Ithaca employs many polysyllabic words derived from Latin and Greek—languages favored by scientific and quasi-scientific disciplines like mathematics, biology, astronomy, medicine, law, and theology. Practitioners of these specialized disciplines no doubt prize arcane terms in part because they keep outsiders outside, but their more essential functions are to name things previously unnamed and to reduce the slipperiness of human language. Colloquial words inevitably take on a range of meanings, but terms concocted in the laboratory and shielded from common chatter can limit the ambiguity and foster precise understanding. Ithaca achieves impressively precise effects in this way, at the cost of sometimes seeming as baffling as a scientific treatise or as pedantic as a university professor. Here are some examples from the first few paragraphs.

Having employed terms from geometry in the first paragraph to describe its protagonists' walking route, in the next one Ithaca moves to a more straightforward presentation of the subjects which they discuss. But the question asked throws up its own scholarly-sounding roadblocks to understanding: "Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?" Duoviri or duumviri (Latin duo = two + vir = man) were magistrates of ancient Rome who held office jointly, in a duumvirate. Bloom and Stephen are clearly not civic authorities, so applying this term to them feels archly ironic. But a symbolic logic is also at work. Ithaca revisits the Homeric episode in which Odysseus and Telemachus walk to the family palace to restore their rule. By that model Bloom and Stephen are indeed duumvirs—diarchs, king and prince. Their intellectual discourse establishes a government of rational men. Nowhere is the doubleness of Joyce's mock-heroic method expressed more succinctly than in this one jocoserious word.

The magistracy metaphor is strengthened by the alliterating word that follows, "deliberate." At first glance it seems unremarkable, a mere synonym for "discuss" or "consider," but its Latin roots imply a judicious weighing of evidence (de- = completely + librare = to weigh). This is what civic authorities do, and in their own sphere it is what Stephen and Bloom seem to be doing, sharing their views on various topics and pondering things more thoughtfully than most Dubliners would. Less consequentially, the sentence ends with another pointedly Latinate word, "itinerary." In common usage it denotes the route proposed for a journey, but here it seems to refer to the journey itself. Joyce is going back to the original sense of the word: in classical Latin iter meant "journey." In late Latin an itinerarium was a course of travel. Only later did it become the plotting of such a course. By going back to origins, Joyce strips away later semantic encrustations. But the highly precise usage carries a whiff of pedantry. No real meaning would be lost by asking what the men discussed on their "walk."

This sentence shows Joyce's cunning exploitation of the original meanings of Latin words. The same strategy may be present elsewhere in the opening paragraphs. When both men confess "the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual magnetism," the obscure word carries its primary English sense of deadening or dulling something, making it less intense. But Joyce may also be calling attention to the original Latin meaning of the verb, "to beat against" (ob- = against + tundere = to beat). If so, then his sentence about the intermittent nature of male sexual desire conceals a sly comment on how desire becomes dulled: by "beating against" something, or someone. Similarly, the reference to "corporation exposed emergency dustbuckets" may involve Bloom's thoughts about using buckets in the street for bowel crises, because the Latin roots (ex- = out of + mergere = to immerse) suggest liquids and evacuations.

Some of the words in these paragraphs do not require detouring into etymology (though it still helps), because they have already acquired precise scientific meanings in English. When the two men discuss "the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees," the word "adjoining" seems a bit much ("nearby" would do just as well), but the arcane botanical term that follows is the only one that would do. It refers to plants that optimize photosynthesis by turning their leaves parallel to incident rays of light so as to avoid an excessive energy load. The Greek roots of the word (para = aside + helios = sun + tropos = turning) combine all three operative concepts in a single adjective, demonstrating the virtues of efficient compaction. But the absurdity of the topic makes the appearance of the scientific term seem ridiculously arcane, and Joyce underlines the comedy by mentioning three paragraphs later that this was "one point on which their views were equal and negative."

The last sentence of the first paragraph employs similarly precise terms from the field of geometry. For Americans, the "circus" in front of George's church does not have the idiomatic sense that it does in the UK, but they can quickly grasp its meaning by noting that the Latin word means "circle." Stephen and Bloom cross it "diametrically"—not in the usual colloquial sense of "standing as far opposite as possible," but instead in the technical sense of passing through the center of a circle by proceeding along its diameter. They do this because it minimizes the walking distance, "the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends." A chord, in geometry, is a line segment that joins two points on a curve, and to subtend something (Latin sub = beneath + tendere = extend) is to lie beneath it and define its limits, as one side of a triangle does to the angle formed by the two opposite sides. The diameter, in this case, subtends the semicircle defined by its endpoints.

Several paragraphs later this kind of mathematical exactitude returns in an arithmetical context—though the OED notes that the word was first used by English astronomer Edmond Halley—when the narrative describes Bloom's house as "the 4th of the equidifferent uneven numbers, number 7 Eccles street." There is an enjoyably paradoxical quality to be savored in this strange word, and also a crossword-solving kind of pleasure in grasping the sense in which it is used, and finally an appealing psychological realism in seeing its relevance to the narrative context. Coming home from the corner of Dorset Street, Bloom does what has no doubt become unconscious: count the doorways (number 1, number 3, number 5) until he gets to his address, number 7. The single word "equidifferent" economically captures the situation: four "different" addresses, three gaps to pass through, "equal" distances in each.

