Joyce's Ulysses

30:2, Reviews JOYCE'S ULYSSES Paul van Caspel. Bloomers on the Liffey: Eisegetical Readings of Joyce's 'Ulysses'. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. $27.50 There are two prevailing schools of thought regarding the thousands of enors that those of us who write on the Joyce texts have made over the decades: that the enors are negligible and will sink like stone to the bottom of the stream, or that they have a pernicious life of their own and will keep bobbing on the surface like greasy corks. Paul van Caspel belongs to the latter school: commenting on a mistake made by an early commentator (c. 1947), he laments that "such enoneous readings ... are sometimes slow in dying" (260)—this one bobbed up in the James Joyce Quarterly in 1983. There is often a wistful note of regret in Van Caspel's remarks as he undertakes hundreds of conections on "bloomers" made by both critics and translators, maintaining a geniality only occasionally tinged with archness. Bloomers on the Liffey is Paul van Caspel's extensive re-writing of his 1980 dissertation, in which a greater degree of hectoring was noticeable (perhaps it is in the nature of the conector to hector). The original version was a remarkably accurate handling of the middle twelve chapters of Ulysses, and not only has Van Caspel expanded it to include all of Ulysses, but has rewritten it into a restructured analysis of the text. What he is too polite to assert outright is that many bloomers are made by critics who write atrociously (he does complain of "learned interpretative theories that tend to smother the text under a growth of metaphor" [xi]), but this statement does not necessarily indict the non-theoretical bumblers. Van Caspel's book is so eminently sensible and necessary that it invites conection when it (infrequently) goes off the rails, and counter-speculations when it indulges in its own speculations. To say that Stephen and Patrice Egan "sat in a bar" seems harmless enough (27), but the Bar MacMahon is a café much like other Paris cafés; that Molly "tells us in the final episode" that her father married a Spanish Jewess" (56) is more serious: that's exactly what Molly never tells us; and is Molly really a "thirty-three-year-old woman" (258), or was she bom in 1870 and misremembers her age? At the level of speculation, Van Caspel wonders how long Haines has been resident in the tower, but the computation by the milkwoman should solve that. Van Caspel enigmatically assumes that Clive Kempthorpe is "an Irish boy" (42), and wonders at "the hidden meaning of the gardener's apron, an item that seems to have escaped critical scrutiny so far" (43)—are we agreed that there is a hidden meaning? Unless we are invited to scrutinize within a given area, is this not what the author himself refers to as "the danger of overexplaining, a tendency to be afraid of loose ends" (74)? 242 30:2, Reviews "Overexplaining" has other moments in Bloomers on the Liffey: to be informed that Deasy "is pronounced 'daisy'" (39) does nothing to foster an eisegetical reading of the text, nor is it necessarily conect for all parts of Ireland and all Irish speakers, and to be informed at any time that "This is Stephen writing Ulysses" (42) is a gratuitous interruption of the eisegetical process. Elsewhere Van Caspel wonders whether Lyons "may have had to bonow the money" to bet on the Gold Cup race (228), yet one can wonder whether Lyons hadn't gone on the wagon to save the necessary money, a speculation closer to the evidence in the text. There are of course "hinge readings" of Ulysses, where evidence, like Dr. Fell's stick, points in two directions. For example, Van Caspel assumes that Breen's postcard reads "U.P." (171), rather than the expanded "U.P.: up." Needless to mention, Molly's soliloquy provides enough dual possibilities to unhinge most readers, and Van Caspel makes his choice for Boylan in the line "he [Bloom] said Im dining out and going to the Gaiety though Im not going to give him [?] the...