As the funeral carriages pass over the Royal Canal, Bloom watches a
boatman standing on his barge as it drops down into the
draining lock. Since Hades is studded with references
to the underworlds of classical epics, this detail tempts one
to hear an echo of Charon, the boatman who ferries souls
across the river Styx in Virgil's Aeneid and the river
Acheron in Dante's Inferno. The inference is justified
several sentences later as Bloom combines his memory of a
local boatman who recently died with his memory of a poem
about a boatman's deadly water crossing: "James M'Cann's hobby
to row me o'er the ferry."
Gifford notes that James M'Cann "was chairman of the court of
directors of the Grand Canal Company, which maintained a
regular fleet of trade boats on the Grand Canal (to central
and southern Ireland)." Since Bloom is crossing the Royal
Canal, on the north side of Dublin, the geography would seem
to be wrong. But M'Cann, Gifford goes on to observe, died on
12 February 1904. He thus "has already arrived in Hades" and
could very well play the part of Charon, helping Bloom cross
the northern river that separates Dublin from the land of the
dead in Glasnevin. In life such tasks constituted a paying
profession for McCann. Now it seems they are a "hobby."
In a note on JJON, Terence Killeen observes that use
of the word "ferry" to refer not to a boat or its action of
crossing a stream, but to the "place where boats pass over a
river etc. to transport passengers and goods" (in the same way
that a "ford" can be a place as well as an action) is "all but
obsolete now and was probably obscure in 1904." But Bloom, he
suggests, is thinking of a line from a poem written a century
earlier:
A chieftain to the Highlands bound
Cries, "Boatman, do not tarry!
And I'll give thee a silver pound
To row us o'er the ferry."
Lord Ullin's Daughter, published in 1804, was written
by a Scottish poet whose work Bloom seems to know—later in Hades
he tries to recall who wrote Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard and comes up with
"Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell." Campbell's ballad describes
the plight of Lord Ullin's daughter and the young chieftain
she has run off with as they flee her father's soldiers. The
ferryman agrees to save the bridegroom from the sword, but the
"dark and stormy water" threatens no less mortal peril. Lord
Ullin arrives at the shore of the loch in time to watch his
girl drown: "The waters wild went o'er his child, / And he was
left lamenting."
Lord Ullin's Daughter, then, coheres with the possible
echo of Charon in its depiction of a boat ferrying people over
some very dark waters. By changing "row us" to "row
me," Bloom puts himself in the boat, confirming the
impression that he is being ferried to the land of the dead.
It seems odd that his meditation on McCann and Campbell comes
in the middle of about a dozen sentences in which he thinks
about traveling west along the canal to see Milly in
Mullingar. But these sentences are preceded and followed, at
the beginning and end of the paragraph, by long gazes at the
boatman, so Bloom has him in view the whole time. Death breaks
in on his happy dreaming.
