6. HADES

SCENE: The Graveyard

HOUR: 11 a.m.

ORGAN: Heart

ART: Religion

COLORS: White: Black

SYMBOL: Caretaker

An ancient cab, littered with the crumbs of a departed picnic party, its upholstery mildewed and buttonless, a properly lugubrious vehicle, conveys Bloom, Power, Simon Dedalus and Martin Cunningham to the cemetery, behind Dignam's hearse. This is the first appearance in Ulysses of Simon Dedalus, Stephen's biological father. He is still the hearty fellow we came to know in A Portrait of the Artist, who advises his son "to associate with fellows of the right kidney." When talking with some of his cronies in a bar during his and Stephen’s visit to Cork, Simon Dedalus recalls the scene of his youthful exploits and says, "We're as old as we feel, Johnny. . . . Here, Tim or Tom or whatever your name is, give us the same again here. By God, I don't feel more than eighteen myself. There's that son of mine there not half my age and I'm a better man than he is any day of the week." It is not surprising that Stephen felt "an abyss of fortune or of temperament" sunder him from his father and his father's friends, the great gulf nature has fixed between the types known to modern psychology as introvert and extravert. Bloom, a mixed type, effusive at moments, yet prudently repressive in general of his own dark thoughts, was more akin to Stephen, that "changeling" in his own home.

Martin Cunningham is known to readers of the story "Grace" (Dubliners) as "a thoroughly sensible man, influential and intelligent. His blade of human knowledge, natural astuteness particularized by long association with cases in the police courts, had been tempered by brief immersions in the waters of general philosophy." He is naturally good-natured and tolerant, unlike Simon Dedalus, who, with all his bonhomie, has a declared aversion for all that is not decently normal, and for those who are not of the "hail-fellow-well-met" persuasion.

The fourth occupant of the cab, Power, was delineated in the same story, "Grace." "Mr Power, a much younger man, was employed in the Royal Irish Constabulary Office in Dublin Castle. His inexplicable debts were a byword in his circle; he was a debonair young man." He is amiable, rather colorless; Bloom finds him "a nice fellow."

As the cab rattles over the cobbled streets, past a patch of ripped-up roadway (the underworld is already appearing), the cortege is saluted on its way by passers-by: "a fine old custom," Dedalus remarks. They pass "a lithe young man, clad in mourning, a wide hat": Stephen. Simon Dedalus remarks that Stephen's fidus Achates*, Mulligan, is a "bloody doubledyed ruffian," a counterjumper's son. [*(88) The loyal or faithful Achates was a friend of Aeneas, and this phrase recurs in the Aeneid (e.g., VI, 158; VIII, 52 1; XII, 384). The phrase is now often used ironically. Seemingly for this reference, the most pertinent use of the phrase is that in Book VI of the Aeneid (1. 158), which describes Aeneas and his "faithful Achates" just before Aeneas' descent into Hades. This prepares for other allusions to Book VI of the Aeneid which occur later in this episode.]

The conversation of the four men is scrappy and topical; clearly the three Irishmen, anyhow, would be the better for a drink, and happier in a bar--as the washerwoman by the Anna Liffey observes in Finnegans Wake: Ireland sober is Ireland stiff. At this hour of the morning, unstimulated, Simon Dedalus' verve is in defect and his temper decidedly "stiff"; his comments on the passers-by are merely malicious or morose. Bloom is the one whose thoughts are most in keeping with the occasion. The dogs' home they pass reminds him of his dead father's dog Athos. Presently some sententious remarks of the others on the "disgrace" of the suicide's end turn his thoughts again to his father's tragic death.

They pass Blazes Boylan out "airing his quiff" and the sight of his wife's latest lover has its usual disquieting effect on Bloom, who, to distract his own attention, meticulously examines his nails. The sight of the "tall blackbearded figure" of a well-known, Dublin moneylender, Reuben J. Dodd, elicits an imprecation from Dedalus: "the devil break the hasp of your backl" "We have all been there," Martin Cunningham laments.

Bloom, in haste to disclaim confraternity, begins to tell how "Reuben J.'s" son attempted suicide without success. The youth jumped into the Liffey and was fished out by a boatman whom "Reuben J." rewarded with a florin. At last they reach Glasnevin cemetery, where some other mourners have already arrived. The service in the mortuary chapel begins, accompanied by the silent commentary of Bloom's monologue.

