magic words

Ulysses, episode 7, Aeolus

Ulysses reading remains slow-going. I don’t feel like I can move on until I write an update, so I’ve been sitting with episode 7 for a few weeks. It is the most formally different chapter so far and has clarified itself on repeated rereads, at least in regard to who is speaking or thinking at any given moment. I’m trying to get back on an every other weekend schedule, though I am currently moving apartments.

I already used the winds of Odysseus as an overarching metaphor for my reading journal for episode 5, ignoring that obviously there would be an Aeolus chapter of Ulysses. But here we are.

Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus both appear in this chapter, but do not meet. Leopold is trying to resume work after the funeral of Patrick Dignam by securing an advertising spot in the newspaper, while Stephen meets with the same men who deliver a op-ed written by his failed Nestor, Mr. Deasy. Most notable in this chapter is the inclusion of newspaper headlines every paragraph or so, punctuating the conversations the men have about advertisements, rhetorical skill, history of empire, humorous anecdotes and misunderstood parables.

The schema gives us the corresponding organ as “lungs” and the art as “rhetoric.” There’s an element of “hot air” in a lot of what is said in this chapter, particular in the context of Aeolus—these are men just falling short of their intended goals. Joyce clearly attaches the rhetoric to the media in the newspaper, but there’s also quite of a bit of law and lawyering in this chapter.

In law, there’s a term “magic words” that I love.¹ I first heard it when I was paralegal and my supervising attorney derisively said to me about something I was drafting and couldn’t stop tinkering with “there are no magic words.” I did not like her, but the term is cute. The idea is that there aren’t supposed to be words that exclusively make something binding, particularly in a contract. If words of the exact same meaning were there, they should have the same effect. I also think about the ways people use legal sounding disclaimers on the internet. “No copyright intended” on a fan edit or something is a favorite, in part because it shows the telephone game style of how these copy-and-paste disclaimers becoming calcified. Even if saying “no copyright [infringement] intended” would help you get around automated detectors, copyright infringement has no any intent element to it—it’s a meaningless caveat, but the IP law naivete kind of charms me.

In episode 7 of Ulysses, there is a lawyer spending time with Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in sequence. J.J. O’Molloy was a rising star of Dublin litigation, but his gambling habit has put him into deep debt. One function of O’Molloy’s presence in the episode is to recall the prowess of the greater legal mind, Seymour Bushe. Bushe was a real lawyer who was the defense attorney in a fratricide case in Dublin, though O’Molloy remembers him as the lead attorney and he was actually the second chair. While the lawyer recalls the defense, Stephen is remembering the Ghost of the King’s line about his murder in Hamlet “and in the porches of mine ear did pour.”

O’Molloy says that Bushe “spoke on the law of evidence” at the trial, which is true, because an alibi defense was not allowed to be proffered because a woman was the alibi and she was not able to testify. So rather than speak on the evidence at hand, part of the defense was about procedural bars to being able to put on a complete defense.

The fallen lawyer also quotes the defense itself and an extended reference to the statue of Moses by Michelangelo in Rome: “that stone effigy in frozen music, horned² and terrible, of the human form divine, that eternal symbol of wisdom and prophecy which is aught that the imagination of the hand of sculptor has wrought in marble of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring deserves to live, deserves to live.”³

But though O’Molloy presents his recitation as exact fact, he flubs remembering where the Moses sculpture is: he says it is in the Vatican, but it is housed in Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli—he may be confusing St. Peter’s Basilica for the similarly sounding church. Still, Stephen is seduced by the quoted rhetoric, “wooed by the grace of language and gesture.”

The image of Moses as adjudicator comes up in another recalled speech, this time about politics of Irish identity, once again linking Bloom’s Jewish identity with Irish identity, even as we see Leopold Bloom be put upon and the subject of antisemitism amongst the same men who are regaling rhetorical tales that rely on images of Moses.

Stephen is the character in the passage who embodies Moses himself, rather than alludes to him as a memory conduit of other’s rhetoric, when he tells the parable of the plums to his fellow barflies. He tells a story of two Dublin women climbing to the top of Nelson’s Tower, spending nearly half their savings on their picnic for the view. But the climb takes so long up the tower, by the time they get there, they spend most of the time arguing about which buildings they see are which and eating their plums, spitting out pits onto passers by below. The telling of this story is repeatedly interrupted by Stephen’s compatriots, who stood rapt for the hollow and copied rhetoric, but can’t seem to pay attention to the original invocation of Moses.

The other title Stephen gives for the parable is “a Pisgah Sight of Palestine,” referencing Moses’ sight of the Promised Land, that he cannot enter himself. The sisters in the parable fail at seeing Ireland, instead devolving into petty spats while using a tower honoring Horatio Nelson, an English conqueror, to attempt to grasp the larger vision of Ireland. The lack of understanding greeting Stephen’s telling of the parable halts communication amongst the men, even as they themselves look at Nelson’s tower in the distance—this is one version of the wind, the hot air, sending Odysseus back from whence he came. The meaningful original story is rebuffed by those charmed by empty words.

I know the Parable of the Plums comes back up, after Stephen and Leopold finally meet, so I’m putting a tab in this thread, of both parable and law, to revisit potentially. The saddest bit of the book so far is when Stephen thinks “Could you try your hand it yourself?” about a potential career as a lawyer, even though he’s spent most of the chapter thinking about rhyme schemes and how the ghost in Hamlet could know the method of his assassination if he was asleep at the time of the murder. I am trying to get my hands on Joyce in Court by Adrian Hardiman, a Joyce scholar and Irish Supreme Court judge. I’ve read a book about litigation around Ulysses in the United States, but Hardiman’s book focuses more on Joyce’s relationship to Irish courts and the historical references that exist throughout his work to litigation.

1. I’ve talked about “magic words” in romance before, I think on Reformed Rakes, very first episode about Cecilia Grant’s Blackshears trilogy. When miscommunication is derisively discussed, oftentimes the assumption is that if only a character said a certain phrase or sentence to each other, that problem would be solved. I don’t find this is actually the case most of the time in romance, and if it were, it would be a pretty contrived plot. There’s no “open sesame” incantation that has power, while all other words fall flat in a relationship.

2. The statue has horns based on the mistranslation of the Vulgate Bible that gives Moses horns. The original word is supposed to mean “shining” or “emitting rays,” but Jerome’s literal translation of gets us “horned” Moses. There is certainly an element of antisemitism here, aligning a Jew with the devil. Michelangelo’s depiction comes at the end of this visual tradition.

3. Carl Jung points to this exact passage as the “magic words” that made him fall asleep while reading Ulysses.