Cyclops

In book 9 of the Odyssey, the hero recounts how he came to a land where giants live in mountain caves, barely civilized by animal husbandry and primitive social organization. Leading twelve men, he enters the cave of "a massive man," later called Polyphemus by his fellow Cyclops. and becomes trapped there when the giant returns with his sheep and rolls a huge stone across the entrance. Polyphemus slaughters and eats two of the men on the first night, and again on the second. But on that second night Odysseus gets him drunk on wine, tells him that his name is "Noman," and after the giant sinks into stupor he and his men blind him with a log that they have sharpened and heated in the fire. The giant screams for help, but when his neighbors rally to his cave and hear that Noman has blinded him, they leave. The next morning, Odysseus and his men escape by clinging to the bellies of Polyphemus's sheep as he lets them out of the cave. They return to their ship and weigh anchor, but Odysseus uncharacteristically lets down his guard, taunting the giant from the waves and telling him that it was Odysseus who cost him his eye. The blind giant hurls a boulder that nearly sinks the ship and calls down Poseidon's wrath on his tormentor.

Joyce's chapter sets the cautious, pacifistic, parallactic Bloom against a blustering, pugilistic, narrow-minded former athlete known as The Citizen. It slowly builds dramatic tension as the drunken brawler scorns, resents, and finally insults Bloom, while the sober Bloom progresses from timidly trying to get along to boldly standing up for himself. Imagistically, the chapter makes the single Cyclopean eye an emblem of the kind of thinking that can see things from only one point of view, and it shows binocular vision being mocked in the pub: "— Poor old sir Frederick, says Alf, you can cod him up to the two eyes." Thoughts of blinding enter early on, when the narrator tells how "a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye," and they return when Bloom refuses to be treated to drinks but consents to light up a "knockmedown cigar." "Some people," he says while verbally sparring with the Citizen, "can see the mote in others' eyes but they can't see the beam in their own." He stands up to his antagonist heroically, and at the end of the chapter the Citizen hurls a biscuit tin at the departing Jew. "he rubs his hand in his eye"

These narrative and imagistic strategies are consistent with what Joyce does in earlier chapters of Ulysses. But Cyclops adds two startlingly new responses to Homer's poem. It features a first-person narrator, prompting readers to wonder who the man is, just as Polyphemus craves to know the identity of Odysseus. But the speaker remains nameless throughout the chapter, a kind of Noman. He is brilliantly loquacious, pouring out a flood of colorful talk, and he knows a lot: although he falls for Lenehan's false suspicion that Bloom has bet on a winning horse, and succumbs to some antisemitic prejudices, on many other issues he proves to be remarkably well-informed. But he is also remarkably mean-spirited. Although he seems to get along well with other opinionated unreflective males, within the safe space of his thoughts he brims with aggressively demeaning insults and never finds anything good to say about anyone. In this way he is a Cyclops—sullen, solitary, suspicious, bound to others only by loose tribal ties.

As a young man Joyce extravagantly admired the plays of Henrik Ibsen, and he wanted to become a playwright himself, but Exiles made clear that his genius was not suited to writing for the stage. In Cyclops, however, he produced a long dramatic monologue as masterful as any ever written, and he used this voice to narrate a tightly unfolding dramatic action, pulling off the very difficult theatrical trick of combining exposition with character development. The crackling, nasty energy of the narrator's voice never flags, and the confrontation between protagonist (Bloom) and antagonist (Citizen) builds inexorably to a passionate climax. Having found just how well he could create drama within the confines of prose fiction, Joyce attempted the trick again in Circe, this time writing a fantastical and wildly ambitious closet drama with elaborate stage directions, name tags for the dramatis personae, and dialogue that utterly supplants narration.

Not content with one radical innovation in narrative technique, Joyce also found a way to create a stylistic equivalent of gigantism by inserting over-the-top parodies into the prose at numerous points, interrupting the narration to hyperbolically exaggerate and enumerate things mentioned in it. The parodies vary in length and in style, but all of them echo the Citizen's blustery, chauvinistic overconfidence. Most, it not quite all, serve to mock the complacent provincialism of the nationalists in the bar and the cultural activists of the Irish Revival. The targets are many: Irish heroic mythology, iconic Irish landscapes, Irish crafts, Irish natural resources, Irish love of Theosophy, Irish celebration of martyred heroes, Irish language and sports, Irish representation in the British parliament, Irish holy men and women, Irish fisticuffs, Irish tribalism, Irish forests, Irish hospitality, and more. While Bloom busies himself sticking his unwelcome opinions in the eye of a bullying antisemitic barhound, these parodic passages are goring every conceivable national sacred cow.

Like the strongly dramatic elements in Cyclops, the parodies proved consequential. Joyce went on to mock the style of sentimental women's fiction in Nausicaa. In Oxen of the Sun he took on the centuries-long evolution of prose styles that had made English a great literary language by writing a long series of imitations. In Eumaeus he mocked his own protagonist by writing an entire chapter in the kind of inept, pretentious artificial prose that Bloom might produce were he to affect authorship. And in Ithaca he adopted the format of religious and secular catechisms to write in the Latinate style of professional logicians. Several later chapters, notably Circe and Ithaca, contain vast lists (quite likely conceived as Homeric catalogues) of the sort featured in many of the Cyclops parodies. These expansive, ludic authorial commentaries were a portal of discovery for Joyce: they opened the door to other gigantic prose possibilities.

After Bloom leaves the Ormond bar in Sirens, somewhere around 4:30 PM, he walks west along the quays and then turns north toward Barney Kiernan's pub on Little Britain Street, where he has agreed to meet Martin Cunningham and Jack Power, presumably at 5. Having seen Boylan leave the bar for his rendezvous with Molly, he is anxious to avoid running into anyone he knows, so he takes an obscure route between the produce market and the fish market: "Dodge round by Greek street. Wish I hadn't promised to meet." But the narrator of Cyclops, who has been walking about in the area south and west of the pub, tells Joe Hynes that he has spotted Bloom: "— I saw him before I met you, says I, sloping around by Pill lane and Greek street with his cod's eye counting up all the guts of the fish." Bloom gets to the pub before Cunningham and Power and waits outside, pacing back and forth. The Citizen spots him through the window: "He's on point duty up and down there for the last ten minutes." A minute more and the stage is set:

     Old Garryowen started growling again at Bloom that was skeezing round the door.
     — Come in, come on, he won't eat you, says the citizen.
     So Bloom slopes in with his cod's eye on the dog and he asks Terry was Martin Cunningham there.