The service ended, the gravediggers come and "shove the coffin on their cart." They walk past the O'Connell circle (an omphalos); "in the middle of his people, old Dan 0'. But his heart is buried at Rome" and, near the grave of Mrs Dedalus, Simon Dcdalus breaks down and weeps. The mourners are joined by Kernan (another of the characters in "Grace"), "a commercial traveler of the old school, of Protestant stock, though converted to Catholicism at the time of his marriage. He was fond of giving side-thrusts at Catholicism." He makes a characteristic remark to Bloom, who in return gave prudent assent.

The conservator, John O'Connell, tells them a funny story "to cheer a fellow up", as Martin Cunningham points out, "pure goodheartedness: damn the thing else." As the gravediggers took up their spades and flung heavy clods of clay in on the coffin, Bloom turned his face. . . "The clay fell softer. Begin to be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind."

Hynes the reporter (a character in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room") notes the names of mourners present and suggests they go round by "the chief's grave" ("Parnell will never come again").

Passing a statue of the Sacred Heart, Bloom censures the anatomical inaccuracy of the sculptor, but himself boggles at a classical reminiscence. He watches an obese grey rat wriggle under the plinth of a crypt; the sight of "the grey alive" crushing itself in under the entrance to the charnel-house fixes itself in his memory and is recalled several times in the course of the day. He remembers that the last time he was here it was to attend the funeral of Mrs Sinico (see "A Painful Case" in Dubliners). As he is leaving the cemetery he encounters the solicitor' John Henry Menton, who has never forgiven Bloom a trivial triumph. Bloom points out a dent in Menton’s hat; Menton curtly responds--"They walked on towards the gates. Mr Bloom, chapfallen, drew behind a few paces so as not to overhear."

This episode has many recalls of the Nekuia (The episode of the Odyssey which describes the visit of Odysseus to the nether world [Book XI], generally known as the "Nekuia," is really a "Nckuomanteia," an evocation of the shades, like the calling up of Samuel by the witch of Endor). The four rivers of Hades have their counterparts in the Dodder, the Liffey and the Grand and Royal Canals of Dublin. Patrick Dignam, deceased, is an avatar of Elpenor who, it will be remembered, broke his neck in a fall from the roof of Circe's house, where he had been sleeping, heavy with wine. The end of Dignam, a "comical little teetotum always stuck up in some pub comer", as Bloom describes him, was equally sudden and due to a series of similar indiscretions. Bloom's description of Dignam is a direct allusion to the name of Elpenor--"Blazing face: red-hot, Too much John Barleycorn. Cure for a red nose. Drink like the devil till it turns adelite." The name of Elpenor comes from a Semitic root meaning "the blazing-face." The first shade encountered by Odysseus on the shore of Erebus was that of Elpenor, who arrived before him—"Thou bast come fleeter on foot than I in my black ship.' " Thus Bloom, arrived at the graveyard, soliloquizes: "Coffin now. Got here before us, dead as he is," and, later, at the mortuary chapel, when the coffin is lying on the bier, four tall yellow candles at its corners, "always in front of us".

This episode has a number of other Homeric parallels, more easily recognizable, nearer the surface, than the symbolic recalls in other episodes. This comparative directness of allusion may be ascribed to the near affinity of the ancient and modern narratives, each of which records a visit to the abode of the dead--the domain of Hades, Glasnevin cemetery.

1) Thus the amiable Cunningham is doomed to the labor of Sisyphus "pressing a monstrous stone with hands and feet, striving to roll it towards the brow of a hill. But oft as he was about to hurl it over the top, the weight would drive him back, so once again to the plain rolled the stone, the pitiless thing. And he once more kept heaving and straining, and the sweat the while was pouring down his limbs, and the dust rose upwards from his head." The "pitiless thing" for Cunningham is "that awful drunkard of a wife of his. Setting up house for her time after time and then pawning the furniture on him every Saturday almost. Wear out the heart of a stone, that. Leading him the life of the damned. Monday morning start afresh. Shoulder to the wheel."

2) The last words are also, perhaps, an evocation of the doom of Ixion. The toil of the Danaids has its Ulyssean counterpart in the never-ending trouble of an old tramp. "On the curbstone before Jimmy Geary the sexton's, an old tramp sat, grumbling, empting the dirt and stones out of his huge dustbrown yawning boot. After life's journey.