Some Latin and Greek compounds in these paragraphs have been so successfully assimilated into English that they do not seem in the least foreign, and therefore do not call attention to themselves: "divergent," "parallel," "interruptions," "disparate," "anachronism," "prospective," "ecclesiastical," "celibacy," "interindividual," "progressive." But all words contain interesting etymological histories, and some of these may be worth looking into. Joyce directs special attention to one of them in the first paragraph by casting it in an unfamiliar grammatical role: "then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner's place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of Temple street." The adverb "inadvertently" would pass unnoticed, but "by an inadvertence" calls attention to itself, and productively so. An inadventence is a mistake, and Bloom and Stephen have made the mistake of not turning right from Gardiner's Place onto North Temple Street as soon as they reached it, instead crossing to the opposite corner, which took them very slightly out of their way. The mistake is exactly conveyed in the word's Latin roots (in- = not + ad- = toward + vertere = to turn): the men did "not turn toward" home immediately on the northeast side of the road. Even in details as fine as this, the language of Ithaca labors to be precise, unambiguous, and informative.

There is pleasure in learning new words, and one of the glories of the English language is a vast vocabulary drawn from sources all over the globe. Making sense of Ithaca's classical fare feeds this appetite and gives one a feeling of being conversant with the great languages and civilizations that gave rise to western culture. Some readers will enjoy every strange new expression the chapter throws at them. (They are the people for whom a trip to the dictionary always takes longer than expected.) Others may feel mildly annoyed every time the text throws out a recherché term when an everyday one would have served just as well. Attributing an Irish king's death to "imperfect deglutition" (Latin de- = down + glutire = to swallow) sounds impressively clinical without saying anything more than that he choked on his food. Referring to Stephen's "gastric inanition" (Greek gaster = belly, Latin inanis = empty) too sounds vaguely medical, but no meaning would be lost by saying he has an empty stomach. Being "indurated by early domestic training" (Latin indurare = to harden) is no different than being hardened or steeled.

Many of these stylistic choices represent a preference for Latinate and Hellenic abstraction over Anglo-Saxon concreteness, but Joyce seems also to have been drawn to greater obscurity. He writes of "Stephen's rectification of the anachronism involved" in a common historical notion rather than to a "correction," even though both words feature the same Latin root (rectus = straight). The word that sounds more familiar and easy-going cannot compete with the one that sounds specialized and rigorous. Instead of a harmful or destructive influence the narrator mentions one that is "maleficent" (Latin malus = bad + facere = to do). The cloud that Stephen observed in the early morning hour is "matutinal" (from Mater Matuta, an Etruscan goddess of dawn who became linked with the Roman Aurora and the Greek Eos). For Joyce as for Yeats, "the fascination of what's difficult" was a consuming obsession. Ithaca demonstrates it in its most crystalline, serene light.

Sometimes, though, the chapter operates from principles that seem arbitrary and even perverse. The opening paragraphs contain at least one example: "Both preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence." Stephen and Bloom, like Gabriel Conroy in The Dead and like Joyce himself, prefer the sophistication of European culture to provincial Celticness, and apparently both would prefer to live in Europe. But the prose cannot simply contrast Ireland with, say, France. It must make it more generally "insular," and the alternative "continental," forcing readers to translate these abstractions into everyday language. (As Molly would say, "Who's he when he's at home?") And then it ups the ante, abstracting the Ireland-Europe binary into a kind of universal choice between here-ness (Latin cis- = on this side of) and there-ness (trans- = across, over, beyond).

To this point, nothing worse has happened than searching out fancy abstractions. But then, instead of simply reformulating ordinary ways of seeing things, the narrative violates them. In common parlance "transatlantic" refers to the large oceanic void between Europe and the Americas, not to the narrow gaps of the Irish Sea or the English Channel. Those waters do commingle, to be sure, so a well-disposed reader might be tempted to rationalize away the mental discomfort caused by calling a jaunt to Europe a transatlantic crossing. But anyone charitable enough to perform such a mental adjustment is rewarded with still more textual perversity. Although the sentence seems to suggest that Bloom and Stephen would be happy to live in France, its grammatically parallel clauses imply the opposite: they prefer their "cis"-home, Dublin.

Has Joyce unwittingly switched the proper order of the adjectives in the second clause? Or does he for some reason assume, and want his readers to assume, that a large continental landmass should be seen as "here," while islands separated from it are logically "there"? Whatever may be going on in this sentence, trying to make sense of it launches a reader into the brain-twisting space of double negatives, misplaced modifiers, uncertain referents, and alternative realities. In a chapter that will later require readers to make precise sense of "He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not," it is hard to dispel the suspicion that one is being toyed with.

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John Hunt 2025