In Calypso Bloom recalls running to fetch the
midwife from her home in "Denzille street." This street holds
associations with more than childbirth. It and nearby
"Denzille lane," encountered in Oxen of the Sun, also
evoke the militant Irish nationalism of the Phoenix Park
murders in 1882, connections brought near the surface of the
book's consciousness by the typically Joycean device of a
strange coincidence.
Mary Thornton, the actual
Joyce family midwife whom Joyce imported into his novel,
lived at 19A Denzille Street, as Gifford and Igoe note. But in
a personal communication Vincent Altman O'Connor observes that
this was also the address of James
Carey, the Fenian leader who turned queen's evidence
during the investigation of the murders and fled Ireland under
state protection in 1883, only to be assassinated by an Irish
nationalist on a ship off the South African coast. There is a
perfectly ordinary explanation for Thornton and Carey living
at the same address: he likely was her landlord. (Assuming,
that is, that she lived in Denzille Street before the
government took him into protective custody and shipped him
out of the country. If she moved in later than June 1893, then
she could have rented from his heirs.) Carey had followed in
the footsteps of his bricklayer father and become a successful
builder and landlord.
There is also a simple explanation for Bloom's knowledge of
the man. Regardless of whether Mary Thornton knew Carey in
person or merely heard about him from neighbors in the
aftermath of his sensational departure, she may well have
shared some of the details with Bloom. Whatever the source of
his knowledge, Bloom has been turning the lesson of Carey's
life over in his mind for a long time, admiring his
nationalism, abhorring his criminal violence, envying his
courage, deploring his betrayal. Eumaeus records this
ever-shifting, parallactic
ambivalence: "turning queen's evidence—or king's now—like
Denis or Peter Carey, an idea he utterly repudiated. Quite
apart from that he disliked those careers of wrongdoing and
crime on principle. Yet, though such criminal
propensities had never been an inmate of his bosom in any
shape or form, he certainly did feel and no denying it (while
inwardly remaining what he was), a certain kind of
admiration for a man who had actually brandished a knife, cold
steel, with the courage of his political convictions."
At the end of Oxen of the Sun Stephen and the other
young men debouche for "Burke's of Denzille and Holles,"
a pub at the intersection of those two streets just north of
the maternity hospital. At the pub's closing hour they head
back south, bound for the Westland Row train station where
they will board for Monto: "Denzille lane this way. Change
here for Bawdyhouse." No one mentions why they fail to
proceed somewhat more directly via Denzille Street, but
perhaps Joyce prized the opportunity to echo a name that one
of the drunkards has given their roving band, "The Denzille
lane boys." Gifford notes that this was "A Dublin slang
name for the Invincibles." It is a common kind of nickname for
Dublin gangs.
Joyce scholarship has not paid much attention to the
Denzille-Invincibles nexus, but Dublin has. Denzille Street no
longer exists; it became Fenian
Street shortly after independence and the civil war of
1922-23.