3) On its way to the cemetery the cab is held up by a drove of branded cattle "lowing, slouching by on padded hoofs, whisking their tails slowly on their clotted bony croups. Outside them and through them ran raddled sheep bleating with fear. The driver with his switch may be likened to "the great Orion driving the wild beasts together over the mead of asphodel . . . with a strong mace all of bronze in his hands, that is ever unbroken".

4) a) Father Coffey wears the mask of Cerberus. "Father Coffey. I knew his name was like a coffin. . . . With a belly on him like a poisoned pup."

b) Another, more direct, allusion to Cerberus, whose name Bloom cannot recall, is in his comment on the hawker's barrow of cakes at the entrance to the graveyard- "Simnel cakes those are, stuck together: cakes for the dead. Dogbiscuits. Who ate them?"

5) The caretaker, John O'Connell, personifies Hades himself; he was a well-known Dublin character, of a longevity worthy of his prototype.

6) To Bloom the "gumption" which got John O'Connell his wife was, perhaps, not unlike that which won Proserpine for her dark lord, most "catholic" of all the gods; but awe of Hades has stayed the candor normal to his silent monologuc.

7) The mourners pass the monuments of Daniel O'Connell and Parnell, the shades of Heracles and Agamemnon. The latter hero, like Parnell, came to his end through a woman; "there is no more faith in women."

8) When Odysseus had greeted these and other heroes "the soul of Ajax alone stood apart, being still angry for the victory wherein I prevailed against him, in the suit by the ships concerning the arms of Achilles, that his lady mother had set for a prize; and the sons of the Trojans made award and Pallas Athene. Would that I had never prevailed and won such a prize." The attitude of John Henry Menton and the episode on the bowling green recall the aloofness of Ajax, who, like Menton, requited a proffered service with a snub and passed "grandly" on.

The incident of the man in the mackintosh (which will be recalled by Bloom several times in the course of his day) offers interesting possibilities for Joycean interpretation in the light of Homeric precedent. When the gravediggers are about to lower the coffin to its resting-place, Bloom, looking round, wonders: "Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh?" When the ceremony is over, Hynes, the reporter, makes his round recording the names of those present, and asks Bloom the stranger. When Bloom identifies him by what he is wearing, Hynes misunderstands it fort his name.

The now-dubbed M'Intosh, the thirteenth mourner, has an uncanny air about him; Bloom adds the incident to the growing repertoire of memories whence he aptly draws as Bloomsday moves on towards Penelope's night. In the Eumaeus episode, when Bloom and Stephen, slowly convalescent from the drugged ecstasy of the brothel (where M'Intosh has, of course, made a spectral entry and disappearance), sit talking in the cabman's shelter, the former, reading the Telegraph, finds recorded amongst the mourners present "L. Boom, C. P. M'Coy, Dash M'Intosh and several others." Bloom, though nettled by the mutilation of his name, points out to his companion the names of M'Coy and Stephen "who were conspicuous, needless to say, by their total absence (to say nothing of M'Intosh)" at Dignam's funeral.

In the Nekuia there is a curious passage, unusually ambiguous for the Odyssey, dealing with the Melampus legend (Odyssey XI. 281-98). This passage (suspected to be an interpolation) seems to have been introduced to lead up to the longer digression in the fifteenth book of the Odyssey (corresponding to the Eumaeus episode in Ulysses), relating to Theoclymenos. Telemachus, about to embark from Pylos, on his way back to Ithaca, where he is destined to meet his father at Eumaeus' hut, encountered "by the stern of the ship, . . . a stranger, that had slain his man and turned outlaw from Argos. He was a soothsayer, and by his lineage he came of Melampus, . . . but afterward be had come to the land of strangers, fleeing from his country and from Neleus and for the dread blindness of soul which the goddess, the Erinnys of the grievous stroke, had laid on him. Howsoever he escaped his fate, and drave away the lowing kine from Phylace to Pylos and brought the maiden home to his own brother to wife." Homer tells us that Theoclymenos was the son of Polyphides, descended from Melampus, and that "Apollo made the high-souled Polypheides a seer far the chief of human kind, . . .[who] being angered with his father, . . . prophesied to all men."

