoken
question: Was there anything suspicious about Bloom’s behavior
tonight? Molly's answer: “Yes because he never did a thing
like that before …” Unspoken follow-up questions ensue:
Has he had sex with another woman tonight? Is there any
evidence of it?
The "yes because" formulation expresses Molly's detective
work: "yes because the day before yesterday he was
scribbling something a letter when I came into the front
room to show him Dignams death in the paper as if something
told me and he covered it up with the blottingpaper pretending
to be thinking about business so very probably that was it to
somebody who thinks she has a softy in him because all men get
a bit like that at his age especially getting on to forty he
is now so as to wheedle any money she can out of him no fool
like an old fool and then the usual kissing my bottom was to
hide it"; "yes because he couldnt possibly do without it
that long so he must do it somewhere." Molly is wrong
about Bloom having had sex on June 16, unless masturbating on
the beach counts—and it may, since she thinks only "yes he
came somewhere Im sure"—but she is certainly right about the
exchange of money involved in his relationship with Martha
Clifford.
By the end of the chapter, Bloom is allowed to speak for
himself. In two remarkable passages, the narrative signifiers
of a remembered conversation crowd into Molly's language
almost as frequently as do her yeses: "the sun shines for you
he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons
on Howth head . . . the day I got him to propose to me yes
. . . yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes
so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true
thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you
today yes . . . I gave him all the pleasure I could
leading him on till he asked me to say yes"; "and then
I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked
me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I
put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so
he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart
was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
Out of the movement from suspicious introspection at the
beginning of the chapter to affirmative engagement at its end,
Joyce crafts his ambiguous but happy ending, one that returns
a reader to the beginning not only of the chapter, but also of
the marriage. And, in a way, to the beginning of the Bloom
family drama in Ulysses: in Calypso, "hurrying
homeward" to be near his wife's "ample bedwarmed flesh," Bloom
thinks, "Yes, yes." The word seems integrally linked
with beginnings and endings. When Bloom returns to memories of
the first woman he wooed, in Circe, the flirtatious
encounter concludes with Josie's Molly-like affirmation: "(Eagerly.) Yes,
yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. / (She fades from his
side . . .)"
Joyce associated Molly's key word with a feminine principle
of circular return. In an August 1921 letter to Frank Budgen
he wrote that Penelope "begins and ends with the
female word yes. It turns like the huge earth ball slowly
surely and evenly, round and round spinning, its 4 cardinal
points being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt,
expressed by the words because, bottom . . . woman, yes." In
October of the same year he also remarked on the word's
essential property of affirmation. Speaking with his
translator Jacques Benoîst-Méchin, he called it "the most
positive word in the human language" (Ellmann 522).
The conjunction of circularity and affirmation suggests the
influence of Nietzsche. Given the interest in this philosopher
expressed in Ulysses, beginning with allusions to the
hyperborean life of the übermensch in Telemachus,
it seems plausible to hear in Molly's "yes" a response to the
concept of eternal recurrence, an idea of cyclical history
from classical antiquity that Nietzsche preferred to the linear teleology of
Christianity. In The Gay Science (a book that
sits on Mr. Duffy's shelf in "A Painful Case"), Nietzsche
posed a hypothetical "burdensome thought": Imagine that
everything in your life is destined to repeat. You relive
pleasant but also painful events endlessly. If there were no
alternative, could you still find joy and meaning in your
life? Would you say Yes to all its imperfections,
frustrations, and tortures, or would you wish to negate it?
"Eternal recurrence" is a fair description of a life story
that constantly circles back on itself in memory, as Molly's
does, and her final word may well be taken as a Nietzschean
affirmation of that imperfect life. Coming at the end not only
of her monologue but of Joyce's novel, this capitalized "Yes"
can also be seen as an instantiation of what Stephen in Ithaca
calls "the eternal
affirmation of the spirit of man in literature." In an
early lecture titled "Drama and Life," Joyce had praised art
that tells the truth about human life, no matter how
unflattering, and that thereby reveals its eternal truths.
Stephen appears to be carrying this view forward into Ulysses,
and Molly puts it into practice.
One more connection to Finnegans Wake deserves
mention, even though it has some of the smell of a red
herring. When he was writing that book Joyce implied that he
had intended a dying-away effect at the end of Ulysses,
comparable to Anna Livia's. In a conversation with Louis
Gillet reported in Gillet's Stèle pour James Joyce (1941),
translated in the 50s as Claybook for James Joyce, he
said: "In Ulysses, to depict the babbling of a woman
going to sleep, I had sought to end with the least forceful
word I could possibly find. I had found the word ‘yes,’ which
is barely pronounced, which denotes acquiescence, self
abandon, relaxation, the end of all resistance. In Work in
Progress I have tried to do better if I could. This
time, I found the word which is the most slippery, the least
accented, the weakest word in English, a word which is not
even a word, which is scarcely sounded between the teeth, a
breath, a nothing, the article the.”
Wrapped up in concluding the Wake, Joyce may have
creatively misremembered some of what he intended while
finishing Ulysses. "The" can justly be called a word
"which is barely pronounced," but few speakers of English
would describe "yes" as such a word, or declare that it
"denotes" passivity. Nor does Molly seem to be going away
quietly at the end of her monologue: if Joyce had not said so,
would any reader imagine that she is falling asleep and
babbling? Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest that
Joyce was looking for a strong effect in 1921, not a weak one.
Ellmann reports that in the draft of Penelope given to
Benoîst-Méchin the final "Yes" was "inscrutably omitted"
(521). Without that word, the book would have ended with "I
will," which suggests forceful determination. When the
translator "tacked on" a final oui Joyce initially
resisted, saying that "the last word of a book is very
important."
There may be some middle ground between these seemingly
incompatible readings of the end of Ulysses. Ellmann
infers that by settling on Yes, "the most positive word in the
human language," Joyce chose to emphasize "submission to a
world beyond himself," as opposed to the Luciferian resistance
implied by "I will." Positivity is by no means incompatible
with "acquiescence, self-abandonment, relaxation, the end of
all resistance," and even if these terms do not fit Molly as
well as they do Anna Livia, "yes" could still be seen as a relatively
unforceful, yielding conclusion. It would probably be foolish
to ignore the resemblance that Joyce saw between Molly and his
river-goddess passing beyond the frustrations of her existence
and losing herself in the streams of the sea.
