Silence that is the infinite of space

In the previous, Lamb-like section, Bloom became lost in thought as he pondered earlier episodes in his life. Now, the voices in the hospital common room recede even further into "clouded silence" as he contemplates "the infinite of space" and the vast "cycles of generations that have lived." This preoccupation with infinities of space and time comes directly from De Quincey's works. So too does the form of dream-vision that follows. It unfolds in three parts. First the soul is in a blurry "region" of "wide sagegreen pasturefields" where "grey twilight ever descends, never falls," and there two ghostly shapes move gracefully: "a mare leading her fillyfoal." "They fade, sad phantoms: all is gone," and the pastured horses give way to an enormous, fantastically varied horde of ghostly animals—elk, yak, bull, mammoth, mastodon, elephant, lion, rodent—who are tramping through a sandy Palestinian wasteland to drink the salt waters of the Dead Sea. These animals feel portentous: "muttering thunder of rebellion," "murderers of the sun," "Ominous revengeful zodiacal host!" They disappear, and "the equine portent grows again," but this time as a vast image "in the deserted heavens." Starlike, constellation-like, nebula-like, the female equine vision arises, floats, gleams, swirls, and morphs "till, after a myriad metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus."

Clearly, all of these visionary apparitions represent aspects of Bloom's consciousness. The horses of the first section are mother and daughter, and when their female presence returns in the third section it carries overtones of both Molly and Milly. The contemplation of their beauty is rudely interrupted by the threatening, ominous animals of the second section, which are stalked and driven by a figure called Parallax with "scorpions" in its brow. The shift in tone recalls the moment in Calypso when a cloud covered the sun and Bloom's dreamy contemplations of Agendath Netaim gave way to apocalyptic bleakness: "No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters." That passage in Calypso ended in a vision of sexual barrenness—"Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world—and here in Oxen the thought that "Agendath is a waste land...Netaim, the golden, is no more" ends the contemplation of a graceful mare and her foal.

In the third section the female presence returns, not as two horses but as a strangely reassuring, fulfilling composite image of beauty. Like a constellation, the horse image looms "over the house of Virgo"—Molly's zodiacal sign. It is "the everlasting bride, harbinger of the daystar, the bride, ever virgin. It is she, Martha, thou lost one, Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant." When the sun comes back in Calypso it is running "in slim sandals" to meet Bloom, "a girl with gold hair on the wind." Now the female presence, "shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call it gossamer," streams across the heavens until finally, "after a myriad metamorphoses of symbol," it becomes concretized in that red triangle. At the end of the following paragraph in Oxen, it becomes clear that this is the bottle of Bass ale on which Bloom has been abstractedly gazing.

In his study of the sources of the styles in Oxen, Janusko expresses frustration that none of the sixteen notes which Joyce made from particular passages in Confessions of an Opium Eater, Suspiria de Profundis, and The English Mail Coach seem to enter into these two paragraphs of Oxen. He observes, however, that a section of Mail Coach titled "Dream Fugue" may have given Joyce the overall inspiration for his dream-vision (72-73). He is almost certainly correct about this: although the details are very different, this section of De Quincey's work tells a very similar story. It starts with a vision of young female beauty, then threatens the girl with death, and finally gives her a kind of apotheosis—one that is colored bright red.

In the vision, De Quincey is awakened by the sound of "Sweet funeral bells from some incalculable distance," at a time of "morning twilight" when things are "almost hidden in mist" and sights are "dusky." He sees a girl adorned with white roses on her head running in fear along a beach, as if chased by something terrible. Concerned, he follows her and sees her swallowed by quicksand. He sits and weeps, "But suddenly the tears and funeral bells were hushed by a shout as of many nations, and by a roar as from some great king's artillery, advancing rapidly along the valleys, and heard afar by echoes from the mountains. 'Hush!' I said, as I bent my ear earthwards to listen—'hush!—this either is the very anarchy of strife, or else'—and then I listened more profoundly, and whispered as I raised my head—'or else, oh heavens! it is victory that is final, victory that swallows up all strife'." The thought proves prophetic: the dreamer finds himself "in trance," carried to "some distant kingdom, and placed upon a triumphal car, amongst companions crowned with laurel" and surrounded by crowds in the darkness. "Tidings had arrived"—joyful news, grandly ecclesiastical—and "we that sat upon the laurelled car had it for our privilege to publish" them. The people on the car are exhorted "by snortings and tramplings" of immortal horses, urging haste, but they wait for "a secret word" of Christian revelation, announcing that "the hope of nations" is accomplished. The Word arrives at midnight, shining with a golden light, leading the people onward as they spread the good word everywhere.

Amidst this universal celebration all the people want to know "is the young child caught up to God?" The answer appears in a vision of a marble altar above three tall windows in the clouds. The red light of dawn is streaming through the windows, brightening "the crimson robes of the martyrs painted on the windows," and "There, suddenly, within that crimson radiance, rose the apparition of a woman's head, and then of a woman's figure. The child it was—grown up to woman's height. Clinging to the horns of the altar, voiceless she stood—sinking, rising, raving, despairing; and behind the volume of incense that, night and day, streamed upwards from the altar, dimly was seen the fiery font, and the shadow of that dreadful being who should have baptized her with the baptism of death. But by her side was kneeling her better angel, that hid his face with wings; that wept and pleaded for her; that prayed when she could not; that fought with Heaven by tears for her deliverance; which also, as he raised his immortal countenance from his wings, I saw, by the glory in his eye, that from Heaven he had won at last. "

Joyce's dream vision has none of De Quincey's Christian triumphalism, but the narrative debt seems clear. Indistinct voices spread over vast distances much as the sounds of funeral bells do in the "Dream Fugue." Two graceful female figures appear in a dusky twilight scene and then disappear, swallowed up in a vision of some great rushing horde, accompanied by sharp cries: ""Huuh! Hark! Huuh!" The female figure reappears, now elevated to the heavens and radiating light whose many bright colors come to rest on red. Joyce's prose does not seem to borrow many words or phrases from De Quincey's works—certainly it bears very little resemblance to the two selections from Confessions of an Opium Eater in Peacock's anthology—but it captures his visionary mood and his intensely passionate affect.