Berard’s speculations on the reasons Homer introduced this irrelevant personage and traced his lineage at such length are pertinent to the M'Intosh mystery.

Here, as in other instances, an interpolation is enclosed at both ends by the same line [thus the M'Intosh "interpolation" is preceded by "burying him. We come to bury Caesar" and followed by the words "Only man buries. . . . Bury the dead"]; the relevance of this passage is of the slightest when the part played by this Theoclymenos in the Odyssey is considered. This famous seer, whose genealogy is given us in thirty almost incomprehensible verses, must have been associated (in some legend which has not survived) with the later life of Ulysses or Telemachus. He figures only in the last books of the Odyssey and then merely to repeat the same banal prophecies (Books XV and XVI) and to warn the suitors (Book XX) . . . . In the Epic Cycle the Odyssey was followed by the Telegony; was this Theoclymenos one of the heroes of the Telegony? Did he figure in the first lines of that epic as a compeer of Telemachus and Ulysses? And was some allusion made in those opening lines to the manner in which Telemachus rescued him at Pylos? Was it in order to explain that allusion that this obscure and pointless passage was intercalated in the Odyssey?"

Berard goes on to point out the mystery which surrounds the movements of Theoclymenos after his arrival in Ithaca. When Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, arrives at the palace, the suitors discuss where he is to sleep; Theoclymenos they seem to ignore. "Where did the latter sleep that night? He did not accompany the suitors or Telemachus; he did not stay with Ulysses. It is unlike Homer thus to abandon one of his characters without having assured him bed and shelter. Yet next day be reappeared at the palace when the slaughter of the suitors was about to begin." There is a strangely modern touch about this MYSTERY MAN FROM PYLOS as a newspaper man of today would feature him. Indced, M'Intosh-Theoclymenos is always with us.

The ambiguous prophecy of Teiresias is recalled by a mention of Robert Emmet, the text of whose "last words" is cited at the close of the episode of the Sirens. "When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written: I Is Done." The equivocation of that utterance lies, of course, in the fact that, assuming that Emmet had the normal desire for prolongation of life, he was, in reality, impetrating a long postponement of Ireland's freedom-a double-edged postulate, akin to the strange rigmarole, about a wayfarer who takes an oar for a winnowing-fan and death that shall come from the sea, which the Theban seer rendered to Odysseus.

Even though such echoes of the Nekuia be disregarded by the reader, the effect of the "incubism" as applied in this episode is ample in itself to produce--and with, apparently, the most commonplace materials--a mortuary atmosphere at least as intense as that of Homer's "dank house of Hades" or the Gravediggers' Scene in Hamlet. Allusions are expressly made to the latter; the gravediggers, for instance, are numbered and Bloom, recalling Shakespeare's scene, admires his "profound knowledge of the human heart". The air presses down upon the mourners; the very earth seems to open in fissures to receive them. "The carriage, passing the open drains and mounds of rippedup roadway before the tenement houses, lurched round the corner." The tramp's huge boot "yawns" as he empties the dirt out of it. "They follow: dropping into a hole one after the other." The idea of the bed, "bed of death ghostcandled" (vide Proteus), is woven into Bloom's soliloquy.

This downward movement reflects the stifling pressure of an incubus from beginning to end. Various forms of burial, prehistoric positions of inhumation, some of which, perhaps, are allusions to Jewish ritual, are recalled--closing up the orifices, cremation, sea-burial, the Parsee fires, mummification. Bloom has a grotesque inspiration in sepulchral economics. One of the gravediggers bends to pluck from the haft (of his spade) a long tuft of grass," a ritual gesture. Joyce persistently uses a mortuary metaphor, apt to deepen the Cimmerian' dusk of the charnelhouse: "fellow like that mortified if women are by", "whole place gone to hell". "Every mortal day a fresh batch". The ghoulish rat serves as a link between the graveyard and the Lestrygonian motifs; in Bloom the baser or, rather, basic appetities are rarely dormant. "One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk." Bloom lunches frugally off a cheese sandwich (compensated at teatime by a more substantial meal).

The bodily organ related to this episode is the heart. "I am the resurrection and the lite. That touches a man's inmost heart." "Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? . . . The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead." Thinking of the suicide's degradation, Bloom muses: "they have no mercy on that here or infanticide. Refuse christian burial. They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken already. . . ."

Bloom's heart, anyhow, is in the right place.